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Good to see that crowdsourcing, one of the darlings of web commerce, is getting exposed for what it is: Cheap and crappy. The web capitalists loved the idea of labor competing against itself, maximizing value for the customer and minimizing labor costs. I.e. free work by 90% of the labor.

Good luck with the new system! Although you're doing it for practical reasons, I still applaud you moving away from this practice.

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Hey aridiculous, we really wanted the economics of the competitive format to be fair. We got to the point where our experienced experts were winning 30-50%, so for them it wasn't so bad. Customers sometimes complained about "only" getting 2 or 3 experts, but we quickly realized it was better for everyone, including the customer.

It's a bit like being a software consultant. Most clients don't pay enough for you to do your absolute best work. That's what happened in the contest format. The best experts didn't make enough to do their best work. With the current format, we see them really sinking their teeth into big trips and having fun.

The problem lay in that some see it as a way to exploit the labor of others.

The real value is in setting it up so that crowdsourcing benefits both parties involved - i.e. CAPTCHAs for human verification and textual image analysis.

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