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How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me

nautil.us

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Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me

#21

Post by Thimothy »

incision wrote: post #2

Fascinating 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…

In my opinion, the attacker missed completely the point of the contest. Its aim wasn't to know who was the one who could come up with the most clever visual processing algorithm, but knowing which is the best way to solve that particular problem, and "Through computer-aid crowdsourcing" could very well be the best answer.

I really hope he wasn't in the winning team.

Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me

#22

Post by clockwerx »

skybrian wrote: post #13
Animats wrote: post #12

Bad design. Anybody could mess up the job. In any large, anonymous group, there will be a certain number of assholes. Of course it didn't work. Ask anyone involved in running an IRC channel, or a MMORPG, or a factory. Given the problem they were solving (reassembling images shredded into strips) they needed something where, when two strips were put together by a human, a program decided if they matched closely, and,…

Or just versioning and the ability to revert, like Wikipedia has.

Probably better is something like tasks.hotosm.org's "Done" and "Reviewed" approach, and requiring accounts.

Obvious vandalism attracts a ban quickly.

Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me

#23

Post by hobs »

Jemaclus wrote: post #11

Just as an exercise in 20/20 hindsight, it seems to me that the easiest change to make is to not trust every player implicitly. In other words, you enforce some level of duplication in the work. If enough people agree that this piece goes there , then it goes there, and if not, then it doesn't. A single attacker is unlikely to be able to undo the work of dozens of supporters, even if it takes less time and effort to…

Yeah that is what I immediately thought, that you would want to do some processing on the changes before presenting it to the users, and not make it live, just asking them to make a change and asking others to rate the change.

That would be a system that you would need a large number of users to manipulate.

The downside of this idea is that their website is clearly about an interactive experience where you move things around and get the feel of others doing the same thing, I dont know if that kind of thing would be compatible with y/our idea without a lot of tricks.

Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me

#24

Post by GhotiFish »

dsuth wrote: post #14
GhotiFish wrote: post #5

This 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…

> In my experience, mobs like 4chan tend to descend on people who have high and mighty ideas of their actions. In my experience, people who defend 4chan's actions like to victim-blame. > 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,…

>but maliciously attacking and sabotaging an opponent in a competition was just fine?

Empathise does not mean condone.

>This sense of entitlement

entitlement? Is someone acting entitled?

>very typical of anti-social b-tard behaviour,

nice...

>and it shouldn't be encouraged.

and it can't be stopped. It is a reality.

Re: How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me

#25

Post by Animats »

xxs wrote: post #18
Animats wrote: post #12

Bad design. Anybody could mess up the job. In any large, anonymous group, there will be a certain number of assholes. Of course it didn't work. Ask anyone involved in running an IRC channel, or a MMORPG, or a factory. Given the problem they were solving (reassembling images shredded into strips) they needed something where, when two strips were put together by a human, a program decided if they matched closely, and,…

if they could do the matching they would have not needed the human force.

Doing all the matching automatically is reasonably hard, but merely checking a human match isn't.
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