Ha, funny seeing this mentioned on HN, this student was my Professor for Astrophysics during my time in this field. He was a great mentor and taught me (and oth

Ha, funny seeing this mentioned on HN, this student was my Professor for Astrophysics during my time in this field. He was a great mentor and taught me (and others) quite a lot, in particular about outreach and science communication. The Zooniverse project is amazing and citizen science in general is a great idea. However, you mention the crux of the issue already: the tasks need to be enjoyable. Looking at galaxies that potentially no other human ever laid eyes on is pretty much as exciting as it may get. A former colleague of mine (in the group of the mentioned student) worked on this interesting structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny%27s_Voorwerp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanny%27s_Voorwerp that was discovered by one citizen scientist in the Zooniverse project (hence the name). It's one of the coolest success stories of crowd-sourced research I've heard about.