The TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS claims its latest victim: Online porn?

[$5 submissions]

A little background on the Tragedy of the Commons and how it works:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Examining the overgrazing of 19th-century community pastures, or commons, Hardin showed how depletion of a vital resource was brought about by those individuals who continually increased the size of their herds out of self-interest. He presented this case as a cautionary tale for a modern society that according to him was abusing the environment. He also argued that human society had an inherently destructive relationship to nature and naturally overexploited common resources.

The metaphor illustrates the argument that free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource ultimately reduces the resource through over-exploitation, temporarily or permanently. This occurs because the benefits of exploitation accrue to individuals or groups, each of whom is motivated to maximize use of the resource to the point in which they become reliant on it, while the costs of the exploitation are borne by all those to whom the resource is available (which may be a wider class of individuals than those who are exploiting it). This, in turn, causes demand for the resource to increase, which causes the problem to snowball to the point that the resource is depleted (even if it retains a capacity to recover). The rate at which depletion of the resource is realized depends primarily on three factors: the number of users wanting to consume the common in question, the consumptiveness of their uses, and the relative robustness of the common.[7]

In essence, webmasters, out of self-interest just OVERGRAZED the Internet by flooding it with free stuff.

Too simple?

The most frequent criticism of the tragedy of the commons theory is that it doesn't reflect how HISTORY played out. Commons farming did NOT collapse. There are still shared resources that are still viable. The solution? COMMUNICATIONS and COMMON STANDARDS.

While that criticism is valid in discussing the applicability of the tragedy to FARMING, that critique might not be valid in online adult. There's no common standard and definitely no enforcement body or method of censure.

What do YOU think?