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Comment by astine | Hacker News Reader

I've always been a little confused... Who's time is worth so little that they'd actually see a single cent worth doing one of these drawings? Kids? Third world laborers?

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?

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A classic and popular misconception that "no one in their right mind would do this", yet they do. The time for effort formula trips up a lot of people, your not the first one come up with this analysis.

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.

Hrm. Still seems weird to me. I post here because it's pretty explicit that I do it for my own reasons. If I were to make 2 cents per post, that would make it somehow demeaning for me, I think.

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?

Things do seem more boring when you're making money for it. Does this effect have a name?

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!"

workers remorse.

Please don't patronize me. I never said, "no one in their right mind would do this." I asked, "why would someone do this if the primary motivation was money?" If the primary motivation isn't money, and people are looking to alleviate boredom, all you needed to do was say that. understand that the reason I asked was because I tried it once and couldn't stand it.

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.

I think you overestimate the value of most of the worlds workers.

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/)

Ops, I knew that number looked to large. I multiplied by an extra 8. Anyway, lot's of people live off of less than 1cent an min of work, but you would need to significantly cut down the PC and internet cost's to make it work out. Anyway, it can still work for a surprising number of people as 1k/year still put's you into the top 1/2 of the worlds workers.

A person that makes 1k/year will hardly be able to buy a PC.

That person will probably not know how to use a computer, read or understand English.

True, but I think this is what the 1 laptop per child concept is all about. US minimum wage is 6.25/hour in other economies over a billion people would be happy with 1-2% of that. The trick is finding something useful for them to do and handing them the tools to do so. Anyway, I expect the cost of outsourcing low end jobs is only going to go down as digital work becomes more common.

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.

> Who's time is worth so little that they'd actually see a single cent worth doing one of these drawings? Kids? Third world laborers?

Unemployed Java programmers?:)

I guess for most people it's not the money, but the feeling of accomplishment and the sense of community - teaming up to achieve a bigger goal. I doubt that sweatshops would do this - they are busy breaking captchas and mining gold in WoW.

Except, how do you know what the bigger goals are? I signed up for MT a while ago thinking I should give it a shot to see what it was like. I had no idea what the tasks added up to on a grander scale and I found that it really wasn't worth my time.

Edit: Are you sure that folks don't use MT to break captchas?

a salon.com article about the motivation of turkers has been posted here not to long ago: http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2006/07/24/turks/

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?

FTA:

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.

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