Mass online collaboration and crowdsourcing are currently working very well: much great content has been created by people through crowdsourcing online, and numerous projects are completed by people collaborating together. So I would argue that crowdsourcing is definitely helpful to people.
Crowdsourcing is an idea that has been popped up in recent years, and becomes more and more popular. Although it is a relative new idea, but there are already many websites and some online platforms have been doing really well. Those websites help gathering people’s idea or donations to complete a project which can hardly be done by individuals or small group of people. For instance, I just listened to a song that is sung in six different languages, and it is a really beautiful piece. That song is produced through crowed sourcing: One artist came up with the idea of make such song, then other artists from different countries saw his post and decided to help. They each did one part of the music and give it to the last artist and finished the song. I would not say it was not possible to make such a song without crowdsourcing, but crowdsourcing make things like that happen more often because crowdsourcing make it really easy for a group of people gather together and work for a same goal.
There is some crowdsourcing I really like when I search for crowdsourcing. There is a website call Design Cloud where people could help a company or individuals design images, logo and shirts and many other things. I found most designs are rather creative and many companies pay quiet well for the designs.
Although there is many benefits of crowdsourcing, but there are also some limitations to it. I realized that most crowdsourcing projects online offer little rewards for people. That means people have to work voluntary or got paid even less than the minimum wage. So people often have to take the outsourcing job as a “hobby”, then the quality of some work might sometime not be as good. But overall the benefits of the crowdsourcing overweight its limitations.
Haoyang Zheng 