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Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

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Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#41

Post by linkregister »

frmersdog wrote: post #12

If there's any justice, a good number of comments will focus on the ethical nightmare MTurk turned out to be. Apologies to the people who worked on it, but it's fair and appropriate for observers to point out when someone has spent their time and energy creating something that is a net negative for the state of society. That's probably the case here.

If mturk workers had better opportunities, they'd take them. mturk is competing with local economies in low opportunity locales. It is rational to work in a cybercafe doing rote web tasks for 8 hours if you'd receive the same amount of money performing manual labor.

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#43

Post by goykasi »

During the beta, the only consistent HITs were to identify an album based on a picture and 4 or 5 choices (if Im remembering correctly). These paid pretty well since the workforce volume was very low and the service was brand new. Well, I noticed that the image link contained an ASIN. So, I wrote a greasemonkey script that would look it up on Amazon and highlight the most likely correct answer. I then turned around and shared it with the forum I frequented. It became extremely popular and spread to other forums before we moved it to a private forum. The damage was already done though.

People kept asking me to automate it, but I felt it was against the spirit of mTurk. So, another member would take my updates and add an auto-clicker. That lasted for a couple of weeks at most before the HIT volume dried up and very few would be released. I guess Amazon caught on to what was happening. But before that, several forum members made enough to get some high dollar items: laptops, speakers, etc. Eventually, I relented and created a wishlist. Thats how I ended up with the box sets for the first run of Futurama seasons.

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#44

Post by case »

When we first created Domainr (then domai.nr, now domainr.com) back in 2008, we needed a list of “zones under which domain registrations were somehow possible.” E.g. not just the root zone list from IANA, but all the .co., .edu., .net., etc. variants. We found what we could from Wikipedia, and used Mturk to find the rest from registry websites, etc.

It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t need to be. We essentially needed a “good enough to start with” dataset that we could refine going forward. It got the job done.

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#45

Post by ruralfam »

Used it to capture respondent data for a unique research tool we run. Got good results. Had to custom-code all the server/client interactions to handle MTurks' requirements. Went well. Still use the content from MTurk users as demo of "...how to get unique insights from your consumers". As things progressed, stopped using it. However all our project setup/server/client code still have variables/functions that start with mturk_. Not causing any issues, so there they sit. I feel guitly every time I think about not having cleansed the code. BTW: Just added new custom code for Prolific. Hoping to test their respondents this week. However Prolific's affect on the code was nothing compared to interacting with MTurk's servers.

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#49

Post by joshstrange »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #21
comrade1234 wrote: post #4

My wife had dozens, well probably over 100, handwritten recipes from a dead relative. They were pretty difficult to read. I scanned them and used mturk to have them transcribed. Most of the work was done by one person - i think she was a woman in the Midwest, it's been like 15-years so the details are hazy. A few recipes were transcribed by people overseas but they didn't stick at it. I had to reject only one transcr…

Do you think ChatGPT could do the same work now? It would be interesting to try it.

Almost 2 years ago I did this with ChatGPT. It was soon after you could feed it images as input IIRC. It worked very well. I settled on AWS Textract + ChatGPT to save money and was able to get it to well under 1 cent to take an image and turn it into a recipe you could export to Paprika (and others). I never pursued it further but it was a fun little side project.

At this point I don’t think I’d do the Textract step since LLMs have gotten way better and cheaper. Also you lose some info/context when the model only gets the post-OCR data.

Re: Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

#50

Post by pacoWebConsult »

akerl_ wrote: post #27
maxrmk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you see as net negative about it? I’m familiar with the product but not that aware of how it’s been used.

It's basically a way for people to externalize tasks that require a human but pay fractions of what it would cost to actually employ those humans. Mechanical Turk was one of the early entrants into "how can we rebrand outsourcing low skill labor to impoverished people and pay them the absolute bare minimum as the gig economy".

It's not a fraction of what it would cost to actually employ those humans, since there were humans who clearly chose to do that work when presented with the opportunity.

I think this is a very first-world oriented take. It efficiently distributed low-value workloads to people who were willing to do it for the pay provided. The market was efficient, and the wages were clearly on par with those who were doing the work found economical to do, considering they did (and still do) the work for the wages provided.

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