I have a story from the mechanical side.

I spent a month in 2012 roughly 4 hours a day doing various tasks.

It was horrible, even if I followed all the "best practices" of Turkers it was not a way to make a living.

By end of the month, I had become so jaded to all the "priming" experiments by graduate and undergraduate psychology students. Those usually paid at least something 3-4 USD an hour.

Did some porn labeling tasks, those were horrible after the novelty wore off.

Did very few other labeling tasks because they paid next to nothing.

To have someone actually depend on living for these seemed like a torture.

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stickfigure 3 days ago | parent [-]

What country do you live in?

There are places where $3-$4 USD per hour is significantly higher than the prevailing wage. This is not a great fact about global wealth disparity, but that money goes towards improving the situation not making it worse.

	▲	hiAndrewQuinn 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		To math it out: 8 hours a day at $3 USD per hour with 2 weeks vacation is about $15,000 per year. That's not a lot of money to someone who lives in the United States. But here in 2025 it gets you out of the bottom quintile of earners in China, India, Brazil, Russia, Turkey, Japan, Central America, South America, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, most of Eastern Europe... For a job that's on demand, and requires, as far as I can tell, decent English skills and an Internet connection, but no real barriers to entry otherwise. It would have been a much stronger deal back in 2012, of course. I'd be interested to know if the introduction of MTurk as a market competitor pushed entry level clerical wages up in some of these areas. Probably not, because English proficiency in a non English speaking country is a very rare skill not usually borne by people in the bottom 20% of income. But that's probably less true today given the dominant of English language YouTube.