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How much money can you make on Mechanical Turk?

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

#81

Post by dalbasal »

dahfizz wrote: post #60
dalbasal wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would assume that Amazon already does this. If a task is trivial enough for an AI, they would do it themselves and get the posters money before the job gets forwarded to the Turks.

Sure, Amazon have all sorts of ml APIs. But a task platform where anyone can complete the tasks using ai, humans or a combination that f both could be substantial impressive.

Say you need to look through 20k images and determine if they contain hipsters. There may not be an off-the-shelf hipster detector. Maybe you could make one, or use humans or a combination by training an NN.. etc.

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

#82

Post by chuckgreenman »

segmondy wrote: post #77
cies wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you think it is fun [...] (mturk) If this was generally perceived as fun, then Amazon would charge money for you to "play" mturk. The fact mturk work pays tells me that mturk is pretty much nobody's hobby.

Programming is fun for programmers, we don't get charged to play with computers. :)

Programming is fun for 15 minutes out of each hour, the other 45 are pretty frustrating.

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

#83

Post by phalangion »

stubish wrote: post #50
blintz wrote: post #42

How do people feel about the research ethics of this? Many academic studies involve the use of MTurk participants, but it seems as though they are not being paid close to a living or even fair wage ($2 an hour is abysmal!). Should universities require that studies using MTurk pay some minimum pro-rated hourly wage? That is, if a Stanford HCI study (which seem to use MTurk often) wants workers to fill out a 15-minute…

I wonder if they actually get meaningful results from MTurk participants; you are getting a very skewed and unnatural demographic, and I don't see how any results based on feedback from MTurk participants can be applied to any normal population. Much more so than the traditional study group of students-who-need-to-pay-rent. I don't see an ethical problem in how much you pay participants (after all, how much it pays o…

> Much more so than the traditional study group of students-who-need-to-pay-rent.

Why do you say that? I imagine the MTurk demographic is much more diverse than "college freshman at X university"

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

#84

Post by phalangion »

cies wrote: post #79
phalangion wrote: post #74

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…

Some people's "hobby" is couponing. I doubt they consider the act of digging through papers to find and cut out coupons to be fun, but the act as a whole is. But I guess if you define a hobby strictly as something you do not for pay, you're correct. If you define it more broadly as something you do during non-work time, then it fits.

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

#85

Post by matz1 »

cies wrote: post #79
phalangion wrote: post #74

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…

Different strokes for different folks

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

#86

Post by tombert »

cies wrote: post #80
segmondy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming is fun for programmers, we don't get charged to play with computers. :)

> 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.

I agree. I think I have a pretty decent job, but if they stopped paying me I wouldn't show up "just for fun".

Programming on stuff I care about is fun, and for some beautiful moments at work there is overlap of "stuff I care about" and "stuff that is valuable to the business", but most of the time the work is "meh" and I mostly view it as "this is much better to me than most other jobs would be for me".

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

#87

Post by ForHackernews »

mruts wrote: post #67
ForHackernews wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is becoming like Brazil: a third world nation with some wealthy enclaves.

As a person who actually lives in a 3rd world country and grew up in America, what you’re saying could not be more false. Even the poorest Americans live a life here that would be considered one of great luxury. We’re talking about living on a dirt floor in collapsing mud houses. We’re talking about babies dying from dirty water as a regular occurrence. No running water, intermittent electricity and definitely no sew…

Americans in Flint, MI have poisonous water, and hookworm is on the rise from sewage contaminated water in Alabama.[0] In 2017, millions of Americans went without electricity or running water for months.[1]

> If you actually think America is a 3rd world country you need to get out more.

I said it's becoming a 3rd world country. There's still some legacy 20th century infrastructure that hasn't collapsed, yet.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/25/16362410/hurricane-maria-...

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

#88

Post by cies »

matz1 wrote: post #85
cies wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Different strokes for different folks

Yes. Though theme parks change at the door yet software shops pay programmers to come in each day.

There is clearly a patter here.

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

#89

Post by navigatesol »

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…

>This sounds insane to me.

Isn't the entire point of the article that he thought it sounded like a good idea, and turned out that it wasn't? In principle, it's easier than some of the options you list, since any corporate job ("analyst") involves a lot of downtime at your computer.

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

#90

Post by giarc »

baud147258 wrote: post #37
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...

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

Or the AI system automatically boots it to Mturk when the photo quality is bad for example.
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