Have any Flutherites gone pro?

I tried it but I didn’t like it. And I work from home so I could actually make more than 1$ per hour doing what I normally do. And you might want to take a look at this post on Waxy.

Turk work really is grind work for low pay. I mean, yeah you can make money, but you’re gonna spend a lot of time for little pay. My time is worth more than pennies. Plus I contribute to Fluther for fun and enjoyment, it’s not my job. Wouldn’t want it to be.
On second thought, that’s not to say I wouldn’t WORK for Fluther all day :)

The rewards there look incredibly low. Helping people out and exchanging opinions is worth more to me than making, like, 4 cents to dig up an e-mail address from a blog.

That’s not going pro. That’s going sweatshop!

mTurk is owned by Amazon, which runs the competitor site Askville, which is where I spent about a year and a half before I came here in disgust. Amazon’s core mission is to make money, not to build a community (even though that’s how they sell it to those on Askville). So, what happens is all the mTurk people answer via Askville and you’ve got some Askvillers who are mTurkers too.

So Amazon expands it’s business model and starts letting mTurker’s write questions as well, and they of course pay them more if they ask a question that happens to be answerable by putting a link to a product that Amazon sells.

Askville rewards people with worthless pieces of “gold” for answering questions and getting ratings on those answers, and they give more gold if you link to an Amazon product. And they build this sense of competition by having a leader board so people will strive for more and more gold.

Then they introduced these bonus questions which some were written by mTurkers and some were just written by a computer which searched keywords, and they incentivised the answering process to give more gold if you answer a bonus question.

So basically, unlike here, what you’re doing often times to make money on mTurk is essentially shilling Amazon products by asking questions about which penis pump is the best and answering questions about book recommendations, all the while posting Amazon links or getting others to post the links, so they are essentially buying banner ads on their own website when it gets right down to it.

Big problem of course is that Askville sucks ass now because if people aren’t infighting over gold gaming, they are becoming more and more openly hostile to each other as trolls start to infiltrate and push their own agendas, and because Amazon doesn’t make any money (loses it in fact) if it has to spend any time on moderating its own boards, you pretty much have to step WAY over the line before you’ll get a mod involved, and by then several well meaning people who were pro-active and who tried to bring the situation to a peaceful end are caught up in the “two to tango” mentality and everyone is punished in the same way.

Hell no, fuck mTurk. It’s competition for Fluther and it creates a highly inferior product. Here we have a community that people actually WANT to spend time in. On Askville, any answers you post become their property and they can if they want at any time publish a “Collective Wisdom: The Askville Chronicles”, promote it on their own website and make a mint on it, by using YOUR answer and never pay you a thin dime for it. Fluther is a labor of love, mTurk and associated sites are a revenue enhancer.

Oh my gosh I didn’t know how awful Askville was… glad I didn’t join that one.

You made a wise choice. Fortunately there are second chances, Fluther is mine.

I always find your answers really interesting Dale; this one in particular. I had no idea how bad Askville was.

Thanks richardhenry, I try to say things when I actually have something to say…and having been through the Askville machine, I have more than a thing or two to say about them. I have no problem with them making money, I knew that was part of the game going in, but when they started trying to wring out every last dime while making the user experience less and less enjoyable (more uninteresting questions, more shilling of their own products, more trolls pushing agendas and abusing other users, less and less oversight), it just got to be too much.

The big problem started when a couple dozen long timers there got fed up with the antics of another user (who is still one of the all time leaders there) because she was a) unable to take any constructive criticism of any kind without becoming downright nasty, accusatory and vile, anb b) was taking full advantage of every opportunity to raise her meaningless gold total. People started to call her on it, and she wouldn’t give up, she could have 30 people all rationally calling her out for the same thing, but she was right and they were all wrong, and she’d belittle them and go after them and people were screaming at Askville to do something about it. But she was SO effective at answering all their bonus questions (or as most of us called them “bogus” questions), with Amazon links that they did nothing. People screamed and complained and Askville said “think of this place as a dinner party” to indicate basically, be adults and resolve it amongst yourselves.

Askville basically rather than developing the community they had, started to allow people to ask questions without even signing up for an account, so there were all these new users who wouldn’t even come back and rate your answers, and who by and large would never become part of the community. They aslo allowed people to cash in their gold around the holidays last year for gift cards and T-shirts, but there was a strict limit, so it didn’t cost them much, THEN they used the fact that they were giving away gift cards worth as much as $100 (but you’d need 10,000 gold coins, which is probably harder to achieve there than it is to get 10,000 lurve here to get it), by saying, join Askville and get $100. Boy were people pissed when they realized that yes, if they put 1000 hours into asking and answering questions they might earn enough coins to get a $100 gift card, but that there weren’t 1,000 hours between then and when the offer expired

But the situations continued to escalate, more and more long timers were just abused by all these new users (and Askville valued new users more than the established community clearly), but eventually enough people reported abuse against this one user enough times and got into it frequently enough on the boards that they were forced to do something about it. So they just suspended 17 users…the troublemaker and 16 people who she had a problem with, for a week.

That’s when about 50 people from Askville came over here. I was not one of the suspended ones, but then later I got into it with someone who just couldn’t be respectful, was calling names and being hostile, while I was trying to calm the situation down. I tried to get them involved, they wouldn’t listen. I wrote to them, I got about 20 people on my side, had them all report abuse and write to the PTB. The other user just reported abuse on my comments to be spiteful when he heard I’d reported him for abuse. Askville eventually came in, gave us both meaningless slaps on the wrist and disappeared.

I felt this was no way to run a community. I saw how to run a community. Here I got into it with another user. Fluther moderators got involved, talked to both of us personally at length, problem solved. The integrity of the community is in tact, I don’t feel I have to avoid this person, and I don’t feel he avoids me, I have no hard feelings, the original issue hasn’t been brought up in months, no one was banned or warned, we were just brought back down to earth by the shared sense that Fluther is about creating a good community with quality questions.

So I’m more than happy to give away my interesting answers here, that’s worth more to me than the 50 cents a day I could make on mTurk.

I spend my time in both worlds (askville and fluther). They each have their pluses and minuses….