

Ask HN:  Have you used Amazon Turk or other site for content generation? - jpmc

I have toyed with the idea of using Turk to generate some content for a project..just to get the ball rolling.  I feel that this project is  suffering from the empty parking lot syndrome.  Is seeding your site cheating/wrong?
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Travis
There have been other HN discussions about seeding your site, and the
consensus seems to be that it's OK if done ethically. I'd say paying users to
generate stuff is fine. Just don't steal copyrighted material, don't pay
people to reword someone else's content. Keep them generating original
material and I don't see any problems.

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byoung2
_don't pay people to reword someone else's content._

I had that experience with mturk...several people must have used the same
content spinning software, because they all returned basically the same
reworded wikipedia article.

~~~
jpmc
I didn't think about that. I guess policing the content that gets generated
will be something to consider.

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aantix
Data IS part of the design process.

As for Mechanical Turk, take a look at some of the papers Greg Little has
published from MIT to get some creative ideas as to how to use Mechanical
Turk.

If you're a Rails developer, take a look at my gem Turkee to easily integrate
with Mechanical Turk ( <http://github.com/aantix/turkee> ).

