
How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/18/genius/how-crowdsourcing-turned-on-me
======
incision
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
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.

~~~
xerophyte12932
> The sort self-importance expressed by the attacker is just awful

While I agree that instead of behaving maliciously, the other competitor
should have lauded their simple yet effective solution, I can imagine the WTF
he must have experienced upon discovering their site. I mean think about it,
if your team has been spending god knows how long wracking your brains to come
up with CV algorithms to solve this stuff, and then you realize the team in
the lead isn't even using an algorithm! They are just using a huge amount of
people to solve it! Now of course the right reaction to this should be to
laugh wholeheartedly and ponder about how a motivated crowd can trump advanced
technology.

We had a similar WTF moment during Google Code jam 2011. In the qualification
rounds, there was a problem Goro Sort[1] and the way the question was written,
it appeared to be a very tough problem. Later we discovered that one of our
friends solved it with a VERY simple algorithm: just count the number of
elements out of place! and it WORKS!! The good part was, instead of being
jealous, we did laugh about it and still do

------
Jemaclus
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 undermine the truth.

I believe Foursquare did something like this with regards to their
recommendations. They'd ask questions about locations (e.g., pick a beautiful
picture, is this place classy?, is it loud?, etc), and only when enough people
agreed would they use the information in recommendations.

~~~
hobs
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.

------
patrickphilips
'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.

------
angersock
_In 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.

------
Animats
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 so, locked them together for
further editing. That would constrain the workers to make forward progress.
You might need an unlock capability if there was a false match, but that
should take the cooperation of several people.

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

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

Obvious vandalism attracts a ban quickly.

------
semiel
Really 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.)

------
probablyfiction
The 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.

~~~
sk8ingdom
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.

------
KaoruAoiShiho
Anyone remember reading something very similar to this about a year ago? It
might have been the same situation but I distinctly remember an article about
crowdsourcing failing due to an attack.

------
JackFr
So this is like a speeded up Wikipedia.

------
GhotiFish
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.

    
    
       “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.
    

In my experience, mobs like 4chan tend to descend on people who have high and
mighty ideas of their actions. Though almost certainly in this case it was
just because the tool was vulnerable to such activities.

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.

~~~
dsuth
_> 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, how is this going to work with actually classified documents?_

Actually this line (from the attacker) garnered the most attention from me. So
the attacker felt that crowd-sourcing the solution was cheating - but
maliciously attacking and sabotaging an opponent in a competition was just
fine? This sense of entitlement is very typical of anti-social b-tard
behaviour, and it shouldn't be encouraged.

Personally I find the tension between clever algorithms and crowd-sourcing
very interesting. Applications like Foldit for protein folding produce some
amazing results. Sabotaging valid solutions does nobody any favours, except in
an extremely selfish and short-term way.

~~~
GhotiFish
>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.

