Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw

Workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk were asked

What are the biggest challenges for crowdsourced work?

What are the biggest challenges or problems facing mechanical turk
workers like you today? What don’t you like about working on tasks?
What problems have you run into?

Write at least one sentence, at most one paragraph.

by Bjoern Hartmann, the creator of the crowdsourced book Amazing But True Cat Stories during our course discussion. He received many interesting responses quite quickly. Responses are below, in chronological order.

The biggest challenge is there is not enough credible work loaded into the system on a regular basis. I find the tasks that require me to sign-up for any form of service to be quite annoying. I wish there was more work for higher pay and that there was also more data entry tasks. The only problem I have is the lack of communication between
the requestor and the worker.

It is difficult to find tasks that pay enough to be worth the effort.

What irritates me the most is getting work rejected for no good reason. I shouldn’t complain as, overall, I have a high acceptance rate. But when I can’t determine what I might have done wrong, it makes me wonder if I’m being cheated. I often stay away from HITs where the “right” answer is determined by the level of agreement among those who answer the question. The “crowd” isn’t always well informed. Finally, I wish the people who post HITs would allow a generous amount of time to complete them, unless there is a reason for keeping completion time short. There have been too many occasions when I’ve been working away and time ran out unexpectedly. I try to remember to check the countdown, but don’t always succeed.

It is sometimes difficult to become qualified for working the tasks after submitting the test.

I had a bad experience with the Mechanical Turk system. I had a HIT rate of 98 %, but once a client rejected 40 HITS of mine by mistake. He realized this mistake and tried to rollback the rejects, but the system would not allow him to do so. As a result my HIT acceptance rate came down to 80 % and I was not able to perform many HITS which I could have easily done. I took it up with Amazon support team, but they were very callous and just said that they are sorry but they can’t do anything about it.

Lack of ability to communicate with requestors is the biggest source of frustration.  Also, it is discouraging to find so few research/academic tasks, with most work related to SEO.  Being banned/blocked by requestors because of a misunderstanding of the task is a real danger, since we don’t have a means of getting clarification before we submit the work.

Sometimes a task application doesn’t work the way the requester intended and you’re unable to submit your work.  Sometimes a task depends on you running a certain operating system.  Tasks almost never pay enough, at least for US workers.  It would be nice to earn a part time income doing HITs but it’s really nothing more than a hobby.

THAT WAS GOOD AND CHALLENGES TO LIFE.

The biggest challenge for me is balancing the reward, the time it will take to complete a task and the trust I put into the requester. In other words, will the time I will put in this request worth the reward and is there a chance the requester is going to rip me off ?

The biggest challenge of crowd-sourced work is finding HIT’s that are easy to do in a reasonable amount of time that pay a reasonable sum of money. I rarely find anything that isn’t spam or unreasonably demanding to complete.

The mechanical turk workers are facing the problem or rather the biggest challenge is that they are not so quality conscious as is being expected of from them.  There is not much problem except that sometimes very little is being offered for a work which demands more in this age of inflationary pressures.

The biggest challenge is needing money in today’s economy and having to accept pennies at times, when the work deserves a lot more compensation. To be fair, some requesters are very generous, but they are the minority. But, one does what one needs to do to pay the bills.

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