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How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

thehustle.co

141–148 of 148 posts

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#141
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "fun" may be to earn a little extra money doing menial tasks. Just the other day there was a discussion here about EVE online and how much menial management is needed in the game to set up for a small amount of fun PvP combat time. What's the difference between that and doing some mindless menial tasks for a couple extra bucks to go out on the weekend?

> The "fun" may be to earn a little extra money doing menial tasks. That the pay is fun (or enables fun) does not make the work fun. Here mturk was named a potential "hobby", that's just ridiculous to me. > Just the other day there was a discussion here about EVE online and how much menial management is needed in the game to set up for a small amount of fun PvP combat time. What's the difference between that and doin…

I don't think you can separate the setup from the work so easily. I highly doubt if you just had the "fun" play then it'd be a successful game. There are plenty of action packed alternatives if you just want the battle part all the time.

People like grinding. Just not when they have to accept that they're grinding for the sake of grinding. There needs to be an upcoming battle or achievement or texture pack unlock or a few extra bucks in the bank in order for them to get their "I'm being productive" kick every time they complete one of their many short, simple, well defined grind tasks. Just a continuous stream of little wins.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#142

I had to do some digging into crowdsourcing for my PhD thesis, and these numbers are well reported in the literature. Our group made the calculations to ensure that our task would pay at least minimum wage. As a result, we had to throttle our participants because they would hit our servers pretty hard. That's not to say that the experience was easy - we had to implement every possible sanity check, and even then we e…

>Our group made the calculations to ensure that our task would pay at least minimum wage. As a result, we had to throttle our participants because they would hit our servers pretty hard. What do you mean by this? Do you mean purely requests per second or what?

Yes, requests per second. Everyone would jump to our task. Compared to "regular" experiments, where getting participants requires active recruiting, this was completely unexpected.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#143
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I hear these stories, I don't know if they've done the math. Let's say I live in Toronto (an expensive city to live in) and make 10$/h after taxes working at Starbucks. 40h/week, 4.5 weeks/mo = 1800$ Bedroom in apartment = 700$ Metropass = 150$ Phone = 50$ Internet = 50$ Food = 350$ Total = 1300$ That's 500$ left for things like going out, clothes, etc. Nobody is exploiting your friends - it sounds like sh…

I live in Toronto, those numbers are hilarious. You cannot live in this city on a yearly wage of 21600. Not only are your numbers wrong individually, but they're also woefully under representative because your fake individual isn't buying toiletries, isn't paying for dental, doesn't purchase clothing, doesn't have any medical consumables to purchase, only eats a meal per day or so, etc. I've done the math. I've lived…

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Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#144
post #101
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming is fun for programmers Bull. If this was true trey would line up to join our company and I could charge them at the door for working with us. Some programming is fun. Sure. Many part of my work are fun. But I'd rather do other things with my life if money was not an issue.

What if it’s fun, but they can program without you? Then they might choose to have fun with the highest bidder. I would program even if money was no issue. There are many who would.

Me too, but not 30+ hours per week. And on something of my choosing. And...

Then programming usually does not come by itself: meetings, company politics, little mgmt, all usually come with it when programming professionally. Many of those tasks I consider less fun than the programming itself.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#145
post #53
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but someone who calls himself a BA should be able to get better return for his time.

He probably can but MTurk is superior because of liquidity and flexibility. There are very few jobs in which value is created and paid for in a span of a minute. By turning dead time into money, generating money in a way you could not for other jobs. And a BA isn’t worth much regardless. Half the people I knew in college now work at coffee shops. A general good rule is what when you see someone do something, there’s…

A business analyst should be able to analyse how to get better return for his money. There’s probably not much other work that you can deliver in such small chunks, but there’s definitely work that can be performed in small chunks at a time.

That you think that you understand someone’s reasons doesn’t mean that you have to agree with or not think there’s are better ways.

Re: How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

#146
post #41

Fun anecdote about some of my own dabblings in online psych experiments and MTurk. 7 or 8 years ago, my then supervisor and I experimented with running psychological (behavioural) experiments on MTurk. We had created a method that would run in browsers in native javascript and were looking to validate it. Coming from a testing-1st-year-psych-students-in-the-basement-of-the-faculty-building kind of thing, we naively t…

Holy smokes that is an amazing story. Do you have any more? I am always fascinated to hear how researchers design studies to prevent people from just spamming in any old answer.

I'm not sure what the state of the art is nowadays. Back in the day. The method at the time was so new, we just assumed that there would be no bots that would be able to complete the experiment successfully, or that they would stand out like a sore thumb upon analysing the data. Modern frameworks will eventually have to deal with this I'm sure. The structured way in which experiments are defined also make it easy to develop tools to automate this. Unfortunately I'm not into the field enough anymore to know how people are dealing with it.

The biggest problem we had was with people with high latency connections. The effects we were looking for were measured in 10s of milliseconds. In order to tease out these effects, we had to be very particular about the timing of when certain stimuli were presented to the participant. High latency page reloads (which were unavoidable in the system we built our method on) would mess with this high-precision presentation requirement. We measured the latency, but did not pre-emptively exclude anyone based on their latency, hence the high % of people with unusable data in our initial validation experiment.

For subsequent experiments I built a "loader" screen that would pretend to be loading the experiment. What it in fact was doing was refreshing the webpage several times (ofcourse, while progressing a progress bar) to measure the latency of the connection of the participant. High average latency + high variance latency connections were excluded. The tresholds were based on what we found in the early validation study.

Surprisingly, after throwing out the high-latency data, there were no other exclusions necessary. It seemed that for our validation study, all participants were very attentive during the experiment.

In "in-person" cases, researchers would add attention checks to their experiments with the logic that failing these attention checks by itself is no indication of "spamming", but seeing weird quirks in the data + failed attention checks would be. One that my supervisor was fond of was throwing in instruction screens, in the middle of runs of trials that required you to press a very specific button to continue. E.g., the experiment has you press 'A' and 'J' constantly, and to continue you have to press 'N'. Secretly though, A and J were also valid ways to continue with the experiment. The thought being that if you were hammering one of those buttons to quickly get through the experiment, you would also skip past the instruction screen very quickly with it.

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