by ArtemusBlank

This is a response to the Mturk New York Times article I posted a little earlier.

If a stranger walked into your job Monday morning, could they expect to perform your duties as deftly as you can? Probably not! It takes years of education, training, and experience to excel at many jobs. If someone wants to treat MTurk as such by discussing wages, the same applies. Using MTurk successfully requires workers to be disciplined, computer-savvy, and flexible with what they do at any given moment. Focus is a must as they manage complex workflows and quickly infer the critical parts of tasks — some of which help surgeons save lives, deliver medicine to villages in Africa, or a myriad of other projects that touch on all parts of digital life we all enjoy.

Perhaps what's most important to note about the article is that when the author attempted to interview workers, he was largely rebuffed. Most MTurk communities have seen this article rehashed time and time again, and we all knew what this was going to say long before it came out. One worker, Doc3D, explained this in the author's initial call for quotes:

You will likely get a very narrow view by the person who would take an offer like this. This would likely be the same people who do the lowest paying hits. There is a somewhat wide range in type of turker. There are batch workers only, survey workers only, transcribers, etc, and then people who do a combination of those. There are workers who will work a 30 minute hit for only 10 cents, and then there are workers who would only do that same hit if it paid at least 3.50. There are workers who have closed quals from several institutions and work those almost exclusively. Then there are workers who will work for just about anything and for any amount. You won't get the full scope of what it's like to turk by just interviewing a single person, and by only offering a dinner - the chances are pretty great that the majority of anyone who would respond is the same people working the absolute minimum hits and that will just skew your perception of the whole thing.

In some ways, I agree with this article and in other ways I don't. I don't think it's that hard to make money off MTurk but it is definitely not easy to the 20 dollars range. I know there are people that use scripts to get good HITS but I don't have the luxury of finding HITS using scripts as the peak workday hours due to having a 9 to 5 job.

A good chunk of people on MTurk forums weren't big fans of the New York Times article because they feel it will chase away good requesters. This is a pushback against that New York Times article.