Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

by Nadia Asparouhova

Our relationship to content matters less than our relationships to the people who make it. As a result, we’re starting to treat content not as a private economic good but as the externalization of our social infrastructure.

By treating content as a commodity, we risk solving the wrong puzzle. Finding answers means returning to the essential questions. Chapters 2 and 3 looked at the social dynamics between creators and the communities that form around them. I suggested that one-to-many models, typical among online creators, are centralized communities, with hidden roles played by both platforms and the creator’s audience; these communities stand in contrast to the distributed, many-to-many online communities we’re used to.

Reputation has a half-life on any social platform; successful creators accumulate reputation, which serves as a “battery” that helps them store consumer attention. But if they don’t keep producing new work, that battery will degrade, and eventually get depleted.

We’ve previously treated content as a first-copy cost problem, and have developed solutions like patents, intellectual property, and copyright to incentivize its creation. But these solutions don’t address the costs of maintenance, which accrue over time. The challenges facing online creators today derive from the fact that they are playing a repeated game, not a single one.

When people talk about the “attention economy,” they’re usually referring to the consumer’s limited attention, as when multiple apps compete for a user’s time. But a producer’s limited attention is just as important to consider.

A tragedy of the commons occurs not from consumers over-appropriating the content itself, but from consumers over-appropriating a creator’s attention.*

When six people are gathered, they can all talk to one another; everyone is engaged in the same conversation. When a thousand people are gathered, they divide into two types of interaction. There’s the broadcasting effect, when someone climbs onstage to control the crowd and everyone turns to watch. And then there’s the small-group effect, when people strike up side conversations with their neighbors, ignoring the main stage. Social platforms must rebuild their infrastructure to accommodate these two use cases.