Ask HN: Have you used Amazon Turk or other site for content generation?

1 pointjpmc4 comments

I have toyed with the idea of using Turk to generate some content for a project..just to get the ball rolling. I feel that this project is suffering from the empty parking lot syndrome. Is seeding your site cheating/wrong?

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There have been other HN discussions about seeding your site, and the consensus seems to be that it's OK if done ethically. I'd say paying users to generate stuff is fine. Just don't steal copyrighted material, don't pay people to reword someone else's content. Keep them generating original material and I don't see any problems.

don't pay people to reword someone else's content.

I had that experience with mturk...several people must have used the same content spinning software, because they all returned basically the same reworded wikipedia article.

I didn't think about that. I guess policing the content that gets generated will be something to consider.

Data IS part of the design process.

As for Mechanical Turk, take a look at some of the papers Greg Little has published from MIT to get some creative ideas as to how to use Mechanical Turk.

If you're a Rails developer, take a look at my gem Turkee to easily integrate with Mechanical Turk ( http://github.com/aantix/turkee ).

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