Prisoner's Dilemma

Sites like EBAY and Wikipedia are able to work because just as Shirky illustrates: "We all face the Prisoners’ Dilemma whenever we interact with people we could take advantage of, or people who could take advantage of us, yet actually manage to trust one another often enough to accomplish things in groups. The shadow of the future makes it possible for me to act on your behalf today, even at some risk or cost to me, on the expectation that you will remember and reciprocate tomorrow." The general idea behind this is that people have to trust eachother and have a some level of faith that the person they are interacting with will do what they are suppossed to. This is the case for not only websites but for day to day activities. We have to rely on eachother to get things done and in order to do so, we have to have some faith that whoever we are relying on is going to do what he or she says he will do. I think that people want to believe in eachother and I think that people want to trust eachother. To see that these websites not only function but flourish is refreshing.