How to build an army of top quality people via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Yes, you read correctly, Mechanical Turk (henceforth referred to as MT).
A thread.
A thread.
Most people think of MT as "that thing Amazon offers where you have a lot of work that you need humans to do where you pay per task and it works out to be below min wage".
Because they have that mental model they automatically equate MT to "low quality" which is wrong...
Because they have that mental model they automatically equate MT to "low quality" which is wrong...
What most people don't know is that MT gives you the option to save and rank how the people (aka Turkers) performed when doing your tasks (aka HITs).
You can also offer up HITs to your saved Turker lists as well.
Given the above, I'm going to lay out how to build your army...
You can also offer up HITs to your saved Turker lists as well.
Given the above, I'm going to lay out how to build your army...
Step 1:
- Create a simple task and offer it up to 1K people
- Offer a slightly better than avg fee
- The goal here is to weed out people that can't follow basic instructions
- A good example might be: "Look up the physical address of <famous landmark> and post it in the form
- Create a simple task and offer it up to 1K people
- Offer a slightly better than avg fee
- The goal here is to weed out people that can't follow basic instructions
- A good example might be: "Look up the physical address of <famous landmark> and post it in the form
Step 1a:
- A key part of offering the better than avg fee is so that you attract people who are at least "ok"
- If you offer too low a rate, you will get both poor performers but you might also get new people just getting into MT
- A key part of offering the better than avg fee is so that you attract people who are at least "ok"
- If you offer too low a rate, you will get both poor performers but you might also get new people just getting into MT
Step 2:
- Label all of the people who correctly completed the task
- This will likely be <1K people which is fine
- The key here is to save the list of people who were able to complete the task for the next step
- Label all of the people who correctly completed the task
- This will likely be <1K people which is fine
- The key here is to save the list of people who were able to complete the task for the next step
Step 3:
- Create a slightly harder task
- Again, pick a better than avg fee for this task
- Send the new task to the people that correctly completed Step 1
- MT lets you do this using the saved list you created in Step 1
- Create a slightly harder task
- Again, pick a better than avg fee for this task
- Send the new task to the people that correctly completed Step 1
- MT lets you do this using the saved list you created in Step 1
Step 4:
- Create a new list of the people who completed Step 3 correctly
- At this point you've probably realized that the following steps are just increasing the difficulty and fee
- you will also be winnowing the list of people down BUT there work will be increasing in quality
- Create a new list of the people who completed Step 3 correctly
- At this point you've probably realized that the following steps are just increasing the difficulty and fee
- you will also be winnowing the list of people down BUT there work will be increasing in quality
As noted above, just keep repeating steps 1-4 and after several iterations you will have ~10-20 people who can perform amazing quality work on a variety of tasks who are essentially on demand and part time.
"Wait, does this really happen?"
"Wait, does this really happen?"
The short answer is "Yes!"
How do I know?
- the tools to do it are all there
- if you look on the MT reddit, you will see people commenting on how they make $X0 per task
- Both of the above imply that the strategy in this thread is a viable one.
How do I know?
- the tools to do it are all there
- if you look on the MT reddit, you will see people commenting on how they make $X0 per task
- Both of the above imply that the strategy in this thread is a viable one.
/end of thread.
Would love to hear feedback, thoughts etc
and if you liked this thread, please check out my other threads.
Would love to hear feedback, thoughts etc
and if you liked this thread, please check out my other threads.
