How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me
nautil.us
How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me
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Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me
#2Fascinating stuff, not at all what I was expecting. Two things come to mind reading this.
1.) The crowdsourced and algorithmic solutions seem to be framed in contrast if not exclusive to each other here. I wonder if combining the two couldn't have helped avoid this:
>'However, the crowd was hopeless against a determined attacker. Before the first attack, our progress on the fourth puzzle had combined 39,299 moves by 342 users over more than 38 hours. Destroying all this progress required just 416 moves by one attacker in about an hour.'
I'm wondering if it's easier to create a 'bouncer' algorithm that detects and blocks/reverts aberrant behavior than to solve the core puzzle itself. If that problem is in fact easier - identifying 'hurtful' or unusual moves, could addressing it help the core solution by helping avoid non-malicious 'back sliding' too?
(I have no clue about these things.)
2.) The sort self-importance expressed by the attacker is just awful.
Unlike the author, I don't see it as a concern about "how crowdsourcing puts the collective potential of humans above technology". That almost sounds noble.
This impresses me as plain old envy and entitlement, an overgrown cousin to every "Why is this on HN?" or "Why is this on the front page? I submitted this before and no one voted for it." comment on HN. The whole thing is one big "should" of personal gratification.
Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me
#3The ability to ban rogue users would likely have helped them immensely. An invitation-only system would probably have been of benefit as well.
Nothing is foolproof, obviously, but their users were working quickly. They only would have needed to keep malicious users away for a limited time in order to achieve success.
The author likely doesn't have much real-world experience with users or his team would have built this sort of capability into the software from the ground up. Any dev worth his or her salt knows to never trust any user.
Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me
#4'In retrospect, it might have been foolish to assume that every member of an anonymous crowd would act according to our best interests.'
In my experience with crowdsourcing, most people actually will complete your task honestly and genuinely. Some may not understand it, but they generally just give back noise and cancel each other out. You'll almost always get a few malicious people though, even if their motivations aren't as straightforward as this case.
If you forget to account for this adversarial subset of folks, eventually you're gonna get got. Very cool story/use-case though.
Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me
#5This was a good read, but the author is not above narcissism it seems.
He reminded me of the Luddites in the 19th century, who
destroyed the cotton- and wool-processing technology
that they feared would replace man with machine. Only in
this case, the concern was reversed: The attacker seemed
to dislike how crowdsourcing puts the collective
potential of humans above technology.
“artistic flare.” The words are now what I imagine when
trying to express the struggle between the creative,
collective mind that emerges online, and the dark,
almost eerie forces that antagonize all kinds of genius.
The authors inability to empathise with "... and personally feel that crowdsourcing is basically cheating (and I’m not the only one that feels this way)." is something that makes me leery as well. That's an understandable viewpoint, how is this going to work with actually classified documents?
Still, like I said, good read.
Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me
#6The ability to ban rogue users would likely have helped them immensely. An invitation-only system would probably have been of benefit as well. Nothing is foolproof, obviously, but their users were working quickly. They only would have needed to keep malicious users away for a limited time in order to achieve success. The author likely doesn't have much real-world experience with users or his team would have built thi…
And one of the crowd-sourcing examples, Wikipedia, has this built in functionality. Certain Wikipedia pages are under constant attack and diligent contributors do what they can to keep them accurate.
Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me
#7In other words, creation took 100 times as many moves and about 40 times longer than destruction.
So, yeah, pick your new engineering hires veeeery carefully.
Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me
#8So this is like a speeded up Wikipedia.
Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me
#9This was a good read, but the author is not above narcissism it seems. He reminded me of the Luddites in the 19th century, who destroyed the cotton- and wool-processing technology that they feared would replace man with machine. Only in this case, the concern was reversed: The attacker seemed to dislike how crowdsourcing puts the collective potential of humans above technology. or sometimes extreme narcissism. “artis…
WHAT THE FUCK YOU GUYS. YOUR MOM. SHIT.
Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me
#10Really interesting article. I think we've only begun to scratch the surface of what's possible with crowdsourcing.
To me, the author's failure seems to be a straightforward one of design. The system allowed attackers to ruin everyone's work, and to do so in a much shorter time than the positive work took. It seems to me that it should be possible to design a system that doesn't have these properties. (Of course it's probably not trivial to do that without making it harder for honest people to participate. But that's a design challenge, not a fundamental flaw of crowdsourcing.)