MTurk Forums

There are two main MTurk forums, Turker Nation and MTurk Forum (links can be found below).  Both serve their purpose well and there is no reason why you cannot join both of them, if you wish.  You can communicate with the MTurk community and keep up to date with what is happening.  For instance, you can sometimes find out useful info such as which MTurk requesters have a bad reputation.  You can also use them just to socialize and have fun.  Both these MTurk forums are ‘unofficial’ in that they are not run or administrated by Amazon, and they are run very much from an MTurk worker perspective.

MTurk forums are generally a fantastic source of information for beginners and experienced MTurk workers alike.  I never cease to learn from them and they are awesome free resources.  People new to MTurk (aka known as Mechanical Turk or Mech Turk) might find them especially useful.  To join, you just need to register for free, get yourself a username and a password, read the rules and away you go!

(I believe that Amazon do have an official forum but it is for MTurk software developers, not MTurk workers.)

Turker Nation

The Turker Nation Mturk forum can be found at http://turkernation.com  It is efficiently administrated by the firm but fair, Spamgirl.  It’s always pretty vibrant there in my experience and there is a tremendous wealth of Mech Turk news, information and opinion in the discussion threads.

MTurk Forum

The appropriately named(!) MTurk Forum can be found at http://www.mturkforum.com  The site has a simple and easy layout, but it is not usually quite as lively as Turker Nation in my experience.  It serves its purpose well, however, with plenty of discussion threads.  I don’t know who the administrator of MTurk Forum is, unfortunately.  (Please feel free to introduce yourself if you’re out there?)

How to get the best hits on M Turk

The best M Turk hits are what all of us M Turk workers are after, of course, whenever we visit mturk.com!  Although to some extent there’s a subjective element involved with getting the best hits, we all seek certain things.  For example, we all want the M Turk requesters that we work for to be honest and pay on time, the M Turk hits to pay us a decent/good rate, and we also want there to be an abundance of the best hits to be available once we’ve found a source on mturk.com, not just a one-off hit - finding good M Turk hits is like discovering gold, once you’ve found a vein, you want there to be plenty more hits of the same type that you can mine.  In my experience, the four main ways to get the best M Turk hits are:

1.  Get the M Turk Turkopticon toolbar.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this Turkopticon toolbar is the best thing going, as far as working at mturk.com goes.  It’s free, so I’m not getting paid to sing its praises, I just think it’s the best invention ever for M Turk workers everywhere.  Basically, once installed, you can point to any request on mturk.com and it tell you how previous m turk workers have graded the requester in terms of paying on time, honesty, how communicative they are etc.  Some M Turk workers write reviews of requesters on there too.  You’ll need to be using a Chrome or Firefox browser though, I don’t think there’s an MTurk Turkopticon toolbar for Internet Explorer.  It’s well worth installing Chrome or Firefox just for the toolbar, if you’re an M Turk worker.

2.  When you find a good hit, stick with it, because if you go away and don’t come back for a time, there’s a good chance that others will use all the hits up while you are gone!  I don’t wish to insult my fellow M Turk workers, but sometimes they behave like piranhas - if they spot one of the best hits, they’ll strip it down to the bone before you can count to three.

3.  Improve your search technique on mturk.com.  M Turk doesn’t give you a great deal of options, though.  I wish it was possible to search for specific requesters on mturk.com, or to be able to save certain searches or settings without mturk.com putting everything back to the default settings.  It’s not always easy to navigate through the 80,000+ M Turk hits you normally find on mturk.com.  All you’ve essentially got is the ability to search for certain keywords such as “survey” or “youtube”, and then the ability to sort them into an order by value of hit, age, etc.

4.  Read the forums, such as MTurk Forum and Turker Nation for the latest news and gossip.

MTurk Links

Amazon Mechanical Turk Top Tricks and Tips


How to avoid MTurk scams


10 reasons why I love Amazon Mechanical Turk

Sites like MTurk

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10 Reasons Why I Love Amazon Mechanical Turk!

Love it or hate it, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (otherwise known as MTurk) is one of the most popular ways of making money fast online.  Working from home can be great when it’s going well, and dire when it isn’t.  This blog aims to give my (random?) thoughts regarding MTurk as well as charting my financial progress and know how.  (If you want to read some of my more formal articles and reviews, follow the links at the bottom of the page, where you’ll find my tips and advice at HubPages.)  Below are 10 reasons why I love Amazon Mechanical Turk.

1.  You don’t need any special skills or go through a job interview to sign up to Amazon Mechanical Turk.  All you have to do is fill out a form to sign up and you can start “working” straight away.  Okay, you have to pass tests to do some of the hits, but most of them you just click your mouse button and start!

2.  It is run by Amazon, not some dodgy fly-by-night company.  It’s totally legit.  And it’s free.

3.  They can pay you in Amazon gift cards!  And you can buy almost anything off Amazon nowadays.  I bought myself a new stereo system with my Mechanical Turk money.  My wife bought herself some jewelry she wanted and some very nice coffee.

4.  You can get your Amazon Mechanical Turk money transferred to your bank account, if you want.  I’ve never done it, I normally just get the gift cards, but if you give them your bank account details and ask them, Amazon will transfer the money for you.  Cool.   My wife has done it and she reckons it takes a few days though.

5.  You get your Mechanical Turk money pretty much straight away.  Well, in most cases, anyway.  I have had some requesters who’ve delayed their payment for a week, but most of them pay within a day or two in my experience.  In fact, some of my favorite ones pay within a few hours.

6.  You can pick and choose when and where you want to work with Amazon Mechanical Turk.  You don’t have to follow office hours, or travel anywhere at rush hour.  That saves you a great deal of time and money and an awful lot of hassle!

7.  You don’t have a boss hanging over you with Mechanical Turk.  You can do the work at your own pace, play some music on the stereo, eat at your computer, dress how you want, and do as little, or as much work as you feel like.

8.  You get a variety of jobs.  Okay, some of them are pretty tedious and you have to sit at a computer all the time you’re working on Amazon Mechanical Turk, but you can do a couple of market surveys, then write a music article, then get paid to watch and comment on Youtube videos…

9.  You don’t have to put up with irritating work coworkers and customers all day when you're using Mechanical Turk.  Okay, I know some people at work at great people, but there are lots of annoying ones too and they can drive you crazy if your with them for 8 or 9 hours/day and 5 days/week.

10.  Amazon Mechanical Turk is new technology and it’s awesome to be involved with something that’s revolutionizing working.  I have been trying out different sites since I started with MTurk and it’s opened up another world to me!

Mechanical Turk Links

Amazon Mechanical Turk Top Tricks and Tips

How to avoid MTurk scams

10 reasons why I love Amazon Mechanical Turk


Sites like MTurk

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