Thursday, August 4, 2011
Amazon's Mechanical Turk PART DEUX
Sorry if this post is lacking in a little bit of quality but to be completely honest my mind is absolutely numb from the last few hours of working on MTurk (this is the cool short way to say Mechanical Turk.)
Some people say they hate their job, well this is like a job that hates you. The tasks are absolutely soul crushing, I have never seen anything worse, seriously.
Here are a few examples of the tasks that I did:
Choose the best category for a product (Category Recommendation)
Write suggestions for tasks
Categorize the following business and capture their URLs
Moderate Tags for 5 Images - Magnum Photos
Out of all of those only one was halfway decent, the "Moderate Tags for 5 Images" was ok because you got to see some actually pretty interesting pictures, the ones I saw were from Iraq. Still, the task itself sucked, you are required to go through all the tags for the image which about half were relevant and half were totally random and unrelated, so it ended up that instead of looking at the picture you were mostly reading random tags and their description. Also I earned $0.04 for 10 minutes worth of work on this task, not sure what that equals in dollars per hour but it doesn't seem worth it to even try and calculate.
All in all I'd have to say Amazon's Mechanical Turk just isn't for me. I'm probably going to work on it a little bit more and write a little bit more about it but if you'd like to try it here's the link: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
Give it a try and see if it is for you, apparently there are people out there that can do this kind of work, and you may be one of them.
On a positive note, Amazon is an awesome company and have always been reliable and their payment system is great so you at least don't have to worry about getting paid.
Some people say they hate their job, well this is like a job that hates you. The tasks are absolutely soul crushing, I have never seen anything worse, seriously.
Here are a few examples of the tasks that I did:
Choose the best category for a product (Category Recommendation)
Write suggestions for tasks
Categorize the following business and capture their URLs
Moderate Tags for 5 Images - Magnum Photos
Out of all of those only one was halfway decent, the "Moderate Tags for 5 Images" was ok because you got to see some actually pretty interesting pictures, the ones I saw were from Iraq. Still, the task itself sucked, you are required to go through all the tags for the image which about half were relevant and half were totally random and unrelated, so it ended up that instead of looking at the picture you were mostly reading random tags and their description. Also I earned $0.04 for 10 minutes worth of work on this task, not sure what that equals in dollars per hour but it doesn't seem worth it to even try and calculate.
All in all I'd have to say Amazon's Mechanical Turk just isn't for me. I'm probably going to work on it a little bit more and write a little bit more about it but if you'd like to try it here's the link: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
Give it a try and see if it is for you, apparently there are people out there that can do this kind of work, and you may be one of them.
On a positive note, Amazon is an awesome company and have always been reliable and their payment system is great so you at least don't have to worry about getting paid.
 |
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
20 comments:
It sounded good in theory, good to know that it actually sucks. Thanks!
God that does sound dull. Cheers for the heads up!
Great blog man +follow
so... i just lost my interest in this stuff ...
Good read. I agree with you there man, MTurk is a pain - and that Amazon *is* an awesome company ;)
+ followed by http://avidpathfinder.blogspot.com/
Learned about one more thing to avoid.
Yeah, doesn't sound too great
4 pennies in an hour? hajeebus
hahaha like my previous comment said, it wasnt for me, but its worth knowing about.
thats interesting man
Damn, I'm not quite sure what you're talking about but it sounds pretty shitty and not worth it.
+followed
If they get better stuff on there it may be awesome but right now i go to fiverr.com its only selling but it has a lot of cool stuff on it.
sounds terrible
maybe if theyd offer better payment because its such a tedious task i'd do it, but 10 mins strait and only 4 cents? nooooooo.
+followed
I have found it's quite hard to gain anything by doing some serious time-consuming work on the net. Some 15 page survey I took a couple of weeks ago which took for some Financial Planning data, only awarded me $0.50 in game points for my time and info. Kinda insulting if you ask me.
I stick to making hand-made quality goods that get used in real world applications...
Wow, read part one, thought i could use a little extra money and was going to try this out but then read this post and second guessed myself. This doesn't sound like my kind of work. Thanks for the update though!
That much money for that amount of work? Pass.
Well it sounded like a great thing in theory but for that little pay it doesn't seem worth it :(
that's very good information
Nice information, I love your blog.
Keep up the good work!
+Follow
Post a Comment