Top
Best
New

Posted by csmoak 11/2/2025

Tell HN: Mechanical Turk is twenty years old today

MTurk was built by two two-pizza teams at AWS over the course of a year and launched on Nov 2, 2005. It took a few days for people to find it and catch on, but then things got busy.

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?

94 points | 62 commentspage 4
BoredPositron 11/3/2025|
Tried it once or twice but never was worth the hassle and the feeling of exploiting other people.
brazukadev 11/3/2025||
This sounds so much like a PR piece from Amazon.
hshdhdhehd 11/4/2025||
MTurk pre-dated their cloud services? wow.
nextworddev 11/3/2025||
Scale AI was a wrapper around MTurk /s
deadbabe 11/2/2025|
With LLMs, I think we will finally have the missing piece needed to make something like MTurk work at scale.

Bad data or false work was a big problem on MTurk, but now LLMs should be able to act as reasonable quality assurance for each and every piece of work a worker commits. The workers can be ranked and graded based on the quality of their work, instantly, instead of requiring human review.

You can also flip the model and have LLMs do the unit of work, and have humans as a verification layer, and the human review sanity checked again by an LLM to ensure people aren’t just slacking off and rubber stamping everything. You can easily do this by inserting blatantly bad data at some points and seeing if the workers pick up on it. Fail the people who are letting bad data pass through.

For a lot of people, I think this will be the future of work. People will go to schools to get rounded educations and get degrees in “Human Cognitive Tasks” which makes them well suited for doing all kinds of random stuff that fills in gaps for AI. Perhaps they will also minor in some niche fields for specific industries. Best of all, they can work their own hours and at home.

hiddencost 11/2/2025|
I, uh, you do understand the causality issues here? I'm reminded of the onion headline "Tab of LSD feeling a lot of pressure from tech worker to come up with new ideas"