I assisted many professors in data collection for their research in the grad school. Later I also collected data for a couple of my papers. mTurk was very popular in the beginning in large part due to its low cost. Then one day they jacked up their commission so much, it was no more attractive to me. Also, the response/task quality went down significantly. My last time using it was in 2018 for a large scale image labeling task. After doing a pilot run, I concluded I was getting garbage. I went to some other vendor and never returned to mTurk after that.

Never used it since it was only available in the US. Looks like additional countries were not added till Oct 2016, 11 years after it was first launched[0]

None of the companies I've worked for have used it AFAIK, despite them all using AWS. I think I've mostly ignored it as one of the niche AWS products that isn't relevant.

[0] https://blog.mturk.com/weve-made-it-easier-for-more-requeste...

I worked at two crowdsourcing companies built on MTurk. Humanoid and CloudCrowd. Had millions of tasks go through from transcriptions to labeling.

I remember participating in the workforce early on transcribing really bad audio recordings along with the cheap survey type stuff. It was pretty neat back in the day.

Nothing of actual utility:

https://github.com/cole-k/turksort

I used it to have transcribed our 2 kids x 5 years of daycare x 180 days a year worth of extensive wonderful daily reports from daycare.

I loved their old tagline: “Artificial Artificial Intelligence”.

I did a project where I had them write poems and draw pictures about and of robots.

I got about 100 of each.

I was in school and automated some MTurk HITs to make a small amount of money.

Tried it once or twice but never was worth the hassle and the feeling of exploiting other people.