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Ask HN: MTurk is no longer available to non-US companies. How are you coping?
As of 22nd August (tomorrow for the hermits among us), Mechanical Turk is giving the huge middle finger to anyone who wants to be a requester and create HITs on MTurk if they aren't a US resident.
I have used MTurk for years and it is infinitely easier than using alternative websites. For example, my startup which is still in somewhat of it's early stage launch (I plan on doing a Show HN next week) has used it for about a hundred thousand HITs already.
I run a vacation rental marketing platform ( edit: www.rentivo.com for the curious) that also builds websites for home owners and agents and handles their payment processing issues. We need to do things like detect watermarks, tag images for inside/outside. Label images. Do data transcription for one website to a strict scheme and we validate thousands of URLs to categorize them based on set questions that we provide.
Being able to have everything returned in a fixed CSV is so useful. We have have dozens/hundreds of workers handle our HITs simulatenously...
But now Mechanical Turk is impossible to use if you don't have a social security number. This is because you need to sign up to Amazon Payments to use Mechanical Turk.
https://requester.mturk.com/mturk/amazonpaymentsacctreqmts
There are no alternatives that exist from what I can gather. You have sites like CloudSource, CloudFlower, ClickWorker etc but all of these are just wrappers around Mechanical Turk and require a budget in the thousands.
The simplicity of MTurk meant that I could create a HIT with 70k HITs and have it completed over the weekend in the format I need.
If I hire someone on Freelancers or oDesk.. it would take weeks to do this!!
What solutions exist to overcome this huge gap! We really need to use MTurk.. and I don't believe that any true alternatives exist.
Edit: Dont' CloudFlower have a minimum spend of $2,500 per month? That's like 5 times our current monthly costs. There is no way we would ever be able to pay this. Plus, I want to handle the creation of the HITs myself. I don't need someone to do it all for me. I typically managed to create HITs that would only cost a $400 at most!
- vitovito 12y agoYou only need a social security number if you're doing it as a personal account. If your startup is doing it, it should be a business payments account, which take an EIN, an employer identification number, which the IRS will issue to a foreign entity: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/obtain-tax-id-number-foreign-entity-58171.html http://smallbusiness.chron.com/obtain-tax-id-number-foreign-... The other alternative would be to integrate payments into an existing distributed work platform like Bossa or PyBossa, and recruit your own audience of participants through advertising.
- squidbot 12y agoFor individuals, if you are ineligible for an SSN you can get an ITIN in its place, but as the parent notes, your business should probably get an EIN: http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Taxpayer-Identification-Numbers-(TIN) http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/International-Taxpayers/Taxpa...
- AshFurrow 12y agoIt took me six months and four attempts to get an ITIN, which included a trip to my US embassy. Not an easy task.
- Havoc 12y agoThat seems to solve OP's problem nicely. :) >>employer identification number, which the IRS will issue to a foreign entity oh god I hope this doesn't catch on & become a trend. I'm OK with the tax authority in my home country...but dealing with them for every country I digitally interact with is not OK. :/
- klodolph 12y agoWell, to be fair, MTurk is an interface to paid human labor.
- cik 12y agoSadly, there are no real alternatives to Mturk - at least nothing with near the reach. If you have a friend in the US who might help you, it's by far the easiest way to go. That being the case, here are some alternatives: https://microworkers.com/ https://microworkers.com/ http://www.clickworker.com/ http://www.clickworker.com/ http://www.shorttask.com/ http://www.shorttask.com/
- mrgordon 12y agoThis doesn't make any sense (no offense). CrowdFlower uses almost a hundred different "channels", of which Mechanical Turk was only one until we removed it a while ago. It was not our largest channel at that point and it represents a small fraction of the workers available on our platform. There is no sense in which Turk has more contributors than CrowdFlower. On the contrary, we have access to a much greater variety of people including specific groups from countries like Japan that Turk has no access to.
- quentinms 12y agoPybossa (http://pybossa.com/ http://pybossa.com/) is a great (IMO) and FOSS alternative. NASA and CERN (amongst others) are using it. See some application examples here: http://crowdcrafting.org/ http://crowdcrafting.org/
- raphman 12y ago> "Based on volunteers not micro-payments" It seems that this does not really help the original poster. Very interesting, nevertheless.
- kelukelugames 12y agoDid Amazon ever say why they are requiring Amazon Payments accounts?
- jonathanberger 12y agoNot that I'm aware of. I'm guessing it's for fraud reasons. But I'm pretty frustrated by the lack of messaging/explanation around this change. If you're going to change this for the worse, at least communicate to us about why the change was needed.
- jccooper 12y agoDunno, but I'll bet the internal reasoning is somewhere between "we need to drive adoption of Payments" and "we'll save an extra percent or two that otherwise goes to a 3rd party".
- trhway 12y agoi guess IRS is afraid that MTurk will be laundering money, each and every $1 bill, manually...
- petercooper 12y agoI'm not sure they've changed policies on who's allowed in. For years they've required requesters to have a US-based bank account and a US billing address, and if you're a personal user, a US drivers' license number. It seems the real change has been the mandatory move to Amazon Payments which requires either an SSN for a personal account or an EIN for a business. But.. if you were a business, you must already have the US bank account and address, and getting an EIN is not too hard from overseas (you have to call the IRS, Google for guides on it, I've done it before). If you had a personal account, you should have had to provide a US drivers license and don't they require an SSN? Perhaps you had an account through a loophole/lack of checking though, but I believe the long term policy has been to keep non-US entities out of the system overall, most likely for tax reasons.
- mailarchis 12y agoYou should definitely check out crowdflower.com we had been using them for image tagging tasks with great results. Plus they gave advanced features that help with quality control.
- gmisra 12y agoSeconded. http://www.crowdflower.com/ http://www.crowdflower.com/
- jorgecurio 12y agoMinimum is $2500 /month now. Fuck crowdflower.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- PanMan 12y agoI used to use Mturk via CrowdFlower, which did (does) some nice filtering on top of the Mturk data. Unfortunately a few months ago they switched from a pay-what-you use model to packages, with the smallest $2500/month. I'm also interested in other interfaces/layers on top of MTurk.
- jorgecurio 12y agoThis. Used to be minimum $100, now minimum is $2500 /month....who the fuck...how can an dev like me fork up 2500 grand a month
- noir_lord 12y ago2500 grand would be 2.5 million dollars, a grand is slang for a thousand.
- jorgecurio 12y agobut imagine if you paid 2.5 million dollars instead of $2500, you would lose at life.
- jorgecurio 12y agoCanadian here. This is a huge pain. Crowdflower is expensive and lot of workers complain that they complete a whole bunch of work and not get paid, it's been marked by people on reddit. Amazon HITs are really the only way to go. Unfortunately, its very difficult now to get on Amazon.
- lukas 12y agoJorge - I'm super biased as the CrowdFlower CEO but we work really hard to make sure everyone gets paid and all disputes are resolved. We have a team of four full time people that do nothing but handle community support tickets and we've paid out many millions of dollars mostly without issues. We moved off of Mechanical Turk a few years ago because it was hard to give workers a consistently good experience there. You can see the twitter stream from our contributors and most of the comments are positive https://twitter.com/search?q=cfcomm&src=typd https://twitter.com/search?q=cfcomm&src=typd We are definitely more expensive than turk, although we have big discounts for small startups that makes us comparable.
- jorgecurio 12y agoLukas, I'm sorry I reacted so negatively, seems I was not fair and let me know if it's possible to use CrowdFlower, like start with a low non monthly commitment cost and go from there. For your information, I am basically doing photo tagging, wondering what my costs will be, how fast jobs will be completed etc. Thank you.
- alogray 12y agoHey Jorge, Looks like Lukas might have missed your response but I can jump in. We definitely love to work with the little guys, too. Nothing is more interesting than the use cases that academics and startups come up with. You should reach out to Lukas via e-mail (he shared it elsewhere in this thread) or our sales team (http://www.crowdflower.com/platform-plans http://www.crowdflower.com/platform-plans) to talk specifics. We've also got a trial that will let you process 5,000 rows of data without having to worry about a paid plan. It's not time limited, either, so you can take as long as you need to go through those first 5,000 photos of yours. You might want to check out a recent blog post up about a photo keyword gen job run by one of the guys at CF: http://www.crowdflower.com/blog/how-i-got-the-crowd-to-generate-metadata-for-my-travel-photos http://www.crowdflower.com/blog/how-i-got-the-crowd-to-gener...
- lukas 12y agoChris - I'm the CEO of CrowdFlower. We're focused on large scale data enrichment tasks which sounds a lot like what you're doing. We have no geographic restriction and lots of european customers. Unlike mTurk we have a platform usage fee to make our business sustainable and to try to break a downward cycle in our marketplace (ie people posting broken or poorly thought out jobs and making contributors frustrated leading to poor quality work). If you are early stage enough (and it sounds like you are) we will waive the fee. Shoot me an email if you're interested and I'll help you get set up.
- crowdcurious 12y agoFor the people using Crowdflower and MTurk, how are people dealing with low-quality work? I've tried using both in the past, but ran into issues with getting good results.
- lilsunnybee 12y agoOn MTurk are you adding any qualifications to your tasks? If not you are much more likely to get bad results.
- crowdcurious 12y agoI did add qualifications, although I forget which ones, and results were shaky. What have your experiences been with qualifications, and which ones did you use?
- labd5507 12y agoNot who you were replying to, but on mTurk 10,000 approved HITs with a 99% approval rating or higher will probably be your best bet. If you are going to put up a lot of HITs, especially if your HITs require special skills, you might want to put up some tasks and assign a special qual to the top, say 10 or 20% of the workers. Then you'd have a more limited group of workers, but ones that you know will do well. (Usually qualification tasks require workers to complete 10-20 of the HITs to get a good idea of the quality of work.) You might sacrifice a little bit of speed, but you'll get better work. Plus, if your work pays decently by mTurk standards, anyone who has the qualification will be on the lookout for your tasks.
- goodJobWalrus 12y agobut why are they doing this?
- callmeed 12y agoInteresting. I used Crowdflower just a few months ago with fairly acceptable results. Wasn't aware they raised their prices. I've been using some local college students now to tag wedding images. Much better results. Id be interested in talking to you more about this if you don't mind. I might be able to fork my tagging system so you could use it.
- deviantbits 12y agoHi Chris, I'm David, the CEO of WorkHub. We're a Europe-based cloud working platform offering an alternative to Mechanical Turk. Just sign up at https://www.workhub.com https://www.workhub.com and a project manager will help you get started. Let me know if you have any questions. Best regards, David
- isaacn 12y agoIf you want a simple wrapper around Mechanical Turk without the hefty fees, check out GridForce: http://gridforceapp.com/ http://gridforceapp.com/ It is a Microsoft Excel 2013 Application that allows you to crowdsource your spreadsheet right from Excel. Disclosure: I built GridForce.
- labd5507 12y agoHonestly, I'd get an EIN from the IRS http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employed/How-to-Apply-for-an-EIN http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ... For international businesses, it requires a phone call but supposedly it's not terribly difficult. Get a mail forwarding serving so you have a US address for Amazon payments, and from there it's just a matter of sorting out a bank account or US credit card. That might be a bit more difficult, but the easiest thing to do (if a little bit of a grey area) would be to get someone in the States to get a prepaid card like Serve AmEx, Bluebird AmEx, or prepaid Paypal mastercard. All of those cards are prepaid, but they have a routing and account number that could be set up as a bank account on Amazon Payments. The Paypal one would probably be especially handy since it could be funded from a foreign bank account or a PayPal account.
- das_alexander 12y agoIf anybody would be interested in a simple API that works as a wrapper for Mturk and mimics how Mturk's API works, charging a flat 5% fee for each HIT; email me at mturk.wrapper@gmail.com
- Mankhool 12y agoAFAIK it has never been available in Canada so I have appreciated reading the suggestions here because I really want to use it.