I’ve never been a big fan of the whole “crowdsourcing” theory as it relates to the wisdom of crowds. I am rather a believer in the power of the individual, a single person’s ability to achieve great things. This may reflect my own hope that some day I will emerge as being one of these great people (I’m still waiting), but I think there is also a fair amount of evidence pointing towards the over-hyping of crowdsourcing as an approach towards accomplishing great things that are not achievable by small talented groups.

My favourite example comes from a talk at a CHI conference (2007 or 2008), where some guy was giving a talk on the subject. His best example of successful crowdsourcing involved three composers who collaborated in writing an opera. First of all, three is not a crowd. Second, these three were not members of “the masses,” but were rather expert composers. This example is a big fail in my book.

This leads me on a bit of a tangent to thoughts on online communities, where discussion forums serve as collections of wisdom created in real time by crowds of collaborators. The two examples I will use are www.digg.com and www.fark.com. Both of these communities are centered around the discussion of news items, but I have observed that the “collected wisdom” produced by the two communities differ vastly in quality. In my opinion the discussion on digg tends to be simplistic, poorly thought out, and often of little value. In contrast, the discussion on fark is often sarcastic and silly, but it is at least clever, and this sarcastic content is intermixed with a good deal of intelligent commentary (at least in comparison to digg). Why are digg and fark so different?

I believe the quality of discussion on digg and fark differ so dramatically because of the reward structure in place on the two sites. digg has a complex system for allowing users to vote for comments and stories they like. Higher scored (more popular) comments receive more exposure, and lower scored comments are hidden. This is meant as a mechanism for encouraging quality content. On the other hand fark is egalitarian, in the sense that a comment written by any one user is given exactly the same weight as a comment written by any other user. I believe that the digg approach works exactly opposite to its intended purpose, and the fark approach that would seem to invite abuse instead encourages quality. The problem with the digg approach is that many users are driven primarily by the need for the approval implied by high scored comments. Instead of writing what they think to be interesting and of value, they write what they think will be voted up. These two things are not the same. On the other hand there is no reward structure on fark. There is only the discussion. There is no secondary market of “approval points” to worry about, and I believe this keeps the discussion honest and interesting.

Is there a take-home lesson to this somewhat meandering post? First, I don’t think a crowdsourcing approach will ever be effective at producing breakthroughs, but it can be effective at achieving less grand goals. Second, when constructing a crowdsource-based community one has to be very careful designing the reward structure, because the results you achieve will be optimized for that reward structure.