August 14, 2008 at 12:58 pm

That is why I really believe they have to want to do these things … out of boredom.
—-

Sort of.

1) For filler during TV time (during commercials, stc.)

2) To truly help science (surveys, etc.)

Aniket Kittur, Ed H. Chi, Bongwon Suh. Crowdsourcing User Studies With Mechanical Turk. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human-factors in Computing Systems (CHI2008), pp.453-456. ACM Press, 2008. Florence, Italy.

http://www.thedailybackground.com/2009/01/16/exclusive-belkins-development-rep-is-hiring-people-to-write-fake-positive-amazon-reviews/

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/17/belkin-paying-65-cents-for-good-reviews-on-newegg-and-amazon/

Everyone is blaming Belkin, who certainly deserves the lion’s share of blame, but I still believe Amazon should do a better job of policing mturk for these spam tasks that violate their stated policy anyway.

The Dark Side to Mechanical Turk

Brendan O’Connor (Dolores Labs), together with Rion Snow, Dan Jurafsky, and Andrew Ng (Stanford) published a paper showing how mturk can be used to quickly and cheaply obtain high quality machine learning data:

http://blog.doloreslabs.com/2008/09/amt-fast-cheap-good-machine-learning/

I’ve done numerous studies on Turks attempting to find out why they do all these odd ball tasks and whats most interesting is how much turk/task behavior mimics everyday web surfing in general less about making money.

Before you ask, why do that for 3 cents, ask yourself, why do you participate in blogs, social networks and everything else on the web. What do you get out of it?

In my Valley of Turks post, I think its clear that not all turks do it for the money. Its a challenge, its a game. The real challenge isn’t the work they do its finding cheap easy to do work thats an easy cent or buck or two.

http://www.floozyspeak.com/blog/archives/2008/08/valley_of_the_t.html

Ya gotta remember this is like a backdoor don’t really care about experiment from Amazon. It arrived on the scene in 2006, and it went through various stages of good PR mostly bad PR back then and only now have they started to look at it again and attempt to spruce it up. Microsoft and Google have had like systems, Microsofts is pretty much gone, Google’s is history but I hear its back again in Russia somewhere.

I agree with Lukas in that the Turk community sniffs out scams faster than you and I would any day. They live on Turk scouring it daily for golden gems of work in the ruff of it all.