Meta: Spam Comments 2
I have received well over 100 spam comments in the last 24 hours, no doubt courtesy of folks like these. The volume of spam comments has increased significantly in the past two weeks.
Thanks to Akismet, only one or two slipped into public view. The ones that did were painfully obvious and quickly deleted, having been worded in this manner (not a quotation–an exemplar) . . .
I find this website marvelous. What you have contributed to my knowledge is unmatched in my experience. Can you recommend me to other sites where I can perceive such wisdom?
. . . and containing links pointing to sites selling knock-offs to the gullible.
Aside:
I feel sorry for folks who sell themselves to do this sort of stuff. They are clearly desperate. But the folks who pay them to do it are scum.
February 23, 2014 at 3:00 pm
Re the MTurk Nation article. Duplicated everything I found. I have serious doubts the average pay is 2 dollars an hours. That’s inflated, just what people will say when interviewed. I couldn’t make that. Fifty dollars a week? Rubbish, unless perhaps you do it all day and for more than ten hours/day, at least. Also, there is the fact the the job posters are under no compunction to pay promptly, so you can wait days for the payment to come into your account. It does get right the difficulty in getting others “angry” about it. A lot of the crowdsource crowd is desperate, the desperation is leveraged by Amazon in a very bad economic climate. The crowdsource crowd, although it may be educated, is also not particularly intelligent. You can get that just by reading the forums.
Here’s an example of one of the forums on Reddit, used by Turkers. I spent a little time analyzing it and the Turkers are scammers, too, in this particular instance, using an advertising kickback scheme to try and chisel some extra money out of publishing links to totally worthless work on MTurk.
http://dickdestiny.com/blog1/?p=16796
Here’s where you need government to counter Jeff Bezos’ world of global network-enhanced libertarian parasitism. The US government could institute some labor rules that cover independent contractor work that pays below a certain minimum level for each job, no matter how small, and quickly make Amazon’s marketplace really unattractive for many businesses.
As for the jobs posted that involve spam and astro-turf manufacturing, they’re all obvious. Amazon says it polices them but there’s no evidence the company is serious about it. They get a cut of every micro-transaction.
The spam I get, much of it seems actually done by human beings, now, rather than purely scripted automation. And when I see those in the filter that look like they were done by desperate people I just think “Amazon.” May Jeff have more kidney stones.
February 23, 2014 at 11:36 pm
It is clearly electronic exploitation, networked sweatshops, not “opportunity,” but the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory gone digital.
They will get away with it until someone stops them, which, as far as I can tell, translates into “they will get away with it.”
When I read that article, I thought of you. And it also clarified some of your references. The Mechanical Turk was a fraud then, and is a fraud now.