How effective is crowdsourcing?

In My Humble Opinion
1

This particular forum is a playground for crowdsourcing, with people asking opinions about everything from cat toys to family drama. I’ve noticed some people have a natural tendency to ask a lot of people (online, generally) their opinion on just about everything. My friend’s wife is like this, asking on facebook for people to help her pick out a color to paint her house, help paint, help choose a theme for her birthday party, etc.

It drives my wife (who is the opposite) nuts. My wife makes all of her own decisions. She feels like people who crowdsource are insecure in their ability to make decisions, and waste time/generate excuses by nattering on with people about the details.

If its something mundane I dont really see the harm in simple curiosity (i.e. Quizzing people on their nipple color/diameter :stuck_out_tongue: ) but I do see my wife’s point about the issues of crowdsourcing. When we ask advice about important things to people we do not know, we gamble that the advice is good (hence the hesitation for people to give medical/legal advice) or will offer us a unique perspective on it. I think deep down, when people vent online about family or work drama, they are hopng to get some validation, particularly if the people don’t know the poster personally.

2

I’d think it depends on how wide of a sample you get in your crowd.

Obviously if your crowd consisted primarily of homebrewers and ask opinions about what beer to buy at the grocery, you’re going to get a very accurate indication of what is considered good beer… by the homebrewing community.

On the other hand, if your crowd was to consist primarily of Belgians, you’d probably get a different group opinion of what beer you should buy.

That’s the catch with using the internet; people tend to ask people they already agree with, so you get a sort of intellectual inbreeding / echo chamber effect.

(which incidentally is a big piece of why I read the SDMB; I’m more or less conservative and skeptical, and it’s good to get the other side of the story, so that I’m not in some kind of echo chamber)

Something akin to crowdsourcing is very effective at predicting things- things like futures markets tend to be fairly accurate at predicting what may happen in the future, because they’re based on the collected wisdom of interested people.

I’ve always foundthis siteto be really interesting in this regard.