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People who use AMT for earning money may not necessarily be the right audience you are looking for.
Mechanical Turk seems to be filled with people itching for some community to participate in -- why not get paid for it at the same time?
I spent about $20 to get 200 responses for my question, but only ended up collecting 103 answers before the question expired.
None of this stuff is perfect, but employing a few of these approaches all at the same time will generate results that can be handy to correlate.
Strange use of Mechanical Turk if you ask me. You could've spent about the same in Google Adwords asking people to take a survey. At least then you'd have a survey of "people who are searching for important keywords related to my topic of interest" rather "people who are so technically capable that they are using MT". "I also found out to my surprise that more men than women said they’d use the service. I fully expec…
It is still waaaaaaaaaaay better than asking your family and friends.
They're both 100% useless.
Mechanical Turkers are incentivized to give positive feedback because there's a chance (lurking in the back of their minds, surely) that people are emotionally sensitive and if they get criticized, they will be emotionally wounded and won't approve their HIT.
Do you know how I know this? I asked Turkers to give me feedback on one of my sites, and it was nothing but sunshine and razzmatazz smoothies.
You know you're building something people want when they vote with their wallets or attention (give you their email address, phone number...)
New Theory: hell, an even better test might be are they willing to "invite their friends" to tell them about it? People share things with friends because they like their friends - is it of sufficiently high value that they will get a "social credit" for sharing with their friends?.
Might be a bit off topic, but does anyone know a good alternative to MTurk for people outside the US?
As others are suggesting, Crowdflower works, and works well, with an excellent API. Also they are just good people. (They use an assortment of workforces)
For smaller jobs self service jobs like the one described in this article SmartSheet UI is amazing. http://www.smartsheet.com/ (MTurk based)
And if you need bigger stuff (or text oriented stuff), with some consulting you can contact me, or my company http://castingwords.com (MTurk based)
People who use AMT for earning money may not necessarily be the right audience you are looking for.
I don't think that people use Mechanical Turk as their sole source for money. If I remember correctly, someone figured out that mechanical turk pays roughly $5/hour if you spend your whole day doing it. That's not very much. Mechanical Turk seems to be filled with people itching for some community to participate in -- why not get paid for it at the same time?
Getting honest feedback probably depends very heavily on survey design, instruction sets, and, if you've been doing it for a while, reputation.
With a jobs size this small you'll get information that might be useful, but will probably be biased. I wouldn't trust it - but I would use it as a starting place.
For the incredibly low price I think it's worth it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me, too. I checked my stats after using MT for a site-survey. Most of the users were from the same geographical region, they gave very positive feedback, and they spent very little time on the site. Pair that with an understanding that MT only pays well if you do lots of little tasks very fast, and you start to get the idea that the feedback might not be the most useful.
You need to put in a text box: "Please describe, in your own words, the purpose of my site:" Then throw out all the responses that are incomplete or way off. The problem is that when I did that, there were too few useable results.
This greatly reduces fraud, and shoddy work. And it has a tendency to highlight the really good workers (some of which are amazing!) - maximizing your benefit as a requester.
It's not clear from the article what kind of business model the Startup in question is planning to use. This is relevant, as the fact the 73% of random strangers said they would "use the service as described" doesn't give any indication that they'd be willing to pay for it. Clearly, the author got his $27.50 worth; how much that's really worth, though, in the long term, remains to be seen.
TLDR: Be HIGHLY suspect of any results you get from mechanical turk (same goes for feedback army and others).
For anyone else interested in this "quick, cheap, feedback" cycle, PickFu is another service that does this: http://pickfu.com/ I spent about $20 to get 200 responses for my question, but only ended up collecting 103 answers before the question expired. None of this stuff is perfect, but employing a few of these approaches all at the same time will generate results that can be handy to correlate.