Crowd Sourced Labor

MackMM

New member
Mar 20, 2012
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Does anyone here use crowd sourced labor, such as MTURK and Facebook Applications? I have some mundane tasks that I am sick of, but not sure which crowd source labor force is best.
 


im from the UK so I'm not allowed to use mturk (US only), but you can use a third party called crowd flower or something. crowd follow simply just act as an agent to mturk for non-us peep.

Alternatively I used shorttask.com to do some crowdsource like facebook like and tweets.

heh. I even used them to get others to sign up to sugarsync with my referral. I paid .40$ for each subscriber. 10 subs got me 10GB account. Not bad for $4. (Lifetime 10GB account).
 
Mturk is good for automating simple tasks that computers are bad at. I'm using it in one of my projects. My interest in it was originally for content generation, ie. Writing and rewriting articles, but I was not getting good results, probably because most workers on Mturk expect the tasks to be quick and easy. So if you think you're going to use it to generate millions of MFA articles and profit, think again.

What people are using Mturk: figuring out if an image is pornographic, dictating voice messages, transcribing business cards, filling out surveys, facebook likes, identifying businesses/people/things in images, finding details/leads about people or businesses - ie. Find their facebook page/phone number/email address, make an argument for a debate, etc.

Definitely worth a look at if you have a project that requires a human eye or ear. If you can automate the task with a computer, I'd say you're better off writing your own bot instead of using Mturk.

@TigerUK you can get around being in the US by registering a US corporation which is what I had to do. Bit of an investment though, so if you only use Mturk minimally it's probably not worth it.
 
I do want to generate articles. I know BMR went out of business, and they used MTURK. Apparently there are TONS of writers who worked for him, some of which are uncommonly talented who are desperate for work. Do you think I could attract those people to work for a little less than BMR paid?
 
I love Mturk but you have to be careful with the jobs you submit. They are very very touchy when it comes to borderline blackhat activity. I had a HIT on there to get people to do a survey and they removed it (although most of the HIT's did get done before they removed it, lol). I read more into the rules and they do not support artificial traffic, FB likes, Twitter followers, Website traffic generation, downloading, requesting personal information, etc.......

Don't get me wrong, I think that for the jobs they will allow, Mturk's work force is unmatched, just be careful.
 
I see, well for articles I might look elsewhere and just save MTURK for the other tasks. Thanks for sharing that information. I didn't know that they had such a tight TOS.
 
No problem at all, again it's always worth a shot, if you do break the TOS or Mturk doesn't like what you post, they will simply remove your HIT and email you letting you know and telling you to read the TOS again, if this is your first offence of course.

As far as articles go, I see a lot of HIT's for that and most of them are even blatant keyword stuffers like (write a 500 word article and mention these words so many times, etc...) so either people are using different accounts or Mturk doesn't care about that?

Good luck man and hope it works out for you, now that my original HIT got shut down I too am thinking hard about how I can utilize thousands of workers all willing to do tasks for pennies, there has to be a way to make money with that, lol.