Free Riding
Discussion
Why it is not a problem for online content creation projects
Timothy B. Lee:
"The idea of "free riding" is based on a couple of key 20th-century assumptions that just don't apply to the online world. The first assumption is that the production of content is a net cost that must either be borne by the producer or compensated by consumers. This is obviously true for some categories of content—no one has yet figured out how to peer-produce Hollywood-quality motion pictures, for example—but it's far from universal. Moreover, the real world abounds in counterexamples. No one loses sleep over the fact that people "free ride" off of watching company softball games, community orchestras, or amateur poetry readings. To the contrary, it's understood that the vast majority of musicians, poets, and athletes find these activities intrinsically enjoyable, and they're grateful to have an audience "free ride" off of their effort.
The same principle applies to Wikipedia. Participating in Wikipedia is a net positive experience for both readers and editors. We don't need to "solve" the free rider problem because there are more than enough people out there for whom the act of contributing is its own reward.
The second problem with the "free riding" frame is that it fails to appreciate that the sheer scale of the Internet changes the nature of collective action problems. With a traditional meatspace institution like a church, business or intramural sports league, it's essential that most participants "give back" in order for the collective effort to succeed. The concept of "free riding" emphasizes the fact that traditional offline institutions expect and require reciprocation from the majority of their members for their continued existence. A church in which only, say, one percent of members contributed financially wouldn't last long. Neither would an airline in which only one percent of the customers paid for their tickets.
On Wikipedia—and a lot of other online content-creation efforts—the ratio of contributors to users just doesn't matter. Because the marginal cost of copying and distributing content is very close to zero, institutions can get along just fine with arbitrarily high "free riding" rates. All that matters is whether the absolute number of contributors is adequate. And because some fraction of new users will always become contributors, an influx of additional "free riders" is almost always a good thing.
Talking about peer production as solving a "free-rider problem," then, gets things completely backwards. The biggest danger collaborative online projects face is not "free riding" but obscurity. A tiny free software project in which every user contributes code is in a much worse position than a massively popular software project like Firefox in which 99.9 percent of users "free ride." Obviously, every project would like to have more of its users become contributors. But the far more important objective for an online collaborative effort to is grow the total size of the user community. New "free riders" are better than nothing." (http://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/tblee/trouble-free-riding)