I have never gotten into Mechanical Turk, but I do freelance work online. My "hourly wage" depends in part on how together I am. I am medically handicapped. Some days, I am fairly together and can make around $12/hour -- not dissimilar form what I was making at a corporate job after a few pay raises. On a so-so day, it can take me forever to complete tasks, lowering my "hourly wage." However, I still need the money, even if the hourly wage is not great. (Edit: On a bad day, I typically do not work. And I don't get fired for missing a lot of days. This was a constant worry at my corporate job.)
Do I wish I earned more per hour? Sure. But I worry about people who want to "improve" conditions for people choosing to do this kind of work. I cannot take a normal job and have any hope of getting well and staying well. I walked away from a corporate job because it was helping to keep me sick.
For me, this kind of low wage work buys me precious freedom and control over my life. If you take it from me, I am left with what? Panhandling? Prostitution? ...??? I don't know what I would be left with. But people making $100/hour should butt the hell out with their excessively privileged ideas about "good working conditions" and let people like me have some freedom to choose. It isn't like most people actually give a damn how hard life is for me or others like me.
Would you complain if, through legislation, nothing were different about your work structure, but you were in fact paid more? I.e. nothing changes but you're making $15/hour instead of $12/hour?
There is no way "nothing else" would change. And your comment is rife with assumptions that I find galling. But I don't have time at the moment to address that.
Probably, yes. Though they could do it directly with central bank money (instead of `traditional' quantitative easing). `Helicopter money' is actually seriously discussed amongst economists.
For starters, that paying people more for the exact same work has zero side effects. It galls me that so many people on HN think you can just magic up money to throw at poor people, like casting fireballs in D&D by magically importing fire from some magical plane of fire without this adding mass to the earth every time it is done. There are no magic solutions. When you inject more money into a process but add no extra value, the result is inflation. That is, in fact, the very definition of inflation: paying more money for the same goods and services.
Also, you are basically assuming me to be incompetent and incapable of bettering myself. That is called prejudice.
Here are things I can do and am doing or have done to improve my income or my situation:
1) Get healthier so I can be more productive. This is my top priority and it is working.
2) Take advantage of the fact that my online income (and other income) is portable by moving someplace cheaper to live. I did this in May. I still struggle to make ends meet every month, but the amount I need to scrape by has dropped by about 20%. My quality of life has gone up substantially in several ways, not just because this area is cheaper.
3) Improve my work process and learn to work the system better. I have been working on both of those things for a long time and they are resulting in me getting access to better paying work and more consistent access to work. At one time, it was often the case that there was abundant work available when I was too sick to do it and a dearth of work on days when I felt okay and wanted to work.
4) Develop my own projects. I run several websites. They sometimes make ad money or tips. It is less reliable, but it is something I often am able to work on at times when I cannot do paid work. This is true in part because I can develop my own projects even without Internet access and in part because I can work on them at times when I am too tired to cope with paid work.
5) Get off the street. I am currently homeless. I left a corporate job and chose to be homeless to get myself healthier. I am somnewhat knowleadeagle about real estate. For a few thousand dollars, I think I could get a tax lien house and get off the street. I think I am well enough for housing to make sense. Having housing would allow me to cook, which would lower my food bill. It would also allow me to have access to the Internet 24/7, which would allow me to work more.
I am not doomed to only make, at best, $12/hour and my life would likely get easier, faster if I didn't have to deal so much with the assumption that because I am handicapped/a woman/insert prejudicebof your choosing, that I will never amount to anything and I should be grateful for idiotic plans, like basic income, that would shunt me off into a permanent, inescapable underclass status.
If you want to help me, here are things you can do in the here and now to help me:
1) Follow me on Twitter.
2) Read one or more of my blogs.
3) Engage me in discussion, either here or on Twitter or by leaving comments on my blog posts. (And a sincere thank you for engaging me in this discussion.)
4) Whitelist my blogs on ad blocker or leave a tip.
5) Promote my work.
6) Answer me in a sincere, good faith effort to help me improve my performance when I ask questions.
I was a little baffled by your initial complaint about people who want to raise the working conditions for people who take ad-hoc labor, like you. You said you "worry" about them, that you can't take a regular job, and so on.
Great, fine, I certainly don't want you to have to take a regular job. I think it's great if you can work a few hours here, pick up a few extra bucks as your health permits, and so on. I have no interest in taking that away from you. I doubt very many people do, unless it's to slough off the work onto people who are more economically hard up than you.
I was, however, baffled by your implication that the way things are now (you making an average of $12 an hour with ad-hoc work, instead of some larger amount) is the best things can be.
I think you're wrong about that, but it is, of course, certainly true if we insist that everything's as good as it can be.
And you're right, there's no magic money solution. Basic income is one, and there's several different models that get tossed around, including just cutting everyone a check (so hey, you make the $12/hour patched together on top of the basic income).
But if you think I'm arguing because I think you're a dumb cripple or whatever, no, get over it, I'm arguing because you typed some otherwise thoughtful stuff and I just don't agree with all of it.
I was, however, baffled by your implication that the way things are now (you making an average of $12 an hour with ad-hoc work, instead of some larger amount) is the best things can be.
I do not assume that is the best things can be. You appear to have done so in your first reply to me and are apparently still doing so. I spelled out in substantial detail how I can and am improving my earnings, both in absolute terms (total take) and relative (hourly wage). You haven't engaged those points at all.
Edit:
I apologize if I sound snappish. It isn't intentional. I am currently mired in an argument with someone else who is, in fact, being very dismissive. It is possible that is negatively influencing my remark here, without me consciously realizing it.
I don't mean to intentionally misunderstand you. I really do appreciate your patience, though, and willingness to engage, too, and am sorry if I come across as thick or willfully being a jerk.
I actually think it's great how much you're doing, outside the patched-together work, to get your own business/content marketing stuff going.
I wish some of the people I knew who were in a similar situation to you (i.e. some disability or another that prevents them from taking regular employ) had your ability to get things done. I wasn't even thinking about them until now, but I just got a linkedin connection request from one of them (and it's like, I know there's no point in them doing it like this, because regular scheduled employ is not in the cards for them, they're just tired of being so poor) and it got me thinking.
Let's say, it's not you I'm worried about, it's more for them that I'm concerned. $12 isn't much, but you're already doing stuff to do better. If my friends could do better, though, given their constraints, their lives would be a lot better off for it. Maybe a basic income isn't the answer, but an extra hundred dollars or two a month would go a long way toward improving their quality of life.
Most people like me feel hopeless. They feel it is pointless. They don't see that there will be a payoff. It takes a long time to see a payoff and most of the social messages around them only reinforce the idea that it is hopeless, there isn't really a solution. The American mindset currently is that poor people need basic income or welfare or to win the lottery.
I am angry and frustrated and I feel it is taking too long and I don't really want to do this anymore. I spend a lot of time cussing at the sky about how hard it is, how unfair it is, how I deserve better and so on.
But I also know what my fate was "supposed to be." I am supposed to be getting about $100k in medical care annually while I steadily deteriorate. My ability to be productive is supposed to be declining, not improving. I am supposed to be either dead or dying a slow gruesome death from problems that doctors do not know how to fix.
You might consider checking out my websites and possibly forwarding selected links to the people you are concerned about. I have a homeless blog. I have a food blog where I talk about using food as my medicine. Those might be the most immediately relevant to your concerns.
There are things disabled people can do to exercise agency and get small gains in the short term that can be gradually leveraged for larger gains down the road. But they have lost hope. So do not talk to them about big gains down the road and do not talk to them about the scope of their challenges. It only makes them depressed. Instead, if you find an article with concrete small, doable solutions that can benefit them in the here and now, share that in a non pushy way. Then be patient. It may be months before you see evidence of results. But if you get into the habit of forwarding them useful bits periodically, it can slowly change.
I apologize if I am overstepping my bounds. I woke up with a fierce headache. Trying to be helpful is a longstanding habit and it is sometimes the wrong thing to do.
As somebody involved in communities with a large amount of people who can't work for one reason or another... being on significant welfare for being literally unable to work, or only being able to work a part-time job, is incredibly stressful.
The issue is, conservative Government parties point to people taking welfare without meeting the requirements for it as a significant issue that costs countries large amounts of money. To solve this problem, Governments set up welfare departments to be all but adversarial, with near-constant - and, worse, unpredictable - changes in requirements forcing a lot of mental effort to be taken just to keep proving and re-proving that you can't work, and welfare agencies taking the default stance that any individual taking welfare is likely to be fraudulent.
The result is that keeping up with the welfare system is often as stressful as a full-time job in itself, if not moreso as you're very aware that society and your Government both think of you as someone who they'd really prefer just died.
Of course, as those most affected by the discrimination against those on welfare are generally the people with the smallest voices - unemployed or low-wage workers, those with disability, and often further minorities - it's not going to change in a long time.
She has a disability. And I do not qualify for ssi.
I have cystic fibrosis. I am getting myself well when doctors say it cannot be done. Having CF does not qualify you for disability. You qualify based on having allowed infection to eat away enough of your lungs so as to have reduced lung capacity below a certain threshold. Based on my last x-rays and the fact that it no longer hurts like a bitch to breathe, the hole in my left lung appears to be gone. So I will never qualify for disability. I am too competent.
Stephen Hawking is not on welfare. Neither was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was wheelchair bound due to having had polio.
Having a handicap does not mean I am some worthless piece of shit with nothing of value to offer. Furthermore, I had food stamps for a time. Someone dropped the ball and they were not renewed in January. I reapplied. Someone else dropped the ball and I was told I would need to reapply again. I decided not to, in part because going to the welfare office makes me so ill, in part for other reasons that I don't care to go into both because it is not actually anyone's business and because I am currently under time pressure to try to make enough money this month. My expenses were higher than usual at the start of the month and I am fond of eating every day.
I can see some appeal to making a miniscule amount of money in my spare time on Mechanical Turk. I mean, I already spend my spare time doing pointless tasks such as solving crossword puzzles and commenting on things.
I would see it as a game where the goal is to try and make as much money as possible with as little work. I can also see that unemployed people might enjoy it just as a way of feeling like they're doing something worthwhile.
Certainly, since I don't need the money, I'd much rather earn $3 an hour on Mechanical Turk, sitting at home and picking and choosing what I feel like doing, than $7.25 an hour in a minimum-wage job.
> Certainly, since I don't need the money, I'd much rather earn $3 an hour on Mechanical Turk, sitting at home and picking and choosing what I feel like doing, than $7.25 an hour in a minimum-wage job.
You don't need the money, so the money doesn't come into it. It could read:
> I'd much rather -- sit-- at home and pick-- and choose-- what I feel like doing, than -work- a minimum-wage job.
The important piece here is not what the people who have time to waste are doing with job gamification, but the reasons why some people are investing significant amounts of time in a sub minimum wage system and presumably why this group has a large crossover with those using it as a primary income source.
Complete speculation suggests to me that this group contains a non-trivial amount of people who are somehow "locked in" by transport, mental illness, or caring requirements yet need to earn money and are more than willing to work.
I am very concerned that there are people cornered into living like this at sub-societal standards. This is not ok yet I am unsure as to how to find out if this is the case.
I tried Mechanical Turk years and years ago. At that time there were really no tasks available that paid an amount that could consistently get you anywhere close to minimum wage.
The only ones that seemed appealing on the surface were these audio transcriptions. I type over 100wpm and 9 minutes of audio took me over an hour to transcribe. I got like $2, and never even bothered withdrawing it.
If any individual on Mechanical Turk is averaging even 1/3rd federal minimum wage, I'd be shocked.
Since most of the tasks pay even far worse than transcription, and there's a significant unpaid time investment acquiring the tasks and getting them approved, and most people probably try a few tasks before leaving and never even ask for a check, I'd guess the average payout for people working on Mechanical Turk is much less than a dollar per hour.
I've read some articles about it and most people who make $5 an hour or more tend to choose tasks efficiently that they can complete quickly without spending too much attention on.
If you rush through easier tasks you can complete them in a few minutes doing a good enough job to get paid.
I used to do data entry and transcription for $12/hour (not adjusted for 15+ years of inflation) and was able to reach about $4-5/hour on Mechanical Turk when I tried it. As I was out of practice, I think $7/hour would be feasible with time. But one thing people forget is that the federal minimum wage is actually closer to $8/hour when you include the doubling of FICA taxes on self-employment income.
Still, the ability to login and earn even $5/hour at arbitrary times of the day may be desirable for a segment of the population that's perhaps a bit asocial and chooses an RV lifestyle.
I run a crowdsourced content site that is a kind of Wikipedia for news (see my profile for link). When we first started we wanted to attract Wikipedia writers, who write for free. Those writers are mainly young, white Americans, like the Mechanical Turk writers mentioned in the article. But they wouldn't come over, because they like fighting on Wikipedia for free.
So I offered $1 per post to write 50-100 words summaries of the news. Depending on the content a writer could add four to eight posts an hour, getting faster at it as they improved their skills. We had about 50 writers on the program, but could easily have had many more. We were overwhelmed with people wanting to join the program and had over 1000 people on our waiting list.
At first, But the $1-per-post program attracted a whole different community: mainly women, many of them minorities, who like to work-at-home. We actually saw this as a big plus because they were no-nonsense about doing the work, and gave diversity to the content, something Wikipedia struggles with. We paid out in Paypal and some people would literally do some work so they could get some food for that day.
I think too many companies think of crowdsourcing as a way to get cheap work, but it's really good to get diverse workers.
After paying out $20,000 for 20,000 posts we changed to a revenue-share system, where writers earn more as the site grows. That presents a different challenge: finding writers who will put in work now, with the hope of a bigger payout later.
Would be interesting to see some side by side comparisons of the content written by the minorities versus white male teen suburbanite (ideally evaluated objectively by someone who doesn't know who wrote it) to see what the tangible results are of a diverse writing staff.
The amount of "creative" writing on our site is very limited. Each post in our system has to follow a particular format, and we have a feedback loop so that the writer can improve their posts, based on those formats. For example a movie post is formatted in a very specific way [1].
I found no difference at all between the output of minorities and white writers. A bigger and more rigorous sample would have given more insight. It's interesting because Wikipedia is known for its gender gap: 90% of its writers are young, white, highly educated males. So therefore most people think that Wikipedia-like content can only created by those kind of people. Instead, I found I could create almost exactly the same content by restricting the format and the users actions, irrespective of the class of person adding the information. In fact, as the site stands it was created maybe 70% by women.
Oh ok. I remain always curious about the benefit of diversity in these projects then. It is constantly touted as a good and it makes intuitive sense to me that it would be, but I was wondering if that manifested in the content they produced in particular.
I see what you mean now. In our site, a larger percentage of women contributors doesn't affect the quality of the posts, but does add more diversity to their content. For example, women are more likely to add news about magazine covers, music performances, and celebrities, while men seem to prefer to add posts about politics and issues. If we only had men contributors then the latter would be overrepresented.
We can see the effect of the gender gap on Wikipedia in the content too. Topics like porn stars, games and politics are overrepresented, while other topics that women would be more interested in, are neglected.
I'm not really sure how giving writers an opportunity to use their time as an investment demeans them, but perhaps I've read your post the wrong way. There are three ways to get people involved: 1. Pay them directly; make a system where they work for free for a noble cause; or let them invest their time now with the hope of larger revenue-share payments later. This latter way actually empowers contributors by treating them like investors.
I see no difference between an investor putting in $1000 in cash, and a contributor investing $1000 of their time, because all we would do with the investors $1000 would be to pay the contributors. In the case where the investor adds cash, as the company grows the investor gets the long-term rewards, while the writer just gets paid $1000 and has no long-term position. However, when the contributor invests their time, we don't need the investor. Instead, the contributor gets the long-term reward for their work as the value of their content rises. So rather than consigning contributors to a fixed wage and giving the benefit of their work to investors, we allow writers to invest in their own future. Of course, that all depends on whether they think the business will grow so that a decent amount of revenue can be shared.
As I pointed out above, many of the work-at-home workers need to get instant cash so this system doesn't work for them, and the Wikipedia people will work for free (the fools!). Our challenge is to recruit people who are willing to treat their participation as an investment. But if it works, they will make a lot more money than they would in any other system.
There's a large-work-at-home community on the web, with sites that list sites, as well as forums and review sites. Search under "work at home". We also got good word-of-mouth because the pay was reasonable, and the payouts were fast, although you continuously have to reassure people that it's not a scam :-(
>"although you continuously have to reassure people that it's not a scam :-("
It's unfortunate, but that is the nature of the broad term "work from home", especially on the internet. I think tech-savvy individuals have, in parallel, been constantly telling individuals that such keywords are usually scams.
Most of these schemes put front and center the idea that you're working at home and getting paid to do simple tasks. They aren't putting up the actual requirements of the work or why you're doing it, which is what a serious employment offer would be concerned with.
A while back I was using Mechanical Turk as a source for programming problems. The major issue was that they were distributing a lot of the work to get around things like the limit of google searches one can do a day (100 I think), so once the problems were scripted, you could easily break those barriers.
Certain problems were quite interesting, involving OCR and fuzzy pattern matching on google rankings, and I'm sure certain ones would make good research problems. It was fun for a few days, but even when scripted the amounts you would make were minuscule.
This article is from 2013, not reflected in the HN title.
I seriously doubt the following statement in the article is still true:
"The users of Mechanical Turk are still early adopters, which explains why so many workers are closer to the median US household income of around $50,000 than to the poverty line."
I did some survey work on MT back then, it was fun for a few days, then became incredibly mind numbing.
A more recent article on MT (probably posted already to HN):
I did this for awhile, and it takes surprisingly long to do these transcriptions. They are mostly transcribing accident interviews for insurance companies. The recordings are absolutely terrible, so you have to re-listen to each part many times to get it right. Additionally, since it is paralegal work, there are very strict requirements for formatting and accuracy.
30 minutes spent transcribing a 4 minute audio clip would not be unusual.
I transcribed a few college lecture fragments at one point just to figure out what it's like and i was able to type while listening as I could understand the accent right away.
While giving out Turk tasks, I noticed some people are about 100x more efficient than others depending on the task.
Well, given that the average speaking speed is 150wpm, whilst average typing speed is only 40 wpm, it probably takes ~15 minutes to transcribe each audio clip, giving about $4.5/hour, which isn't so great.
If the person can touch type or if there are major pauses during the recordings (which happens a lot during lectures), you make $15/hr. If there are enough pauses, you can do two at a time and get $30/hr.
Your estimations are incredibly generous, even for somebody using a transcription pedal. The audio for the transcription jobs on sites like MTurk is often very low quality and recorded on a device that is clearly not close to the speaker(s). They are also often for things like local government meetings where the speakers are using a lot of proper nouns that you may not be familiar with. Both of these factors result in a LOT of rewinding to listen to a word multiple times.
That was my thought as well.. I don't think the majority of tasks will wind up much under $10/hr for most people. Only Amazon knows what the average person is making in an average hour of turn around time though. It would be interesting to find out though.
Spend some time on mechanical turk.. the average transcription task takes a surprising amount of time to complete. I type 70-90 words per minute and a 30 second transcription might take me 5-6 minutes, due to having to replay parts over and over, and deal with formatting it according to the requirements
I guess the wages are low because any task has to be verified by another person (possibly in a consensus-test, where the input of the other person is verified against your input). Or at least, that's what I'm guessing.
It has been years, but when I placed projects on mturk I had them listed to be completed 2-3 times each. This was the only sane way to filter out input by users which was completely wrong. The positive thing was once you identified someone submitting non-sense you ban them from the project and pay nothing.
Americans are not ready for what is going to happen to the labor market when minimum wage goes to $15 an hour.
Duolingo has hundreds of people translating the New York Times into several languages being paid nothing. (edit) What about people who spend hours answering questions on Stack Exchange?
American's spend several hours a day watching TV. What if the service gives people a distraction that they are mentally active in? There might be several advantages other than monitory performing these tasks over passively sitting in front of a TV.
There was a stat a few years back that if we could redirect 1% of e everyone's time spent watching TV we could have a new Wikipedia-scale project every 7 weeks. Zoning out has its place, but I bet more than a few percent of TV time is raw boredom rather than relaxation.
For me, the value I get from StackExchange is that potential employers see me as more valuable. GitHub stars and open source commits are all forms of social currency and in my opinion, are worth way more than inflated USDs.
I have a task I need done, a value that it's worth to me to have it done, and all I need to know is "can you do it?" and "are you willing to do it for what it's worth to me?"
Desperate humans are cheap, I would say. And until we have a completely global market place for labour, there will always be a large disparity between what we think an individual is worth, and how little an individual is willing to work for due to their local circumstances.
As usual, I fault the governments that promise but don't fix, election after election.
Do I wish I earned more per hour? Sure. But I worry about people who want to "improve" conditions for people choosing to do this kind of work. I cannot take a normal job and have any hope of getting well and staying well. I walked away from a corporate job because it was helping to keep me sick.
For me, this kind of low wage work buys me precious freedom and control over my life. If you take it from me, I am left with what? Panhandling? Prostitution? ...??? I don't know what I would be left with. But people making $100/hour should butt the hell out with their excessively privileged ideas about "good working conditions" and let people like me have some freedom to choose. It isn't like most people actually give a damn how hard life is for me or others like me.