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

How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

thehustle.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 148 posts

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

#21

Post by dalbasal »

londons_explore wrote: post #20
ptero wrote: post #19

The person described is a "senior business analyst", reportedly making good money, but decides to work on MTurk, doing menial tasks, to help offset extra costs (diapers, etc.) of a baby that was born. This sounds insane to me. Almost anything else sounds better: reduce expenses, figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise, even get a low % credit to pay for those diapers for a year, etc. . Is this just…

Some MTurk tasks are amenable to sub-contracting out or writing bots to mostly or fully automate. If he does that, I could see it being competitive on an hourly basis to a regular job.

How open are Amazon to this?

Ooh, the idea of mTurk is "human powered." OTOH, a market for tasks that can be do e via a combination of automations and humans could be powerful.

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

#22

Post by jwieczorek »

dalbasal wrote: post #21
londons_explore wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some MTurk tasks are amenable to sub-contracting out or writing bots to mostly or fully automate. If he does that, I could see it being competitive on an hourly basis to a regular job.

How open are Amazon to this? Ooh, the idea of mTurk is "human powered." OTOH, a market for tasks that can be do e via a combination of automations and humans could be powerful.

Such a combination is what Unbabel does in translation. ML-driven automated translation followed by crowd-sourced human review and corrections. It's a neat idea and could be the future of translation (as opposed to full automation).

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

#24

Post by blueboo »

ptero wrote: post #19

The person described is a "senior business analyst", reportedly making good money, but decides to work on MTurk, doing menial tasks, to help offset extra costs (diapers, etc.) of a baby that was born. This sounds insane to me. Almost anything else sounds better: reduce expenses, figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise, even get a low % credit to pay for those diapers for a year, etc. . Is this just…

We believe it's insane and dismiss it out of hand because we all realize Mechanical Turk doesn't pay a living wage in the developed world.

But I dunno, I feel OK with the premise that this guy reduced his expenses and optimized his career as much as he could.

Say you did all that and had a few hours a week you wanted to use to make your household budget a bit healthier...getting paid for some kind of remote work via an automated system that'll accommodate your inconsistent hours has an appeal!

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

#25

Post by rjf72 »

Havoc wrote: post #23

Only way I can see this working is if you're in a CoL area that is low end 3rd world. Else pretty much anything else will be more profitable

I think many people do this not out of need but as a time waster that pays a bit. As the article mentions, 75% of 'Turkers' are American. The article's subject says, "I’d literally be sitting around bored half the day without it. Making money beats doing nothing."

Of course he wouldn't be doing literally nothing. Instead he'd be just mindlessly wasting time browsing Facebook, checking out the latest clickbait, posting on forums, and engaging in the sort of activities that studies are increasingly showing are destroying our collective mental health and social cohesion. Instead, he's using that time to make an extra thousand a month.

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

#29

Post by oflordal »

ptero wrote: post #19

The person described is a "senior business analyst", reportedly making good money, but decides to work on MTurk, doing menial tasks, to help offset extra costs (diapers, etc.) of a baby that was born. This sounds insane to me. Almost anything else sounds better: reduce expenses, figure out if he can get more responsibilities and a raise, even get a low % credit to pay for those diapers for a year, etc. . Is this just…

If you think it is fun, having a hobby (mturk) that is a small net positive can save you a lot of money compared to having a hobby which is a net loss (most hobbies).

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

#30

Post by kuu »

sschueller wrote: post #26

I wonder how many task on Mechanical Turk can actually be automated. By that I don't mean building some fancy AI but tasks that can easily be automated and have just been posted on Mechanical Turk.

I guess automating is not always the cheapest option, and for "once in a life" experiment/test/dataset it can be sometimes cheaper to hire people than develop an algorithm.

I guess XKCD said it before: https://xkcd.com/974/

Post reply on HN