Moloch
Football stadium
Everyone is sitting in a football stadium. If someone at the very front stands up to get an even better view, it forces everyone else behind to adopt the same strategy just to get to where they were before, but now everyone is stuck standing up and no one has a better view than before. It’s a lose-lose situation. Moloch is present here.
Instagram beauty filters.
If you’re trying to become a famous Instagram model, you are incentivized to post the hottest pictures of yourself that you can. There’s a lot of attractive women on Instagram. How do you compete against them? You post really hot pictures, and that’s how you get more likes. Now you can use beauty filters where, at the touch of a button, it makes your face look absolutely incredible compared to your natural face. Everyone is incentivized to adopt that short-term strategy. But overall, it’s bad for everyone because now everyone has to use these things. They make you sacrifice your integrity to stay competitive, which on aggregate creates this race to the bottom spiral where everyone else ends up in a situation worse off than if no one used the beauty filters. Nobody can go back to the old way because it’s just too costly.