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Posted

Heard a thing about this on NPR this weekend.  https://www.mturk.com/

If you don't know (I may be way behind the curve here), it's crowdsourced menial labor, mostly things that can be done online.  Some interesting stories about it over the last year (so maybe I am).  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/

Anyone ever done anything with it?

Posted

I did a few things with it before, but not worth the time. You have to meet certain qualifications to do jobs and most just pay pennies. I think I lucked out and did a survey that paid $2.00 for 5 minutes of my time.

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Posted
39 minutes ago, clapclapclap said:

Owned by Amazon (Jeff Bezos, once again the working man's best friend...)  What's with the name, is it based in Constantinople?

According to NPR, it's a sly reference to a scam in which an "automated machine" was, in actuality, a person under a table.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk

A lot of the menial tasks are commissioned by allegedly "automated" sites and services and they pay someone a few pennies to do while maintaining the illusion that it's all machine done.

Posted

Yea, this is mega-old. At least 4-5 years when I first heard of it I want to say. Not worth the effort I surmised back then.

Posted

We've looked into it for a few projects we have going on but haven't pulled the trigger yet. 

I'm guessing it will be a lot of hit or miss but we do want to try it for some of the things we have going on here that programming doesn't quite get us to where we need to be. 

 

 

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Posted
17 minutes ago, blacklab said:

We've looked into it for a few projects we have going on but haven't pulled the trigger yet. 

I'm guessing it will be a lot of hit or miss but we do want to try it for some of the things we have going on here that programming doesn't quite get us to where we need to be. 

 

 

aka dealing with derka pm's

Posted
4 hours ago, TwiceHorn said:

Heard a thing about this on NPR this weekend.  https://www.mturk.com/

If you don't know (I may be way behind the curve here), it's crowdsourced menial labor, mostly things that can be done online.  Some interesting stories about it over the last year (so maybe I am).  https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/amazon-mechanical-turk/551192/

Anyone ever done anything with it?

I've used it for simple data scrubbing/name matching that we could not automate. It worked fairly well. 

My colleagues use it to find participants for online experiments.   

  • Like 1
Posted
2 hours ago, Dbeasy said:

Used it for data gathering. It worked. It was cheap. Been around for years.

This.  Using it for having people complete simple tasks for you is great.

Using it as a way to make money for yourself (as in completing said tasks for others) is not so great.

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