I think this is a perfect example of how money today is worth more or less than it actually is. Another way of saying that is that money is nonlinear or even non-constant.
For example, say you are broke and wandering the streets of a big city and really want to buy a bus ticket to another city for $20 or whatever. No matter how much your net worth is, you can't get that $20 easily. You could try asking various businesses to do some work for cash, you could try a song and dance routine, etc, but your choices all amount to various forms of begging.
Meanwhile you can be sitting in an office somewhere and make that money in less than 3 hours even at minimum wage, even if you do little or no work. You can even sell something on craigslist if you’re home. I suppose in desperation you could sell blood plasma, but that’s one of very few lifelines.
Nobody thinks $20 is worth much, but when you don’t have it, it’s very expensive indeed.
To me, the root of the problem is whether you are resource rich or resource poor. So the web, by virtue of being intangible, is almost quintessentially resourceless. The trend seems to be lower and lower wages for increasingly onerous labor. In other words, if you have money, you get a real world return greater than the value of your money. But if you don’t have money, then getting it requires an expenditure of resources and effort larger than the value of the money itself.
At some point in the near future, acquiring money will be so expensive from a labor standpoint that it will be cheaper to simply do things yourself and live outside of mainstream society by bartering goods and services. This really bothers me, because that shouldn’t be the goal of progress. The paradox is that even though every new fiverr and mturk create more jobs, they lower the value of work. Right now this is affecting developing countries by creating a race-to-the-bottom economy, but the futurist in me looks all the way to the end and sees how so many jobs today (especially the non-production ones like administrative/clerical work) will eventually be automated by technology and thereby make the purchase of capital through labor even more expensive.
Does anyone see a way out of this? Did I miss something fundamental?
I think the way out of this is a basic income guarantee. When a basic income is provided without requiring labor and this basic income meets the needs of an individual the cost of human labor will increase (the cost of everything will increase probably). This system assumes there is enough wealth around for the government to distribute enough to everyone.
The way I see it, automated jobs will still add real value to the economy. Perhaps everyone can receive a share of that surplus through some form of universal income. At that point, assuming most of society's economic value creation is automated, monetary compensation could be completely decoupled from labor, yet everyone can be better off since everyone would be resource rich.
The internet helps globalize the digital labor market, competition from people that live in countries with low costs of living will drive the wages down for jobs that can be done from a computer and bureaucrats will be replaced by efficient databases, humans and paper are not very efficient.
This is natural evolution, IT wages bubble will burst because anyone with the proper education in any place in the world with lower expenses will be able to do it for less.
I hope the same happens with education, internet will change humanity in ways we can't imagine right now.
In the aftermath of the Bubonic plague in Europe, the shortage of labor led to higher wages for serfs, eventually ending any semblance of what we'd call 'feudalism.'
I'm not advocating a mass die-off of human beings, but any other means of limiting the supply of low-quality labor would have the same effect. If some sort of back-to-the-land subsistence thing became popular among the youth, those who didn't partake might find that a McJob paid more by virtue of there being fewer people willing to do it. Sort of a "shrug" by the lower-class Atlas instead of the elite.
1-Globalization: technology and governments based in short term economics allow work to be made where is cheaper -> wages will be similar everywhere in the world in the near future.
2-Supply and demand: technology decreases the demand of human labor (automated work) and increases the supply (mturk, fiverr, freelancer, etc) -> wages decrease.
One solution is a [Basic Income](http://binews.org/) — "an income unconditionally granted to all on an individual basis, without means test or work requirement."
A Basic Income would help solve the problem of poverty and climate change, and should be a human right.
To me, it doesn’t make sense to say that money is non-linear or non-constant. Money is not a function of time, therefore it does not make sense to describe it with time-dependent terms such as “linear” or "constant”. Inflation, the change in the purchasing power of money over time, yes. Money, no.
Money is simply a token that we use to represent the intangible concept of value. I think your comment seeks to address a change in what individuals, and by extension and on aggregate, societies, fundamentally value over time.
I’ll return to that in a bit. First let me address the problem with your example: It ignores the compounding returns to performing similar actions over time. Economically: Human capital accumulation. Colloquially: Experience.
When you get your first entry-level salaried job, you are actually a liability to the company. You come in with a low level of human capital - the company is basically paying to train you, all the while putting up with any potential mistakes due to your lack of experience. Why would a company do this?
By hiring you, the company is making an investment in your stock of human capital. It takes on some risk up front in return for some amount of reward in the future when you are wiser. As you gain experience over time, (ideally) you perform increasingly valuable tasks with a higher efficiency. You have accumulated the one thing youth (or old age for that matter) cannot buy for itself: time.
Getting paid for 3 hours for "little to no work" is a drop in the bucket compared to 10 years of solid, salaried employment.
By comparison, one-off jobs which might net you $20 in a couple of hours are a completely different situation where a low level of human capital is not purchased by means of a salaried contract. Rather, it is rented with a much shorter time horizon in mind, generally for menial tasks that require little to no experience.
To connect this idea back to the larger debate of “lowering the value of work”: I think you need to specify what kind of work you are talking about. I agree that the value of human menial labor is constantly decreasing. Why?
The supply of physical, menial tasks (washing dishes or mopping floors) is determined by the inflows of the human birthrate (more humans=more eating=more dishes to wash) and the outflows of automation (dishwashing machines), among other factors. Automation adds value by adding hours to our lives that would otherwise be spent washing dishes. For menial tasks it is generally more cost efficient. Thus the outflow outweighs the inflow (decreasing birthrate) leading to a lower supply of menial labor.
I don’t think we will revert to a hunter-gatherer bartering society in the future. Markets and specialization are much more efficient forms of raising standards of living, which I define as the ultimate goal of “human progress”. I think we will eventually need to reexamine our definition of “standards of living” as we move away from the realm of the physical to that of the virtual. Perhaps one (sad) day food will be unnecessary, as we redesign our bodies to subsist on a different form of energy, or do away with physical bodies altogether. This standard of living does not take into account food, shelter, transportation, etc. – the fundamentals that we strive to improve today through progress.
Anyways, enough with the science fiction and philosophizing. The fundamental lesson here is that the market gets what the market wants. There are a lot of human beings, so menial labor, both physical and mental, is in high supply driving down its relative value/price. Technology is eating jobs from the bottom up. Increase your human capital so that your brain is more valuable than a charged hunk of steel. Be the person who knows how to operate the machine and you will never have to beg for a $20 bus ticket.
I used MTurk off and on through my teens[0] (15-18) and found that the majority of my earnings came in through the 50 word or less summaries. You get to a point where you've read enough PR department press releases that you can write the entire summary (at least to the required standards, which in my experience, is "barely comprehensible English") by looking at the headline. I was able to finish 50 word summaries in under 30 seconds. They values range from .25-.50 and they seem to come from a lot of submitters.
I've had a theory that out in the world somewhere is someone selling a guide to using MTurk to create article summaries and the guide suggests the price range of $.25-.50 because for the entire time that I've been on MTurk (many years now), every time I come back the price range is the same with small fluctuation.
Past the relatively low amount of summaries that are posted daily, money can be made by watching the right forums where people post high paying HITs (the name of the most popular forum eludes me at the moment) that are typically 5-15 minute surveys that pay .5-3.00 each.
By far, the biggest barrier to making a decent wage for me was the number of available HITs. The ones that pay over pennies each are few while the ones that are horrible time invests are everywhere. If I had an unlimited number of summary HITs, I could have made well over minimum wage.
[0] Made about $450 over the time, but this was sporadic, random working periods.
It might sound strange, but I find certain kinds of survey type simple tasks incredibly relaxing and some of the HITs clearly connect to what seems to be interesting research.
Pretty much everything the author says here is spot-on and has been for a long time.
MTurk is positively flooded with HITs for generating fake reviews for products and fake content for websites. The best paying HITs by far are translation tasks - transcribing Arabic and Farsi seems to pay the best ($0.30 or more per minute of transcription).
I aim for academic projects with preference for things which require qualification (simple math / reading comprehension tests usually) as they generally pay quite a bit more.
I've earned an average of $0.27 per HIT and have never had one rejected.
Some of the more interesting / unusual tasks I've seen:
* Pinpoint various joints (shoulder, elbow, knee) in each frame of a clip showing a baseball player swinging a bat.
* Drop a pin on an estimate map location based on scenery shown in a short video clip (This was long before MapCrunch/GeoGuessr).
* Manipulate the camera in a scene of flat-shaded objects to bring them into 'correct' perspective.
* Choose 'preferred' structure designs (little houses) which appear to have been created by some sort of genetic algorithm.
I get distracted by categorization jobs, like look at this blueprint and if there is a blueprint number in the title box, enter it. Well, I end up admiring the print. Oh look a giant gear for some kind of mining thing. Why, what an interesting looking architectural drawing.
Similar thing happens with categorize document numbers. Apparently some municipality decided to turn millions of paper scanned pages of contract bids into piles sorted by contract, so I'd end up sitting there reading all about bids to put in some drainage culvert. Who would ever have guessed theres so many steps and processes and backfill and compaction are critical and theres so many inspectors... I mean you can half A a drainage culvert in like one paragraph but if you want it done right its 50 pages of PDF.
These jobs are probably impossible without an excellent short term memory or dual (or more) monitors.
The ones that annoyed me the most were "leave blank if no number" so I'd scour the document for what seemed like forever just to make sure. Inevitably leading me to becoming fascinated by drainage culvert design.
Its very D+D like. Whats behind this dungeon door? Oh, I see, a blueprint of a giant gear from some mining equipment. Fascinating. Like archeology but I'm getting paid for it. Well, not much pay.
"At the time, I was hoping Dmitry would reject my HIT so I could go on a tirade about how unfair it was, and try to get him banned from MTurk or whatever."
I found this quite amusing. You know why this HIT was approved? Because requesters are also punished for rejecting too many HITs! He also would have been banned had Amazon discovered the scheme he was pulling.
This is a serious problem that requesters face. Often the workers who spam everyone with fake work will report anyone who rejects their work as retribution.
This was a great read. I found it particularly interesting that the author came into each encounter 'cold', which is to say without much in the way of additional tooling. They did install a word counter extension but much of their tools were ad-hoc or non-existent.
That suggested that there may be an interesting 'toolware' market for Turkers. For example, document editing; Lets say we build a simple document editing platform (copy editing not typesetting) which includes components that are dropbox like (shared storage), Google docs like etc. And design a workflow around that toolset. So pick a HIT, get a document id, it shows up in your shared storage, use the included tool to edit it, when you're done, click 'done', and have the whole thing resubmit back for evaluation. That might allow you to focus on editing and not get hung up on a bunch of getting it done issues.
Not sure how practical that is, but if there are common Turk workflows it might be useful to build some common tooling for them.
I've used MTurk to have interviews transcribed several times, and almost always had flawless results. (sometimes jargon or names trips them up.) I've always been incredibly impressed at the speed they get done, which is substantially better than I've ever achieved doing them myself. I usually aim to pay $10 for a 10 minute segment, which should amount to more than $10/hour for a good typist.
Last time I looked at MTurk, it was offering money if I would complete some simple task, and, oh, by the way, download this crapware onto your computer and run it.
I checked Mechanical Turk as an example of how to not to price for Newslines, my crowdsourced content site. It seems that most publishers use crowdsourcing as a way to save money, and while that may work for some tasks, you will not get consistent work done.
Rather than crowdsourcing being a way to find cheap writers, content business should see crowdsourcing as a way to find a diverse pool of writers who have different interests or knowledge, who can dip in and out of work, and then pay them fair money for their time.
I pay $1 per post for writers to write 50-100 word posts that follow a very specific format. We provide feedback to the writer to try to make them make money faster. The way I figure it is, if the writer makes money then I can make money. If they stick with you, you don't have to train new people. People won't leave after half a day.
We have already paid out thousands of dollars and our site is growing fast. Writer satisfaction is high. We currently have a waiting list of hundreds of writers wanting to sign up.
Initially I found $1/[edit: item] strangely low as an example of "high pay". Having a look at what newslines is actually about, I still think it is low, but not as low as I intially thought (I'd assumed you wanted contribution from domain experts, who'd I guess you'd price at at least 100/hour).
I'd assume anyone that can write well, should be able to make at the very minimum 30/hour writing -- That leaves on average 2 minutes/newsline. I suppose the lesson is that there are many skilled poor people out there.
(Note, this isn't meant as negative criticism, just some observations)
Like Jeff, I'm a professor who works on crowdsourcing. For one of my current projects, I am working on a tool to make the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace fairer for workers. I have developed a Chrome plugin that tracks the length of time it takes to complete a task, and a web site that aggregates the information across many workers. Crowd-Workers.com allows workers to discovery higher paying work by sorting tasks by estimated hourly rate.
It's been over a year and a half since i've spent any serious time on Mechanical Turk trying to supplement low income, so some of my experience might be dated. With a bit of a learning curve it's plenty doable to find decently paying jobs in transcription, writing, etc. on MT, especially if you have a strong grasp of the English language. But even with higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs on that platform, the overall experience of working on MT can often end up being plenty demoralizing and unfair in many many ways, such as qualifying for skilled work and also being compensated for work performed.
The most frustrating jobs i've ever performed on the platform were usually approx 5-10 minute tasks that seemed to be decently paying and straightforward, asking you to categorize items based on some arbitrary but seemingly simple system, but later all 5 or more submissions you might have made could be blanket denied / payment refused. In that case not only do you not get payed, but having HIT submissions rejected really seriously hurts your reputation and what jobs you're allowed to apply for on MT; often many more high paying jobs on the system use high acceptance rate and flawless work history as the lowest bar for entry, and so MT workers can be screwed over incredibly by having work rejected through no fault of their own.
To not get seriously screwed newcomers are somehow supposed to know which types of HIT's to definitely avoid that could kill their rating, but without enough information to actually make that judgement. A task might seem easy and give the illusion that it's okay to send 5 or 10 submissions in a row, only to later have them all rejected and serious reputation damage done.
I think it's interesting but also really sad how this mirrors a lot of the unfairness and power imbalance in the larger working world as well. Reputation is everything, but if you just happen to get unlucky to start out your career working for clueless bosses / clients with unrealistic expectations, there's a good chance future job and career prospects are going to be seriously hindered, if not completely derailed.
Transcription work was usually very well paying i found, but doing one long transcription task for a $30 payout is a huge risk the way things were set up. Never mind that you worked for 4 or 5 hours on it; whoever assigned the job can reject it for whatever random reason they want and you get nothing. As nice as it can be to earn a nice wage for more high-skilled tasks, the possibility of being denied any payment for a days work with little recourse is really frustrating and demoralizing; the way Mechanical Turk is structured if anyone's taking a negative financial hit for work done, it's almost without fail going to be the worker.
Though this CMU professor obviously put some work into this write-up, i don't see how somebody can possibly get an accurate picture of what it's like trying to earn an income on one of these platforms by just devoting 4 hours and extrapolating based on that really limited experience. It is really easy to miss all but the most obvious and glaring problems that way, just from not sticking around long enough to even run across them.
There are plenty of MT workers who have spent much more substantial amounts of time on the platform, that are much better able to communicate benefits and pitfalls for the everyday worker. They might not be professors at prestigious universities like CMU, but having a decent amount of hands-on experience should really be the low bar for discussing pros/cons of the platform seriously; just as one example assumptions about longer-term take-home pay in the write-up were pretty naive: many better paying tasks (especially web browsing tasks and surveys paying more than a pittance) are often in limited supply and cannot be repeated either at all, or only a few times per day / week, etc. Even the best employers providing the most decent fairly-compensated work come and go, making a steady healthy income sometimes very difficult to achieve even in the best of circumstances.
Mechanical Turk has experienced a lot of success from the start largely because they created a service that makes it so easy for virtually anybody with internet access and a basic computer, to work from home and perform simple tasks / other types of work when and wherever they want, and actually get paid for it.
By any decent standards of developed-world countries the pay is shit though, and worker protections and benefits are nonexistent; workers can be denied payment and even have their reputation ruined for no good reason, with little in the way of an appeals process. But even now services like MT are still a pretty new thing. Maybe in 10 or even 20 more years most of the bugs will get worked out, and workers of every skill level can be a on more equal footing when negotiating with employers, settling disputes etc.
If there's no real appeal process, what reason is there for any MT employer to make any payouts at all? Honesty and not realising this about the system?
I hope you're trying to be on the workers side but either way this is a terrible thing to say. The way you look down upon people trying their very best to make a living is not helping them at all.
[+] [-] zackmorris|11 years ago|reply
For example, say you are broke and wandering the streets of a big city and really want to buy a bus ticket to another city for $20 or whatever. No matter how much your net worth is, you can't get that $20 easily. You could try asking various businesses to do some work for cash, you could try a song and dance routine, etc, but your choices all amount to various forms of begging.
Meanwhile you can be sitting in an office somewhere and make that money in less than 3 hours even at minimum wage, even if you do little or no work. You can even sell something on craigslist if you’re home. I suppose in desperation you could sell blood plasma, but that’s one of very few lifelines.
Nobody thinks $20 is worth much, but when you don’t have it, it’s very expensive indeed.
To me, the root of the problem is whether you are resource rich or resource poor. So the web, by virtue of being intangible, is almost quintessentially resourceless. The trend seems to be lower and lower wages for increasingly onerous labor. In other words, if you have money, you get a real world return greater than the value of your money. But if you don’t have money, then getting it requires an expenditure of resources and effort larger than the value of the money itself.
At some point in the near future, acquiring money will be so expensive from a labor standpoint that it will be cheaper to simply do things yourself and live outside of mainstream society by bartering goods and services. This really bothers me, because that shouldn’t be the goal of progress. The paradox is that even though every new fiverr and mturk create more jobs, they lower the value of work. Right now this is affecting developing countries by creating a race-to-the-bottom economy, but the futurist in me looks all the way to the end and sees how so many jobs today (especially the non-production ones like administrative/clerical work) will eventually be automated by technology and thereby make the purchase of capital through labor even more expensive.
Does anyone see a way out of this? Did I miss something fundamental?
[+] [-] leorocky|11 years ago|reply
This is Paul Krugman's take on it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/opinion/krugman-sympathy-f...
[+] [-] z2|11 years ago|reply
The way I see it, automated jobs will still add real value to the economy. Perhaps everyone can receive a share of that surplus through some form of universal income. At that point, assuming most of society's economic value creation is automated, monetary compensation could be completely decoupled from labor, yet everyone can be better off since everyone would be resource rich.
[+] [-] givan|11 years ago|reply
This is natural evolution, IT wages bubble will burst because anyone with the proper education in any place in the world with lower expenses will be able to do it for less.
I hope the same happens with education, internet will change humanity in ways we can't imagine right now.
[+] [-] presidentender|11 years ago|reply
I'm not advocating a mass die-off of human beings, but any other means of limiting the supply of low-quality labor would have the same effect. If some sort of back-to-the-land subsistence thing became popular among the youth, those who didn't partake might find that a McJob paid more by virtue of there being fewer people willing to do it. Sort of a "shrug" by the lower-class Atlas instead of the elite.
[+] [-] galfarragem|11 years ago|reply
1-Globalization: technology and governments based in short term economics allow work to be made where is cheaper -> wages will be similar everywhere in the world in the near future.
2-Supply and demand: technology decreases the demand of human labor (automated work) and increases the supply (mturk, fiverr, freelancer, etc) -> wages decrease.
[+] [-] hypertexthero|11 years ago|reply
A Basic Income would help solve the problem of poverty and climate change, and should be a human right.
[+] [-] roymurdock|11 years ago|reply
To me, it doesn’t make sense to say that money is non-linear or non-constant. Money is not a function of time, therefore it does not make sense to describe it with time-dependent terms such as “linear” or "constant”. Inflation, the change in the purchasing power of money over time, yes. Money, no.
Money is simply a token that we use to represent the intangible concept of value. I think your comment seeks to address a change in what individuals, and by extension and on aggregate, societies, fundamentally value over time.
I’ll return to that in a bit. First let me address the problem with your example: It ignores the compounding returns to performing similar actions over time. Economically: Human capital accumulation. Colloquially: Experience.
When you get your first entry-level salaried job, you are actually a liability to the company. You come in with a low level of human capital - the company is basically paying to train you, all the while putting up with any potential mistakes due to your lack of experience. Why would a company do this?
By hiring you, the company is making an investment in your stock of human capital. It takes on some risk up front in return for some amount of reward in the future when you are wiser. As you gain experience over time, (ideally) you perform increasingly valuable tasks with a higher efficiency. You have accumulated the one thing youth (or old age for that matter) cannot buy for itself: time.
Getting paid for 3 hours for "little to no work" is a drop in the bucket compared to 10 years of solid, salaried employment.
By comparison, one-off jobs which might net you $20 in a couple of hours are a completely different situation where a low level of human capital is not purchased by means of a salaried contract. Rather, it is rented with a much shorter time horizon in mind, generally for menial tasks that require little to no experience.
To connect this idea back to the larger debate of “lowering the value of work”: I think you need to specify what kind of work you are talking about. I agree that the value of human menial labor is constantly decreasing. Why?
The supply of physical, menial tasks (washing dishes or mopping floors) is determined by the inflows of the human birthrate (more humans=more eating=more dishes to wash) and the outflows of automation (dishwashing machines), among other factors. Automation adds value by adding hours to our lives that would otherwise be spent washing dishes. For menial tasks it is generally more cost efficient. Thus the outflow outweighs the inflow (decreasing birthrate) leading to a lower supply of menial labor.
I don’t think we will revert to a hunter-gatherer bartering society in the future. Markets and specialization are much more efficient forms of raising standards of living, which I define as the ultimate goal of “human progress”. I think we will eventually need to reexamine our definition of “standards of living” as we move away from the realm of the physical to that of the virtual. Perhaps one (sad) day food will be unnecessary, as we redesign our bodies to subsist on a different form of energy, or do away with physical bodies altogether. This standard of living does not take into account food, shelter, transportation, etc. – the fundamentals that we strive to improve today through progress.
Anyways, enough with the science fiction and philosophizing. The fundamental lesson here is that the market gets what the market wants. There are a lot of human beings, so menial labor, both physical and mental, is in high supply driving down its relative value/price. Technology is eating jobs from the bottom up. Increase your human capital so that your brain is more valuable than a charged hunk of steel. Be the person who knows how to operate the machine and you will never have to beg for a $20 bus ticket.
[+] [-] crazypyro|11 years ago|reply
I've had a theory that out in the world somewhere is someone selling a guide to using MTurk to create article summaries and the guide suggests the price range of $.25-.50 because for the entire time that I've been on MTurk (many years now), every time I come back the price range is the same with small fluctuation.
Past the relatively low amount of summaries that are posted daily, money can be made by watching the right forums where people post high paying HITs (the name of the most popular forum eludes me at the moment) that are typically 5-15 minute surveys that pay .5-3.00 each.
By far, the biggest barrier to making a decent wage for me was the number of available HITs. The ones that pay over pennies each are few while the ones that are horrible time invests are everywhere. If I had an unlimited number of summary HITs, I could have made well over minimum wage.
[0] Made about $450 over the time, but this was sporadic, random working periods.
[+] [-] ski|11 years ago|reply
It sounds like good practice in concise communication.
[+] [-] incision|11 years ago|reply
It might sound strange, but I find certain kinds of survey type simple tasks incredibly relaxing and some of the HITs clearly connect to what seems to be interesting research.
Pretty much everything the author says here is spot-on and has been for a long time.
MTurk is positively flooded with HITs for generating fake reviews for products and fake content for websites. The best paying HITs by far are translation tasks - transcribing Arabic and Farsi seems to pay the best ($0.30 or more per minute of transcription).
I aim for academic projects with preference for things which require qualification (simple math / reading comprehension tests usually) as they generally pay quite a bit more.
I've earned an average of $0.27 per HIT and have never had one rejected.
Some of the more interesting / unusual tasks I've seen:
* Pinpoint various joints (shoulder, elbow, knee) in each frame of a clip showing a baseball player swinging a bat.
* Drop a pin on an estimate map location based on scenery shown in a short video clip (This was long before MapCrunch/GeoGuessr).
* Manipulate the camera in a scene of flat-shaded objects to bring them into 'correct' perspective.
* Choose 'preferred' structure designs (little houses) which appear to have been created by some sort of genetic algorithm.
[+] [-] VLM|11 years ago|reply
I get distracted by categorization jobs, like look at this blueprint and if there is a blueprint number in the title box, enter it. Well, I end up admiring the print. Oh look a giant gear for some kind of mining thing. Why, what an interesting looking architectural drawing.
Similar thing happens with categorize document numbers. Apparently some municipality decided to turn millions of paper scanned pages of contract bids into piles sorted by contract, so I'd end up sitting there reading all about bids to put in some drainage culvert. Who would ever have guessed theres so many steps and processes and backfill and compaction are critical and theres so many inspectors... I mean you can half A a drainage culvert in like one paragraph but if you want it done right its 50 pages of PDF.
These jobs are probably impossible without an excellent short term memory or dual (or more) monitors.
The ones that annoyed me the most were "leave blank if no number" so I'd scour the document for what seemed like forever just to make sure. Inevitably leading me to becoming fascinated by drainage culvert design.
Its very D+D like. Whats behind this dungeon door? Oh, I see, a blueprint of a giant gear from some mining equipment. Fascinating. Like archeology but I'm getting paid for it. Well, not much pay.
[+] [-] spikels|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tripzilch|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geronimox|11 years ago|reply
I found this quite amusing. You know why this HIT was approved? Because requesters are also punished for rejecting too many HITs! He also would have been banned had Amazon discovered the scheme he was pulling.
[+] [-] compare|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|11 years ago|reply
That suggested that there may be an interesting 'toolware' market for Turkers. For example, document editing; Lets say we build a simple document editing platform (copy editing not typesetting) which includes components that are dropbox like (shared storage), Google docs like etc. And design a workflow around that toolset. So pick a HIT, get a document id, it shows up in your shared storage, use the included tool to edit it, when you're done, click 'done', and have the whole thing resubmit back for evaluation. That might allow you to focus on editing and not get hung up on a bunch of getting it done issues.
Not sure how practical that is, but if there are common Turk workflows it might be useful to build some common tooling for them.
[+] [-] abakker|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|11 years ago|reply
Amazon Mechanical Turk: Gold Mine or Coal Mine?
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/COLI_a_00057
[+] [-] danielweber|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazypyro|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tectec|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sparkzilla|11 years ago|reply
Rather than crowdsourcing being a way to find cheap writers, content business should see crowdsourcing as a way to find a diverse pool of writers who have different interests or knowledge, who can dip in and out of work, and then pay them fair money for their time.
I pay $1 per post for writers to write 50-100 word posts that follow a very specific format. We provide feedback to the writer to try to make them make money faster. The way I figure it is, if the writer makes money then I can make money. If they stick with you, you don't have to train new people. People won't leave after half a day.
We have already paid out thousands of dollars and our site is growing fast. Writer satisfaction is high. We currently have a waiting list of hundreds of writers wanting to sign up.
http://newslines.org/newslines-rewards/
[+] [-] e12e|11 years ago|reply
I'd assume anyone that can write well, should be able to make at the very minimum 30/hour writing -- That leaves on average 2 minutes/newsline. I suppose the lesson is that there are many skilled poor people out there.
(Note, this isn't meant as negative criticism, just some observations)
[+] [-] ccb_|11 years ago|reply
Read more about the tool: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ccb/publications/crowd-workers-pos...
Try out our Chrome plugin and our web site: http://crowd-workers.com/landing
[+] [-] lilsunnybee|11 years ago|reply
The most frustrating jobs i've ever performed on the platform were usually approx 5-10 minute tasks that seemed to be decently paying and straightforward, asking you to categorize items based on some arbitrary but seemingly simple system, but later all 5 or more submissions you might have made could be blanket denied / payment refused. In that case not only do you not get payed, but having HIT submissions rejected really seriously hurts your reputation and what jobs you're allowed to apply for on MT; often many more high paying jobs on the system use high acceptance rate and flawless work history as the lowest bar for entry, and so MT workers can be screwed over incredibly by having work rejected through no fault of their own.
To not get seriously screwed newcomers are somehow supposed to know which types of HIT's to definitely avoid that could kill their rating, but without enough information to actually make that judgement. A task might seem easy and give the illusion that it's okay to send 5 or 10 submissions in a row, only to later have them all rejected and serious reputation damage done.
I think it's interesting but also really sad how this mirrors a lot of the unfairness and power imbalance in the larger working world as well. Reputation is everything, but if you just happen to get unlucky to start out your career working for clueless bosses / clients with unrealistic expectations, there's a good chance future job and career prospects are going to be seriously hindered, if not completely derailed.
Transcription work was usually very well paying i found, but doing one long transcription task for a $30 payout is a huge risk the way things were set up. Never mind that you worked for 4 or 5 hours on it; whoever assigned the job can reject it for whatever random reason they want and you get nothing. As nice as it can be to earn a nice wage for more high-skilled tasks, the possibility of being denied any payment for a days work with little recourse is really frustrating and demoralizing; the way Mechanical Turk is structured if anyone's taking a negative financial hit for work done, it's almost without fail going to be the worker.
Though this CMU professor obviously put some work into this write-up, i don't see how somebody can possibly get an accurate picture of what it's like trying to earn an income on one of these platforms by just devoting 4 hours and extrapolating based on that really limited experience. It is really easy to miss all but the most obvious and glaring problems that way, just from not sticking around long enough to even run across them.
There are plenty of MT workers who have spent much more substantial amounts of time on the platform, that are much better able to communicate benefits and pitfalls for the everyday worker. They might not be professors at prestigious universities like CMU, but having a decent amount of hands-on experience should really be the low bar for discussing pros/cons of the platform seriously; just as one example assumptions about longer-term take-home pay in the write-up were pretty naive: many better paying tasks (especially web browsing tasks and surveys paying more than a pittance) are often in limited supply and cannot be repeated either at all, or only a few times per day / week, etc. Even the best employers providing the most decent fairly-compensated work come and go, making a steady healthy income sometimes very difficult to achieve even in the best of circumstances.
Mechanical Turk has experienced a lot of success from the start largely because they created a service that makes it so easy for virtually anybody with internet access and a basic computer, to work from home and perform simple tasks / other types of work when and wherever they want, and actually get paid for it.
By any decent standards of developed-world countries the pay is shit though, and worker protections and benefits are nonexistent; workers can be denied payment and even have their reputation ruined for no good reason, with little in the way of an appeals process. But even now services like MT are still a pretty new thing. Maybe in 10 or even 20 more years most of the bugs will get worked out, and workers of every skill level can be a on more equal footing when negotiating with employers, settling disputes etc.
[+] [-] pjc50|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MicroBerto|11 years ago|reply
I bet you'd learn some great stuff and see some crazy software
[+] [-] adultSwim|11 years ago|reply
Looking at your posting history, I can see that you often take the time to write thoughtful comments. Please keep it up.
[+] [-] aceperry|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitlord_219|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runj__|11 years ago|reply
I hope you're trying to be on the workers side but either way this is a terrible thing to say. The way you look down upon people trying their very best to make a living is not helping them at all.
[+] [-] pc86|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robertfw|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggchappell|11 years ago|reply
It's also interesting that the linked page has two scroll bars (tried both Chrome & FF).
[+] [-] stopbits|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkhpalm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexchamberlain|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pgl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garretthunyadi|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joereggan190|11 years ago|reply
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