It appears to me that there was a golden age of crowdsourcing that lasted from maybe 1999 to 2010. If you started a project in this time, you had the chance to

It appears to me that there was a golden age of crowdsourcing that lasted from maybe 1999 to 2010. If you started a project in this time, you had the chance to get lots of quality contributions, for free, from people whose motivation is just to be part of something. Now, you will get: - Modern trolling, as you point out. Well-organized armies of trolls, some working for political purposes, some just for the lulz, can subvert anything. - Disruptive bots (I don't know why this is a change since the golden age, but maybe it's simply that more people are better at programming) - Spam that's a full-time job to moderate - Lack of motivation because there are so many other fascinating things on the Internet - A change in expectations because money has entered the equation -- crowdsourcing is now something that people do as a menial job, and they aren't paid enough to do it well The sabotage by 4chan of the crowdsourcing team in the Pentagon shredder challenge [1; sorry about the stupid title] makes a good indicator of the end of the crowdsourcing era. That happened in 2011. I run a project, ConceptNet [2], that has obtained a lot of its data from crowdsourcing. Years ago, I stopped supporting the ability for the public to edit ConceptNet directly. (This does not mean the project shut down. Far from it. It currently produces state-of-the-art NLP models.) Supporting public contributions became obviously not worth the effort. Some projects that started at the right time and maintained excellent communities are still working, though -- Wiktionary would be an example, and it's one of the places that still provides new data to ConceptNet. [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/02/how-a-lone-hacker-shredded-the-myth-of-crowdsourcing/ https://www.wired.com/2015/02/how-a-lone-hacker-shredded-the... [2] http://conceptnet.io http://conceptnet.io