“‘The real impact of the attack was not to destroy the assembled pieces but to destroy the user base of the platform, and to disrupt the recruitment dynamics.’
All the motivation generated by weeks of good PR, a fun task and a smart financial incentive scheme evaporated in the face of attacks by a single person lasting, in total, no more than a couple of hours. The researchers warned, ‘Our results raise caution in the application of crowdsourced problem solving for sensitive tasks involving financial markets and national security.’”
Source: How a lone hacker shredded the myth of crowdsourcing — Backchannel — Medium