Mechanical Turk

[BinoAl]

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
I just signed up for this and I'm waiting for approval. It seems pretty interesting. I'm not expecting to make good money, or even minimum wage, it's just idle curiosity that has me interested. Apparently, while the majority of the jobs are crappy and are just several cents for 10 minutes of mindless work, the Transcription jobs are pretty fair. Anyone have experience with this?

[Eriottosan]

Here was me thinking this would be a thread about the 18th century chess playing automaton which wasn't an automaton ... And now I'm fascinated by the whole concept of this ... It must be named after it. Artificial Artificial Intelligence ... It must be.

[BinoAl]

Here was me thinking this would be a thread about the 18th century chess playing automaton which wasn't an automaton ... And now I'm fascinated by the whole concept of this ... It must be named after it. Artificial Artificial Intelligence ... It must be.

Yup, it was made by Amazon as a service to do things that programs can't do well, and named after the chess playing Turkish wannabe automaton :) Most of the "jobs" are just things like tagging objects with descriptive words, surveys from universities doing research, and of course, transcription :)

[SageEthereal]

This looks interesting, might have to take a closer look sometime; maybe even give it a try.

[agentwiggles]

I've played with it a little bit in the past, but I can't really say I'd recommend it. There are some jobs that pay pretty well, but they're really few and far between, and they're by far more of a pain in the ass than the .10c ones, so you wind up convincing yourself it'd be easier to do more of the lesser paying ones. Sometimes you don't get paid. Jobs are boring, but require enough attention that you can't just do them while you watch tv or something. Ultimately, every time I mess with it, I waste an hour doing boring shit that isn't even worth half of minimum wage for the time spent, and add another .25 cents to my balance.

I guess some people would say that's the point, that if you fuck with it long enough you'll make some cash, but I'd imagine I've spent about 8-10 hrs on the site and I don't think I've even earned 5 dollars.

Reminds of my brief "job" with ChaCha - a text message service which basically employed Google monkeys to answer stupid questions some dildo teenager sent to an SMS shortcode. What a waste of time...

[BinoAl]

After messing with this for a bit: Screw it. So far from worth it. Ludicrously low pay for nearly everything. I managed to find a 2$ survey that only took about 15 minutes, but otherwise, it's been pretty pointless.

Reminds of my brief "job" with ChaCha - a text message service which basically employed Google monkeys to answer stupid questions some dildo teenager sent to an SMS shortcode. What a waste of time...

I was checking that out a couple years back, just a few months before my 18th birthday. Couldn't end up doing it obviously, since I wasn't 18 at the time. Wasn't it an hourly pay around 3 or 4 dollars an hour?

[Miss_Kat]

I never worked for ChaCha, but I did work for the KGB (Knowledge Generation Bureau) and just.. ugh. Doing mindless shit for very little pay is just not worth it. At one point, back when I was still under the impression you could make a living with the company, I worked my ass off for an hour, non stop googling shit and doing math homework. Earned a buck. No thanks.

I looked around on the Turk thing and have pretty much the same impression as agentwiggles.

The only make-money-online thing I do is just one particular survey site, but even that is slow. ~$15 every 4 months.

[agentwiggles]

I was checking that out a couple years back, just a few months before my 18th birthday. Couldn't end up doing it obviously, since I wasn't 18 at the time. Wasn't it an hourly pay around 3 or 4 dollars an hour?

Yeah, if you were even that lucky. There was a lot of really crappy stuff about it. The system was setup weirdly, too. There were four positions you could try to take. Two I can't remember - iirc they were kinda specialist stuff, like a translator. The main two, though, were a person who actually saw the incoming text and would categorize it or tag it or whatever, then rephrase it as simply as possible and pass it on to a person like myself, who would then try to find an answer online, which is what was sent to the person who texted.

The former might have been pretty decent, but the job I had sucked ass. The questions were often vague or just plain stupid (I fielded a few questions that were something like "Did <some girl's name> from <some place> do <some random thing>") and you weren't paid for a question if it wasn't considered to be a good answer by some checking person or system, which was pretty much just done arbitrarily. I'd say about half the work you did went down the tubes, automatically. When I did it, it was paid on a weird points system - later deobfuscated and just represented money. It roughly amounted to .10-.15 cents per question. Also, you couldn't cash out until you'd made $100. My interpretation of that whole thing was that it was basically a scam, because they knew they'd get a bunch of people looking to make a quick buck, who would get sick of it before they ever were able to be paid.

This, I think, is the mental math that people who decide to sink into these services are doing:
Assume you can do 1 question per 2 minutes (which is, in all honesty, a ridiculous assumption, but one that's theoretically possible, if you're not getting any difficult questions or losing money for answers deemed insufficient), and assume you're getting .15 cents per question (which isn't always true).
.15 * 60 is 4.5, so the upper limit is $4.5 an hr. Not bad, by the sound of it, honestly. Not even minimum, but I'd probably put an hr or so in a day if it was gonna earn me a pack of cigs and a case of beer for a weekend.

But it really never ends up coming out that way. One task will stump you and take 10 minutes. And once that happens you've given up 1.50 of that hypothetical 4.50. By this point, you're down to $3 an hour, and that's if you only break out of the rhythm one time. The tasks are boring and they come en masse, and when all is said and done you'd be lucky to make a buck an hour.

Damn, that got long. But I think I made my point haha