
The 'microworkers' making digital life possible - bauc
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48881827
======
asdfman123
> Why do the media keep running stories saying suits are back? Because PR
> firms tell them to. One of the most surprising things I discovered during my
> brief business career was the existence of the PR industry, lurking like a
> huge, quiet submarine beneath the news. Of the stories you read in
> traditional media that aren't about politics, crimes, or disasters, more
> than half probably come from PR firms.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

~~~
VBprogrammer
This. I worked at a midstage startup for 3 years. Even the major newspapers
would print (or at least publish online) your press-releases practically
verbatim. They seemed particularly susceptible to anything which contained
some dubious statistics.

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jdpigeon
I was having a hard time deciding which pair of glasses to buy a few years
ago, so I posted a survey to mTurk with selfies in a bunch of different
frames. About $20 got me ~150 responses and a clear winner. I've been
fascinated with the service ever since.

~~~
ad404b8a372f2b9
Aren't you worried choosing your look based on the demographics of mTurk would
make you attractive to a non-representative sample of the population?

~~~
lonelappde
People have more in common than differences.

~~~
ad404b8a372f2b9
Attractiveness is very cultural.

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soult
If you want to catch a glimpse into the lives of some of those workers,
kolostories.com[1] "interviews" the workers of their captcha solving
microworking site. It's macabre yet fascinating.

1:
[https://kolostories.com/contents/list](https://kolostories.com/contents/list)

~~~
ThisNameIsTaken
Wait, is this a real company? What employment agency (sort of) promotes their
service by showing how easy it is to ditch their workers and visualises that
by shooting them down?! [1] If it is not a parody, macabre doesn't even
capture it.

[1]: [https://anti-captcha.com/](https://anti-captcha.com/)

~~~
gridlockd
So you are doubting the integrity of a company that circumvents captchas,
which are supposed to prevent fraud?

> Wait, is this a real company? What employment agency (sort of) promotes
> their service by showing how easy it is to ditch their workers and
> visualises that by shooting them down?!

The buff guy wearing the mask and cape is supposed to shoot the _cheaters_ ,
not the honest workers. On the other hand, at your command, he will shoot the
second guy who is clearly filling in the correct answers. In other words, if
you just want to see the world burn, he will be your willing henchman.

------
gambler
So we're automating repetitive physical work and then shove people into
repetitive information work that pays peanuts, has no benefits, forces you to
work in isolation and spend tons of time sitting in front of the screen. And a
lot of this information work goes towards training more systems that will
automate away more jobs.

And _this_ gets semi-positive coverage from the same press who gladly calls
for erasure of individuals from the digital society based on the notion that
any "incorrect" opinion can potentially constitute grave societal harm. Hah.

Obviously, the solution isn't to delete automation. It is to make AI
algorithms into tools directly usable by average individuals. What is
happening right now is kind of the other way around.

~~~
Retric
I had a really mind bending conversation with someone a while ago that
actually liked this kind of work. They where supported by their significant
other and no job they could take would really change the couples standard of
living.

It’s competition is daytime soaps not a 9-5 jobs. It’s still flexible and a
little extra spending money makes themselves feel better.

------
paggle
Man, I didn’t realize Venezuela was so fucked that dentists are now doing
mTurk.

~~~
vinceguidry
It's been like that in Cuba for years. These guys made an actual commercial,
for an actual Cuban doctor, who actually sold cars, that ran on actual late
night TV, lampooning it.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b5CKSqlz60](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b5CKSqlz60)

Plenty of examples in Cuba of luggage handlers making more money than doctors.

~~~
seamyb88
Ew a luggage handler? What makes them think they can earn money, the
horrendous little urchins.

Cuba.... Cuba... isn't that the country with the best healthcare system in the
world? Don't they send thousands of doctors to the USA on humanitarian
missions, because the USA doesn't give healthcare to its people? [1].

Now, you'll laugh at this because of decades of anti-Cuban propaganda (the
luggage handlers!), but your anecdote of a Cuban doctor dissatisfied is very
cute in the face of what is actually the best healthcare system in the world.

Hard to believe that an industry runs better when a handful of individuals
aren't a huge, profitting strain on its resources.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_medical_internationalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_medical_internationalism)

~~~
vinceguidry
There's nothing wrong with manual laborers making money, what's wrong is that
doctors can't.

~~~
seamyb88
But they can.

~~~
vinceguidry
If doctors are running in droves from Cuba to be luggage handlers or car
salesmen in the US, you don't see a problem with that?

From the Wikipedia link you posted:

> According to Luis Zuñiga, director of human rights for the Cuban American
> National Foundation, Cuban doctors are "slave workers" who labor for meager
> wages while bolstering Cuba's image as a donor nation and "the Cuban
> government exports these doctors as merchandise".[34]

And the reason it's luggage handlers and not other kinds of laborers is
because luggage handling specifically puts you in contact with wealthy
foreigners whose seemingly small tips are big money in the local currency.

In order to make any kind of real money in Cuba, you must find yourself in a
position to interact with foreigners. The local economy will never provide
that opportunity.

~~~
seamyb88
I begrudgingly cited wikipedia, but there's enough in there to show, at the
very least, that Cuba has a better healthcare system than the USA.

Cuba is desperately poor, like most post-colonial countries. Despite this,
Cuba has: [1]

\- a greater life expectancy than the usa. \- more hospital beds per capita
than the USA. \- more than double the number of physicians per capita than the
usa.

The list goes on. Communism works in theory, but in practise the CIA spends
trillions of dollars making sure it doesn't. And even then it puts them to
shame.

The only way Cuba's way of doing things, not their embargo-induced
circumstances, is sub-par is if you toy with the fascist idea that not
everybody deserves basic human rights like healthcare.

BTW, this is across industries like healthcare, education etc. The war on Cuba
is the same one waged on the poor in America.

[1] [https://www.nationmaster.com/country-
info/compare/Cuba/Unite...](https://www.nationmaster.com/country-
info/compare/Cuba/United-States/Health)

~~~
vinceguidry
I'm not going to wade into the muddy waters of trying to argue that Communism
doesn't work at all, but rather to point out that a) the CIA doesn't have
'trillions' of dollars to throw around, and b) the American embargo doesn't
prevent Cuba from making trade deals with other nations. It just prevents them
from drinking from the teat of American foreign aid and access to limitless
American markets and investment.

The US has enough soft power to make Cuba's life difficult on the
international plane but it can't render Cuba impotent. If Cubans need to flee
to the US for a chance at a better life that's the fault of Cuba's atrocious
institutions and politics making opportunity impossible to find.

The CIA is an organization with tens of thousands of people in it and Cuba is
a country with millions. The CIA has to spread its 15 billion dollar budget
all over the world, while Cuba is free to spend its 50 billion dollar revenues
on whatever she wants.

~~~
seamyb88
And I'll stop wading through the waters of arguing with somebody void of the
history of the topic. After I point out that the CIA made hundreds of attempts
to assassinate Castro.

You seem to be missing a whole portion of the story. So all I have for you now
is, you are wrong.

~~~
vinceguidry
Fine by me but can I point out before you leave that your points keep
wandering. First it's "trillions" of dollars, when challenged, you say I know
nothing of the history and state what just about anyone knows, that the CIA
has attempted to assassinate Castro.

I don't even know what point you're trying to make here. Cuba does not have a
world-class medical industry, it's not a better place to live than the US,
people do not flee the US to live in Cuba.

Do I think the embargoes should end? Yes. Do I think the US interfered with
Cuba's politics? Yes. Am I going to play a weird shell game with where I try
to figure out what point you're trying to make? No. Cuba's a hellhole, we
didn't make it that way, Castro was more than capable of doing that all by
himself. He certainly was capable of resisting hundreds of assassination
attempts, if indeed Escalante's 638 number referred to actual attempts.

~~~
seamyb88
Manufacture your own victory if you wish. No better way than to nitpick an
estimated figure in a quip, which incidentally is a correct one. I could
suggest your next move: claim that I didn't mean spending over decades and
imply I meant all in one day.

Britain, the U.S., a selection of European countries, Russia , Israel and
allies have fucked the world for the benefits of their elites. But, please,
another anecdote about how people don't flee the USA (despite the glaringly
obvious ramifications of wealth distribution on infrastructure). I conjecture
that your inability to fathom my point is not my problem.

------
reportgunner
Isn't it rather the digital life that is making microworkers possible ?

------
armandososa
I went into full-time freelancing career as a graphic/web designer in 2007,
then came the financial crisis and by mid-2008 I was struggling to feed myself
because of the lack of work.

So in my desperation I tried mechanical turk.

I worked very hard for 8 hours tagging stuff, correcting text and selecting
things with boxes. It was horrible, repetitive, mindless grunt work. And I
earned like 5 dollars. That was not going to work.

So instead I advertised my very limited PHP and JavaScript skills and I
started working as a programmer instead of a designer. It turned out there was
still a demand for those.

I am very thankful that I had some coding knowledge because I don't know what
else could I've done.

(I also tried 99designs, which paid better while still being dehumanizing, but
that's a story for another day)

~~~
PopeDotNinja
I had a logo made on 99designs last year. I quite liked the experience as a
customer; with limited experience in hiring a creator, I got what I wanted.
But the process made me a little uncomfortable.

Basically the process went like this...

\- put up description of what I want

\- declare how much I am willing to pay

\- have people submit proposals

\- ask designers I like it iterate on design as needed

\- pick a winner

I wasn't comfortable asking people to do work and have no money change hands
if I rejected all the designs, so I committed to selecting a winner so that at
least someone got paid. I was OK enough with this part of the process, as it
felt a bit like people applying to a job and hiring one of them, and I was
doing my best to make the job not crappy.

The part that got under my skin was that I got so many submissions. Like 50. I
was paying like $400 for what I had originally thought would cost $99 (paid
more to attract more submissions, so not sure why I am surprised). It hadn't
really registered with me how much work I'd be creating for other people by
through this process.

In the end, I am OK with the platform as a tool for finding designers I like.
I have since hired the designer who won for more work, so in a sense it's a
recruiting platform for me. But I can see how many would put in a lot of work
and never get paid at all. Kind of like real life :P

~~~
armandososa
As a designer I didn't really liked the experience (but things may have
changed since 2008). But I had to basically enter as much competitions as
possible every day, that meant doing as much as four or five proposals daily.
The quality, as one could expect, wasn't as good because a) I spent little to
no time refining each idea and b) there was no time to edit myself. Out of the
tens of competitions I entered I won two (I won 3k which was very welcome at
the time) and both become regular clients outside the platform.

I may have getting used to working on 99designs eventually, but I'm just not
wired to that staggering amount of rejection and sense of uselessness.

~~~
PopeDotNinja
I was surprised at how much quality some of the people cranked out. I suppose
a logo is tightly scoped, especially when the directions were "make a ninja
pope". I didn't even need to do much back and forth. I got what I wanted with
some Minor feedback eye colors and pose.

------
marmaduke
I was expecting something about Fiver but this is even more micro.

The killer is spending 20 minutes to get 60 minutes of work, so 8$/hr only
nets 6$/hr

------
xwdv
What are your favorite microworker hacks?

~~~
brosinante
My favorite hack is trying to avoid the 2019 equivalent to sweatshop labour.

~~~
gridlockd
You seem to disregard that in many countries the alternative to "sweatshop
labor" is becoming a beggar.

A dollar an hour can be a good income in some parts of this world, believe it
or not. If you can't compete on price like that, don't bid.

~~~
seamyb88
> You seem to disregard that in many countries the alternative to "sweatshop
> labor" is becoming a beggar.

Know who hasn't disregarded this? The wealthy people exploiting it, who
pointed it out to you in the hope that this level of depth on the matter was
all you needed.

Nobody on HN is a participant in a race to the bottom. Don't advocate it as a
career strategy.

~~~
scroot
It's the neoliberal Panglossian response -- the best of all possible worlds!

~~~
gridlockd
You have named your nemesis, but can you show that he's wrong?

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ackbar03
I've read somewhere that mturk was never profitable for Amazon. I wonder if
this is still the case since there are now a plethora of labeling service
companies out there

~~~
zawerf
I was really surprised at Scale AI's recent 1 billion valuation considering
it's also more or less just another labeling service:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20614672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20614672)

~~~
MarkMMullin
I dunno - having done my own share of labelling, a company to make that horror
go away is certainly of value - that said, converting people to cogs in AI
systems is worrisome

