Crowdsourcing: for grades or for money?

In the lecture 2, Pro. Chan provided us with many websites to know more about social networking. In the past, I used Chinese websites to satisfy my requirement more frequently, but knew little about foreign websites. When Facebook, Twitter and YouTube became a lifestyle for people over the world, many famous Chinese websites came out, such as Renren, Tencent, sina, etc.

 

Pro. Chan introduced the definition of Crowdsourcing, that is, a crowd of users come up with their strategies to help the asker to solve his problem and maybe the asker will choose the best strategy to pay for. Of course, the method to attract users to answer the question is to provide the award, but this award usually includes two types: the money and the grades.

 

In the examples of BurdaStyle and Witmart that is often called as Zhubajie by Chinese people, money is just used to inspire many users to provide their strategies as award. To some degree, this is a type of e-commerce. Users sell their knowledge but not an object in contrast to eBay and Taobao. But it is easy to understand why users have passion to participate in this bargain to earn money. Maybe there are some people to have a life by answering questions in these websites and I think I will call them Brainstorming-Businessman.   

 

Additionally, for some people, it seems difficult to understand why some users want to earn grades in the website by answering questions. These grades can’t bring any delicious food, any beautiful cloth, any their favorite objects and even a blank paper. Why such many users are voluntary to answer questions due to the grades?

 

First of all, the grades is relative to users’ level in the website. More grades means users can own more priorities as a VIP and even can use these grades to exchange presents. Zhidao.Baidu is the best example of this. http://zhidao.baidu.com/shop/?TabIndex=1#dhzq This link shows that users can use the grades to exchange these presents and at the same time they must satisfy the level,  which is relative to the grades, and the adopted ratio. So if you want to get these presents, you can exchange your grades to them. However, I don’t think this is the most significant aspect to inspire users to participate in the activity.

 

From my perspective, using the grades to exchange the idea with others can absorb more users. I have registered an ID in Zhidao.Baidu for several years. In the beginning, I found many people sent their questions and then got the answers from others. So I sent a question that I can’t find the answer from my surrounding friends in this website. But several days later, no one responded to me. I didn’t know what happened until one person left words “ No grades, no response.” From then on, I feel it is important to achieve grades to get solutions for me. So I must help others in order to earn grades and then provided these grades to earn solutions. From this example, this type of award can stimulate users to join in the ask-answer activity. Thereby, it is possibly the reason why Zhidao.Baidu can be so popular.

 

Finally, it is just a method to enjoy oneself. So far, I have gotten more than two thousand grades in the Zhidao.Baidu. Some friends will ask me why I have so much passion to answer others’ questions and it’s really because of earning grades to make others answer my question. I will say no. Just when I have interest in some topics, I will search for them and will look at others’ questions. Sometimes I want to illustrate my opinion and just will write my idea for the asker. Often the true feeling can get the asker’s favor and he will give the award for my answer. So sometimes the grades is equal to fun.   

 

 

In my idea, the crowdsourcing websites without any payment still own the potential to attract users to participate in. So this is the special fascination of social networking.