Getting Help Evaluating HITs and Requesters

Turker Nation Forums

You’re ready to make money online with Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk). You open up the Mturk homepage and you browse the list of HITs. After a couple minutes, you see a nice juicy HIT that provides a decent reward.

But how do you know who this Requester is and how do you know they won’t capriciously reject your work? Well, if you’ve read my earlier article, “You’re on Your Own,” then you know that Amazon certainly won’t take your side.

So, what can you do? Well, there are a number of strategies you can take to protect yourself. I have written article detailing my advice on how to Avoid rejection, but there are some helpful resources out there for you. In this article, I’m going to discuss one of the best -- the Turker Nation online forums.

Turker Nation provides an array of forum topics for the Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers...and Requesters. For evaluating a Requester, they provide a very helpful forum with the title of
Requesters Hall of Fame/Shame

The Requester’s Hall of Fame/Shame contains posts from Mturk workers where they chronicle their experience with Requesters. This thread contains a wealth of experience from Mturk Workers as they tell the story of bad Requesters and, also, good Requesters -- and this is as good as bad report because knowing you can trust a Requester is important. The forum uses positive and negative graphic icons that quickly identify who is a good or bed Requester.

If you have any suspicions about a Requester, then I would readily suggest that you check this forum to see what other Workers are saying.

Also included in this thread are lists of spammer and scammers. These are folks who use Mturk to troll for customers or personal data. Although Amazon clearly states what jobs Requester can post as a HIT, Amazon does not police HITs and I rarely see Amazon boot anyone from Mturk.

Now, backing up some. I’ve had used the Hall of Fame/Shame in the past and found contradictory reports on a Requester. One poster will slam a Requester while another poster will say that things went well with the Requester. I would imagine that along with there being some bad requester, there are some bad workers. So ultimately, you will have to discern whether or not from the posts who you can trust. Obviously a slew of bad reports on a Requester should be heeded.

Turker Nation also offers from friendly forums along with their helpful information. They have a Turker Introduction forum for new Workers to introduce themselves. They include a Questions forums for Workers and Requesters to ask find answers or ask questions.

If you’re working for Mturk, then Turker Nation should be in your bookmarks/favorites. You’d be a fool to ignore a resource like this when doing work like this.