The dark side of the internet, in a nutshell?

As incentives to take higher actions increase—due to higher stakes or more manipulable signaling technology—more information is revealed about gaming ability, and less about natural actions. We explore a new externality: showing agents’ actions to additional observers can worsen information for existing observers. Applications to credit scoring, school testing, and web searching are discussed.

That is from a forthcoming JPE paper “Muddled Information,” by Alex Frankel and Navin Kartik.