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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

First thought: seems like Mechanical Turk is popular in India.

There also appear to be MTurk "shops"--some of the people are clearly sitting at the same computer (some even used the exact same sign...)

Yeah I noticed that too. There's also some location inconsistencies!

http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=33

http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=34

http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=35

Here as well, look at the closet on the right and the pictures on the wall.

http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=10 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=14 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=45 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=42 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=41 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=32 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=31 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=30 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=29

That doesn't indicate a formal "shop" to me.

If you're getting $1 for each picture of a person holding a sign you submit, you might as well have everyone else in the room take a turn.

That makes sense. $1 is 40 Indian Rupees, and $50 (the prize money) is 2339 Indian Rupees at current rates. Neither amount is an insignificant amount of money in India.

If $1 = Rs. 40 Then $50 = Rs. 2000

Yes. Neither amount is insignificant. But I still wonder, why only India? People from Pakistan, China and even Sri Lanka , Singapore are in +/- 3 hrs. timezones.

The timing of the post would be crucial to understand this.

Indians speak English.

So do people from Singapore, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Iran.

Fewer than 10% (almost all of which speak it as a second language)

That's still about 100 million people.

What's that expressed as a percentage of Indians with Internet connections at home?

FYI, $1 is insignificant in Singapore. Average household monthly income probably around 4000 USD (personal estimate, I live there, didn't look for official data)

Agreed. I had mentioned Rs. amount there - as a reference to the parent post. quoting Indian Rs.

I wanted to highlight - the time as a factor for other countries. Timezone.

What irks me that as an Indian I can't create a job on MTurk! I would love to try MTurk but it is only open for US citizens..

It shouldn't just irk you as an Indian, it irks me as a dutch person as well.

If a service finds people from a certain country good enough to be 'minions' how come it finds them not good enough to be 'bosses' ?

This is actually a really nice opportunity to give amazon a run for their money and to set up a competing service that operates world-wide on both the give and the take side.

There are employment laws in the UK which mean a Mechanical Turk-like system wouldn't be able to have jobs listed for such low amounts - I think it comes under the minimum wage laws.

Because of this and similar laws in other countries, Amazon have kept job-posting MT accounts limited to the USA at the moment, which doesn't have the restriction.

I don't know enough about Dutch or Indian law to know whether a similar system could be set up within them, but there are problems with rolling something like this out globally.

Minimum wage laws only apply to a situation where there is an employer-employee relationship between the two parties, this is much more like a free-lance situation.

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