Does anyone use Mechanical Turk?

I looked into it the other day, as I’m a Stay-At-Home Mom, and have time to do such things. ^_^

The premise is great – for those who don’t know, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a place people can post simple jobs they need done, that aren’t easy for a machine to do. In return, they contribute money to your Amazon account. You can withdraw the money after you’ve accumulated $10. The jobs pay anything from one cent up to $7 (that I’ve seen).

Unfortunately, this system – cool though it sounds – has already been discovered by spammers, advertisers, and the like. Now, most of the jobs you see are (not very cunningly) trying to convince you to sign up for information on Internet College, or to click-for-a-free-iPhone, or what have you.

The jobs that ARE legit are usually things like “Write a 300 word article on _________. If I like it, I’ll pay you. If I see any problem with it, you don’t get paid.” I’ll let you guess how many of those ghost writers see their $2 compensation.