Social-media based projects suffer a version of the free-rider problem that I call the front-rider problem. You’ll get a lot of contributors for the front-end part of the project, but sharp drop off towards the tail-end so 1-2 coordinators end up doing the backstopping.
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In practice, because of this effort such projects don’t aim deep. Whether they aim high (classifying galaxy photos for NASA) or low (shitposting meme variants), they always aim shallow. So they rarely take on tasks that require deeper collective follow through.
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Working to reshape incentives to fix front-riding. Unlike free-riding, it’s not a moral or incentives failure but a coordination failure. The intent and interest in deep follow through is there, but the mechanisms past the first shallow process stages is too weak to do much.
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Need to go deeper with crowds
Wisdom of crowds: private knowledge, eg trading
User-generated content: creativity/variety, eg memes
User-generated distributed production: commodity labor, eg masks. Map-reduce basically.
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Crowd-sourced Apollo projects
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