The Chinese “Human Flesh” Web: the first decade and beyond

Human flesh search (HFS), a Web-enabled crowdsourcing phenomenon, originated in China a decade ago. In this article, we present the first comprehensive empirical analysis of HFS, focusing on the scope of HFS activities, the patterns of HFS crowd collaboration process, and the characteristics of HFS participant networks. A survey of HFS participants was conducted to provide an in-depth understanding of the HFS community and various factors that motivate these participants to contribute. This article also advocates a new stream of Web science and social computing research that will be important in predicting the future growth and use of the World Wide Web.

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