The Emergent Order of Twitter
When a set of arrangements is making people miserable, coercion is often a big part of the explanation. Think of authoritarianism, discrimination, or vigilantism, where individuals suffer because of conditions they can’t change, imposed by others possessing power.
But in some cases, incentives, not coercion, are to blame. This happens often in markets and in personal relationships — and it’s true also of Twitter. The environment is such that free people, making individually rational decisions, harm themselves and the group as a whole, creating suboptimal but — paradoxically — highly stable outcomes. History, economics, psychology, and sociology are rife with examples. Or, looking to game theory, we might say that Twitter is a dilemma in which we are all prisoners.
Read the rest here.
