June 22, 2026
Tiny choices, massive mess
Granularity comes at a cost – Game Theory
More choices, more chaos? Commenters say the real problem is people gaming the rules
TLDR: The post argues that giving people more tiny choices can backfire, because they start gaming the system instead of using it fairly. Commenters split hard between “that’s obvious in any rule-based system” and “nope, the fix is actually even more flexibility,” with bonus mockery aimed at the word “granular” itself.
A seemingly nerdy post about booking sports courts and buying stocks somehow turned into a full-blown comments-section faceoff over a very human question: do more options actually make things worse? The author argues that when you make systems more fine-grained — more price steps in markets, more half-hour booking starts for courts — people don’t magically become more efficient. They become more strategic. In plain English: give people tiny gaps in the rules, and they’ll start squeezing through them.
That sparked immediate pushback. One camp basically shrugged and said, well, obviously. As one commenter put it, game-like systems are notoriously fragile, and tiny rule changes can create wildly worse outcomes. Another camp was not buying the conclusion at all. Their spicy counterargument: the sports-booking mess might actually be fixed by adding even more flexibility, not less. So yes, the internet managed to turn “granularity has costs” into “actually, your granularity isn’t granular enough.” Classic.
Then came the practical people. A SaaS founder who runs court-booking software dropped a real-world reality check: with 30-minute start times and mixed session lengths, clubs end up with awkward little gaps they can never fill. Not dramatic, but painfully relatable. And for pure comments-section chaos, one reader launched a side quest against the word “granular” itself, demanding to know whether “more granular” means bigger ice cubes or smaller ones. Honestly? That may have been the funniest and most unhinged plot twist of all.
Key Points
- •The article argues that greater granularity in strategic systems can introduce costs rather than always improving efficiency.
- •In the stock-market example, tick size is presented as the smallest quoting increment, with smaller tick sizes increasing market granularity.
- •The article cites Nasdaq's argument that when spreads are many ticks wide, tiny price improvements can let traders cheaply gain queue priority.
- •According to the article, easy queue-jumping can reduce incentives for liquidity providers to quote aggressively, which may lead to wider spreads or less participation.
- •The sports-court example describes a booking system with overlapping half-hour start times, no charge for extra unbooked play time, and anti-bot measures such as captchas and rate limits.