Contracts and Mortage Lookups are Flooding my Window!
Lately whenever I visit mTurk (which is often), the top of it is flooded with a bunch of HITs that I have no interest in. And most Turkers don't have any interest in them either or they'd be disappearing at a decent rate.
Now you've all seen the "Mortage Lookups" from Enrovia Research. The issue with these is they take a long time and pay next to nothing.
And then there's the newer but similar HITs, "Contract details" from JB (JB is actually an Amazon Employee, note the @amazon.com email address)
For those unfamiliar with these two HIT types, in a nutshell you go to another website, find scanned records, and then extract information from those.
Now I personally think both of these HITs should pay more, so do all of you. So does everyone. We've already established that for all HITs. But business is business, you pay the smallest amount possible to get your work done.
The issue I have isn't the pay, the issue is that these HITs could be simplified with programming. They have workers manually go to a site and lookup documents that could be scrapped and put into an HIT, or the Requesters could release a tool to quicken the process (remember those Greasemonkey scripts). Or even simply make these into External HITs (HITs not hosted on mTurk but appear to be) and inside the HIT have a frame that takes users to the site so they don't have to deal with having multiple windows/tabs.
Something that many Requesters seem to miss is that the trick to mTurk isn't high pay, but rather simplification. Break tasks down as much as possible, into very small, very quick, 1 or 2 cent HITs. Even if the only way to break them down and simplify is through additional HITs (which of course can raise costs)
So Requesters do yourself a favor, stop for a moment, look at your HITs and brainstorm out how to simplify them, even if it means a week worth of programming to automate it. The time investment is worth it if you are going to be sending out thousands of HITs.
Simply put, make the task easier, and you can pay less and get results faster.
(This conclusion is based off my personal experiences as a Turker and Requester and from what I've seen on mTurk)
Now you've all seen the "Mortage Lookups" from Enrovia Research. The issue with these is they take a long time and pay next to nothing.
And then there's the newer but similar HITs, "Contract details" from JB (JB is actually an Amazon Employee, note the @amazon.com email address)
For those unfamiliar with these two HIT types, in a nutshell you go to another website, find scanned records, and then extract information from those.
Now I personally think both of these HITs should pay more, so do all of you. So does everyone. We've already established that for all HITs. But business is business, you pay the smallest amount possible to get your work done.
The issue I have isn't the pay, the issue is that these HITs could be simplified with programming. They have workers manually go to a site and lookup documents that could be scrapped and put into an HIT, or the Requesters could release a tool to quicken the process (remember those Greasemonkey scripts). Or even simply make these into External HITs (HITs not hosted on mTurk but appear to be) and inside the HIT have a frame that takes users to the site so they don't have to deal with having multiple windows/tabs.
Something that many Requesters seem to miss is that the trick to mTurk isn't high pay, but rather simplification. Break tasks down as much as possible, into very small, very quick, 1 or 2 cent HITs. Even if the only way to break them down and simplify is through additional HITs (which of course can raise costs)
So Requesters do yourself a favor, stop for a moment, look at your HITs and brainstorm out how to simplify them, even if it means a week worth of programming to automate it. The time investment is worth it if you are going to be sending out thousands of HITs.
Simply put, make the task easier, and you can pay less and get results faster.
(This conclusion is based off my personal experiences as a Turker and Requester and from what I've seen on mTurk)
posted by Eric Cranston at 2:23 PM
5 Comments:
Good point Eric, but the money doesn't justify automation for either workers or requesters. The Enrovia HITs are a prime example. At one point, I saw thousands of those HITs posted for a total combined value of less than $100! Sure they could hire a developer to process the HITs better - but then they'd spend hundreds more just to do that. The incentive for them just isn't there. Which kinda sucks I guess, but like you said, that's the marketplace at work.
They wouldn't spend hundreds more - they just put up a hit for a penny and some idiot will write them a greasemonkey script to do what they want.
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Hi,
I visited your blog and found an informative one for finance related topics.I have also some finance related web sites
on finance.So,I think it would be beneficial for both of us if we will join in a community and become link partners to
each other which will help your blog/site in getting more Google values.If you are interested then please contact me
at- marksmith(at)savedude.com
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