
How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk? - Steven-Clarke
https://thehustle.co/making-money-on-amazon-mechanical-turk/
======
ptero
The person described is a "senior business analyst", reportedly making good
money, but decides to work on MTurk, doing menial tasks, to help offset extra
costs (diapers, etc.) of a baby that was born. This sounds insane to me.
Almost anything else sounds better: reduce expenses, figure out if he can get
more responsibilities and a raise, even get a low % credit to pay for those
diapers for a year, etc. . Is this just me? This is an honest question.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I guess the article doesn't say it well, but this can be done in small scraps
of time from wherever you currently are under circumstances where making money
with a "regular job" would not be possible. If you make, say, an extra $5/day
on what used to be your smoke breaks and lunch hour at work for an 8-5 job,
you have an extra $180 or so a month without any additional overhead (for
uniforms, whatever), scheduling conflicts from a second job, additional time
taken away from family, etc.

Mechanical Turk generally sucks as a substitute for a regular job, but can
make sense as supplemental income, even at nominally very low hourly pay. If
you work 8 hours at $10/hour but have a 30 minute commute, you are really
getting $80 for 9 hours of your time. That actually puts you below $9/hour to
think of it that way.

If you do freelance work, iirc, freelancers chase their pay about 40% of the
time. That also drives their real wages down. Plus, there is time involved in
getting each assignment.

I have read that you can expect to do one unbillable hour for every billable
hour, so you need to charge at least twice as much to make the same wage.
Plus, for jobs with benefits, roughly half your compensation can be in the
form of benefits.

So freelancers should charge four times as much as the hourly rate they would
accept at a salaried job with benefits.

But if you already have benefits and just want to supplement your income, you
can accept half as much. If you can eliminate some of the time burden of
freelancing, you can halve it again.

Looked at that way, $2/hour is potentially the equivalent of $8/hour as
supplemental income. And you can fit it in to otherwise useless scraps of
time.

~~~
ABCLAW
"Looked at that way, $2/hour is potentially the equivalent of $8/hour as
supplemental income. And you can fit it in to otherwise useless scraps of
time."

No. $2/hr is potentially the same as freelancing at $8/hr under your
comparison.

That's completely different. Because no one freelances at $8/hr.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I don't do Mechanical Turk, but I've worked online for years and had a
corporate job previously.

I made about $100/day at my corporate job and at least $20/day went towards
costs involved in having the job. I don't have that kind of overhead with the
work I do currently.

Freelancers don't charge $8/hour, but it's not at all hard to google up
"client from hell" stories where they spent so many hours trying to get their
pay that it was only like $2/hour by the time they were done or they didn't
get paid at all etc.

I don't really want to argue this. Someone asked a question and I answered it
based on first-hand experience making often nominally low hourly pay. And now
people are nitpicking my reply, presumably because they've got relatively
cushy lives and this type of assessment is alien to their experience.

If you make $100/hr at a salaried position, like a lot of programmers do, you
probably don't need to think too hard about "But after my commute, etc, what's
my _real_ hourly wage?" If you make a lot less than that and want to survive,
you absolutely need to think about "But what am I really making after x, y and
z?" And the counterintuitive answer turns out to be that a nominally low
hourly rate without a whole lot of unbillable time burden, like a commute or
chasing your pay or looking for work, can be far better in real terms than a
nominally higher hourly rate with a lot of hidden time burden or other costs.

Something I wrote a while back:

[http://writepay.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-value-of-not-
chasin...](http://writepay.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-value-of-not-chasing-your-
pay.html)

If your life works just fine, good for you. But there are clearly many people
willing to work for Mechanical Turk for nominally low wages. I'm sure every
single one of them would love to have a higher hourly wage. I'm just trying to
cast a little light on why people do this.

Everyone on HN can sneer at it all they want as stupid and not making sense
etc. That doesn't change the fact that lots of people are working for
nominally low pay via various online services. At best, it will just
discourage me and others like me from bothering to answer questions here about
it.

------
Phemist
Fun anecdote about some of my own dabblings in online psych experiments and
MTurk.

7 or 8 years ago, my then supervisor and I experimented with running
psychological (behavioural) experiments on MTurk. We had created a method that
would run in browsers in native javascript and were looking to validate it.
Coming from a testing-1st-year-psych-students-in-the-basement-of-the-faculty-
building kind of thing, we naively took what the going wage was for that
(something like 8 euros/hour), and put an experiment online that would take
around 20 min to complete, and paid 2 euros.

My supervisor used his own credit card and set the spend limit to around 1000
euros; thinking that we'd never hit it. Boy how wrong were we. Apparently this
6 euro/hour wage was _much_ _much_ higher than the going rate, and we hit the
spend limit in around 2 hours. Even though we had to throw out around 70% of
the completions, we ended up with usable data from around 150 participants.

We went in expecting to run the experiment for a week or 2, and get maybe 50
participants, but came out with 500 in a span of 2 hours. Safe to say, we
celebrated a job well done that night over one or two drinks. People were
commenting on how nice of a change of pace it was compared to the then-usual
MTurk tasks and that they would have done it for free. Some even left their
e-mail addresses should we run another online experiment. I've since been out
of the field of online behavioural experimentation, but it seems to have taken
off quite a bit.

~~~
bob_theslob646
Holy smokes that is an amazing story. Do you have any more? I am always
fascinated to hear how researchers design studies to prevent people from just
spamming in any old answer.

~~~
Phemist
I'm not sure what the state of the art is nowadays. Back in the day. The
method at the time was so new, we just assumed that there would be no bots
that would be able to complete the experiment successfully, or that they would
stand out like a sore thumb upon analysing the data. Modern frameworks will
eventually have to deal with this I'm sure. The structured way in which
experiments are defined also make it easy to develop tools to automate this.
Unfortunately I'm not into the field enough anymore to know how people are
dealing with it.

The biggest problem we had was with people with high latency connections. The
effects we were looking for were measured in 10s of milliseconds. In order to
tease out these effects, we had to be very particular about the timing of when
certain stimuli were presented to the participant. High latency page reloads
(which were unavoidable in the system we built our method on) would mess with
this high-precision presentation requirement. We measured the latency, but did
not pre-emptively exclude anyone based on their latency, hence the high % of
people with unusable data in our initial validation experiment.

For subsequent experiments I built a "loader" screen that would pretend to be
loading the experiment. What it in fact was doing was refreshing the webpage
several times (ofcourse, while progressing a progress bar) to measure the
latency of the connection of the participant. High average latency + high
variance latency connections were excluded. The tresholds were based on what
we found in the early validation study.

Surprisingly, after throwing out the high-latency data, there were no other
exclusions necessary. It seemed that for our validation study, all
participants were very attentive during the experiment.

In "in-person" cases, researchers would add attention checks to their
experiments with the logic that failing these attention checks by itself is no
indication of "spamming", but seeing weird quirks in the data + failed
attention checks would be. One that my supervisor was fond of was throwing in
instruction screens, in the middle of runs of trials that required you to
press a very specific button to continue. E.g., the experiment has you press
'A' and 'J' constantly, and to continue you have to press 'N'. Secretly
though, A and J were also valid ways to continue with the experiment. The
thought being that if you were hammering one of those buttons to quickly get
through the experiment, you would also skip past the instruction screen very
quickly with it.

------
neilv
A few years ago, a friend of mine, in her 20s, worked full-time as a
technician in a university-affiliated research lab, she managed to find a
steal of a studio apartment (half the price of a bottom-end one-bedroom in the
neighborhood), and she bought awful cheap bulk food... but money was still so
tight that, in the evening, when she was too tired to do anything else, she
did these online "gigs" that paid only $1-$2 an hour.

Since she could write, she mostly did writing assignments (which I suspected
were for SEO Web sites), in which they tell you a topic and how many words to
write, you research and write the article, and you get paid a pittance. But $2
will buy steel-cut oats for the day.

Her time should've been worth more than $1-$2/hour, and I don't like the idea
of companies arguably exploiting desperate people this way. Though it's not
just companies: university researchers sometimes use Mechanical Turk workers
to process data, and as research subjects.

~~~
alexashka
Every time I hear these stories, I don't know if they've done the math.

Let's say I live in Toronto (an expensive city to live in) and make 10$/h
after taxes working at Starbucks.

40h/week, 4.5 weeks/mo = 1800$

Bedroom in apartment = 700$

Metropass = 150$

Phone = 50$

Internet = 50$

Food = 350$

Total = 1300$

That's 500$ left for things like going out, clothes, etc.

Nobody is exploiting your friends - it sounds like she complained to you, you
took her words at face value and concluded that those other people are at
fault.

~~~
ABCLAW
I live in Toronto, those numbers are hilarious. You cannot live in this city
on a yearly wage of 21600. Not only are your numbers wrong individually, but
they're also woefully under representative because your fake individual isn't
buying toiletries, isn't paying for dental, doesn't purchase clothing, doesn't
have any medical consumables to purchase, only eats a meal per day or so, etc.

I've done the math. I've lived here. I've financed years of study in the city
on loans and been on Ontario Works at times at the start of my career. Your
model is poorly constructed.

~~~
rococode
Honestly wondering because I've fortunately not needed to budget this closely
before: OP said $350 for food and "500$ left for things like going out,
clothes, etc.". Does that not cover what you bring up? ~$11.60 per day for
food seems enough for a healthy three meals a day for one person - a quick
google shows numbers like $250/month on a "moderate budget" for food. I feel
if you're eating one $11 meal every day that's probably a good place to start
cutting down on the spending. Is $500 not enough for toiletries, dental,
clothes, etc.? Looking at the past month of my own spending, I bought a couple
rolls of toilet paper, a tube of toothpaste, body soap, no new clothes, some
skincare stuff, and probably $150 worth of insurance. Maybe I forgot a ton of
things but I don't think I spent close to $500 on the "extra necessities", as
I would call them.

Just to be clear, I don't disagree with you that $21600 is too little to live
on. But I mostly buy OP's numbers, which makes me wonder what I'm missing.
Debt payments, maybe?

~~~
ToFundorNot
$11 per day for meals is low, most people who live alone will spend roughly
$15 a day (a single meal from McDonald's for instance is $10.95). The cheapest
'eat out' option is roughly $6 for a single meal at Costco/Ikea. Even peanut
butter + jelly for every meal, and water for a drink is over $3 a day. Also,
for rent, it's more like $800 for a single room in a shared unit, a bachelor
is closer to $1500.

~~~
xyzzyz
In Walmart for $11 you can buy 1 pound of chicken breast ($2/lb), 1 pound of
rice ($.50/lb), 1 pound of tomato sauce ($.50), 1 pound of carrots ($1/lb), 1
pound of bread ($.88/20 oz), half pound of butter ($3/lb), half pound of
cheese ($2/8 oz), and still have $4 left after tax. You can literally feed a
family of four with this. Of course, most nominally poor people will spend
much more, because they're not actually all that short on money.

If you take 1860s unskilled worker wage and spend it all on food, you'll get
about as much as you could with SNAP benefits (~$130/month) today. The UBI is
already here, it's just our standards have rose significantly.

~~~
slowhand09
I concur with your experience. Spouse is a great shopper. We probably spend a
little more than this daily, but we frequently get 2-3 meals each out of it.
Dinner for 2, 2 days lunches. We eat out 2 nights per week, one being take-out
pizza and a salad. The salad always gives us enough for part of a 2nd meal. We
shop carefully, cook at home. Buy soft drinks, bottled water in bulk, make
iced tea, buy big bags of ground coffee, etc. We do this by choice and eat
better foods than most people we know. We can afford to spend quite a bit
more, but this suits our lifestyle.

~~~
xyzzyz
This has been my experience when I was growing up, and when I was a student.
Food these days is insanely cheap if you aren't going for specific tastes, or
if you're good at cooking.

I'm much wealthier now, so I spend much more on food because I can, but if
you're really frugal, you can keep your expenses extremely low by simply
avoiding expensive ingredients. For example, a single red bell pepper costs
$1.50, which is insanely expensive compared to chicken, beans, rice, or
carrots, based on the nutritional value. Of course, fresh vegetables are nice,
but fresh vegetables any time of the year are very modern invention, thus
expensive, and you can easily do without them.

------
dgivney
A somewhat interesting article which strongly turns into a puff piece of MT. I
started scrolling to the bottom to find out who was paying for this content
and there it was "In his book, Side Hustle From Home: How To Make Money Online
With Amazon Mechanical Turk"..

I wonder just how does he manage a new baby, a side hustle that fills every
minute with productive money-making and writing a book!.. The author really
should be writing a book about his exceptional time management skills instead.

~~~
Traster
This seems like an almost constant feature of ways to make money online - the
people who are making the money are almost uniformly making money by selling
tutorials on how to make money online.

Want to make money online playing poker? Pay $800 for Upswing Poker's
masterclass!

Want to make money online trading stocks? Check out the ultimate Penny Stock
Playbook for only $50!

Want to make money online drop shipping? For only $1600 you can buy the
ProfitableOnlineStore course and have all your questions answered!

So it makes you wonder doesn't it: If people are so good at making millions
making money online, why are they offering to sell you the secret rather than
_actually making the millions themselves_. The answer is: It's easier to sell
gullible people tutorials than it is to actually make a living exploiting
arbitrage opportunities in one of the most efficient markets ever known to
man.

~~~
tpkj
Bingo.

"Yo dawg, I heard you're thinking of a new way to make money...so I wrote a
book about thinking of a new way to make money so you can think about a new
way to make money while I make money from you thinking about my new way to
think about making money."

------
blintz
How do people feel about the research ethics of this? Many academic studies
involve the use of MTurk participants, but it seems as though they are not
being paid close to a living or even fair wage ($2 an hour is abysmal!).

Should universities require that studies using MTurk pay some minimum pro-
rated hourly wage? That is, if a Stanford HCI study (which seem to use MTurk
often) wants workers to fill out a 15-minute survey, they would need to pay at
least $8 an hour (so $2).

I’ve been to thesis defenses at Stanford where researchers have explicitly
stated that they chose to use MTurk because they can pay workers far less than
locally recruited participants.

~~~
stubish
I wonder if they actually get meaningful results from MTurk participants; you
are getting a very skewed and unnatural demographic, and I don't see how any
results based on feedback from MTurk participants can be applied to any normal
population. Much more so than the traditional study group of students-who-
need-to-pay-rent.

I don't see an ethical problem in how much you pay participants (after all,
how much it pays or if it pays at all will be one of the variables the study
needs to account for). The ethical problem I see is not caring if the results
are meaningful, just publishable.

~~~
mritchie712
I'd think it's so skewed that it makes the results worthless. I wonder if
anyone's done a study on it (e.g. get an actual random US sample vs. a MTurk
sample and compare the results).

------
probably_wrong
I had to do some digging into crowdsourcing for my PhD thesis, and these
numbers are well reported in the literature.

Our group made the calculations to ensure that our task would pay at least
minimum wage. As a result, we had to throttle our participants because they
would hit our servers pretty hard.

That's not to say that the experience was easy - we had to implement every
possible sanity check, and even then we ended up throwing away half our data.
For us it was still worth it, since twice the rate was still cheap and we knew
not to trust the internet. But a less internet-savy researcher blindly
trusting their data would have gotten some surprising results.

~~~
namanyayg
What kind of sanity checks did you implement, or how did you know what data to
throw?

~~~
probably_wrong
We had an interactive task (hosted in our own server) and a questionnaire
afterwards. Sanity checks off the top of my head:

* Control words: our server gave them two (unique) control words (one for joining, one for winning), and we asked for them in the post-task questionnaire. Some of these words ended up being reused among several participants, even from participants that never even started the task.

* IP checks: we had an experiment that you could "win" (and earn a bonus), but you only were allowed to play once. Some people restarted the task several times, so we only used the first attempt in a sequence (as reported by their IP and timestamp).

* Data thrown away: we further removed data where we had more than one player per IP (to control for both multiple accounts per person and use of proxies), experiments that were way too fast, and experiments with unsupported browsers (which we explictly mentioned in the description).

Regarding money, we were not allowed by the TOS to withold payment to anyone
that filled the questionnaire, even if we knew they did it in bad faith. We
therefore implemented the "winning" bonus, and also gave bonus to people who
lost but really tried.

I want to point out that a LARGE percentage of participants played honestly,
and some of their data was thrown away only out of an abundance of caution.
Once you keep the first bad apples out, they simply move to other, easily-
exploitable tasks.

------
dsissitka
If you'd like to see what this looks like in practice see:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9Qt6bVc5mY&list=PLuh2SVJZ17...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9Qt6bVc5mY&list=PLuh2SVJZ17yC2-32cCfOCw_CIRFsVdNF5&index=2&t=0s)

The hourly rate will flash every few seconds.

~~~
bob_theslob646
That video looks to show someone who built an automated script that spams
random answers. Seems rather terrible to me to be fair.

------
TrackerFF
The problem with these gigs is that the tasks are extremely generalized. So
while they attract more workers, it is always going to be a sellers market.
The only way a worker can scale his income, is by increasing volume - and
picking the right assignments.

I've been doing side-hustles since I was a teen, and continue today, even
though I have a well-paying professional job. My observations are that domain
knowledge / specialized expertise always pays better.

You're much better off learning some hobby, almost any hobby, and monetizing
it. How do you monetize it? Do content writing. Start flipping on Ebay /
Craigslist / etc. Perform / create if you can. etc.

Now - I understand that these (MTurk) kinds of jobs are for desperate people,
that want/need the money now - not 4 years down the road. Building expert
knowledge will take time, and you will more likely than not get burnt a few
times in the start - but the long-term payoff is much better.

Last month, I made $800 in selling two musical instruments. Time invested in
it all was around 2-3 hours, mostly on picking 'em up, and shipping them.

Maybe not the answer for everyone, but it's extremely hard for me to imagine
any other way now. I currently have three different hobbies which I enjoy very
much (and have for years), and I'm lucky enough to have so much knowledge in
that I also make a decent side-income off.

Best of all? It doesn't feel like you're working - though you need to treat it
like work, if you're gonna make money.

~~~
arvinsim
Interesting. May I ask what hobbies are these?

------
closetOperator

      Unless you have a clear 
      strategy, MTurk work is a 
      complete waste of time.
    

True. I perused Mechanical Turk tasks some months ago, and was confronted by
an array of plaintive, useless demands to perform what amounts to unproductive
garbage picking for listless and disinterested college grad students running
unimaginative projects without a clue as to whether the requested task is even
possible.

It would be a request like:

    
    
      Gather phone numbers from
      this queue of web pages.
    

And they'd seem to have paid for a "database" of "leads" which was more than
likely an excel spreadsheet of "hyperlinks" categorized according to a search
query of keywords from the data provider.

You get into the queue, and start pulling up each URL in series, and they're
all these expired domains with parked registrar pages for GoDaddy and Tucows
or whatever, Along with some Geocities, Angelfile, Tripod and AOL home pages
thrown in. Quickly, you get a sense that some fool of data science masters
program enrollee paid good money for a dusty, mouldering text file, didn't
even look at it, and dropped it right the fuck into a template for a
Mechanical Turk task.

Now, there are three immediately obvious courses of action. One, abort and
never again consider Mechanical Turk as a useful platform for operating an
exchange of effort for rewards. Two, plead with the task owner by reporting
feedback to them and ask them to stop for a moment and consider the flaws
inherent to this framing of a human activity deemed worthy of compensation.
Three, obey the letter of the law, and not the spirit, hold your nose, bellow
the words "you asked for it!" and proceed to fill the task with the tech
support numbers for all of the domain registrars, hoping that you'll not only
get paid for grifting on the task owner, but also possibly inundate all these
domain squatting registrars with robocalls trawling for psyche student surveys
and questionnaires that will attempt to publish similarly terrible research
papers designed with the intent to ostensibly "prove" a flawed hypothesis of
human behavior with results that couldn't possibly be replicated because the
hypothesis itself begs its own question.

Valuing my time, I just logged out, and haven't looked back since.

They need moderators to mechanical turk the quality of each task, because it
benefits no one and wastes people's time, to even propose fruitless,
unredeeming tasks.

Unless things have changed since winter, from what I witnessed, there is
perhaps zero review of tasks to assess whether a request fits the profile of
anything even remotely possible or worth trying.

------
s_Hogg
Related to this, Stanford created something so you can use Mechanical Turk
without being overly exploitative (ensures you pay at least US$15/hr):
[https://fairwork.stanford.edu/](https://fairwork.stanford.edu/)

~~~
s_Hogg
I particularly like this part of the FAQ:

I have an even cleverer point suggesting that I might not be able to trust
workers' self reports. Might my clever rebuttal be right? Yes. But you are
using this tool because you want to help ensure fair treatment to workers,
right? Fair treatment starts with trusting workers. They will make good faith
estimates.

------
gitgud
I want to know who is paying $0.01 USD to get someone to manually transrcibe a
reciept to a table.

It seems the Mechanical Turk ecconomy could be dwindling due to the
accessiblity of AI these days.

~~~
FluffyKitty
Possibly Expensify? There was that news that came out a bit ago that their
"SmartScan" actually fell back on Mechanical Turk [1] even though it was sold
as a AI-type thing.

[1] [https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/11/expen...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/11/expensify-acknowledges-potential-privacy-problem-by-
calling-it-a-feature/)

~~~
Thorrez
Yep

>“Most people’s first mistake is they go on there and accept any task they
see,” says Naab. “They’ll do these transcriptions — $0.01 to transcribe a
whole receipt for Expensify. That’s a terrible ROI.”

~~~
jmnicolas
It depends, $0.01 might be worth something in a very poor country.

But on the other hand if you have access to a computer a poor country, 1 cent
might not be worth your time anyway.

~~~
mruts
You can use MTurk on phones I assume? Even very poor people often have
smartphones and data where I am living (Tanzania).

------
Mediterraneo10
I signed up for Mechanical Turk soon after its creation. I transcribed
podcasts and made about $10/hour, which was not bad money for a student,
especially considering that these podcasts were on interesting subjects and it
did not feel like hard work. After a few months I moved on to other things,
and when I looked at MTurk again, I saw that it had quickly become a race to
the bottom. No freelancing site can withstand those capitalist pressures for
long.

------
PaulHoule
Every time I have looked at Turk lately the HITs I've seen have been awful.

For instance there used to be a lot of HITs that involves transcribing printed
receipts.

I wouldn't mind doing this so much if the receipts weren't smudged and creased
or otherwise illegible, but I think these people have an OCR that can handle
the easy ones and you're left with a residuum of hard cases which sometimes
can't be transcribed at all, or for which you'll probably make enough mistakes
to get in trouble. I find that mentally fatiguing on top of the extra time.

------
anm89
What would the argument be that some workers in the economy but not these
people specifically deserve a minimum wage? I get that they are designated
contractors but it seems pretty arbitrary. People would lose their minds if
they found out Amazon was paying warehouse workers $2.50 an hour but couldn't
they just arbitrarily assign prices per package and call them contractors as
well?

------
simonebrunozzi
Working as a "turker" on Mechanical Turk, or as a Tasker on Taskrabbit, or as
a Lyft/Uber driver, all have one thing in common: the switching cost to/from
that particular job is almost zero.

In my view, this is why you can get paid less than what you deserve, but that
option is still attractive to you.

In other words, if you have 34 minutes between things, one of the few paying
things you can do is MTurk, even if it doesn't pay well.

------
mhh__
In my brief experience, bursts of actually quite a lot (My favourite being one
where you got £1-£2 for "Does this sentence make sense" Yes/No) surrounded by
almost nothing.

I've seen some people on Reddit who are effectively gaming it well enough to
actually make consistent money, but that's clearly the exception not the rule.

------
Havoc
Only way I can see this working is if you're in a CoL area that is low end 3rd
world.

Else pretty much anything else will be more profitable

~~~
rjf72
I think many people do this not out of need but as a time waster that pays a
bit. As the article mentions, 75% of 'Turkers' are American. The article's
subject says, "I’d literally be sitting around bored half the day without it.
Making money beats doing nothing."

Of course he wouldn't be doing literally nothing. Instead he'd be just
mindlessly wasting time browsing Facebook, checking out the latest clickbait,
posting on forums, and engaging in the sort of activities that studies are
increasingly showing are destroying our collective mental health and social
cohesion. Instead, he's using that time to make an extra thousand a month.

~~~
Havoc
>I think many people do this not out of need but as a time waster that pays a
bit. As the article mentions, 75% of 'Turkers' are American.

Been tempted myself. But then I crunch the numbers vs my actual job and go
clean my apartment instead.

That plus a very real fear of RSI from all the mouse clicking. I mean I
already click at work all day then on hn/reddit in afternoons...

------
sct202
I tried mTurk after reading an article like this years ago, and it was the
biggest waste of time ever. It was ungodly tedious for like pennies per task.
I don't know how anyone could be doing so well at getting tasks that average
out to $0.47 ($45k/95k tasks) like this guy is claiming; this is an absurd
outlier.

------
Ajs1
Surprising stats. I’ve been aware of mech Turk a long time, but did not
realize average pay per task is quite that low

------
lordnacho
Is there anything stopping people from just randomly filling in the surveys?
It seems like the kind of thing where someone would have made a bot. How many
people who are paying a couple of bucks for something like that are going to
complain at you?

~~~
jonchang
Survey instruments generally have a few ways to check for this, usually via
attention checks which require you to answer in a specific way as stated in
the question text (defeating your bot). Similarly a survey could be designed
to ask the same or similar question multiple ways, and a survey response that
lacks the expected correlation can also be rejected.

------
sschueller
I wonder how many task on Mechanical Turk can actually be automated. By that I
don't mean building some fancy AI but tasks that can easily be automated and
have just been posted on Mechanical Turk.

~~~
kuu
I guess automating is not always the cheapest option, and for "once in a life"
experiment/test/dataset it can be sometimes cheaper to hire people than
develop an algorithm.

I guess XKCD said it before: [https://xkcd.com/974/](https://xkcd.com/974/)

~~~
taneq
XKCD gave me a 503 "Backend unavailable" and I thought it was some advanced
meta-joke for a second.

------
RocketSyntax
You could totally automate commonly requested tasks and then apply your
algorithm to many other tasks to print $

------
Yuval_Halevi
MTurk is the closest there is for a modern slave.

~~~
shawabawa3
Slaves are the closest thing to a modern slave

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senectus1
wow, those number suck _hard_.

I wonder what Nationality these "Turker" are from...

~~~
Thorrez
> Despite an uptick in foreign users over the past few years, the majority of
> them (75%) are based in the US.

~~~
ForHackernews
America is becoming like Brazil: a third world nation with some wealthy
enclaves.

~~~
mruts
As a person who actually lives in a 3rd world country and grew up in America,
what you’re saying could not be more false. Even the poorest Americans live a
life here that would be considered one of _great_ luxury. We’re talking about
living on a dirt floor in collapsing mud houses. We’re talking about babies
dying from dirty water as a regular occurrence. No running water, intermittent
electricity and definitely no sewage. Most people here haven’t eaten meat in
months, occasionally years.

If you actually think America is a 3rd world country you need to get out more.

~~~
ForHackernews
Americans in Flint, MI have poisonous water, and hookworm is on the rise from
sewage contaminated water in Alabama.[0] In 2017, millions of Americans went
without electricity or running water for months.[1]

> If you actually think America is a 3rd world country you need to get out
> more.

I said it's _becoming_ a 3rd world country. There's still some legacy 20th
century infrastructure that hasn't collapsed, yet.

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-
low...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-lowndes-
county-alabama-water-waste-treatment-poverty)

[1] [https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16362410/hurricane-
maria-...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16362410/hurricane-maria-puerto-
rico-power-outages-electrical-grid-destroyed)

~~~
ataturk
Not sure why the downvote when it is abundantly clear that in every corner of
the USA there is this general trend towards decay with very little offsetting
it. All our infrastructure is falling apart. I blame the pension crisis. All
available monies are going towards pension obligations. Not much is left over
for anything else.

~~~
ForHackernews
All your comments are marked [dead] and hidden. I've 'vouch'ed for this one
because there seems to be nothing obviously wrong with it (and selfishly
because it agrees with me).

Have you been shadowbanned?

