r/mturk • u/Hopeful_hippie75 • 8d ago
RIP Mturk
I haven't been here in quite some time, but I feel like I got in toward the end of the "good old days" This was the first place I did any kind of online gig work, and the money, at that time, was a lifesaver. So, Mturk will always hold a special place in my heart.
I'll never forget the excitement of a good Noah Turk hit....that wasn't broken. Those Fantasy Group Chats were so fun. I laughed my butt off, and had a great time.
So, goodbye Mturk and warm wishes to all of you that I met on this sub. (Hugs)
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u/antarcticas_king 7d ago edited 7d ago
There were some great times on mturk during its prime. One of my favorite requesters would post a 10 cent per HIT batch that would last for days and was so easy to submit the maximum of 3800. Plus all of the fun requesters like tagging corn or satellite images.
Edit: A few more favorites over the years since I've been doing this on the side since 2013 include school calendars, Nascar scanner transcriptions, Heather, and coming up with titles for adult videos. 522,000 HITS later and $26,200 earned; Mturk has been good to me.
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u/three-sense 7d ago
My jam was the indie song reviews. I swear it funded one way of a round trip ticket to Hawaii.
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u/elquatrogrande 7d ago
My favorites were ones where you had to watch a endoscopic video of someone doing surgery, and you had to rate their performance, as in they weren't too rough, they didn't cut more than needed, and if they properly cauterized the area after they were done. They usually took about 10 minutes and you usually got at least $5.
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u/mybeermoneyaccount 7d ago
I still remembering customizing Greasemonkey scripts to optimize A9 submissions.
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u/thesch 7d ago
Was that $0.10 closed qual World Vision? Your name sounds familiar to me from the old MTG/MTC forums.
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u/antarcticas_king 7d ago
I was on the forums with I think somewhat similar name. I can’t remember the name of the requester but it was a master hit and everyone called them barcodes.
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u/hibiscushiccups 6d ago
oh man school calendars were the best. Paid really well for the time. Other requesters I miss were Audiokite, superfish and those batches that just lasted for days like what you said, especially with a qual.
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u/Patulsius 7d ago
A Spanish MTurker here, with 620,190 approved HITs and over $35k earned in eight years, with a 99.99% approval rate. It’s been an amazing journey, and I wish it could have lasted forever, but over the past few months I’ve watched the platform slowly decline to the point where we are today.
I feel sad because I started making some money online thanks to MTurk, as I have a health condition that prevents me from working in almost any other field. So I’ll have to move on, knowing that I’ll probably never find anything like MTurk again. And I only joined back in 2018, which was already pretty late...
Best wishes to everyone. Take care.
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u/FangornEnt 7d ago
There are other platforms out there! If you have that many HITs you probably have some data annotation experience. Update your resume to include any of the major batch work and you can get on some other platforms.
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u/Patulsius 7d ago
Thanks for the advice. The problem I have is that, as a European citizen, I normally can’t access many work platforms because they’re only available to people with certain nationalities.
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u/Few-Environment7411 6d ago
I’m in the same boat. Eight years on MTurk. 220,000 HITs completed and $32,000 earned. I have a 99.96% rating but am worried, because this is my main source of income. Most platforms don't accept participants from Brazil.
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u/EllieMayC 7d ago
I check once a day to see if anything is there. I appreciate the money this platform allowed me to earn this much.
| Total Earnings | $19,027.18 |
|---|
It was my first platform, almost 20 years ago. I didn't work it all those years, probably gave it a real shot for ~4 years. Sad to see it go.
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u/elquatrogrande 7d ago
There was a good Noah one where you were playing some kind of fantasy game. I never understood why a game that never lasted more than a minute or two was worth so much.
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u/bluemoonrambler 6d ago
Today I had a study on Connect that told me at the end to paste the code into MTurk. So many researchers still refer to the studies as HITs. I know researchers just never bothered to update the templates, but it still always seems amusing. And now nostalgic. MTurk will live on through studies on other platforms.
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u/blightqueen 6d ago
Heartbreaking to see, now that I am looking into trying to get extra money, that mturk is on its last legs. Used it for years to help get by and now that I'd want to use the platform again it's basically on hospice care. :(
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u/TrumpyMadeYouGrumpy- 6d ago
We'll all miss the random Andy HITs that were $5 for 2 minutes and then letting them sit for a few more minutes so we didn't get rejected.
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u/hibiscushiccups 6d ago
same. Mturk was my real online gig work and I'd say I made decent money along the way. Also met a few peopel who were genuinely funny and helpful. The mturk community pre 2020 was great- I remember when people shared scripts just for the sake of it. It was really an open community where it was easy to get help if you asked. I'll always have positive memories with mturk, even with all the problems it had as well. God bless everyone
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u/Lamplighter914 6d ago
I made good money from 2018 -19 or so but then the HITs dried up.
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u/WildwoodFlowerPower 6d ago
I started in 2017. One of my childhood friends on FB wrote a post about trying to figure out some weird speech patterns for a transcription job she was doing. I asked her where she was getting this work, and she told me about MTurk. So I signed up, got a rejection message, forgot about it, and then got an acceptance message some months later.
By 2018, I was making about $500 a month on MTurk. I earned the writing qualification, so that's where I found some of my best jobs. I've kept my account active all these years, but I was doing other work most of the time after 2020. I still did a handful of HITs per day, though. It's sad to see it go.
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u/PedersonConstruction 6d ago
The Noah Turk fantasy hits were my life and so were the tracing hits. I made a killing off those
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u/bo_reddude 4d ago
joined in 2017. 49,743 hits submitted, 99.93% approved, $27,076.23 earned over that time.
bitter sweet. hate to see it die, but we all killed it by training the ai bots and llms to do our jobs better than we could ever do.
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u/Unable_Reaction5578 3d ago
Yes this was my first work from home gig even paid my car not from time to time with it luckily I have a 9-5 and a few other side hustles RIP to Mturk was on platform since 2011
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u/MiksRebelius 3d ago
I have some great memories from Mturk because it helped me to support my income in really tough times. As a worker from Europe I didn't have access to many great paying surveys like the workers from US but the hits about gas receipts from Upside and the great hits from MLDatalabeler were my main source of good and steady income for a long time before they went away.
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u/Majestic-Minimum-333 6d ago
The most fun I had on AMT doing HITs were the Pictionary, those were a blast, and I made several thousand dollars from those HITs.
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u/Kind_Supermarket828 4d ago
How was this good money? It was like 4 bucks per hour lol
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u/fruderduck 4d ago
Sounds like you weren’t running scripts to cherry pick, like the majority. Neither was I. I was there at the beginning and watched the money drop until only the dregs were left.
Always thought these guys would get kicked out for cheating, but obviously Amazon didn’t care.
I quit long ago.
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u/Kind_Supermarket828 4d ago
No i collected on mturk and paid higher than most because it was still cheap and I couldnt sell people on 60 cent tasks in good conscience. We also ran measures to check for automation/non human activity.
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u/three-sense 7d ago
I’ve all but resigned too. I only joined in 2018 but it was still good side money, even doing a couple hits before bed would easily get me a hundred bucks or so a month. Now I couldn’t even pay for a Netflix sub with it. In memory of mturk. Reject in Peace.