Geoff Mattie of Project Management Institute published a post asking, “Does Crowdsourcing Work in a Project Environment?” that raises some very valid concerns that indicate to me that he is far sharper than the average bear.
This infographic from 99designs is a good introduction to what crowd-sourcing is (click the image to see the entire infographic):
Most bloggers do not realize that when they flag a comment as spam they are effectively blacklisting and banning that person and preventing their comments from appearing in ALL other WordPress blogs.
If it only kept your comments from appearing in their own blog that would be fine – but that isn’t how Akismet works.
The Akismet problem is so serious – taking away the voices of the most
intelligent and influential – that we developed an Akismet Alternative.
Most people see only what THEY know, believe there is only ONE correct way to do anything, and are sure they are right and everyone else is wrong. They don’t realize there are usually many ways and many opinions based on different backgrounds.
Only those who source their knowledge from large groups of disparate opinions can obtain the big picture. If I were to use crowd-sourcing I would carefully choose my “crowd” depending on what I wanted to know.
If I wanted to develop best practices I would select a “crowd” of the most intelligent, brilliant people I know in that niche area of expertise.
If I wanted to know what some specific target audience wants to buy I would carefully select only those in that target demographic because anyone else’s opinions would not be valid for that study.
People like me know we are not “normal” and one of the largest hurdles for many business owners to get over is that their target audience is NOT like them. They do NOT know what you know. They are NOT familiar with your industry jargon. They are NOT as passionate about whatever it is you love and do NOTwant to spend their spare time learning all about it. They just want to buy what they want to buy and usually that is whatever the people they follow use or recommend.
The target demographic of most businesses is made up of followers – not leaders. Business owners and managers are usually leaders. These are very different kinds of people just as technical people are usually very poor sales people and those who excel at sales usually do not have strong technical skills. (Yes there are SOME exceptions – brilliant people are often good at a vast range of things – but I have yet to meet anyone who excells at everything.)
Akismet proves to me that crowd-sourcing for blocking spam or blacklisting spammers does NOT work and would only work if they hand-selected the bloggers with wisdom enough to know that only those who are obvious spammers should be banned from commenting – not just those whose opinions you do not like.
Bill Casselman raises many more concerns about CrowdSourcing. His definition?:
Crowdsourcing is getting low-pay or no-pay outside amateurs to do company work.
He continues:
A Business Concept as Old as Suckers
The word crowdsourcing may be new but the concept is as old as P. T. Barnum. You remember P.T? He’s the American sharper who invented the freak show, the department store and the three-ring circus. Barnum’s most famous utterance? “There’s a sucker born every minute, and two to take him.” To which that spry iconoclast H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) added: “No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
He has other objections to uses of crowdsourcing I had not thought of so you may want to head over and read the rest of his diatribe against other types of crowdsourcing.
There is another crowdsourcing disaster on the horizon that could seriously affect Internet users who use Google search. Google recently announced a Chrome Personal Blocklist browser extension add-on that COULD be used to blacklist sites exactly the same way Akismet blacklists bloggers:
“While Personal Blocklist is designed to allow individuals to build up their own unique blocklists, Google says it may use the data to influence the search results for others. From its announcement: “The extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.””
While that quote says “potential ranking signal” there is nothing to keep Google from using it to censor Google results. If you are one of the naive who trusts Google implicitly I implore you to read these posts:
- Google Farmer Update Slaps Google Shopping and Google Maps Competitors
- There is NO SUCH THING as a Google Fairy
- Google is a monopoly
Gail Gardner
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As an owner of 4 sites I think that the Google blocklist mention above is very worrying. My sites feature only the best quality content but unfortunately not everybody understands what the true definition of good content is. For example, I know a number of people who think that standard display adverts like Adsense on websites are intrusive and spammy. All of my sites are adsense funded and I would hate to think that someone could add my site to their blocklist because it has adverts on it….and that in turn could damage my rating with google. There needs to be some way of defining the reason for blocking if google are going to start incorporating this info into the rankings.
Matt Clarke would love you to read ..Funny Football Quotes
Hi Matt,
The problem we have is that G just doesn’t care about the individual site owner and you’re correct that there can be no consensus on something as subjective as what is spammy and what isn’t.
They are selling that block feature as a way to refine YOUR OWN content and then using it for something else entirely. There are many reasons a person might not be interested in a site – but that doesn’t mean that site won’t interest OTHER people.
That you aren’t interested TODAY doesn’t even mean you might not be interested tomorrow. The average person isn’t going to be thinking about their own tomorrows much less what anyone else in interested in.
I check sites before I approve comments and at least the two pages linked in this comment display ads in a reasonable quantity (3) in optimum positions.
As long as a blogger doesn’t make the mistakes I mention in How NOT to Monetize Your Blog they should not be penalized – but I’m betting many will.
We MUST take back the power we have handed that one company to decide who succeeds and who fails. The Google Monopoly is dangerous to our freedom of choice and Google’s Evil makes it obvious they can’t be trusted.
It is up to all of us to find alternatives and explain why we MUST use them to everyone we know and in our blogs. The are taking away our freedom of choice as I show in the screen captures on this page about the Google’s Panda update.
They are marching us toward one so-called “choice” and I for one am totally opposed to giving up ANY of my freedoms. I do not answer to THEM – I answer to a higher power.
growmap would love you to read ..Traditional Versus Collaborative World Views
Here’s my experience with crowdsourcing as recently as Jan 2012:
Things I’ve learned about Crowd-sourcing Media content:
The time I had to wade through the terrible (I mean MSPaint bad) designs that were submitted, I would GLADLY pay someone who has a reputation and who, immediately understands western culture.
Crowd-sourcing tournaments are only good if you have no clue what you want, and are in dire need of direction. Then, hire a professional.
We see the trend where ‘crowd’ generated solution that is not only pertinent but lot cheaper than the expert generated solution.
It’s relative, you know. Of course, it fails many times, but it also has pros. A start-up with a small budget can get to choose from a bundle of logos/designs made solely for them!
And if they dont like any – there are no bounds. One can end up finding some really good designs there, without spending a fortune.
Hi Nish,
The problem is it benefits one side but damages many on the other. While someone who wants a logo can get a deal, is it really fair to have many people working for free in hopes they might be the lucky one chosen to receive a pittance for their work?
Anyone who is truly skilled would do well to avoid participating is such an unfair competitive environment.
growmap would love you to read ..SOPA Blackout Strike Already Started; Why Major Sites and Blogs Went Dark in Support
I didn’t even know that GASP was made to solve this problem. I’ve been using akismet and GASP together. But I better disable Akismet and see what happens.
I think it was a great idea to make the program/plugin work like that. It just went wrong. How else are you going to make a good blacklist?
There are too many human spammers that need to get blacklisted. You can’t let a team of people deal with that.
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Hi Danny,
The problem is there is no consensus on what spam is – and most bloggers who haven’t thought this issue through would immediately flag YOUR comments as spam because they link to your business and you offer products for sale.
That is why I so frequently write about what IS and IS NOT spam and the importance of supporting small businesses.
growmap would love you to read ..What If There Was an Easy Way to Get Your Tweets Retweeted? There Is – And It is Fast and Free
Thanks to genius brains like Jeffe Howe who introduced the concept of crowdsourcing in an interesting way. Dealing with Akismet can also become a headache sometimes but it is applications like Akismet which makes wordpress blog more challenging to use. However, blocking even the good guys can become its own downfall. Blocking spammers is one thing but blocking even the best commenters doesn’t sound too friendly.
People should start using GASP now.. There are certainly times when program Fails.. I don’t really recommend anyone to use Akismet since I’ve already heard a lot of complaints about their service and blocking comments problems.
Hello Gail,
Here’s another thought for you and a different slant on “crowd sourcing”. To be technical, crowd sourcing is also all those nice neat freelancer websites all over the internet. For those that wish to hire intelligence, or at least that being the goal, they can goto any of these websites, pay a fee, and they get the expertise they need for their efforts.
In a Utopian world, this would be great, but over time, even this is polluted to a degree. Please understand that I have nothing against foreign individuals, there are a great number of them with an exceptional command of the English language, and are very much deserving of the fruit of their efforts, which I’d expect is well underpaid given their skill. However, there is a far greater number that lack that command. That being said, please allow me to continue.
These markets are increasingly crowded with individuals more than willing to work for pennies an hour, and although there are some, given their lack of command with the language, there are others working for sweat shop wages, with better skills, that are more deserving just like all high skilled people. The problem with the market is that these “crowd source” areas are so flooded that the services are now commodities. For anyone, say in the US, to attempt bidding the projects, they would assuredly make less than minimum wage at a local burger joint.
This is another area where I see “crowd sourcing” failing. In people’s zeal to make internet riches, there are far too many foreign individuals, and others, willing to work for less than minimum wage. They do so because, unlike me and many others, they can afford to do so and still survive, while the rest of us would surely starve.
Jim Sanders would love you to read ..trogar1971 wrote a new blog post- The Base Internet Marketing Strategies Cornerstone – Knowing Our Target Market
I have heard of this crowdsourcing but didn’t know that much about it. Thank you for sharing this valuable information.
I find this new knowledge about Akismet worrying. Certainly, what looks like spam to one is not necessarily spam to another. I have worked with someone who considers every comment with a link attached to be spam unless that comment was very, very intelligently written … but when he is unable to check his spam box for a few days and the “spam” messages accumulate into the hundreds, he simply marks them all as spam, and heaven save those that had real opinions in them but got buried in all the trash 🙁
That infograph illustrated the power of crowd sourcing very well. Cheers
All thumbs up on this analysis… while the concept of crowd sourcing is very much appealing for most people, it’s very important that they do it with best practice methods.
“People like me know we are not “normal” and one of the largest hurdles for many business owners to get over is that their target audience is NOT like them.”
-I think your sentence above pretty much sums it up. The issue with crowdsourcing brings me back to studying statistics in college. To get a random sampling of answers from the general population, crowdsourcing might be effective. However, for consulting purposes on a technical matter, I would definitely shy away from depending on this.
I have also had problems with Akismet. It blocks comments that are not spam.
It makes me wonder what words or how it’s algorithm works to mark completely non-spam comments as spam?
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Hi Gustavo,
The reason so many are flagged as spammers is because it only takes a few “spam” clicks by bloggers to ban you but it takes tons of “not spam” to clicks to get you unbanned. Kristi and I had both tested that before we discussed it.
That will never be a problem in any blog where they use our anti-spam solution.
growmap would love you to read ..GrowMap Anti-SpamBot Plugin Testimonials
I had the same problem with Akismet. A friend and I often exchange comments. Recently we discovered that our comments were being blocked. I rarely comment on other blogs so we don’t even know why Akismet chose to spam us. I started looking for an alternative and found the gasp plugin,Thanks
Welcome to GrowMap, Nancy. I’m glad you found our solution. Not only does it only take a few “spam” reports by other bloggers to get you banned – someone hateful can actually write comments using your information which is usually easily available and ban you on purpose.
growmap would love you to read ..GrowMap Anti-SpamBot Plugin Testimonials
I had the same problem with Akismet. A friend and I often exchange comments. Recently we discovered that our comments were being blocked. I rarely comment on other blogs so we don’t even know why Akismet chose to spam us. I started looking for an alternative and found the gasp plugin. I recommended it to my friend but she seems to think Akismet will be okay even though it dumped her comments on my blog into spam too. Ah well. I guess you can’t save everybody. 😮
Hi Terescia,
I applaud you for your wisdom both in finding and implementing a solution and in not beating yourself up for not being able to get your friend to understand the importance. As you say, we can NOT save everyone.
Some bloggers are called to share their wisdom and being able to comment on other blogs and provide high quality advice are essential to growing their influence which can be used to create a better world. I encourage any blogger interested in doing that to contact me.
growmap would love you to read ..How to Win Friends and Influence Bloggers- Others
Well I can see how much this helped me as I am one of the black listed! Why should anyone that owns a blog be able to decide what spam is or is not and then have that person black listed with Akismet? It is disturbing that a system as large as Akismet would rely on only that criteria. There must be a better way.
Another great article. thanks!
Hello App,
IMHO, that is how Akismet wants it because their system is going to progressively censor those who are most active who are also most influential. There is a huge battle going on for control of the Internet and it is up to us to ensure we find a way to retain our voice one way or another.
There are many ways they could improve Akismet but they are not interested. They could require more than X bloggers to flag someone as a spammer, or they use a group of bloggers willing to be trained on some specific definition of spam or they could weight the votes of the most experienced, impartial bloggers heavier than hobby bloggers.
So just as you would develop an App, we bloggers have collectively developed a better way to deal with Spam. Andy @CommentLuv created the GrowMap anti-spambot plugin and we provide instructions on best practices for blocking spam that eliminates the need for Akismet (although a few bloggers still use it too).
growmap would love you to read ..Best of GrowMap – Our Most Important Posts All in One Place
I look from the angle crowdsourcing is successful but I think crowdsourcing websites are distinct from content websites.
I’ve never heard of crowdsourcing before reading your post. It’s quite interesting. What is the alternative for Akisnet plugin?
Alexis would love you to read ..Google’s Recent Algorithm changes- Are You a Winner or a Loser
Actually, I’m confused about Google, about Google Fairy. Many blog/sites with low quality is unblocked by Google, but many great and unique blog/sites with old domain and high quality is blocked by Google. I’am so curious How to Google makes the decision. what matters is the underlying to decide that the blog needs to be blocked or not?
Moreover, with the new algorithm, Google makes traffic of many great and unique blog/sites is down.
I’ve heard of crowdsourcing a few times in the recent past but I wasn’t real sure what it was all about and haven’t really taken the time to research it until I read this post. What you said about the Askimet plugin is actually very disturbing. I use this plugin on all of my wordpress sites and had no idea that it could blacklist and block the best commenters out there. Is there an alternate “hands off” solution to blocking spammers but still letting the good guys in or would you have to go through each comment manually and mark as spam or approve? Also, I hope that Google doesn’t mess it up for the good guys by what they’re planning to do.