Amazon Mechanical TurkReviews 63

I would really like to give this site five stars. Essentially "Mechanical Turk Requesters" ask mturk.com to accomplish a set of tasks, tasks that "Mechanical Turk Workers" then accomplish. Requesters and Workers need never actually contact each other.

I think automating the relationship of people who need to get tasks done and people who want to accomplish these tasks for some kind of incentive in the fashion that "Amazon's Mechanical Turk" does this is awesome and could most likely be the future of a large portion of labor.

It disheartens me, however, that a lot of this work is antithetical to the hacker ethic in specific and putting human potential to its highest, best use in that it can not only be quite a bit tedious at times but also not compensate very well for the amount of work involved. Compounding this, instructions with some Requesters can be very vague and as you get no instantaneous feedback on your work, this can damage your ratings, restricting you from being able to take on more choice tasks, if you do a lot of tasks in a row incorrectly.

Also, I am too often left only hoping that the goals of the tasks I take on are in agreement with my own values.

I have been using this site for about 8 months now. As the previous reviewer said, the HITs pay from $. 01 to $20.00 and up. Generally, the harder the task, the more money you will be paid (obviously) and the more qualified you have to be. For the HIT's that require qualification, you need to take the given test and pass it to be able to qualify. Basically, the more time you spend on here the more money you will make. One can make a good amount of money on here. Certainly not a sole income but definitely some spending money or some money to put away in savings or something. I've been paid for taking quizzes, surveys, transcribing audio, editing written assignments, and some other odd jobs. It can be fun too!

I randomly stumbled across mTurk.com (Amazon Mechanical Turk) while surfing the net. I read reviews about this site, and how people can make money by completing HITs, or human intelligence tasks. It's a reliable site, and it is owned by Amazon.com themselves. People upload simple tasks others can do, for example, you can complete mini surveys, or write articles, and transcribe audio (listening an audio and writing it out into words). HITs vary from $. 01-$20 & up. I've been doing HITs averaging from 4-5 bucks, and made around $130 in two weeks, which is not bad at all. This site is pretty much secure... you have the option of transfering your money into Amazon credits, or into your bank account through the Amazon website.