Tuesday, March 8, 2016

New dirtbag on Amazon Mechanical Turk, turkprime.com

It has been quite some time since we have posted new dirtbags on this blog, but one steaming pile of crap has risen to the top trying to devalue an already fragile workplace. Turkprime.com 
They do not have the balls to have their own requester account, because if they did, their Turkopticon scores would be so low, no one would ever work for them.

What they do is they allow scumbag academics to post using their platform for free at whatever price they choose. If someone wants to use them to post HITS and wants to pay a penny per hour, turkprime says, " go right ahead, we don't care about this workplace or about the real people trying to earn a living "

Some of the negativity about them on reddit

I love the comment "If I see "powered by turkprime.com" I return the hit"

Some excellent posts here as well
They've also been trying to defend poor pay recently on Twitter.


We can see these scumbags are routinely paying less than a dollar an hour. 

Just disgusting.



Thursday, August 29, 2013

What is Jon Brelig and Oscar Smith?



Experienced Mechanical Turk workers know who these unknown entities are and avoid them like the plague.   The copy business cards under the guise of Oscar Smith is for an app called CardMunch which is owned by LinkedIn.  Yes, a multi-million dollar corporation is the one behind paying workers less than $1 per hour.
The other one, copy receipts is Jon Brelig. This is a startup who chooses to use the CEO’s name as their requester name for the company InfoScout. They operate two apps Receipt Hog and Shoparoo.
These two companies undermine and devalue the entire workplace and are highly visible because of the apps they use.  When a customer inputs a new receipt or business card, their hits refresh and show up on the top of the newest hit list. So they are always visible like a herpes sore. I have personally spoken with representatives from both companies in the past and would gladly punch them in the face if I met them in person. The standard response when questioned about these payment practices is “You do not have to work on them, it is your choice”.

There is a huge learning curve on Mturk and it can take upwards of 6 mo to a year before you can earn a reasonable wage. For someone just looking in from the outside, it can seem like it is not worth the time, but with experience you build up a list of the right people to work for and you can make it work. I average $320 a week on mturk working maybe 4 hours per day. It is not a huge amount of money, but it really helps out and I do not work for shitheads like Oscar Smith and Jon Brelig.   
New non-usa accounts have not been accepted on Mturk for close to a year. They are gradually eliminating these foreign accounts because of low quality work.
And yes, Indians and new turkers are primarily the ones working for LinkedIn aka Oscar Smith and Jon Brelig because not a single American with even a shred of self esteem or self worth would work for these scumbags. .

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Jon Brelig is a scumbag and pays workers less than $1 per hour

What kind of piece of garbage pays workers less than $1 per hour?

Jon Brelig

From their web description "infoScout makes brands better marketers by providing the industry's richest & most actionable source of household purchase information by item."

They do this by using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to pay workers less than $1 per hour to do data entry work. I hope Brelig goes broke. He gives lectures on how to pay a fraction of minimum wage to other startups and encourages worker exploitation on Amazon Mechanical Turk.
If I ever meet Jon Brelig, I will punch him in the nose and laugh as the blood drips down his face. 


Receipt Hog and Shoparoo are garbage.