Finding MTurk good hits

Finding MTurk good hits can be a very frustrating business.   The main difficulty is that there are usually many thousands of MTurk hits posted and it can take forever sifting through them.  If you are not careful, you end up spending half your time browsing for good hits, which is time that you could have spent earning.  Browsing time = wasted earning time, in my opinion!

One of the difficulties of searching for good hits on MTurk is that the search facilities are pretty basic.  There is no ‘Advanced Search’ option.  You can only search using critiera such as how much the hit pays and what words are included in the title of a hit, which means there’s a lot of guesswork involved.  You can’t search for specific requesters (though it’s true that you can click on their name once you’ve found one of their hits to see all the rest of them).  You can’t save your searches if you want to do a similar search later on.

Another problem is that once you’ve found a source of good hits, they can either dry up, or your requester disappears, often quite suddenly.  You are then left wondering whether the requester is going to return in a few hours, a few days, or never again.  If you are like me, you can waste time searching for them over and over again!

Solutions?

There aren’t any easy solutions to either problem.  Of course, it would probably be useful if MTurk split hits into categories rather like Microworkers does.  It would also be useful to have more advanced search options and the ability to save searches, so that you can use them again.  This is in the hands of Amazon MTurk, however.

With regard to keeping abreast generally on what’s happening, there are ways of communicating with the MTurk worker community that I’ve mentioned before – namely, the two main forums, Turker Nation and MTurk Forum.  Also the Turkopticon Toolbar has many comments on specific requesters that MTurk workers have written, such as how reliable they are and how communicative they are.

Not all MTurk workers are willing to give specific details of their favorite requesters and good hits, however, for fear of creating increased competition!

Is Amazon MTurk slave labor?

This article was prompted by a friend who told me that she’d tried Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) after reading one of my articles.  She had done a number of hits but eventually decided that the MTurk payments were way too low and that Amazon MTurk was essentially a form of slave labor.

It is an issue that I’ve wrestled with myself, during my darker moments as an MTurk worker.  MTurk requesters effectively sidestep most labor legislation when they use MTurk,  meaning that MTurk workers, unlike people working in the “real” world, have virtually no rights.  Employers get a good deal out of MTurk potentially, as their overheads are minimal and they can effectively hire and fire at will.  Workers, on the other hand, are vulnerable to being ripped off.

Some of the MTurk requesters also offer payment rates that are effectively absurd.  Sometimes if you are like me, you look at the hit and think that they are paying you 1 cent for each task, which is already poor money, but then you read on and there are 10 of these tasks per hit.  That means that you are being offered 0.1 cent for each task.  Even if you can complete two tasks per minute, that’s still an hourly payment rate of just 12 cents!

Okay, I will shut up moaning.  But the issue is still a serious one.  At the end of the day, I use my MTurk payments to supplement other income that’s coming in and spend the money on essentially frivolous stuff such as nice coffee and audio equipment.  I feel concerned about people who are in a dire financial situation and reliant on MTurk to pay for some of their essential, day to day needs.

MTurk is fine in that context, as casual work that supplements other income, but I’d hate to see a world where all work was like MTurk and everyone was forced to scrape a living from day to day with virtually no rights or job security - a kind of weird cross between Victorian England and internet technology.  In short, I think that MTurk is great as an online earning option (which can also be fun sometimes!) but not if it’s your only effective choice!

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

Bubblews is an easy and fun way to make money.

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