How Crowdsourcing Turned on Me

1.) The crowdsourced and algorithmic solutions seem to be framed in contrast if not exclusive to each other here. I wonder if combining the two couldn't have helped avoid this:

>'However, the crowd was hopeless against a determined attacker. Before the first attack, our progress on the fourth puzzle had combined 39,299 moves by 342 users over more than 38 hours. Destroying all this progress required just 416 moves by one attacker in about an hour.'

I'm wondering if it's easier to create a 'bouncer' algorithm that detects and blocks/reverts aberrant behavior than to solve the core puzzle itself. If that problem is in fact easier - identifying 'hurtful' or unusual moves, could addressing it help the core solution by helping avoid non-malicious 'back sliding' too?

(I have no clue about these things.)

2.) The sort self-importance expressed by the attacker is just awful.

Unlike the author, I don't see it as a concern about "how crowdsourcing puts the collective potential of humans above technology". That almost sounds noble.

This impresses me as plain old envy and entitlement, an overgrown cousin to every "Why is this on HN?" or "Why is this on the front page? I submitted this before and no one voted for it." comment on HN. The whole thing is one big "should" of personal gratification.

I believe Foursquare did something like this with regards to their recommendations. They'd ask questions about locations (e.g., pick a beautiful picture, is this place classy?, is it loud?, etc), and only when enough people agreed would they use the information in recommendations.

In my experience with crowdsourcing, most people actually will complete your task honestly and genuinely. Some may not understand it, but they generally just give back noise and cancel each other out. You'll almost always get a few malicious people though, even if their motivations aren't as straightforward as this case.

If you forget to account for this adversarial subset of folks, eventually you're gonna get got. Very cool story/use-case though.

So, yeah, pick your new engineering hires veeeery carefully.

Given the problem they were solving (reassembling images shredded into strips) they needed something where, when two strips were put together by a human, a program decided if they matched closely, and, if so, locked them together for further editing. That would constrain the workers to make forward progress. You might need an unlock capability if there was a false match, but that should take the cooperation of several people.

To me, the author's failure seems to be a straightforward one of design. The system allowed attackers to ruin everyone's work, and to do so in a much shorter time than the positive work took. It seems to me that it should be possible to design a system that doesn't have these properties. (Of course it's probably not trivial to do that without making it harder for honest people to participate. But that's a design challenge, not a fundamental flaw of crowdsourcing.)

Nothing is foolproof, obviously, but their users were working quickly. They only would have needed to keep malicious users away for a limited time in order to achieve success.

The author likely doesn't have much real-world experience with users or his team would have built this sort of capability into the software from the ground up. Any dev worth his or her salt knows to never trust any user.

   He reminded me of the Luddites in the 19th century, who 
   destroyed the cotton- and wool-processing technology 
   that they feared would replace man with machine. Only in 
   this case, the concern was reversed: The attacker seemed 
   to dislike how crowdsourcing puts the collective 
   potential of humans above technology.

   “artistic flare.” The words are now what I imagine when 
   trying to express the struggle between the creative, 
   collective mind that emerges online, and the dark, 
   almost eerie forces that antagonize all kinds of genius.

The authors inability to empathise with "... and personally feel that crowdsourcing is basically cheating (and I’m not the only one that feels this way)." is something that makes me leery as well. That's an understandable viewpoint, how is this going to work with actually classified documents?

Still, like I said, good read.