Our community is smarter than the geniuses of Silicon Valley
The tech companies are all in a rage these days for “crowdsourcing”. The old saying that the “wisdom of a village is never wrong” has finally caught on amongst the know-it-alls of tech, and little by little they are turning to their communities to refine and improve their product. Well jump on the wagon boys, here at PlanetRomeo we’ve been doing crowdsourcing since before the term was first coined in 2006, and our “crowd” consists of old pros who know what they are doing.
The main way we crowdsource is with our picture verification system. Every day tens of thousands of pictures are uploaded to PlanetRomeo. Before any of them go live on their profiles, they have to be approved. This is done after a number of our users have seen and voted on them in the picture classification tool, marking them either Non-Sexual, Softcore/Sexy, Hardcore/Porn, or Illegal. We set the descriptions of these categories, but it’s up to them to sort the pictures.
Why do we do it this way? Well, most importantly, if we had to sort all these pictures here at the PlanetRomeo office, it would take years to get pictures approved! Either that or we’d have to hire an army to do so, and start charging massive fees to access our site. We’re not going to do that. Also, we’ve learned as well that our community enjoys using the classification tool; it’s a kind of sorting game that lets you see a random assortment of new pics before anyone else. And, well, they do it better then we could! The wisdom of the village really is never wrong.
So if you are a Romeo and you want to have your pictures approved quickly, bank up a little photo karma and spend a minute or two with the picture classification tool. Just go under My Romeo & Administration/Users help Users/Picture Classification to check it out.
And if any of those big boys out in California want to give us credit for pioneering crowdsourcing in their next TED talk, I’m afraid we’d have to invite 1.6 million Romeos up on stage to humbly take a bow 🙂
Spencer – Senior Communications Officer