

"I make $1.45 a week and I love it" - senthil_rajasek
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/07/24/turks/

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emmett
This reminds me of one of my favorite Paul Buchheit quotes:

"The internet is about harnessing the power of the bored for the benefit of
the lazy."

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Jem
What's to stop someone using this to 'outsource' CAPTCHA solving? (Not that
spammers need any help doing so!)

I signed in with my normal Amazon account and had a look; it seems to be full
of bloggers paying tens of users a couple of cents to blog about their URL or
add it to social networking sites. As a blogger that relies on genuine traffic
and social bookmarking, it makes me despair.

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sh1mmer
I wonder how many people in developing countries are Turkers. The article
didn't discuss that at all (perhaps because the journalist didn't have access)
but a few $s a day might be worth it in some places. Or certainly more worth
it.

~~~
babul
Only if they have the hardware and cheap, reliable internet connections.

If this is the case, then they are usually fairly literate and generally
pursue options that provide a higher return e.g. online
training/learning/certification to enhance job prospects, job-hunting,
blogging supported by AdSense/adverts, ecommerce/eBay, etc., or in the worst
cases spamming/scamming.

Those that would truly benefit from a few dollars a day are the ones least
likely to be independent Turkers. The best case sceanario for them in this
respect would be to work in a Turk farm (where a host company provides the
infrastructure), but then they would only get a fraction of that dollar they
earn. However, at least they would be indoors doing non-manual labour.

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gcv
Has anyone here used the Turk for getting people to test their webapps yet? Or
better yet, for apps which need lots of raw data which is tricky to collect
automatically?

~~~
derefr
I bet you could actually use it to get people using a website on a permanent
basis. To short-circuit the charging by the hour, just make the goal "complete
this short survey on our site... Which is only available if you're a regular
user."

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ph0rque
Or how about this: create this content for $0.0X... do it while signed in, and
receive recurring revenue (10% of our ad revenue for a given content).

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DougBTX
Love that sheep site linked to at the end of the article, great idea.

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mynameishere
Agreed. Be sure to hit it if you didn't read the whole thing:

<http://www.thesheepmarket.com/>

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seregine
Our service is powered by Mechanical Turk:

<http://saneshopping.com>

~~~
almost
Cool idea!

If you don't mind answering I'm curious as to how long it usually takes for
your HITs to get answered and do you get many problems with ones that no one
will do?

~~~
seregine
We do have some that no one will do, but usually that's a problem with the
question (e.g. they can't find what we ask for or it doesn't exist).
Turnaround varies with time of day. I wrote more about this question here:

[http://blog.clayvalet.com/ci/2008/05/21/working-with-
mechani...](http://blog.clayvalet.com/ci/2008/05/21/working-with-mechanical-
turk/)

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someperson
"He is one turker, however, who is plotting how to move up the food chain.
Currently, Cranston and a friend are working to launch a Web-based business
altering photographs, called Image Den, using, naturally, Mechanical Turkers
to treat the images."

It seems his site has shut down in the last 2 years since this article was
written

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thomasmallen
You could make more money picking up change, and nobody else would profit from
your labor.

~~~
eru
Other people profiting is a bad thing?

Actually picking up change increases inflation.

~~~
ojbyrne
Probably not these days, since the cost of some coins are higher than their
face value. By picking up and using change you'd be saving the government the
cost of replacing it.

~~~
eru
Perhaps.

I was using the first order assumption that the governmental money supply was
independent of picking up change.

~~~
ojbyrne
And perhaps you're correct. But I wouldn't be surprised if the government
spends money estimating the amount of non-picked up change.

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ojbyrne
Chances are that with taxes, cost of an internet connection (especially if
your bandwidth is capped), cost of a computer, etc, they're probably getting
paid negative amounts.

~~~
gaius
We can presuppose that these are sunk costs. One example is the man who does
this instead of playing online poker. He'd be online doing _something_ anyway.

~~~
netcan
Yes that's how it will seem so long as it's not too big. Just like they
present certain college jobs under some obscure classification that means they
are not bound to minimum wage.

Or mailbox stuffers. Down here they advertise those jobs as a way to make sure
you get your daily walk & get paid a little.

If it becomes a serious channel to a labor market, it might become a way of
bypassing Chinas $144 minimum wage. (BTW, There are quite a few internet
sweatshops going already with 12X7 weeks @ $144 p/m)

~~~
rms
Would be curious for a link to an internet sweatshop...

~~~
netcan
[http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/w...](http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/wp/di/di_wp32.htm)

Seems sort of silly at this point. But with enough demand for more unskilled
labour online, it might become something more substantial.

From the paper: " The rather wobbly-legged best guesses for 2008 are that
400,000 gold farmers earning an average US$145 per month produced a global
market worth US$500m; but we could easily more than double the latter to over
US$1bn. There are probably 5-10m consumers of gold farming services. "

