Crowdsourcing Competitions Encourage Malicious Behavior: Reason Why Answers are Mean on StackOverflow?

StackOverflow is a competition.  I read people bragging about their reputation score in StackOverflow regularly.  I’m appalled at the rude and sexist comments in StackOverflow.  I wonder if this paper helps to explain some of what’s going on.

Crowdsourcing generally espouses openness and broad-based cooperation, but the researchers explained that it also brings out people’s worst competitive instincts.“[T]he openness makes crowdsourcing solutions vulnerable to malicious behaviour of other interested parties,” said one of the study’s authors, Victor Naroditskiy from the University of Southampton, in a release on the study. “Malicious behaviour can take many forms, ranging from sabotaging problem progress to submitting misinformation. This comes to the front in crowdsourcing contests where a single winner takes the prize.”

via Crowdsourcing Competitions Encourage Malicious Behavior, Study Finds – Nextgov.com.