Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?

priceonomics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 60 posts

Re: Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?

#21

Post by chjohasbrouck »

hugh4 wrote: post #2

I can see some appeal to making a miniscule amount of money in my spare time on Mechanical Turk. I mean, I already spend my spare time doing pointless tasks such as solving crossword puzzles and commenting on things. I would see it as a game where the goal is to try and make as much money as possible with as little work. I can also see that unemployed people might enjoy it just as a way of feeling like they're doing…

I tried Mechanical Turk years and years ago. At that time there were really no tasks available that paid an amount that could consistently get you anywhere close to minimum wage.

The only ones that seemed appealing on the surface were these audio transcriptions. I type over 100wpm and 9 minutes of audio took me over an hour to transcribe. I got like $2, and never even bothered withdrawing it.

If any individual on Mechanical Turk is averaging even 1/3rd federal minimum wage, I'd be shocked.

Since most of the tasks pay even far worse than transcription, and there's a significant unpaid time investment acquiring the tasks and getting them approved, and most people probably try a few tasks before leaving and never even ask for a check, I'd guess the average payout for people working on Mechanical Turk is much less than a dollar per hour.

I've always wondered how it's legal.

Re: Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?

#22

Post by eru »

AJ007 wrote: post #17
amelius wrote: post #5

I guess the wages are low because any task has to be verified by another person (possibly in a consensus-test, where the input of the other person is verified against your input). Or at least, that's what I'm guessing.

It has been years, but when I placed projects on mturk I had them listed to be completed 2-3 times each. This was the only sane way to filter out input by users which was completely wrong. The positive thing was once you identified someone submitting non-sense you ban them from the project and pay nothing. Americans are not ready for what is going to happen to the labor market when minimum wage goes to $15 an hour.

> Americans are not ready for what is going to happen to the labor market when minimum wage goes to $15 an hour.

Lots of `informal' employment, I'd guess?

Re: Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?

#23

Post by eru »

Mz wrote: post #16
Frondo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you complain if, through legislation, nothing were different about your work structure, but you were in fact paid more? I.e. nothing changes but you're making $15/hour instead of $12/hour?

There is no way "nothing else" would change. And your comment is rife with assumptions that I find galling. But I don't have time at the moment to address that.

Actually, there's one way to make such a change: pay everyone an unconditional basic income of, say, 24$ (= 3$ * 8h) per day.

But I agree, Frondo's comment seems to be rife with assumptions.

Re: Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?

#24

Post by iopq »

chjohasbrouck wrote: post #21
hugh4 wrote: post #2

I can see some appeal to making a miniscule amount of money in my spare time on Mechanical Turk. I mean, I already spend my spare time doing pointless tasks such as solving crossword puzzles and commenting on things. I would see it as a game where the goal is to try and make as much money as possible with as little work. I can also see that unemployed people might enjoy it just as a way of feeling like they're doing…

I tried Mechanical Turk years and years ago. At that time there were really no tasks available that paid an amount that could consistently get you anywhere close to minimum wage. The only ones that seemed appealing on the surface were these audio transcriptions. I type over 100wpm and 9 minutes of audio took me over an hour to transcribe. I got like $2, and never even bothered withdrawing it. If any individual on Mec…

I've read some articles about it and most people who make $5 an hour or more tend to choose tasks efficiently that they can complete quickly without spending too much attention on.

If you rush through easier tasks you can complete them in a few minutes doing a good enough job to get paid.

Re: Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?

#25

Post by marincounty »

amelius wrote: post #5

I guess the wages are low because any task has to be verified by another person (possibly in a consensus-test, where the input of the other person is verified against your input). Or at least, that's what I'm guessing.

Or, the wages are so low is because humans are inherianty cheap, and willing to exploit people especially when no one is looking.

Would this website work if they required a clear picture of the work provider, and a brief resume?

Re: Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?

#26

Post by Frondo »

Mz wrote: post #16
Frondo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you complain if, through legislation, nothing were different about your work structure, but you were in fact paid more? I.e. nothing changes but you're making $15/hour instead of $12/hour?

There is no way "nothing else" would change. And your comment is rife with assumptions that I find galling. But I don't have time at the moment to address that.

What assumptions?

Re: Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?

#27

Post by sparkzilla »

I run a crowdsourced content site that is a kind of Wikipedia for news (see my profile for link). When we first started we wanted to attract Wikipedia writers, who write for free. Those writers are mainly young, white Americans, like the Mechanical Turk writers mentioned in the article. But they wouldn't come over, because they like fighting on Wikipedia for free.

So I offered $1 per post to write 50-100 words summaries of the news. Depending on the content a writer could add four to eight posts an hour, getting faster at it as they improved their skills. We had about 50 writers on the program, but could easily have had many more. We were overwhelmed with people wanting to join the program and had over 1000 people on our waiting list.

At first, But the $1-per-post program attracted a whole different community: mainly women, many of them minorities, who like to work-at-home. We actually saw this as a big plus because they were no-nonsense about doing the work, and gave diversity to the content, something Wikipedia struggles with. We paid out in Paypal and some people would literally do some work so they could get some food for that day.

I think too many companies think of crowdsourcing as a way to get cheap work, but it's really good to get diverse workers.

After paying out $20,000 for 20,000 posts we changed to a revenue-share system, where writers earn more as the site grows. That presents a different challenge: finding writers who will put in work now, with the hope of a bigger payout later.

Re: Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?

#28

Post by ebt »

This article is from 2013, not reflected in the HN title.

I seriously doubt the following statement in the article is still true:

"The users of Mechanical Turk are still early adopters, which explains why so many workers are closer to the median US household income of around $50,000 than to the poverty line."

I did some survey work on MT back then, it was fun for a few days, then became incredibly mind numbing.

A more recent article on MT (probably posted already to HN):

http://www.npr.org/2015/05/22/408680035/mechanical-turk-work...

Re: Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?

#29

Post by sp0rk »

lqdc13 wrote: post #10
JamesMcMinn wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, given that the average speaking speed is 150wpm, whilst average typing speed is only 40 wpm, it probably takes ~15 minutes to transcribe each audio clip, giving about $4.5/hour, which isn't so great.

This is like the worst case scenario. If the person can touch type or if there are major pauses during the recordings (which happens a lot during lectures), you make $15/hr. If there are enough pauses, you can do two at a time and get $30/hr.

Your estimations are incredibly generous, even for somebody using a transcription pedal. The audio for the transcription jobs on sites like MTurk is often very low quality and recorded on a device that is clearly not close to the speaker(s). They are also often for things like local government meetings where the speakers are using a lot of proper nouns that you may not be familiar with. Both of these factors result in a LOT of rewinding to listen to a word multiple times.

Re: Who Makes Below Minimum Wage on Mechanical Turk?

#30

Post by corysama »

zappo2938 wrote: post #19
amelius wrote: post #5

I guess the wages are low because any task has to be verified by another person (possibly in a consensus-test, where the input of the other person is verified against your input). Or at least, that's what I'm guessing.

Duolingo has hundreds of people translating the New York Times into several languages being paid nothing. (edit) What about people who spend hours answering questions on Stack Exchange? American's spend several hours a day watching TV. What if the service gives people a distraction that they are mentally active in? There might be several advantages other than monitory performing these tasks over passively sitting in…

There was a stat a few years back that if we could redirect 1% of e everyone's time spent watching TV we could have a new Wikipedia-scale project every 7 weeks. Zoning out has its place, but I bet more than a few percent of TV time is raw boredom rather than relaxation.
Post reply on HN