Why oDesk has no spammers by Panos Ipeirotis.
From the post:
So, in my last blog post, I described a brief outline on how to use oDesk to execute automatically a set of tasks, in a “Mechanical Turk” style (i.e., no interviews for hiring and completely computer-mediated process for posting a job, hiring, and ending a contract).
A legitimate question by appeared in the comments:
“Well, the concept is certainly interesting. But is there a compelling reason to do microstasks on oDesk? Is it because oDesk has a rating system?”
So, here is my answer: If you hire contractors on oDesk you will not run into any spammers, even without any quality control. Why is that? Is there a magic ingredient at oDesk? Short answer: Yes, there is an ingredient: Lack of anonymity!
Well, when you put it that way. 😉
Question: How open are your topic maps?
Question: Would you use lack of anonymity to prevent spam in a publicly curated topic map?
Question: If we want a lack of anonymity to provide transparency and accountability in government, why isn’t that the case with public speech?