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by ChuckMcM
4359 days ago
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This was a great read. I found it particularly interesting that the author came into each encounter 'cold', which is to say without much in the way of additional tooling. They did install a word counter extension but much of their tools were ad-hoc or non-existent. That suggested that there may be an interesting 'toolware' market for Turkers. For example, document editing; Lets say we build a simple document editing platform (copy editing not typesetting) which includes components that are dropbox like (shared storage), Google docs like etc. And design a workflow around that toolset. So pick a HIT, get a document id, it shows up in your shared storage, use the included tool to edit it, when you're done, click 'done', and have the whole thing resubmit back for evaluation. That might allow you to focus on editing and not get hung up on a bunch of getting it done issues. Not sure how practical that is, but if there are common Turk workflows it might be useful to build some common tooling for them. |
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In the early days of Mechanical Turk (2005-06), when almost all the HITs were seeded by Amazon themselves and were of a few common types that kept being replenished, there were browser extensions to greatly improve the UI for the common tasks (the default UI is very bad). One of the more profitable tasks was fixing the location of addresses on the new-defunct A9 BlockView (a product similar to what Google would later introduce as Street View). They'd present you about 10 photos of a streetfront that were supposed to be near an address, and you were supposed to pick the one centered around the address (e.g. the store or house entrance). Or else indicate none of the above, if the alignment was seriously off so that the correct address was out of the frame. If you used the regular website UI, you could make maybe $3-4/hr, but most of this was tedious clicking: accept HIT, click a tiny radio button, scroll down, submit HIT, request next HIT, repeat. The browser extension implemented the obvious UI improvement: use the images instead of tiny radio buttons as click targets, and then auto-submit and request the next one on click. I think in one version you could also just hit a number 0-9 on the numpad instead of clicking. With that extension I was making $20-30/hr for a little bit.