sdfx

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?

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.

What really baffles me is the number of people that start out with the foreground and then destroy most of their work by slowly filling in the background. No wonder that it took them 5 month. Great project though and a nice demonstration of what can be done with mechanical turk.

Funniest thing are the charts (particularly the one at 38:00). While they are probably as accurate as 90% of the charts from other presentations, the "hand made"-esthetics reflect the randomness pretty well.

Interesting article about an amazing service, have to remember it for the next time I run into a similar problem. But please don't use it to blast out my personal data to hundreds of "untrusted" people...

The number games in this article are without any substance, especially the estimates for the percentage of upgraders.

Other companies are using a tiered system, where you get free lifetime upgrades for the base version and you pay a fee for premium/business services (Jungledisk.com is using this approach). This way you can build a (happy) userbase and increase the trust in the company. Satisfied customers are more likely to upgrade to a payed plan.

This almost makes me want to clean my car

maybe because it's not so hard to use "site:..." on google.

It's not the idea per se thats bad. There are a number of stories on YC which point to this problem: Most ideas are nothing without execution. (most recent: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=237096 )