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Fiverr: What Amazon's Mechanical Turk Should Have Been Like

43 points by tzury 17y ago

kevinpet 17y ago
Let me briefly explain the difference: With mturk, you have work you want to get done, and people go look through the HITs for things that fit their abilities. With fiverr, you have money you want to spend, and you go looking through things people imagine someone might want to pay them to do. I've used mechanical turk for annotating a training set for automated classification. I cannot imagine what I would use this service for. Claiming this is what mturk should have been assumes that mturk sucks because all the tasks people want to get done are boring.
- jreposa 17y ago
  Agreed. Two separate concepts. The only link is paying someone for a service. However, I've only spent 5 minutes on the site, and I've already spent $10. I'm already hooked...
  - guiseppecalzone 17y ago
    I'm curious, what did you order?
MichaelApproved 17y ago
Seems like a different site than Mechanical Turk. I go to MT to fulfill a need. Fiverr seems like a place I'd go to if I had money to burn on something random.
- Judson 17y ago
  Talk about money burning a hole in your pocket. Here is a listing: "I will plant a tree in my backyard for $5" Thanks, but no thanks.
chris123 17y ago
I'm not sure about the MT analogy, but it is Fiverr is a neat concept. Hopefully you can keep the spam down and signal-to-noise ratio up. Also keep improving the reputation system, perhaps with some stats and percentages and filtering and sorting. Would like to be able to favorite people as well (or maybe you can already and I didn't notice the feature).
scottjackson 17y ago
It's nothing like MT, but it's a fun site. A friend of a friend contracted someone on fiverr to design a logo for a project he was working on. I saw the logo the fiverr person produced, and it was the lamest thing I'd ever seen. Which you'd expect. But still. Funny. Fiverr's quirkyness reminds me a bit of http://highdeas.com/ http://highdeas.com/ (OT: my favourite highdea was this: http://highdeas.com/technology/Microwave_equivalent_cooling_device http://highdeas.com/technology/Microwave_equivalent_cooling_...)
braindead_in 17y ago
Very useful site. I just found something I was looking for. Lets see how it works out.
duck 17y ago
The title of this HN post should of been: "Fiverr: A couple useful services and a lot of dumb ones, both for $5".
fod 17y ago
'I will send a torrent of undirected twitter/facebook spam on your behalf for $5'
Concours 17y ago
My experience with fiverr is so far positive, I've set a Gig there some weeks back: I'll tweet about your service to my 18000+ followers (I follow less than 70 peoples) for $5 , it works really good for me: I'm $525 richer since then, but the most important thing, I've learned to deal with customer support, you can't imagine how peoples act even if they just pay a voucher for a service (I guess even if it's free), so no matter what they pay, and how great the ROI is, they will still ask for more, some poeples actually behave like they just hire you full time for $5 , that's the best thing I learned from it (customer can be really rough), and it also helps me validate an experience about twitter advertising and followers behaviour (a couple of peoples complained about the ads, and 1 or 2 unfollowed me, but otherwise, all ok) I can recommend the service, but you really should know what you are paying for , it may have some Value if you really know what you are doing and you could have a lot from $5 , if you're lucky.

43 points by tzury 17y ago

Let me briefly explain the difference: With mturk, you have work you want to get done, and people go look through the HITs for things that fit their abilities. With fiverr, you have money you want to spend, and you go looking through things people imagine someone might want to pay them to do. I've used mechanical turk for annotating a training set for automated classification. I cannot imagine what I would use this service for. Claiming this is what mturk should have been assumes that mturk sucks because all the tasks people want to get done are boring.

jreposa 17y ago
Agreed. Two separate concepts. The only link is paying someone for a service. However, I've only spent 5 minutes on the site, and I've already spent $10. I'm already hooked...
- guiseppecalzone 17y ago
  I'm curious, what did you order?

MichaelApproved 17y ago

Seems like a different site than Mechanical Turk. I go to MT to fulfill a need. Fiverr seems like a place I'd go to if I had money to burn on something random.

Judson 17y ago
Talk about money burning a hole in your pocket. Here is a listing: "I will plant a tree in my backyard for $5" Thanks, but no thanks.

chris123 17y ago

I'm not sure about the MT analogy, but it is Fiverr is a neat concept. Hopefully you can keep the spam down and signal-to-noise ratio up. Also keep improving the reputation system, perhaps with some stats and percentages and filtering and sorting. Would like to be able to favorite people as well (or maybe you can already and I didn't notice the feature).

scottjackson 17y ago

It's nothing like MT, but it's a fun site. A friend of a friend contracted someone on fiverr to design a logo for a project he was working on. I saw the logo the fiverr person produced, and it was the lamest thing I'd ever seen. Which you'd expect. But still. Funny. Fiverr's quirkyness reminds me a bit of http://highdeas.com/ http://highdeas.com/ (OT: my favourite highdea was this: http://highdeas.com/technology/Microwave_equivalent_cooling_device http://highdeas.com/technology/Microwave_equivalent_cooling_...)

braindead_in 17y ago

Very useful site. I just found something I was looking for. Lets see how it works out.

duck 17y ago

The title of this HN post should of been: "Fiverr: A couple useful services and a lot of dumb ones, both for $5".

fod 17y ago

'I will send a torrent of undirected twitter/facebook spam on your behalf for $5'

Concours 17y ago

My experience with fiverr is so far positive, I've set a Gig there some weeks back: I'll tweet about your service to my 18000+ followers (I follow less than 70 peoples) for $5 , it works really good for me: I'm $525 richer since then, but the most important thing, I've learned to deal with customer support, you can't imagine how peoples act even if they just pay a voucher for a service (I guess even if it's free), so no matter what they pay, and how great the ROI is, they will still ask for more, some poeples actually behave like they just hire you full time for $5 , that's the best thing I learned from it (customer can be really rough), and it also helps me validate an experience about twitter advertising and followers behaviour (a couple of peoples complained about the ads, and 1 or 2 unfollowed me, but otherwise, all ok) I can recommend the service, but you really should know what you are paying for , it may have some Value if you really know what you are doing and you could have a lot from $5 , if you're lucky.