Crowd work with or without crowdsourcing platforms

Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), oDesk, InnoCentive, Science Exchange and others are on rapid rise in recent years. By outsourcing work to a network of people, they provide a more economical and efficient means of production. But essentially, crowdsourcing platforms are not the only means to outsource work to a crowd through the Internet. Studies in China, for example, have shown that quite some crowd works are accomplished through QQ (an Chinese instant messaging software) or other communication tools. So what are the advantages and disadvantages of using current crowdsourcing platforms, and how can they better designed? With these questions, and to better inform the design of future crowdsourcing platforms, we conducted a comparative study of crowd work with and without crowdsourcing platforms. In this paper, we present the study, and discuss advantages and disadvantages of using current crowdsourcing platforms in comparison to using QQ and other means for crowd work. We then end by suggesting implications for design for future crowdsourcing platforms.