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

31–40 of 148 posts

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

#31

Post by Ma8ee »

blueboo wrote: post #24
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…

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

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

#33

Post by taneq »

kuu wrote: post #30
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/

XKCD gave me a 503 "Backend unavailable" and I thought it was some advanced meta-joke for a second.

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

#34

Post by jonchang »

lordnacho wrote: post #32

Is there anything stopping people from just randomly filling in the surveys? It seems like the kind of thing where someone would have made a bot. How many people who are paying a couple of bucks for something like that are going to complain at you?

Survey instruments generally have a few ways to check for this, usually via attention checks which require you to answer in a specific way as stated in the question text (defeating your bot). Similarly a survey could be designed to ask the same or similar question multiple ways, and a survey response that lacks the expected correlation can also be rejected.

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

#35

Post by arvinsim »

TrackerFF wrote: post #15

The problem with these gigs is that the tasks are extremely generalized. So while they attract more workers, it is always going to be a sellers market. The only way a worker can scale his income, is by increasing volume - and picking the right assignments. I've been doing side-hustles since I was a teen, and continue today, even though I have a well-paying professional job. My observations are that domain knowledge /…

Interesting. May I ask what hobbies are these?

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

#36

Post by H8crilA »

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.

Much of what's happening in such markets is collecting data to build ML systems.

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

#37

Post by baud147258 »

FluffyKitty wrote: post #8
gitgud wrote: post #4

I want to know who is paying $0.01 USD to get someone to manually transrcibe a reciept to a table. It seems the Mechanical Turk ecconomy could be dwindling due to the accessiblity of AI these days.

Possibly Expensify? There was that news that came out a bit ago that their "SmartScan" actually fell back on Mechanical Turk [1] even though it was sold as a AI-type thing. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/expen...

Perhaps they're transcripting some receipt to compare/check with the result of their AI-type system?

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

#38

Post by jmnicolas »

Thorrez wrote: post #9
FluffyKitty wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly Expensify? There was that news that came out a bit ago that their "SmartScan" actually fell back on Mechanical Turk [1] even though it was sold as a AI-type thing. [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/expen...

Yep >“Most people’s first mistake is they go on there and accept any task they see,” says Naab. “They’ll do these transcriptions — $0.01 to transcribe a whole receipt for Expensify. That’s a terrible ROI.”

It depends, $0.01 might be worth something in a very poor country.

But on the other hand if you have access to a computer a poor country, 1 cent might not be worth your time anyway.

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

#39

Post by prepend »

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…

All the things you mention are not exclusive to MTurk. So he could do those and make a few hundred extra.

I view this as passive time where spending a few hours while watching tv, or rocking the baby, or whatnot seems acceptable to some people.

Many free to play games have the same attention span requirements and they don’t pay anything.

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

#40

Post by namanyayg »

probably_wrong wrote: post #13

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…

What kind of sanity checks did you implement, or how did you know what data to throw?
Post reply on HN