I linked to David Ronfeld’s paper laying out the terms.
The resource allocation that happens at Christmas is tribal in nature. People don’t receive gifts because they pay money to receive a gift. They don’t receive gifts because a hierachy organizes who gives whom a gift.
YCominator says that one of the biggest benefits of being a YC company is the access to YC alumni. YC alumni feel that they have a tribal obligation to help new YC company.
When programmers on stackoverflow help each other that value exchange is a network.
Most of the value generated at Wikipedia get’s generated through the network mode. A person thinks that contributing to Wikipedia is valuable, so they contribute.
Value generated at LW get’s generated through the network mode.
In a lot of open source value get’s generated via the network mode. Internet governance works in the network mode.
If you look at many African countries they are in a mess because their main way of value exchange is tribal. Politicians have more loyality to the clan to which they belong than they have to the hierachy of the government.
If you think the only two choices are a command economies and market economies you miss the way value flow in such societies and therefore make all sorts of bad decisions.
Also, wikipedia isn’t really like an economy
It produces value in a way that’s different than market economies and command economies.
As a resource allocation problem, wikipedia is trivial.
It still manages to outcompete the Encyclopaedia Britannica which operates through market mechanisms where it pays people to write articles.
It still manages to outcompete the Encyclopaedia Britannica which operates through market mechanisms where it pays people to write articles.
Irrelevant. The question at hand is how to allocate resources. Britannica is also a trivial resource allocation problem. Wikipedia gets volunteer labour for free on a massive scale, whereas Britannica has to pay. The fact that wikipedia therefore wins is nothing to do with allocation
I linked to David Ronfeld’s paper laying out the terms.
The resource allocation that happens at Christmas is tribal in nature. People don’t receive gifts because they pay money to receive a gift. They don’t receive gifts because a hierachy organizes who gives whom a gift.
YCominator says that one of the biggest benefits of being a YC company is the access to YC alumni. YC alumni feel that they have a tribal obligation to help new YC company.
When programmers on stackoverflow help each other that value exchange is a network. Most of the value generated at Wikipedia get’s generated through the network mode. A person thinks that contributing to Wikipedia is valuable, so they contribute. Value generated at LW get’s generated through the network mode. In a lot of open source value get’s generated via the network mode. Internet governance works in the network mode.
If you look at many African countries they are in a mess because their main way of value exchange is tribal. Politicians have more loyality to the clan to which they belong than they have to the hierachy of the government. If you think the only two choices are a command economies and market economies you miss the way value flow in such societies and therefore make all sorts of bad decisions.
It produces value in a way that’s different than market economies and command economies.
It still manages to outcompete the Encyclopaedia Britannica which operates through market mechanisms where it pays people to write articles.
Irrelevant. The question at hand is how to allocate resources. Britannica is also a trivial resource allocation problem. Wikipedia gets volunteer labour for free on a massive scale, whereas Britannica has to pay. The fact that wikipedia therefore wins is nothing to do with allocation