Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Free Rider Problem Part 2

Through the years the internet has become one of the largest growing communication Media available. Everyday thousands of people log onto the internet and participate in online discussions. The free-rider problem is something that has been around since the creation of the internet, and is slowly becoming a non-issue. In this essay I will describe to you the encounters I experienced with the free-rider problem, and give you my opinion on its affects.

This week in class we were assigned to monitor a pre- World Wide Web technology, and react on the things we saw. There were many different social media available to us, but I choose to monitor a Usenet group. Usenet is a place where a bunch of people with the same interests can come and post messages about that specific topic. (p.111) Authors Peter Kollock and Marc Smith wrote “Managing Virtual Commons,” which presented many problems and solutions for the Usenet communities. According to the authors, Usenet has “grown exponentially, and currently consists of several thousand discussion groups.” (P. 111) Basically, you can go onto Usenet and find almost any group you are looking for. One major problem that faces the members of these Usenet groups is Free Riding. To me a free-rider is one who benefits from the work of others without doing their fair share, or actively disrupts a community. The group I joined was alt.sports.football.pro.ny-jets. This is a board where New York Jet fans from all over can come and discuss the happenings of their team. Over the course of the week that I monitored this media, subjects such as the coaching staff, New England Patriots, Chad Pennington, and of course Brett Farve were discussed. Opinions were thrown around, and some bad mouthing accrued. I decided to not join this group, but to sit back and watch the types of interactions that were taking place. From the beginning I knew it was going to be a very interesting experience because I am currently on a New York Jets message board on www.espn.com. I was very anxious to see the difference between the boards, and the way they operated.

Now let’s get to this issue of free-riding. Throughout my first two days observing the Usenet group, there were no clear cut signs of free-riding. Maybe I caught one person posting positive messages under a guest name, where no accountability was to be had. Zero spam, or off topic threads were posted and it seemed to be a happy little community. I figured that sometime during this period I would certainly encounter some sort of free-riding since it is such a large issue. Still, day three and four gave me nothing. But as I logged on this morning to do my final blog reaction there were a couple spam threads up, and some off topic discussions. I began to think why there would be four cases of spam in this one day, but none on the other. Do these spammers wait until after the Jet fans emotions are stirring a day after a brutal loss? Are they that smart? I came to the conclusion that it had nothing to do with that, a little bit of spam is just no big deal. Kollock and Smith discussed the different things a Usenet community might do in the face of free-riding and spam. Discussed by the authors were strategies such as penalizing them, kicking them off the group, ranting and raving at them, or simply ignoring them. (p. 124) Out of all of those options, the least likely I believed to happen would be to ignore them and hope they go away! Personally if I were a diehard member of this group, the frustration with spam would drive me through the roof. But not alt.sports.football.pro.ny-jets, all four cases of spam had zero responses. The members of this community chose to ignore spam such as, “Carmen Electra P*S*Y Flash,” or “Watch Videos and Earn Money on Super100sports.com.” These actions seemed to have worked. Shortly after those off topic post were added, normal conversation went on again about the Jets, and what do to for next week. It seems like this free-rider problem is not so much of a problem.

With the internet growing at the speed at which it is, and the communication media expanding faster than ever the occurrences of this free-rider problem will always be around. In my opinion the people today are so used to this spam that we take it with a grain of salt. We don’t give it the attention someone like Kollock and Smith might have in 1996. Its 2008, we deal with this type of junk on a day to day basis. I learned a lot from the time I spent observing this Usenet group, and was surprised with their reaction to their encounter with free-riders. It goes to show you the normalcy that we now have adapted for these types of nuisances.

Kollock, Peter & Smith, Marc. (1996) Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in computer comminutes. In Susan C. Herring (Ed.), Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic, social and cross-cultural perspectives (pp. 109-128). Philadelphia: John Benajmins.

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