Only in adversarial games, and most of engineering isn't adversarial. Enabling compression on your website or designing your UI to make things clear to users give real improvements that don't degrade with time. Other sorts of improvements like optimizing your JS delivery or your server specs decay with time, because people make incidental changes elsewhere, but this is a slow process. Adversarial situations are very different because there's a motivated person on the other end trying to counter what you're doing, and gains are especially short-lived.
I like to divide solutions into four approximate categories based on what sort of scenario they're applying to:
1. Collaborative situations: your solution works better and better, because people notice and work with you. Ex: designing an icon or coining a word for a new concept; over time more and more people recognize it, use it, etc.
2. Indifferent situations: your solution continues working about the same, because it's not about interaction with others who adapt. Ex: enabling compression on HTML serving, inventing joist hangars, new cancer surgery technique. Most inventions and engineering is in this category.
3. Decay situations: your solution slowly stops working as well, because the world moves on. Ex: payroll software needs to be updated as payroll regulations change.
4. Adversarial situations: your solution quickly stops working well, because others are directly trying to counter your work. Ex: investing strategies, antibiotics, ad fraud, ad fraud detection.
When you're evaluating a solution based on how it seems like it would work in the current world, thinking about how collaborative-vs-adversarial the situation is helps you predict what the full rollout of your solution would look like.
It's nice that you have a framework but you still haven't addressed my (I think fairly simple) question about how any of it applies here.
I realise this probably comes of a little snarky but I've tried following your comments in good faith and it just seems like a very abstract hammer looking for a nail without really reading/listening to the quite literal/simple/not-very-abstract discussion being had here.
We started with EdwardDiego calling blocking cloud IPs "a simple solution to ad fraud" and me replying that because ad fraud is an adversarial situation this wouldn't be nearly as much of a solution as they seemed to think.
Then, in our subthread it seemed to me like you were saying that it being adversarial doesn't matter, and wins are always ephemeral ("every solution is a component in the perpetual fight"). I responded by explaining how this varies by situation, with some where wins compound (cooperative) but that the adversarial nature of ad fraud shortens the lifetime of wins dramatically compared to other domains.
