Amazon.com’s “Mechanical Turk” is a service where you can farm out small tasks for small fees.   It’s called “crowdsourcing”, and it’s certainly a low form of employment.  It has also turned into a new form of pollution.

Paid Puffery

Here’s a one of the better tasks:

Visit a site and ask a question.

Visit this site and find a question to answer that currently has 0 answers.

http://questions.civicvoice.com/answer.php

Answer a question, something that has at least 15 words in the answer, and not randomly generated..

After you have posted your answer, copy and paste your answerback into the form below.

No reference to Mechanical Turk should ever be made in your questions.

The answer must be submitted on http://questions.civicvoice.com/answer.php in order to be paid for this hit.

thanks!

That’ll bring you $0.06 from someone who calls himself Steve Stedman.   Notice that you don’t need to actually know anything to answer the question.  Notice also that the quality of the response doesn’t matter (as long as it isn’t random).   All you can hope is that the poor people who do the work have more of an ethical code than the guy who is doing the hiring.

Boy, oh boy, doesn’t the “wisdom of crowds” look good today.

You can only make a living doing it dishonestly.

Here’s another one, slightly more horrifying.  I hope you weren’t planning to use the web to select a doctor…

Write a review about a physician

Navigate to http://www.savvyspot.com/rw/Browse+Reviews+Physicians/rw/Mode=BrowseCategory/CategoryID=518/rw/reviews/search.aspx
Write a review for the physician by clicking on “Write a review” (if you want to create an account) or “Write a review anonymously” (if you don’t want to create an account) on the left side tasks
If you choose to create an account, you must write the review using “Full Mode”
The review must be genuine/original and 50 words minimum
The review must contain at least one contribution (location, contact, image and etc.) or 2 helpful information (opening hours, accept credit card and etc.)
Then provide one of the following as the answer to the task:

If you created an account, your screen name and last name.
If you used “Write a review anonymously” without creating an account, title of the review and the secret key provided on the first page of the write review page.

Bonus will be given for good content or extra contributions

Note that the task doesn’t tell you to write a fake review.  In fact it says it must be “genuine/original”, for whatever that’s worth, but there’s certainly nothing to stop anyone who wants to lie.   And, think about it: most people could honestly do only one review, because they know only one doctor.  That will earn all of 15 cents.   But, once you get in the swing of things, you could write one fake review after another.   And, that’s the only way you could make it pay enough to live on.    Fifteen cents for a real review requring thought and writing?    And you can only do one, so you have to count the time spent figuring out the web site?   Sounds like you’re getting $0.15 for about 10 minute’s work, or about $1 per hour — not a living wage.

But, if you want to cut and paste (and then change a word here or there to make it “original”) you could probably do one review in a minute or two.   That’ll net you about $5 or $10 per hour.   That’s pretty poor wages for selling your soul, but at least it’ll keep you in potato chips.

Destroying the Agora for pennies

And here’s ad advert from someone who’s willing to pollute someone else’s web site for personal gain.  That’s a notch lower than filling your own web site with rubbish.

Go to http://www.newsobserver.com

Find a story that looks interesting to you and click on it:
At the bottom of the story will be a “comments” section:
In order to comment, you will need to Register, so go ahead
and click “register”:

Now make a relevant and respectful comment about the story:
At the bottom of your comment paste the following html code.

<br>
<a href=”http://weddingfavorszoom.com”>Wholesale Wedding Favors</a>
<br>

When you are finished be sure to copy and paste the url where I can find your comment so that you will get paid.

So, I hope you weren’t wasting your time replying to a comment on a newspaper’s web site, either.  Whoever they are, they probably didn’t mean it.  They were just being paid to write comments, and it was the only thing they could think of.

This one is the modern equivalent of fly-tipping or tossing a beer bottle into someone’s front yard.    Worse, in fact: people are paying other people to toss beer bottles.