this post was submitted on 29 Feb 2024
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What's a turker? I've never heard that term before, aside from final fantasy viii.
Amazon has a service called Mechanical Turk. Businesses put up listings for small jobs and random people complete the small jobs for a set amount of money. The jobs are things like 'transcribe this lecture' or 'fill out this survey'. The goal is to connect small jobs with low-skill workers.
Some of the tasks are more involved than that and require proof of knowledge. But, that is the gist.
If you can't guess it, you could read the first sentence of the article.
Read the first paragraphs of the article (till the paywall), still have no clue what a "turk" is.
Maybe I'm just dense.
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a service where people can do simple tasks for small amounts of money. Usually things you would expect to be automated, especially in this day and age. I did it for a bit about a decade or so ago. Things like small amounts of proofreading, transcription, etc.
The name is a reference to a hoax device made in the late 1700s that was supposedly a chess playing automaton. In actuality it was operated by a person hiding within. It was nicknamed the Mechanical Turk because it had a model of the head and torso of a person dressed in Ottoman robes, etc.
"A workers rights group for Mechanical Turk workers says that at least dozens of MTurk workers have been suddenly locked out of the Amazon-owned microlabor platform, suggesting a widespread issue that is denying these people the ability to work and in some cases denying them access to money they have already made on the platform."
Yea, that really helped (it didn't).