4Chan is notorious for doing this successfully, with even less detail to start with. The large anonymous crowd of viewers and poster is highly likely to contain people who can identify even the smallest detail. Within the past few years, a few remarkable ones stand out to me:
1. Locating terrorist training camps by high voltage power lines visible in the background.
2. Shia LeBeouf's IRL Super Capture the Flag, "He Will Not Divide Us," located and vandalized no less than 5 times. The last one used astronavigation principles, and visible contrails from airplane traffic.
3. Identifying muggers in crowds based on nothing more than biking gear and facial hair.
The one thing these had in common, was a sustained call for effort. By keeping the limited original details available and obvious, people in every timezone and demographic could view them. This greatly increases the odds of specialist knowledge or community insiders being able to add information to the detail, which goes back to the general audience, forming an action feedback loop.
Amatuer hour indeed, but when you have 10000 random people you get results pretty quick.
Yes, but then again, Reddit also did the same thing right after the Boston marathon bombing and as I recall it went pretty badly, as they ended up identifying the wrong person as the culprit and his mom ended up receiving threats from random people (he was missing at the time). He was later found dead in a river and it turned out he had killed himself.
1. Locating terrorist training camps by high voltage power lines visible in the background.
2. Shia LeBeouf's IRL Super Capture the Flag, "He Will Not Divide Us," located and vandalized no less than 5 times. The last one used astronavigation principles, and visible contrails from airplane traffic.
3. Identifying muggers in crowds based on nothing more than biking gear and facial hair.
The one thing these had in common, was a sustained call for effort. By keeping the limited original details available and obvious, people in every timezone and demographic could view them. This greatly increases the odds of specialist knowledge or community insiders being able to add information to the detail, which goes back to the general audience, forming an action feedback loop.
Amatuer hour indeed, but when you have 10000 random people you get results pretty quick.