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Some possible pitfalls of crowdsourcing include the following:

• Added costs to bring a project to an acceptable conclusion.
• Increased likelihood that a crowdsourced project will fail due to lack of monetary motivation, too few participants, lower quality of work, lack of personal interest in the project, global language barriers, or difficulty managing a large-scale, crowdsourced project.
• Below-market wages^[20] or no wages at all. Barter agreements are often associated with crowdsourcing.
• No written contracts, non-disclosure agreements, or employee agreements or agreeable terms with crowdsourced employees.
• Difficulties maintaining a working relationship with crowdsourced workers throughout the duration of a project.
• Susceptibility to faulty results caused by targeted, malicious work efforts.

Though some critics believe crowdsourcing exploits or abuses individuals for their labor, studies into the motivations of crowds have not yet shown that crowds feel exploited. On the contrary, many individuals in the crowd experience significant benefits from their participation in crowdsourcing applications.^{[21][22][23][24]} Further authors discuss both risks and rewards of using crowdsourcing as a means of balancing global inequalities.^[25]

The term has become popular with businesses, authors, and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticisms.

But they are indifferent to the point of depravity to the totalitarian, censorious and restrictive consequences of DRM, filters and liability.

They aren't moustache-twirling supervillains. They're greedy, blinkered provincials and hypercompetitive macho bullies who are unwilling to look past the short-term benefits to the consequences. They think only of how things will work, not how they'll fail.

But they're a distant second to a rearchitecting of our law and technology to create the preconditions for repression, corruption and suppression of dissent.

Or will we allow a small gang of selfish and short-sighted entertainment companies to fatally compromise the infrastructure of the 21st century to add a few points to its bottom line?

Facing the indifference and hostility of the vast majority of their populations -- sometimes referred to as "non-publics," to indicate their disinterest in establishment culture -- European policy-makers reinterpreted their own roles. They began to see themselves as needing to address the many cultures within their societies, not simply promoting the traditional "high art" culture favored by wealthy patrons in the past. Instead of focusing on how to lure people into established arts institutions, these cultural ministers turned to a set of much broader social questions:

• How can we begin to overcome the already-entrenched alienation of modernization?
• How can we retrieve and preserve relevant traditions?
• How might we facilitate cross-cultural communication, even cooperation?
• How can we help animate community life?