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Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

mturk.com

71–80 of 179 posts

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#71
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially the annotation of biomedical literature ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/ ) but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space My favori…

I truly have no idea what this website is saying https://generalresearch.com/

Perhaps they're targeting a super specific niche. Like somebody who sees WXET Ephemereal and yelps in triumph "that's my quant!".

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone using an IP that a geoip database says is US, doesn't mean that person is a US voter. The existence of proxies on the internet is a feature.

Obviously, a problem not even fully addressed by L2’s datasets. Sure, but the use of proxies to masquerade the identity of users being sold to researcher buyers that paid for a different service is fraud

It makes me question why the surveys don't ask for the users country. That way they cd can figure it out without trying to guess it based off of IP.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#73
post #11

Mechanical Turk had a good run, but not surprised it's shutting down. I'm sure the platform was getting flooded with people doing task arbitrage and using lots of AI anyway. I believe the issue is that this can no longer be a horizontal play. MTurk was mostly for unskilled tasks...the kind AI can do well enough that it isn't worth the cost differential to verify it or keep farmed to humans. The "trust but verify" AI…

It is weird because the last time I've heard about MTurk was about developing countries being rather reliant on it for doing AI grunt work. If am not totally wrong this must mean that the data work has moved to other services.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, a problem not even fully addressed by L2’s datasets. Sure, but the use of proxies to masquerade the identity of users being sold to researcher buyers that paid for a different service is fraud

It makes me question why the surveys don't ask for the users country. That way they cd can figure it out without trying to guess it based off of IP.

Users/respondents lie, and many buyers/researchers are neo-luddites; most C level still come from the telemarketing days. A fun example: mobile targeting is terrible when off wifi because all survey platforms uniq identify users based off their IPv4, so any T-Mobile LTE users in the same city going through the same CGNAT often share profiling data that ends up conflicting, which ends up meaning they don't get sent into the best survey(s). The issue is even worse in heavy IPv6 countries like India+France.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#76
post #11

Mechanical Turk had a good run, but not surprised it's shutting down. I'm sure the platform was getting flooded with people doing task arbitrage and using lots of AI anyway. I believe the issue is that this can no longer be a horizontal play. MTurk was mostly for unskilled tasks...the kind AI can do well enough that it isn't worth the cost differential to verify it or keep farmed to humans. The "trust but verify" AI…

> task arbitrage and using lots of AI anyway.

Oh, I remember UpWork.

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#77
post #54
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, their commission algorithm would round down to the nearest whole cent when their 20% commission resulted in a fractional cent on the unit transaction level, not the monthly invoice level. can someone ELI5 because what in the office space

Go watch Superman III for more details...

Or Office Space

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

our of curiosity, can you say what your use of it was?

Initially the annotation of biomedical literature ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/ ) but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space My favori…

> Can you say what your use of it was?

> Initially the annotation of biomedical literature but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space.

Reading this is similar to how I feel when I've asked Claude about something it coded for me. As with Claude, I think I get it after reading it three times; you guys were a middleman that provided a simplified interface for Mechanical Turk?

Re: Mechanical Turk shutting down September 30

#80
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially the annotation of biomedical literature ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/ ) but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space My favori…

I truly have no idea what this website is saying https://generalresearch.com/

As usual, the real tldr is in the privacy policy https://generalresearch.com/supplier/privacy-policy/notice-t...

> General Research Laboratories, LLC (“GRL”) is an aggregator of market research surveys in multiple marketplaces for business customers. GRL does not typically host consumer surveys which are conducted by other consumer-facing organizations....

So, just a middleman to give you fake/shady at best survey responses to pad your numbers, so big enterprises/concultancies can have data that say whatever they want. The rest of the website is just BS

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