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I hired 50 people today. This is what they look like
- olalonde 17y agoFirst thought: seems like Mechanical Turk is popular in India.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- myoung8 17y agoThere also appear to be MTurk "shops"--some of the people are clearly sitting at the same computer (some even used the exact same sign...)
- delano 17y agoYeah I noticed that too. There's also some location inconsistencies! http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=33 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=33 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=34 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=34 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=35 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=35
- aonic 17y agoHere as well, look at the closet on the right and the pictures on the wall. http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=10 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=10 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=14 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=14 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=45 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=45 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=42 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=42 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=41 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=41 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=32 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=32 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=31 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=31 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=30 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=30 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=29 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=29
- eli 17y agoThat doesn't indicate a formal "shop" to me. If you're getting $1 for each picture of a person holding a sign you submit, you might as well have everyone else in the room take a turn.
- khandelwal 17y agoThat makes sense. $1 is 40 Indian Rupees, and $50 (the prize money) is 2339 Indian Rupees at current rates. Neither amount is an insignificant amount of money in India.
- nishantmodak 17y agoIf $1 = Rs. 40 Then $50 = Rs. 2000 Yes. Neither amount is insignificant. But I still wonder, why only India? People from Pakistan, China and even Sri Lanka , Singapore are in +/- 3 hrs. timezones. The timing of the post would be crucial to understand this.
- robotrout 17y agoIndians speak English.
- nearestneighbor 17y agoFewer than 10% (almost all of which speak it as a second language)
- nishantmodak 17y agoSo do people from Singapore, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Iran.
- agravier 17y agoFYI, $1 is insignificant in Singapore. Average household monthly income probably around 4000 USD (personal estimate, I live there, didn't look for official data)
- paraschopra 17y agoWhat irks me that as an Indian I can't create a job on MTurk! I would love to try MTurk but it is only open for US citizens..
- jacquesm 17y agoIt shouldn't just irk you as an Indian, it irks me as a dutch person as well. If a service finds people from a certain country good enough to be 'minions' how come it finds them not good enough to be 'bosses' ? This is actually a really nice opportunity to give amazon a run for their money and to set up a competing service that operates world-wide on both the give and the take side.
- paulsilver 17y agoThere are employment laws in the UK which mean a Mechanical Turk-like system wouldn't be able to have jobs listed for such low amounts - I think it comes under the minimum wage laws. Because of this and similar laws in other countries, Amazon have kept job-posting MT accounts limited to the USA at the moment, which doesn't have the restriction. I don't know enough about Dutch or Indian law to know whether a similar system could be set up within them, but there are problems with rolling something like this out globally.
- jacquesm 17y agoMinimum wage laws only apply to a situation where there is an employer-employee relationship between the two parties, this is much more like a free-lance situation.
- jacquesm 17y agoI think you failed in your objective to say 'hi' to that actress, instead you have made lots of other people say 'hi'.
- paulgerhardt 17y agoAndy Baio did this last year with the additional task of including "why do you turk?" http://waxy.org/2008/11/the_faces_of_mechanical_turk/ http://waxy.org/2008/11/the_faces_of_mechanical_turk/ Interesting to see how the demographic has shifted in that time period. Regarding the bit about crowd-sourcing ideas; Andrew Hyde used Turk to solicit startup-ideas: http://andrewhy.de/using-mechanical-turk-for-ideas/ http://andrewhy.de/using-mechanical-turk-for-ideas/
- eru 17y agoOr time of the day?
- paulgerhardt 17y agoAndy Baio's project took place over the course of 3 days; it's not explicitly stated how long this task took to complete though given how high the pay was (relatively) I could see this job filling up in an hour. (Edit: or 3 hours - pay seems to be a large factor, I wonder if by paying less one gets more people who do the task out of boredom rather than necessity and how that correlates to quality of results.)
- mindstab 17y agoIt could have something to do with the time the job was created. As the author mentioned in a comment, after 3 hours the job kinda died. So If he posted it in peak hours for India, than it's not surprising that most of the respondents were Indian, while the fellow from your link may have posted it in peek hours for a more "white" timezone. What we really need I supposed is one of these every hour for 24 hours. Then we'll get a better idea of the demographics of MTurk.
- mmelin 17y agoIs it common for Turkers to repeat tasks? These people used the same sign: http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=1 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=1 and http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=9 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=9
- steveeq1 17y agoYeah, it is. There were a lot of bad submissions. I'm just experimenting with Mechanical Turk right now. Initial impressions. . . 1) a lot of fraud (about half sent in pictures of their cat or something) 2) most people are from india 3) Most of your replies come in the first 3 hours or so. After that it wains. You have to resubmit after this 4) There were repeat submissions. Three of them looked like they are from the same room, same camera. But people claimed different locations.
- swombat 17y agoAfter that it wains wanes
- ars 17y agoA wain is a kind of wagon or chariot. Can someone please tell me why this submission is interesting to HN? (Obviously it is, I just can't figure out why.)
- eli 17y agoMechnical Turk is kind of interesting. It's one of those things that I'd really like try out, but have no immediate use for. I'm sure I'm not the only one. (In fact, most of the cool projects I've seen using MTurk are of the Gee Whiz variety) Also, people like to look at pictures.
- gmichnikov 17y agoTry soliciting suggestions for birthday or holiday presents. Or, try soliciting feedback from 100 people on the clarity/ease of your company's sign-up process, introductory video, etc. Many of the comments will be worthless, but you'd be surprised at the quality you get from some people, even at rates as low as $0.05-0.10.
- dawie 17y agoThis is not nice: "I'm offering a $50 reward to the guy with the best photo, so have fun and be creative" They thought they had a chance of winning. Blows my mind how 4 out of 50 (8%) did not even complete the stated requirements. Also crazy how all many of these people are Indian.
- iheartmemcache 17y ago4 out of 50 is 8% not 12%.
- dylanz 17y agoI think he paid them all $1 for the task, with the added bonus of possibly getting $50 if they win. Why is that not nice? They got paid, and entered a contest. $1 for a HIT on Mechanical Turk is pretty good, especially considering the amount of work they needed to do here (which is not much).
- ardit33 17y agoare you kidding me? it is a fricking $1. Even in a developing country is not much, especially with the dollar going down. Don't be surprised when people don't take your requirement that seriously.
- ericb 17y agoI've also seen people making 100k+ who can't follow simple instructions or be bothered to read requirements.
- dylanz 17y ago45RS to take a photo and post it online is a good deal. That buys you lunch (or food for your family).
- gommm 17y ago1$ is the salary for one hour work for a maid in Shanghai... And Shanghai is not exactly the cheapest part of China.
- ashishk 17y agoCool experiment. Thinking of using Turk for photo approvals on my site, but the accuracy issue leaves me slightly hesitant. Has anyone had experience doing this?
- eru 17y agoFrom what I read the standard technique seems to be let two people review everything. When there's a discrepancy you can add more manpower (and take the majority view or so) or look at it yourself.
- eli 17y agoYup. There are a couple of language translation services that use techniques like that.
- jules 17y agoA problem is that there are rooms of people turking together. They'd probably all submit the same translation, for example.
- eru 17y agoI guess you should flag exactly similar translations. Though I do not see how you can do this without relying on security by obscurity.
- jfno67 17y agoWhat I did was to have up to five person work on a hit. Many simple hits are done at 0.05$ so it's still not too expansive. For text submissions, you can enforce validation rules (simple and regex). So you don't have to manually reject non-conforming work. You can also have the Turker fill in their work on a webpage that you control, so validation can be much more advanced. I never went all the way but sometimes I think about it.
- hyung 17y agoHey ashishk, sorry for using HN to contact you, but I can't seem to find your contact info anywhere. Our company provides very affordable and accurate photo approval services. Photos are manually approved and we can handle anywhere from 10-1,000,000 photos per day. If you're interested, feel free to email me (email address is in my profile).
- bretthoerner 17y agoSo who won the $50 bonus?
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- markbnine 17y agoThis makes me curious about Amazon's vetting process for requests.... taken one step further, I can imagine all sorts of ridiculous things to ask people to do.
- SwellJoe 17y agoWhy would Amazon vet the requests? People can choose whether to take part in any particular project.
- markbnine 17y agoWhat if somebody asked people to write something profane? Or political? Or perhaps deface the image of an icon or religious leader? Once you move past written messages, you open up all sorts of avenues. Crowd-sourced politics? Crowd-sourced porn? Crowd-sourced violence? Etc. At what point does Amazon need to filter these requests?
- hga 17y agoPerhaps Amazon could crowd source this? After all, for someone to get anywhere doing ill with MTurk the request must be seen by people.
- thirdusername 17y agoWhen it's illegal? There's a huge difference between crowd sourcing violence and writing something political (which a lot of people already get payed to do), ones organized crime the other is not.
- imgabe 17y agoI don't see any problem as long as they're not asking them to break any laws. Ultimately it's up to the parties involved to obey the law though. If someone puts an ad for a hitman in the help wanted section of the newspaper, should the newspaper be held responsible?
- drawkbox 17y agoOn demand viral marketing or protests... I do think it is very interesting to see the faces behind Mechanical Turk.
- cookiecaper 17y agoWould you do that for a dollar? I might if I knew where I had a spare piece of paper and a Sharpie, but I don't. The payment for most of the tasks on Mechanical Turk and other things like it is just not worth the time for almost any task I've seen. Which is really sad, because it'd be awesome if it were worth it.
- mrduncan 17y agoThe payment for most of the tasks on Mechanical Turk and other things like it is just not worth the time for almost any task I've seen. While that may be true for you, there are plenty of places across the globe where $1 (with a chance of $50) is not an insignificant amount.
- nostrademons 17y agoI would if I just happened to come across the posting and just happened to have paper and a sharpie and a digital camera next to me. It's interesting to read all the comments that say "$1?!?! You're ripping off these people! Why would anyone ever do anything on Mechanical Turk?" How many hours do y'all spend on Hacker News? How long did it take you to write those comments? How much were you paid for it? In strictly economic terms, Turkers are getting ripped off a lot less than news.YCers are. After all, $1 is infinitely more than $0. We labor for free so that Paul Graham can have a viable online community and pick of the top posters for his seed capital firm.
- cookiecaper 17y agoThis isn't really labor, first of all. For most of us it's both a leisure and educational activity that we participate in not for PG's benefit, but for our own benefit by learning and socialization. Making a sign that says "Hi Lili" and taking a picture of it is much less fruitful, even if it nets me $1 in money. The things I learn on HN net me much more money in the long run.
- nostrademons 17y agoBut we have no way of knowing if Mechanical Turk participants think of their turking the same way...
- socratees 17y agoI hope I'm not sounding offensive. But what is the author trying to prove here? It's a well known fact that majority of the people on mechanical turk come from developing / under developed countries.
- SwellJoe 17y agoI didn't think there was any commentary on where the people are from. Did I miss something?
- socratees 17y agoI didn't mean to be on the offensive side or to start an argument. I was just asking a question. Refer the author's reply. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1010388 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1010388
- SwellJoe 17y agoNo one has accused you of being on the offensive side, I don't think, and I wasn't arguing with you. I just didn't see any indication that this project had much to do with the location of participants. So, I just wasn't sure what you were getting at with your "But what is the author trying to prove here?" query, since it seemed to me that the guy was just trying out Mechanical Turk and documenting the results, without any social or political commentary that I could perceive. It doesn't seem like he was trying to prove anything.
- justinhj 17y agoDoes the author say anything at all about race or country? Besides most of them seem to be from USA.
- jules 17y agoThey are lying, however: http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=33 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=33 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=34 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=34 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=35 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=35
- markerdmann 17y agoI'm surprised that this made it to the top of HN. I did something similar for my friend's birthday last year, but I never considered it particularly newsworthy. Another fun project was proving to our product manager that he was completely wrong (about listing overdue timesheet dates in reverse chronological order) by submitting the question to Mechanical Turk and getting instant user feedback. Does the popularity of this link mean that there is enough interest in Mechanical Turk to justify the creation of web apps around it?
- hkr 17y agoThe following guy made me smile. =] http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=27 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=27
- allenp 17y agoMy favorite as well. Reminds me of an evil genius in-training from Captain Horrible's Sing Along Blog or something.
- benhoyt 17y agoThis is similar to a short survey I ran the other day: I wanted some stats about how many people used wedding gift registries, so I put an ad on Facebook (targeted at married females in NZ) that said "Answer 4 questions about your wedding and be in to win $50". 70% of people who clicked did the survey, which is a really high "conversion" rate -- I suspect the $50 prize draw really helps. I spent about $0.25 per click, so all up 200 survey results cost me about $120.
- marcusbooster 17y agoSo did you actually give the $50 prize to anyone?
- benhoyt 17y agoYes -- though not yet, because they (weirdly) haven't replied to my "you've won the $50 survey prize" email. Either they thought it was spam, or they typed in their email address wrong. I'm guessing the later, and will move onto the next randomly-selected participant in a couple of days.
- gridspy 17y agohttp://xkcd.com/570/ http://xkcd.com/570/
- philfreo 17y agoFacebook used to have a really useful (and inexpensive) Polls feature that allowed you to get something like 1000 or 5000 responses from your demographic to a multiple choice question. They pulled it for some reason though. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/04/AR2009010400542.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01...
- nearestneighbor 17y agohttp://www.dilbert.com/fast/2007-09-03/ http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2007-09-03/
- sheriff 17y agofunny, I've been running a HIT recently which asks turkers to wish my friend a happy birthday. http://happyturkday.tumblr.com/ http://happyturkday.tumblr.com/
- UncleOxidant 17y agoThe economy is saved! Oh, maybe not...
- robak 17y agoThe disproporion is caused by an obvious fact that women usually study stuff like political studies, international studies, women studies, literature and such. Anything hard like engineering or CS, law, economics and you will see very few women in the classroom.
- EAMiller 17y agoAaron Koblin, of the flight patterns visualization fame (http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/index.html http://www.aaronkoblin.com/work/flightpatterns/index.html) has a few art projects based on MTurk. Bicycle Built for Two Thousand was a project where each worker was asked to sing a tiny part of a song, without knowing what the song was, then the complete song was reconstructed: http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/ http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/
- az 17y agofunny how http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=33 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=33 and http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=34 http://www.thestever.net/viewer.php?num=34 have the same color background (even the dot on the wall by the upper right hand corner is the same) but the signs they are holding are across the world from each other...