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I don’t know what a HIT is, but I’m pretty sure the problem is that they wanted you to use your _eyeballs_! Not OCR. And yeah, the service is notorious for und

I don’t know what a HIT is, but I’m pretty sure the problem is that they wanted you to use your _eyeballs_! Not OCR. And yeah, the service is notorious for underpaying.

PaulHoule 3y ago
A HIT is a single task on Mechanical Turk. "Transcribing" is a better word or maybe "manual OCR". The ones they sent to AMT were just awful, I would say 2/3 of them were impossible to transcribe with complete accuracy and would take a lot of time to do it, I'd be afraid of getting kicked out for making mistakes on them. The hardest problem I had when I ran a lot of HITs were people that I called "Superturks", generally these people were very fast but the quality of the work was as low as they could get away with. If I kicked them out I could raise the quality of the work but it would not get done so quickly. There's the possibility of coaching them to do just a little bit better (would be happy to pay a bonus) but it is no so simple to do in that context.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Sounds like a waste of time to me. You seem like an intelligent person. Doesn’t a minimum wage job pay better?
  - a123b456c 3y ago
    Some mturk workers mturk while physically present at another job
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    That's why "I couldn't find any HITs I could stand to do." Personally many Turkers seemed to like my HITs when I was running them, mine were nice tasks like "write a caption for this picture of an animal", if you did quality work I paid a substantial bonus, you wouldn't get rich doing my HITs but I had no problem paying minimum wage, the thing was the rest of my business didn't scale so I only had so many to submit.
aidenn0 3y ago
Eyeballs are optical, and it sounds like GP was recognizing characters, so I think it was, in fact, Optical Character Recognition.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Contrast that to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...

I don’t know what a HIT is, but I’m pretty sure the problem is that they wanted you to use your _eyeballs_! Not OCR. And yeah, the service is notorious for underpaying.

PaulHoule 3y ago

A HIT is a single task on Mechanical Turk. "Transcribing" is a better word or maybe "manual OCR". The ones they sent to AMT were just awful, I would say 2/3 of them were impossible to transcribe with complete accuracy and would take a lot of time to do it, I'd be afraid of getting kicked out for making mistakes on them. The hardest problem I had when I ran a lot of HITs were people that I called "Superturks", generally these people were very fast but the quality of the work was as low as they could get away with. If I kicked them out I could raise the quality of the work but it would not get done so quickly. There's the possibility of coaching them to do just a little bit better (would be happy to pay a bonus) but it is no so simple to do in that context.

ShamelessC 3y ago
Sounds like a waste of time to me. You seem like an intelligent person. Doesn’t a minimum wage job pay better?
- a123b456c 3y ago
  Some mturk workers mturk while physically present at another job
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  That's why "I couldn't find any HITs I could stand to do." Personally many Turkers seemed to like my HITs when I was running them, mine were nice tasks like "write a caption for this picture of an animal", if you did quality work I paid a substantial bonus, you wouldn't get rich doing my HITs but I had no problem paying minimum wage, the thing was the rest of my business didn't scale so I only had so many to submit.

aidenn0 3y ago

Eyeballs are optical, and it sounds like GP was recognizing characters, so I think it was, in fact, Optical Character Recognition.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Contrast that to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recogni...