Hacker News Reader

Comment by markbnine | Hacker News Reader

What if somebody asked people to write something profane? Or political? Or perhaps deface the image of an icon or religious leader? Once you move past written messages, you open up all sorts of avenues. Crowd-sourced politics? Crowd-sourced porn? Crowd-sourced violence? Etc. At what point does Amazon need to filter these requests?

View on HN

> Crowd-sourced politics? Crowd-sourced porn?

So?

When it's illegal? There's a huge difference between crowd sourcing violence and writing something political (which a lot of people already get payed to do), ones organized crime the other is not.

While I don't doubt that everyone has their price... I think you would find it cost-prohibitive to pay enough people to do something like that to have any sort of real-world impact.

People are not going to go out of their way, or risk jail time, for $1.00/task. You'd need to pony up a lot more money (like, I'm guessing, 100's of thousands of dollars) to get enough people to violate basic principles on a large enough scale for this to create some sort of shift.

If they're in India, and breaking laws in say the US, I doubt they'd care too much.

I don't see any problem as long as they're not asking them to break any laws. Ultimately it's up to the parties involved to obey the law though. If someone puts an ad for a hitman in the help wanted section of the newspaper, should the newspaper be held responsible?

Perhaps Amazon could crowd source this?

After all, for someone to get anywhere doing ill with MTurk the request must be seen by people.

On demand viral marketing or protests...

I do think it is very interesting to see the faces behind Mechanical Turk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com