Free labor is all that is being pedaled in most of these projects... It really worries me about our future as a planet.

It's crazy how many people jump on doing surveys for free , and even in creating content for social platforms daily for free, because it's promoted by billion dollar profit companies that could easily hire and pay people while still making good profit.

The free labor economy is insanely out of control now, and accurate truths about the exploitation and data mining never will be discussed because these companies can easily suppress and downvote them. I don't do any surveys, haven't since before the Cambridge Analytica story.

*peddled

I gave away quite a bit of free labor to Google and niantic as they were launching ingress. If I had known that pokemon go would eventually be a thing, I might have thought a bit more about the power I had to shape where people would be walking every day for the next 10 years.

I don't know what you are ranting about but the term "crowdsourcing" is exactly what this tool is created to do. Don't use it if you don't want to.

It's still funny a company awash in money wouldn't just hire people to do this.

And I'm quite sure people criticizing this won't be using it :)

Because it's cheaper and it's clearly working. I doubt someone doing this as a full time job would be as good at these monotonous tasks than 10 times as many people who are doing it for a few minutes per day.

It could still be called "crowdsourcing" if it were compensated.