

Dawn of the Digital Sweatshop - anandkulkarni
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/gyrobase/dawn-of-the-digital-sweatshop/Content?oid=3301022&showFullText=true

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rdl
I think the real problem here is that the systems (being built by people
making far more than minimum wage) and beneficiaries of those systems (also
making far more than minimum wage) haven't yet been able to extract enough
value from HITs to pay a decent wage. If a worker can only produce $3/hr in
economic value, there's no way he can or should be paid $10/hr.

Once a work system is good enough to provide 5 minute highly qualified answers
to questions like "is this CT indicative of cancer?", there will be a lot of
people making good wages on task marketplaces. I think we're just in a
transitional period right now.

~~~
ukd1
Most of it boils down to trust.

The main problems of these systems are that if you can get $3/hr of economic
value from a single turk, it's hard to trust that you are getting accurate
results without checking by repetition. This means that you could end up
repeating the task 2, 3 times or more to get accuracy.

Scammers and bad workers are a big issue on any platform like this. I'm not
sure how easily this can be solved - the workers only incentive to not cheat
the system is the possibility of the requester rejecting their work and them
not getting paid as well damaging their rating.

Whilst this seems like a good-enough way, there are enough lazy / bad
requesters who don't bother rejecting work which skews ratings of workers.
Also, ratings on mturk are lifetime ratings, rather than last n days, which
isn't that indicative of recent worker quality.

~~~
anandkulkarni
I'd argue the solution to trust is appropriately _matching_ work to reliable
workers for whom the work is fairly paid, not simply raw repetition.

At $3 an hour, someone in (say) Lithuania would be highly motivated to do the
work right, even if someone in the US wouldn't particularly care.

This is the approach we took at MobileWorks, and it works fairly well.

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anandkulkarni
MobileWorks was one of the few companies that joined YC with an explicit
social agenda tied up with our commercial goals. Our idea's always been that
you can get much higher-quality results than Mechanical Turk by treating
people better, paying more fairly, and focusing on the worker -- the opposite
of Turk's anonymous high-volume approach.

Still, it's funny to see how surprised crowd workers are when they first find
a crowd platform that takes their interests into account more than Turk, even
through small steps like maintaining a friendly community of workers and a
gentle onboarding process. One guy told us that "going from Mturk to
MobileWorks is like going from a seedy motel to a 5-star hotel".

~~~
rdl
Pretty awesome that YC will fund businesses which both have a commercial goal
and a social agenda. IMO that's more useful than pg et al donating a
percentage of their carry to charity (although that's great too). Of course,
the businesses have to make sense commercially as well, but MobileWorks
doesn't seem to have a problem with that.

~~~
anandkulkarni
I expect they're used to this. Successful businesses in YC often have hugely
positive social outcomes even if it's not part of their initial value
proposition: Airbnb has helped folks earn enough to avoid losing their homes,
Ridejoy reduces atmospheric pollution, etc.

For us, it was fortunate that the commercial opportunity was directly linked
with our social mission -- doing the right thing by workers makes more
business sense in crowdsourcing than treating people anonymously and paying
them lousy wages.

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rdl
Why is an article like that (quality long form journalism) published in a
local alt-weekly paper vs. something national?

~~~
krakensden
EBX does great work. But more broadly, local alt weeklies are much more
willing to fund this sort of thing than the big papers, and that's been true
for at least fifteen years.

~~~
brandnewlow
No one wants to buy advertising next to an article like that, so it's a
tougher sell. Meanwhile, local alt. weeklies are often run by people who think
it's cool to publish articles like that.

~~~
krakensden
I think advertiser's content preferences are oversold. They care about the
size of the audience and their willingness to buy, and maybe how much trouble
they'll get in if they're caught funding the KKK. Almost nothing else.

Local alt weeklies have two problems: they're local (small audience), and
alternative (not buying your mass market crap).

~~~
rdl
Yeah, I was thinking GQ, Vanity Fair, or Rolling Stone -- still counterculture
(sort of, at least for RS), but wider circulation.

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tsotha
Yet another indication skill development is the key to a decent life. Just
like nobody will pay much for unskilled labor, nobody is going to pay much for
unskilled button clicking.

People who depend on laws to extract more than their labor is worth are
swimming against the current.

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johnbenwoo
Here's one way Facebook has benefited from this type of model -
<http://gawker.com/5885714/> \- "Inside Facebook’s Outsourced Anti-Porn and
Gore Brigade, Where ‘Camel Toes’ are More Offensive Than ‘Crushed Heads’"

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zeroonetwothree
It's hardly a "sweatshop", since performing online tasks is not really
physically demanding.

~~~
ojbyrne
From wikipedia (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor>):

"A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that describes a subject by
asserting that it is, on some point of comparison, the same as another
otherwise unrelated object. Metaphor is a type of analogy and is closely
related to other rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via
association, comparison or resemblance including allegory, hyperbole, and
simile."

