Comment by ScottWhigham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ScottWhigham | Hacker News Reader

Strange use of Mechanical Turk if you ask me. You could've spent about the same in Google Adwords asking people to take a survey. At least then you'd have a survey of "people who are searching for important keywords related to my topic of interest" rather "people who are so technically capable that they are using MT".

"I also found out to my surprise that more men than women said they’d use the service. I fully expected it to be the other way around." 200 people is not a large sample size and I would caution you against making sweeping decisions about the future of a company based on this small size. It could be that the MT program attracts more men than women? I don't know how you set it up but you said earlier that you didn't really do any segmentation.

It is still waaaaaaaaaaay better than asking your family and friends.

Dude. No.

They're both 100% useless.

Mechanical Turkers are incentivized to give positive feedback because there's a chance (lurking in the back of their minds, surely) that people are emotionally sensitive and if they get criticized, they will be emotionally wounded and won't approve their HIT.

Do you know how I know this? I asked Turkers to give me feedback on one of my sites, and it was nothing but sunshine and razzmatazz smoothies.

You know you're building something people want when they vote with their wallets or attention (give you their email address, phone number...)

New Theory: hell, an even better test might be are they willing to "invite their friends" to tell them about it? People share things with friends because they like their friends - is it of sufficiently high value that they will get a "social credit" for sharing with their friends?.

When we created http://markiter.com we decided to present users with two options instead of just asking vague questions.

You could compare a few pictures, videos, landing pages, etc. And get some a vote with a comment on which is better.

Forced more legwork on the user to actually create multiple options.

I guess you could ignore the 73% that said they would use it. But note that 27% said they wouldn't use it and also stated "WHY they wouldn’t use" it. This should be at least 1% useful.

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