Anybody working as a "mechanical turk"?

Dienekes · Post by **Dienekes** » Wed May 25, 2011 8:05 pm

Ran across this at Amazon:

https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
Not really familiar with it and haven't spent a lot of time looking into it but I'm curious if there are folks on the forum who have knowledge of this.

Post by **jacob** » Wed May 25, 2011 8:24 pm

Looked at it once. The rates seem to correspond to minimum wage level. I don't know enough to know whether better paid jobs are filled fast, but I did note that some jobs are paid poorly. You need a good idea about how fast you can do a certain job.

JohnnyH · Post by **JohnnyH** » Wed May 25, 2011 9:02 pm

Tax free minimum wage from home doesn't sound that bad to me

I recently saw a guy going completely turbo speed on 2 adjacent video poker machines, clearly following an algorithm. I wonder how much he made.
I know people used to be able to make $20/hr by doing similar with online poker.
But seems burnout must be high from such repetition.

dragoncar · Post by **dragoncar** » Thu May 26, 2011 7:02 am

I tried it once and got fed up after the first few ones were obvious scammers (go to website, enter your phone number, confirm signing up for some monthly fee).
Recently, I've done some gigwalking (gigwalk.com), which is fun and you could probably make at least minimum wage at a completely self-determined pace. However, the money is peanuts compared to my real job, especially after taxes, so it's really just an amusing hobby right now.

B · Post by B » Thu May 26, 2011 7:49 pm

I just tried it. I found higher paying jobs that were not scams by using search criteria, such as "Spanish". That turned up translation and transcription jobs. I also had luck by search by who was offering the job. Once I discovered a legit offer, all other offers by the same person/entity were legit too.
After playing with it for about 15 minutes I had done 40 jobs and they payed a total of $1.30. So, it's about $5 an hour. Not great, but its an okay way to make your internet bill pay for itself in a sense.
Also, I had fun with some of the jobs. Some of them felt like rapid-fire brain teasers.

paxprobellum · Post by **paxprobellum** » Sun May 29, 2011 3:48 pm

I've had some good luck searching for jobs > $1 or > $2. Some of them are thinly veiled economic (and/or otherwise academic) experiments. For example, I recently had to upload a picture to a photo contest and was asked for how much I would sell my spot in the contest (and how good a shot I thought I had). I've been generally trying to get > $10/hr. It's an interesting diversion.