How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me

Re:How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me by GhotiFish on Thursday October 23, 2014 @06:38PM (#8501131)

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.

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Re:How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me by dsuth on Friday October 24, 2014 @12:10AM (#8502109)

> 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.

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Re:How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me by GhotiFish on Friday October 24, 2014 @01:59PM (#8504961)

>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.

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Re:How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me by xerophyte12932 on Friday October 24, 2014 @01:28AM (#8502267)

I don't think Darpa was looking for an algorithm to unshred documents, as the article states, they were assessing vulnerability of shredded documents. In that regard, this team's efforts were most important as they highlighted how an adversary doesn't even need a complex CV algorithm, all they need is a huge crowd and an incentive

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Re:How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me by xxs on Friday October 24, 2014 @03:37AM (#8502525)

That's an understandable viewpoint, how is this going to work with actually classified documents?

My thoughts exactly - the system is designed for the military, now imagine getting thousands of random people peeking at the documents.

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