"I make $1.45 a week and I love it" | Hacker News Reader

"I make $1.45 a week and I love it"

salon.com

This reminds me of one of my favorite Paul Buchheit quotes:

"The internet is about harnessing the power of the bored for the benefit of the lazy."

What's to stop someone using this to 'outsource' CAPTCHA solving? (Not that spammers need any help doing so!)

I signed in with my normal Amazon account and had a look; it seems to be full of bloggers paying tens of users a couple of cents to blog about their URL or add it to social networking sites. As a blogger that relies on genuine traffic and social bookmarking, it makes me despair.

I wonder how many people in developing countries are Turkers. The article didn't discuss that at all (perhaps because the journalist didn't have access) but a few $s a day might be worth it in some places. Or certainly more worth it.

Only if they have the hardware and cheap, reliable internet connections.

If this is the case, then they are usually fairly literate and generally pursue options that provide a higher return e.g. online training/learning/certification to enhance job prospects, job-hunting, blogging supported by AdSense/adverts, ecommerce/eBay, etc., or in the worst cases spamming/scamming.

Those that would truly benefit from a few dollars a day are the ones least likely to be independent Turkers. The best case sceanario for them in this respect would be to work in a Turk farm (where a host company provides the infrastructure), but then they would only get a fraction of that dollar they earn. However, at least they would be indoors doing non-manual labour.

It's actually more than a few $ a day to be made, English speakers can get around $4 an hour once they get good at the system. These English speakers aren't doing it to support themselves, they spend their money as Amazon credit on DVDs and surround sound systems and LCD TVs.

Has anyone here used the Turk for getting people to test their webapps yet? Or better yet, for apps which need lots of raw data which is tricky to collect automatically?

I bet you could actually use it to get people using a website on a permanent basis. To short-circuit the charging by the hour, just make the goal "complete this short survey on our site... Which is only available if you're a regular user."

Or how about this: create this content for $0.0X... do it while signed in, and receive recurring revenue (10% of our ad revenue for a given content).

There was a paper about this at CHI 2008:

http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~echi/papers/2008-CHI2008/2008-0...

Love that sheep site linked to at the end of the article, great idea.

Agreed. Be sure to hit it if you didn't read the whole thing:

http://www.thesheepmarket.com/

Our service is powered by Mechanical Turk:

http://saneshopping.com

Cool idea!

If you don't mind answering I'm curious as to how long it usually takes for your HITs to get answered and do you get many problems with ones that no one will do?

We do have some that no one will do, but usually that's a problem with the question (e.g. they can't find what we ask for or it doesn't exist). Turnaround varies with time of day. I wrote more about this question here:

http://blog.clayvalet.com/ci/2008/05/21/working-with-mechani...

"He is one turker, however, who is plotting how to move up the food chain. Currently, Cranston and a friend are working to launch a Web-based business altering photographs, called Image Den, using, naturally, Mechanical Turkers to treat the images."

It seems his site has shut down in the last 2 years since this article was written

You could make more money picking up change, and nobody else would profit from your labor.

Other people profiting is a bad thing?

Actually picking up change increases inflation.

Probably not these days, since the cost of some coins are higher than their face value. By picking up and using change you'd be saving the government the cost of replacing it.

Perhaps.

I was using the first order assumption that the governmental money supply was independent of picking up change.

And perhaps you're correct. But I wouldn't be surprised if the government spends money estimating the amount of non-picked up change.

Chances are that with taxes, cost of an internet connection (especially if your bandwidth is capped), cost of a computer, etc, they're probably getting paid negative amounts.

We can presuppose that these are sunk costs. One example is the man who does this instead of playing online poker. He'd be online doing something anyway.

Yes that's how it will seem so long as it's not too big. Just like they present certain college jobs under some obscure classification that means they are not bound to minimum wage.

Or mailbox stuffers. Down here they advertise those jobs as a way to make sure you get your daily walk & get paid a little.

If it becomes a serious channel to a labor market, it might become a way of bypassing Chinas $144 minimum wage. (BTW, There are quite a few internet sweatshops going already with 12X7 weeks @ $144 p/m)

Would be curious for a link to an internet sweatshop...

http://www.sed.manchester.ac.uk/idpm/research/publications/w...

Seems sort of silly at this point. But with enough demand for more unskilled labour online, it might become something more substantial.

From the paper: " The rather wobbly-legged best guesses for 2008 are that 400,000 gold farmers earning an average US$145 per month produced a global market worth US$500m; but we could easily more than double the latter to over US$1bn. There are probably 5-10m consumers of gold farming services. "

Mailbox stuffing is a great idea for me actually. I walk every day past roughly 100 mailboxes and would stuff a sheet of paper in each for 1 cent if I could do it without slowing down.

Most people doing this are English speakers that spend their proceeds at amazon.com. The low wage doesn't feel so bad when you are slowly working your way to a 1080p plasma. $4/hour is about the rate an experienced turker gets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com