Re:Ask HN: Is Mechanical Turk good for getting recommendations?
by saracen75 on Friday April 09, 2010 @11:01AM
(#1252853)
Thanks byoung.
I am prepared to pay well for really interesting and refreshingly novel activity alternatives. I know that it will be hard to find good writers from MT, but I what I really want is just basic information like what, where, when, how much, and the website link or contact if available.
What I am not sure about is whether giving detailed description and parameters for the job, together with a reasonably good reward, will be likely to produce reasonably good results...
What about any alternatives to MT that you know of?
Re:Ask HN: Is Mechanical Turk good for getting recommendations?
by byoung2 on Friday April 09, 2010 @12:11PM
(#1253066)
Here's one technique I've had success with on MTurk. I needed 500 descriptions written (250-350 words each) so I created a test hit with just 25 assignments. The reward was $2 with a $1 bonus for excellent work. I got about 10 really good results, the rest were average to terrible. I feel bad about not paying people unless they just didn't follow the instructions or they plagiarized, so I ended up paying everyone. For the 10 excellent results, I paid them the $1 bonus, and in the bonus message, I told them to contact me for more assignments. For the 3 that contacted me, I worked out a flat rate to write 50 at a time.
You can also use Elance to find writers, but these tend to be more expensive.
If you are just looking for top 10 lists, it should be fine. If you want detailed reports like WikiTravel (http://wikitravel.org/en/Main_Page), you'll have a harder time finding people who can write well for a low price.
Mechanical Turk is like any other system of inputs and outputs: what you get out of it depends on what you put in. From my experience, if you give very detailed instructions and examples of what you want, and you pay a decent reward, you'll get good results. If you want people to write 500 word articles for $0.05, you'll get crap.