@Tekchip @shanselman

#GreshamsLaw applied to social media? And is there a Rule number (like 34) for spam instead of porn?

As for blocking <item> ground more finely.. it'll probably happen. Scratch an itch, &c. Of course, with the number of forks, it may take a while to percolate.

Multifork 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘶𝘴 foundational 𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘶𝘴 proprietary/closed..

@scottspeaking There's a growing set of literature, though generally you could look at the rise and fall of movements, social groups, religious movements (look up the Second Great Awakening and Burned Over Districts sometime), etc.

My basic take is that there are two forces at play: (1) network effects though not the n^2 of Metcalfe's Law but some diminishing-return function (Odlyzko and Tilly suggest log(n): https://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/metcalfe.pdf) and (2) frictional costs which are more-or-less constant per node instance (though which can be modified across the network as a whole through various network-hygiene measures).

So, if you've got diminishing returns and constant costs, at some point adding another node no longer breaks even.

The pathological death spiral occurs when high value nodes start defecting from the network. This is the Yogi Berra effect: "Nobody (who's anybody) goes there anymore, it's too crowded (with everybody who's nobody)".

Danah Boyd has some great early work looking at the dynamic between Facebook (upstart) and MySpace (incumbent) in the mid/late aughts: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/ICA2009.html

That's related to the Nazi At the Bar problem as described by @imaragesparkle at Birdsite: https://old.reddit.com/r/TalesFromYourServer/comments/hsiisw/kicking_a_nazi_out_as_soon_as_they_walk_in/. There are some founding / infiltrating cohorts who are so toxic that they lead to the flight of others. See generally Brain Drain and recognise that this can work in multiple directions for multiple groups, e.g., European Jews fleeing to the US whilst American Blacks fled to Europe. Same fundamental reason, but different dynamics affecting different groups. (This is also a #GreshamsLaw phenomenon, which is another trope of mine.)

I've written my own thoughts on why Usenet died, which Fedizens might want to consider. Not all the factors apply, though some do, upshot: it simply became too high-risk (and low-reward) to host Usenet: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3c3xyu/why_usenet_died/

#Usenet #MetcalfesLaw #OdlyzkoTilly #AndrewOdlyzko #SocialNetworks #RiseAndFall #DanahBoyd

@davidgerard I might have come up with a better example / illustration. The Toxoplasma essay is familiar to me (availability heuristic) and has circulated / been discussed for years. The specifics of the dynamic seem close to the lawyering Doctorow was mentioning.

There are a few other possibly related dynamics --- fandoms come to mind, and the Evaporative Cooling Effect:

https://web.archive.org/web/20101012105003/http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/social-software-sundays-2-the-evaporative-cooling-effect/

Though both miss the specific work-by-rules / sabotaging element.

There's a brain-drain / #GreshamsLaw aspect as well.

Again, I'm no particular fan of the site, it was the example, illustration, and dynamic that I was hoping might be useful.

@woozle @pluralistic

@Ahuka The Market for Lemons

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

https://viterbi-web.usc.edu/~shaddin/cs590fa13/papers/AkerlofMarketforLemons.pdf

#MarketForLemons #GeorgeAkerlof #GreshamsLaw

The J.K Galbraith "bad investments driving out good" dynamic is basically: when investors' portfolios go so poorly that they need to raise cash to cover obligations, they'll sell anything to raise that.

So if some IvanInvestor is 50% in HonestSamsSkeeveyStock and 50% in BlueChipCo, leveraged 50%, then if HSSS crashes, IvanInvestor must sell BlueChipCo to cover margins. (Or other obligations.)

If there are enough IvanIvestors ... the price of BSC starts to move.

With housing it's similar, though the mechanism is often of reserves or assets, particularly for banks. With a sufficient movement, enough sellers become "highly motivated" that the market as a whole moves.

Of course, if you're planning to profit from this, you've got to have lower exposure and cash (or equivalently robust assets, which aren't falling) on hand to be able to buy. That tends to be a wealth ratchet for the already uber-wealthy.

#JKGalbraith #JohnKennethGalbraith #GreshamsLaw #Housing

@pluralistic Another ... interesting ... dynamic of collapsing bubbles is of bad investments driving down good.

J.K. Galbraith notes in The Great Crash: 1929, a book I know you've read and like --- see also "bezzle".

Galbraith:

The great investment trust boom had ended in a unique manifestation of Gresham's Law in which the bad stocks were driving out the good.

#Housing #Bubbles #JKGalbraith #JohnKennethGalbraith #TheGreatCrash1929 #GreshamsLaw

@rysiek There's a flavour of argument over packaging systems and formats which runs:

• X package format is difficult for software developers to use.
• Y package format is easy for software developers to use.
• Therefore Y package format is better than X.

What's not realised is that the fundamental value and benefit to package management is to systems administrators / owners / users, and integrated distributions of packages. And that the major costs of operation and maintenance are not installation, but *operations and maintenance.

"Easy for sofware developers" typically translates to "encourages sloppy and difficult-to-maintain processes and practices". Not only this, but by lowering up-front costs at the expense of long-term costs, the practice further encourages poor practices (from an O&M perspective), and puts well-behaved software at a disadvantage.

See the Debian Project's explicit focus on user benefit, a long-term value benefit.

This is a Jevons Paradox / Gresham's Law crowding out of well-behaved software and a race-to-the-bottom of poor long-term O&M behaviour.

#Linux #PackageManagement #OperationsAndMaintenance #JevonsParadox #GreshamsLaw #Flatpak #snap

@cadadr #GreshamsLaw is my favourite underdog economic concept.

(Underdog in the sense that nobody appreciates it. Not in the sense that it benefits underdogs.)

(Or undercats.)

@kensanata

@cadadr@mastodon.sdf.org My imression, having been on the Web since the mid/late 1990s, and the Internet since the mid-1980s, is similar.

I actually saw AltaVista demoed at a tech conference,when Digital's 64-bit Ultrix was a notable advance in raw performance, allowing the entire index to be held in RAM. Google, when it appeared in 1999 was another quantum leap, this time in search relevance, and through about 2010--2012, things improved.

Sacrificing "+word" notation to Google+ was the first highly apparent sign of decline, in 2012 as I recall. Search has gotten dumber, and I switched to DDG in June 2013.

Not everything is ... directly ... Google's fault, though black-hat SEO gaming, advertising incentivisation, weaponised viral clickbait, scams and fraud, social media, walled gardens, the rise of mobile, and (though it hurts me to say) the vast democratisation / increased access to the Intenet (largely fuelled by mobile) is itself a major factor. #GreshamsLaw.

And Google's had a hand in much of that, if often indirectly.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

-- Frank Wilhoit

http://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288

#Conservatism #GreshamsLaw #Nonreciprocity #power

@Sandra

Everything you say on the futility of participation at the consumer level is as true of the corporate or the political (whether ballot or revo) levels.

False.

The dynamics differ offering different capabilities (and failure modes).

Markets respond principally to supply and demand, as well as monopoly powers.

Politics responds to political influence, votes, political contributions, and public discourse, but is regulated by legislation, constitutions, common law, precedent, tradition, and other factors.

Each has failure modes. For markets, externalities, fraud, coercion, #GreshamsLaw, #JevonsLaw. These all work directly against "personal responsibility" reforms.

Politics suffers from corruption, influence, capture, and other factors but at least presents a different set of mechanisms for correction than markets alone.

Maket failures aren't resolved by marketng them harder.

Political and regulatory change aren't easy, simple, or guaranteed. But the represent capabilities markets and "individual responsibility" alone simply do not and cannot offer.

@Sandra

Think about what you are saying here. You, an individual, can’t effect consumer pattern change on the wide/collective level. But you apparently can effect policy making, production, or marketing pattern change on the wide/collective level?

No.

Neither I nor collective individual action shy of near total compliance achieves this. The tactic as one of achieving the goal of ending negative externalising actions is utterly ineffective. The reason is that the more complete it becomes, the higher the rewards of defection. Simple #GameTheory payoff matrix.

A 1990s ex-junkie memoir I saw once had a cover reading something like "The problem with heroin is that the longer you stop the better that first next hit feels." Effectiveness of cure directly encourages relapse.

Individual action as signalling might have some merits.

But if you want to change the game you've got to change the rules, for everybody playing. Otherwise it's just #GreshamsLaw and a defectors' #RaceToTheBottom

I alone cannot accomplish either. Collectively, the rules change is the only efective mechanism. For signalling and messaging, restraint may be useful, but on an effort allocation, the smart strategy is 90% regulation & rules aimed at the system, 10% messaging interity.

And the whole "you're not doing enough personally" schtick can fuck right off. Because that's the countertactic I see, and quoted and linked at the top of this thread. It's what Annie Leonard's message is all about (I've been quoting it for years).

Wars aren't won by saints and purity scores.

1/

"Race to the bottom" is a phrase often used to describe one class of #GreshamsLaw dynamics, referring to regulatory, normative, or quality behaviours.

It seems to have emerged far more recently than I'd have imagined.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=race+to+the+bottom&year_start=1900&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Crace%20to%20the%20bottom%3B%2Cc0

#OccasionalNgrams