10,000 Mechanical Turkers work separately to draw a 100 dollar bill.
tenthousandcents.com
tenthousandcents.com
Guess the Mechanical Turk isn't good for, say, important data entry (without a system to set up cross-checks).
Pretty cool, though.
I actually posted about our experience with MY yesterday here: http://blog.newscred.com/?p=157
In any case, it's more interesting to stare at than just 8 well-done samples.
Anyone compared 2c and 1c with doublechecking for simpler tasks?
This is the most interesting piece. You are seriously missing something if you are not checking this out. There are multiple sections -
Detail (Mind blowing! - people putting in so much into this)
Creativity - All the funny stuff
Random art - hearts, texts and all that.
We just jump to the obvious answer in our heads without thinking about why, why WOULD someone do this. Why do people participate in social media? Why does the average teen check their myspace page 17 times a day? Who's getting paid to make 2.0 such an interesting place, well we sure aren't. Yet in turk land, the name of the game isn't to wake up and get excited about doing a .02 cent task. Its how fast can I do that so it doesn't feel like I did a .02 cent task. I'm bored, watching tv, why not make a few cents. Crazy, I know, yet, again, hello people are doing it.
Then we jump into the next assumption, well most of these folks have to be indian or chinese. Gold farmers sleeping in cots, that's it, thats gotta be it. Feel better? Wrong, 80% of these turks are not chinese gold farmers. They average joes here in the states buying milk and bacon just like you do. SHOCKING!
The sad thing is we hone in on all the .02 cent stories in turk, and yes there are plenty of them. But most turks I believe endure that cent crap to get to bigger fish. The "it took me less than 30 seconds for a buck" HITS, and I did 50 of those today. Now the money isn't so bad.
For people requesting the work, paying some 2 cents is a great way to get crap data, good luck with that. Course at a large volume of stuff, maybe you don't care, but in general turks don't do 2 cent tasks for 2 cents, they do it cause they are bored, multi-tasking, its interesting or fun- drawing 100 bill rather interesting, or cause its fast as hell to do.
Or more precisely - what kind of people think of stuff like this, sober up, and then actually implement it?
When I consider something like this, I don't think: "Oh, that's scary and/or challenging!" Instead, I think: "given all other possible uses of my time, is this one the best use possible?" Usually, the answer is no.
For me, if there's any "meaning" in this project, it's in divining why someone would choose to begin (or participate in) this in the first place.
If the question is "given all the ideas I have right now, and considering the effort to implement each, should I work on this?", the answer might be different.
People have different interpretations of what they consider meaningful.
Re-reading what I wrote, it sounds harsher than I had intended. Here's what I was trying to get at: for me, most of the meaning in projects like this (IMO) lies in the interpretation of why the artist chose to do it at all. My own limit is not typically fear, but indecisiveness.
If you're going to talk about Big Capitalism exploiting the cowering, puny forces of labor, you might want to pick a business where the startup cost is in the low three figures.
I can see kids doing this, though I doubt that many would have access to the accounts and bank information necessary. As per third worlders: if a person's situation were such that a cent per minute was a reasonable wage, how could they afford a computer and an Internet connection? I'm imagining vast Chinese sweatshops with workers making .5 on the cent.
Is my analysis wrong here?
Edit: Are you sure that folks don't use MT to break captchas?
It's certainly nothing for me, but it somehow attracts a lot of people. Is there something about breaking captchas in their terms of service?
Efficient Frontier, a search engine marketing firm, has used Mturk.com to accomplish tens of thousands of tasks since early 2006. Efficient Frontier helps companies figure out which keywords will bring Web surfers to their sites. With Mturk.com, Efficient Frontier can afford to pay three different people to look at each potential keyword, and vote whether those words are relevant to a given site. It costs the company just 4.5 cents to test each keyword, paying 1.5 cents to Amazon, and 1 cent each to three turkers.
That is sheer genius.
The problem you have is the lens you're looking through. No one paid you to post here, no one paid you to participate in a social network, watch a youtube video, let alone make a blog, yet a whole heck of alot of the folks on the planet do it.
People need to stop looking at turk through the "job" lens because it will never ever make sense. But if you look at it through the multitasking, social media, bored outa my gord, what the hell, yearning to participate in something, be apart of something, advisory and authority lens it makes much more sense.
Meanwhile, read up on turks, get to know their behaviors and find out the why behind their actions.
http://www.floozyspeak.com/blog/archives/2008/08/valley_of_t...
Don't take my word for it, go ask them yourself, make HIT, put it up there and see for yourself. But take the traditional "this is a job" lens off cause that is a classic misguided view of mechanical turk.
It does appear to work though, so maybe that's not a valid concern for many people. I wonder how exhaustible a resource people like that are, though. If MT were to become more widely used, would it fall off a cliff as the supply of people doing it "just for the heck of it" dried up and they are forced to ask for market rates?
I'm reminded of the first time I ever went to a casino. After an hour of exploring and putting the occasional dollar in a slot machine, I was about five dollars down. "Oh well, I thought, five dollars for an hour's entertainment is pretty good value!". Then on the next machine, I won ten bucks, and found myself thinking "An hour's work for five dollars? What a gip!"
That said, your study does answer my question. People see it as easy money that they can pursuit while doing other things or when there is nothing else to do, which makes sense.
Let's say revenue is 1cent an minute for 40 hours a week and 48 weeks a year. That's 9,216$ / year. Split the cost of a low cost energy efficient PC 300$, electricity ~100$, and internet 400$/year, over 1 year. And your left with ~8416$ which works out to ~700$ a month. In 2004 a southern China factory job would pay about $120 a month for long hours and often dangerous conditions. There are more than 4 billion people who gladly take that job but most of them don't have the skills to do so.
PS: If you think my numbers are a little off 8000$/year places someone in the top ~15% of the worlds income earners. (http://www.globalrichlist.com/)
That person will probably not know how to use a computer, read or understand English.
PS: My point is mostly about what constitutes a "living wage" in most of the world and has little to do with Amazon Mechanical Turk as it exists right now. I expect most people using Turk are making a lot more than 1cent / min of work or are just doing it as a hobby where the cash value is almost zero incentive.
Unemployed Java programmers?:)
whee