Giles Bowkett wrote When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend … Continue reading “Is crowdsourcing fundamentally flawed?”
Giles Bowkett wrote
When you build a system where you get points for the number of people who agree with you, you are building a popularity contest for ideas. However, your popularity contest for ideas will not be dominated by the people with the best ideas, but the people with the most time to spend on your web site.
…
Even if you didn’t know about the long tail, you’d look for the best ideas on Hacker News (for example) not in its top 10 but in its bottom 1000, because any reasonable person would expect this effect – that people who waste their own time have, in effect, more votes than people who value it – to elevate bad but popular ideas and irretrievably sink independent thinking. And you would be right. TechCrunch is frequently in HN’s top ten.
It also speaks poorly for crowdsourced ideas. People who put a lot of time into these things need to be ranked by authority in some way, but how do you verify the authority, how do you independently value someone’s time? And how do you tell that one person spending five minutes on a subject is worth considerably more than another spending five days? It’s the same effect, I think, that has made Sourceforge almost useless – projects get ranked by releases and activity which means little in a world where all projects are treated equal regardless of actual quality.
Then again, this is a world where a fart noise application makes someone a years salary in two weeks.
…over Christmas Eve and Christmas day, more than 58,000 people purchased a copy of iFart, netting him over $40,000 dollars in just two days.
…
It was initially released on December 12th…
In the two weeks following its release, it’s been downloaded 113,865 times, netting the creators $78,908 in the process. 78 grand is higher than the average income per capita for every country in the world – and this guy surpassed that in two weeks.
I guess this is why I had a meeting last week entitled “A Better iFart App” which was, in part, ironic and in part, totally serious. Someone out there is sitting on a goldmine idea which will net him or her thousands upon thousands times more than the actual monetary input (in terms of developer hours). It won’t see the iFund VC fund, it won’t enable someone to retire but it will mean that someone can spend two weeks building something and then spend the rest of the year trying to think of an interesting followup.
Crowds are stupid. Farts are funny. And because of this, we may find ourselves constantly disappointed by the world.
