I say this a lot in the context of reliability engineering, but it's moreso something I've learned from life. Any sufficiently complex system has rules which means they have incentives (and disincentives!), any system with sufficiently complex rules is a game. You can either craft the game in such a way that the 99% do what you want and the outliers are intentionally marginalized or you can let the 1% run the show according to the meta rules your incentives taught them and make everyone else observers. Social media is the story of the latter.
Great observation. That's why I think rules and structures should be kept simple and minimal. The economy isn't supposed to be a game because people's lives are at stake. Social media algorithms are now an integral part of the economy so their complexity and obscurity poses a significant problem.
I'm not sure a simple system is better. Distributed systems, even people systems, are necessarily complex. Making them simpler does not correlate to better.
The harder work is teaching people who craft systems to think deeply about the relationships and possibilities among the weights of incentives and disincentives. Think, balancing scales rather than questioning the quantity of what's on the scales as a first principle.
