2009.117: Capitalism and the Free Market, Both Sides Now with #mturk
I've been experiencing Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT or mturk) for a couple of weeks. I'd been hearing about it for a long time, it started around 2005 and every time AWS came up with something new, mturk was also mentioned.
If you haven't heard, mturk is a marketplace where workers and employers are brought together with small jobs called Human Intelligence Tasks, or "HITs". These are tasks that a machine can't easily do but a human can.
What brought me to action on AMT was that I wanted to get a transcript of a one-hour podcast. I priced the service on the web and saw $90-$150. I can't justify that much expenditure, so I posted a job on mturk, breaking up the hour into 6-ten minute segments and offering about $5 each. The work was returned quickly, the quality not perfect but adequate. Then I noticed that the same company that charges $90 per hour has jobs on mturk paying $2 for 10 minutes. That's equal to $12 per hour of transcription, which they sell for $90.
I got curious and started doing some of the HITs myself. For example, I earned 5 cents to identify an object in 25 photos. The more interesting
work for pennies is writing blog posts and reviews. Looking into this side of things, you see how certain reviews are written by people who
haven't used or even seen the product or service being reviewed and are instructed to NOT mention they are being paid to write it. There are a
few "fun" jobs like writing real reviews of local eateries or special tips for travel. As I delve into AMT, I see deeper implications as well as the most superficial exploitation.
The bottom line in all this is that as you look around in AMT, you will learn a lot about the human condition around the world. There are two good forums to see what workers and work requesters are saying about Amazon and each other:
http://www.turkernation.com/
http://www.mturkforum.com
I've also started trying to bring workers and requesters together every Wednesday in a live Turkers Talk teleconference. So far, we've had some interesting people on, talking about their motivations and their experiences.
