Crowdsourcing, especially in the public sector, can be a difficult proposition in my experience. We've all seen big publicity stunts that rely on crowdsourcing go horribly wrong. Turns out some people can't be trusted to help out with things that don't directly benefit them. For example, look at the whole Tay fiasco. Tay was an artificial intelligence program developed by Microsoft and set loose on Twitter to learn from regular users. It only took about a week for Tay to be shut down because Twitter trolls had taught the bot to repeat the worst things they could think of. In other words, they made a robot racist. Of course this wasn't the fault of every Twitter user, it was clearly done by a small group of dedicated trolls who actively worked to make it happen. They saw an opportunity to annoy Microsoft and took it.
But focusing on the bad side of things isn't the only way to look at crowdsourcing. There are some very good examples of crowdsourcing working, particularly in the realm of creating content. The now-classic monster Slenderman is actually an example of crowdsourcing. Slenderman was created by Eric Knudsen on an internet forum and exploded from there, morphing into a mascot for crowdsourced internet horror stories known as creepypasta. Since Slenderman wasn't connected to a published work of fiction, copyright on the character was basically nonexistent and any type of media had free range to capitalize on the trend. There are Slenderman video games, movies, YouTube series, etc. The character evolved from a simple creepy design with a few vague concepts to a whole mythology, including related crowdsourced characters and common tropes.
And for those of us who crave even more there's also the SCP Foundation, an archive of thousands of horror stories centered around a single fictional world, all crowdsourced and freely available. Some of these stories are great reads and others are... not so great, but the SCP Foundation is much more controlled than something like Slenderman. It has a moderation team and strict rules for how stories should be formatted. This sort of crowdsourcing is way safer than Microsoft's racist Twitter bot, controlling how people are allowed to submit new content and imposing a barrier of entry to prevent low effort trolling. You actually have to write a story, not just send a tweet. Of course there's still trolls, but moderation deals with them quickly and effectively.
It’s weird to think of it, but urban legends are a form of crowdsourcing, aren’t they? I hadn’t considered it until you used Slenderman as an example. Tons of people will tell each other the same story, but different versions. Then those people may tell other people, and may change a piece of it, until it’s a cultural story that everyone knows some version of.
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