Connections Within the Crowd

Words: Kristy Milland

Kristy Milland worked on Amazon Mechanical Turk and runs Turker Nation, a forum for platform workers to share work tips and talk with others.

I took over running Turker Nation from another Turker long ago. I’m not sure what his motivation was, but I personally joined because as I was completing the tedious HITs I realized there must be some scripts or extensions available to make them easier or faster to complete. I searched for the forums to find those scripts. Turker Nation serves a number of purposes: the provision of tools which allow workers to make more money, work more efficiently, or protect themselves from fraud and mistreatment on mTurk; a water cooler-esque environment where they can talk about their work with others who both understand the language of mTurk and the difficulties of working there; and a place where they can, if they wish, organize to engage in campaigns to better their work environment.

There is both a sense of community and solidarity as well as a Turker identity found on the forum. The most surprising thing about Turker Nation is that people are taking unpaid time to help each other earn more money. Not only do they share tools and advise on how to make more money, they also tell each other about which Requesters and work is good. This is detrimental to themselves to a point, of course, as that means the work will be completed more quickly and there will be less left for themselves. At the same time, they benefit because the entire group shares and that permits them to learn about work they wouldn’t have otherwise. This give and take is what has built such a strong community on Turker Nation, and has allowed us to turn mTurk into a full-time income opportunity for those who have no other options (even if not a hugely lucrative one)