Mechanism Design Applied To Twitter Post Engagement

A clever individual on Twitter made the following post “I’ll send $10 to each post that has 0 likes.”

And Twitter exploded.

Users constantly liked each other’s posts and created new posts when others like their posts and so on and so forth. Until that thread was jammed packed with content like cucumbers in a pickle factory or some thing 🤷‍♂️

BUT little did the author of the tweet know that there is a Nash Equilibrium hidden here that would have been his/undoing.

The users would have eventually taken into account the actions and thoughts of their competitors. This would have lead the competition to an optimal state resulting in each competitor posting only once and deleting that post if it was liked.