How to make money with Mechanical Turk without being scammed

Just want to chime in as a regular requester here - mTurk is a major part of our business, and we've found that treating mTurk workers with respect (answering their emails promptly, communicating with them on forums, giving a fair pay rate) results in extremely high quality work that we can verify as high quality.

Our trick is to give a slightly lower base pay rate and then give bonuses to workers who provide higher quality work so they're more likely to come back. We watch our turkopticon ratings very closely to make sure we're doing right by them.

There are a lot of bad requesters and a lot of bad workers, but if you know how to use it the work can actually be immensely valuable. As a requester, having workers voluntarily post your HITs to forums and /r/HITsWorthTurkingFor/ tends to drive the largest number of high quality results.

I wrote this so others wouldn't have to hunt down all the tools I used, or worse, waste a lot of time on scam jobs.

MTurk is just as much a scam for those posting jobs as maybe for those that try to make money on it.

I have heard many more horror stories about the poor quality of completed tasks and needing to request 3+ turkers to complete the same task in the hope that at least one would do it properly. Maybe what you are seeing are simply people posting jobs who have been burnt too many times.