

Zappos hires Mechanical Turk to proofread product reviews - Panos
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/04/27/zappos-hires-mechani.html

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_delirium
As a consumer this is slightly annoying. When I see a "user-posted" review on
a website, I like to know that it's _actually_ what the user posted. Things
like typos and grammatical information are useful bits of information to help
me decide how reliable the reviewer is.

~~~
hugh3
Yes, perhaps a better policy would be "All comments with spelling or grammar
errors will be deleted".

Imagine if the entire internet had such a policy. What a wonderful world we
would have!

~~~
palish
DaVinci wrote without using capitals or punctuation.

Drew Houston wrote his Dropbox apology without using capitals.

And grammar... Well, grammar sometimes be subjective, y'dig?

It took me a long time to set aside my prejudice for people who had trouble
writing perfectly. But once I did, and once I actually _listened_ to what they
were saying, I was often surprised to discover that those people turned out to
be smarter than I was. Or more experienced. Or had some unique insight that I
hadn't considered before.

Of course, Occam's Razor suggests that the simple explanation is I'm "just
another dummy".

Or could it be that _form_ without _substance_ is _rubbish_?

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lsb
Note that the article quotes the retail price of mechanical turk; Amazon
bought Zappos last year, so they probably get a better deal.

~~~
togasystems
Amazon charges ten percent of a HIT, so they probably dropped that charge. The
rest goes to the worker.

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jcr
There's some more information (another write-up) here: [http://behind-the-
enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/04/want-to-i...](http://behind-the-enemy-
lines.blogspot.com/2011/04/want-to-improve-sales-fix-grammar-and.html)

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aantix
>Find, Fix, Verify

I'd be interested in seeing how they partitioned up these hits. I would assume
that one Turker is performing the fixes, while another varies?

To me these n-stage Mechanical Turk tasks are much more interesting than any
classical survey tasks that you typical see on MTurk. You can achieve some
amazingly creative results if you have one Turker make a change and then allow
other workers to make subsequent changes, iterating over the previous
versions.

Effective crowdsourced, micro-iterative design may be a great way to bootstrap
a startup with user generated content.

<http://www.github.com/aantix/turkee>

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hugh3
How much are they paying? I love nitpicking the errors of others' errors, so
why not do it for some pittance?

edit: Oh. Ten cents per review. Probably a bit too pittance-y even for my
tastes. Still, back when I was an undergrad...

