Posted by csmoak 3 days ago
Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today
At the time, AWS was about 100 people (when you were on call, you were on call for all of AWS), Amazon had just hit 10,000, S3 was still in private beta, and EC2 was a whitepaper.
What did you create with MTurk and the incredibly patient hard-working workforce behind it?
I spent a month in 2012 roughly 4 hours a day doing various tasks.
It was horrible, even if I followed all the "best practices" of Turkers it was not a way to make a living.
By end of the month, I had become so jaded to all the "priming" experiments by graduate and undergraduate psychology students. Those usually paid at least something 3-4 USD an hour.
Did some porn labeling tasks, those were horrible after the novelty wore off.
Did very few other labeling tasks because they paid next to nothing.
To have someone actually depend on living for these seemed like a torture.
There are places where $3-$4 USD per hour is significantly higher than the prevailing wage. This is not a great fact about global wealth disparity, but that money goes towards improving the situation not making it worse.
That's not a lot of money to someone who lives in the United States. But here in 2025 it gets you out of the bottom quintile of earners in China, India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Japan, Central America, South America, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, most of Eastern Europe...
For a job that's on demand, and requires, as far as I can tell, decent English skills and an Internet connection, but no real barriers to entry otherwise. It would have been a much stronger deal back in 2012, of course.
I'd be interested to know if the introduction of MTurk as a market competitor pushed entry level clerical wages up in some of these areas. Probably not, because English proficiency in a non English speaking country is a very rare skill not usually borne by people in the bottom 20% of income. But that's probably less true today given the dominant of English language YouTube.
Look for the illustrations…
I’ve also done a statistical shape analysis comparing to all bronze ax heads in England. Not yet published.
The most valuable prospects were businesses in buildings where we had a direct fiber connection. There were sites online that purported to list the buildings and leads that the company bought from somewhere, but the sources were all really noisy. Like 98% of the time, the phone number was disconnected or didn't match the address the source said, so basically nobody used these sources.
I thought MTurk would be my secret weapon. If I could pay someone like $0.10/call to call business and confirm the business name and address, then I'd turn these garbage data sources into something where 100% of the prospects were valid, and none of the sales reps competing with me would have time to burn through these low-probability phone numbers.
The first day, I was so excited to call all the numbers that the MTurk workers had confirmed, and...
The work was all fake. They hadn't called anyone at all. And they were doing the jobs at like 4 AM local time when certainly nobody was answering phones at these businesses.
I tried a few times to increase the qualifications and increase pay, but everyone who took the job just blatantly lied about making the calls and gave me useless data.
Still, I thought MTurk was a neat idea and wish I'd found a better application for it.
Delightful.
For those using it to "get by" idk, I mean I knew someone who qualified for SSDI in theory but was still denied. He used it to offset some cash needs but obviously was not sufficient enough. Think the bigger issue around ethics is more societal. People shouldn't have to rely on it in place of SSDI when they shouldn't have been denied. I suppose the same can apply to food stamps etc. With this administration obviously things are tightening and getting more strict. Potential SSDI reforms will probably exasperate the need for this service. The ideal is this wouldn't be the case and the service just provides the small cash niceties for small time gaming and donations.
ref; https://www.propublica.org/article/social-security-disabilit...
It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t need to be. We essentially needed a “good enough to start with” dataset that we could refine going forward. It got the job done.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170809155252id_/http://kittur....