[_bpo]

I worked for years on systems built on top of MTurk (building trust systems, scaling tasks, etc)

The hardest thing is always task design, as the author discusses. It's quite challenging to create a task that will work in all browsers, across cultural and language boundaries, and to pay enough to incentivize the worker (while simultaneously little enough to make all the effort worthwhile).

The final effect is a bit dehumanizing on both ends. The workers feel alienated and mistrusted by the people requesting the tasks. The people requesting the tasks feel that the workers are lazy / "scammers" trying to cheat them.

We don't fully even know how to think about this kind of work yet - ideas like "hourly wage" don't seem to fit for someone working completely independently, at their own pace, possibly distracted or impaired.

Still, despite the trouble, it seems like one of the most promising fields for interaction design. There's the possibility to really improve peoples' lives (or make them worse).