[fny]

> If they feel they are being "cogged", they will work like cogs

Most people who get into Turking know they're going to be cogs, and honestly, the only thing they care about is getting paid properly for it.

No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation.

[raddan]

Some of our prior work, AutoMan, (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2927928, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/voxpl-p...) which developed this very idea (almost a decade ago!), explicitly addresses many of the issues around exploitative practices. By default the system pays the minimum wage. We usually paid workers quite a bit more than minimum wage while developing the system. You can read more about it in our CACM letter response (http://www.cs.williams.edu/~dbarowy/acknowledge_crowdworkers... scroll down the the bit titled "Acknowledge Crowdworkers in Crowdwork Research".

Also, while it does not have the convenience of being a web service, you can download and use AutoMan now (https://docs.automanlang.org/). Most importantly, AutoMan provides statistical quality guarantees. It looks like Human Lambdas uses a manual auditing approach, which does not scale. It's surprisingly common for some crowdsourcing tasks to be as hard to audit as it is to do them in the first place. For the kinds of tasks that AutoMan supports, this is basically a non-issue.

I still actively maintain the library, and I am always happy to talk to people about use cases.

[raddan]

I should also add that the requester ratings site, Turkopticon (https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu/), rated our jobs highly. I can't seem to find our reviews now (probably because we haven't run any jobs in awhile), but if someone can figure that out, you should see that workers were pretty happy with our system. I often got emails from workers asking for more work! Also, the throughput on a good job when using a properly designed system is insane. If I recall correctly, our case study on estimating calorie content from photos gathered thousands of labels in about 45 minutes.

[prepend]

> No pie-in-the-sky marketing BS is going to make up for sub minimum wage compensation.

Comically marketing BS is frequently created by consultants who cost money. Money that doesn’t go towards higher wages, or worker bonuses, or coffee in the beak room, etc

[brobdingnagians]

I think their biggest concern is getting paid. But I don't think it's good for people to accept dehumanisation, even if they seem to be okay with it. Subconscious acceptance of things like that can mess people up. They are free to accept it, but I think we should carefully consider what we are doing to people's self image.

People with a feeling of creative control and ownership or having a stake in success tend to do a better job too. Self esteem definitely helps productivity.

[ath92]

Getting paid properly is important of course, but intrinsic motivation (of which a sense of autonomy is an important driver) is very important to keep workers happy, independent of whether they're doing crowdsourcing work or just a regular job.

I find it hard to believe that this platform will be competing against Amazon Mechanical Turk on price, so they'll have to compete in other dimensions. Increasing worker motivation to improve the quality of the output is a win-win for all the stakeholders, so IMO it's worth pursuing.

[Closi]

Good luck convincing workers that they are self-actualising while transcribing financial records from hard-to-read receipts.

If you are running a team doing this sort of work, it's better to be straight up with them and say "you know, this work is boring and repetitive, but we have a good team, look after each other, and you can listen to a podcast at the same time".