Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing has become quite popular over the years. Especially with the rise of social media and the need to get data and input from many different people at once. I myself am totally for crowdsourcing. Me personally, I think it is a great way to get different perspectives and opinions on a topic from many different people. I myself am guilty of crowdsourcing; especially on facebook. When it comes to the nail polish and make up department, I am clueless. I don't know how to do makeup nor do I know which color nail polishes coordinate well with certain color dresses. Which is why when I have attended two weddings where I would have to dress up and look all nice, I turned to facebook to ask which color nail polish I should get. Sure it's not a serious question but it is a simple question that many different people can answer which allows me to eventually come up with a solution. By asking people's opinion on something such as nail polish color, it gives people the impression that I care about their opinion. I do care about certain people's opinion but not as many as some people may think. I have seen the good that crowdsourcing can do. Take for example Buzzfeed. One of the Buzzfeed posting concerns unsolved mysteries. Some include Jack the Ripper, missing people, spontaneous combustion, and the famous JonBenet Ramsey case. Most of the videos end with different theories of what happened to these people. What Buzzfeed unsolved has people do is post questions or comments on their social medias. What that allows is new theories to arise, possibly leading to more clues, and a high chance of the case being solved or maybe even the ability to point things out they may not have been caught initially. Maybe one day these videos will help solve one of these cases. Anyways, there is also the cases of where crowdsourcing has really helped people. There is this group of biker gangs that block the westboro baptist church. That way when the families are grieving their loved ones, they don't have to see that awful "church" picketing the funeral of their loved one. That I think is a great example of crowdsourcing doing good. It probably started from someone with an idea t shield families,  other people jumped on that idea because it helped people and now there is a whole biker gang of people doing this good deed. However, it's not to say that crowdsourcing is perfect because nothing is truly that perfect. I don't doubt that it has been used with bad intentions but all I have seen it do so far is more good than bad. I understand why companies do it; it's a quick, easy, and convenient way for them to reach out to their customers and then in turn the customers feel valued because the companies show that their opinion matters and so you get happy customers and happy companies and so everyone wins. Sure it's less personal but they get the results they want and they get them fast.