Porn | Why My Plan To Use Porn Work To Pay For A Virtual Mob Failed

I don't think I'm cut out for management.

After days spent tackling low-paying jobs such as writing titles for porn clips on Amazon Mechanical Turk, I thought I was ready to move up. I was ready to have the Turkers - as they call themselves - work for me.

It turns out getting someone to do you your job for you isn't for the lazy, however, even in this age of cheap digital outsourcing.

Mechanical Turk, of course, is a sort of online marketplace for digital day labor. For a few cents, or a few bucks, you can become a ‘requester' and hire one of the site's 500,000 workers to do digital tasks that require a bit of human judgement, such as photo recognition or comment moderation (see" Amazon Turk Will Hook You Up With Porn Jobs That Pay Pennies" ).

Artificial artificial Intelligence, as Amazon calls it. Forty-percent of these people have college degrees. Most of them do it for fun. Talk to them and they'll tell you they're basically monetizing their leisure time.

The problem: when it came to tapping into all this intelligence, I wasn't too intelligent. My initial plan was to use the service to steal readers from my colleagues (see " Paying Turkers To Steal Readers, Write My Articles, Do My Reporting, And Fix My Liver "). But when I tried to hire Turkers to post comments to my colleague's stories, pointing them at my own, I got… nothing.

Turkers were taking notice, however. On a community bulletin board called Turker Nation, the Turkers were talking. They criticized my work history: "105 HITS and has a 90% approval rate," one commenter scoffed. They called me cheap: "So not only is he a smacktard, he's a low-baller as well." They called me out on violating Amazon's terms of service: "If anyone reported your HITs they'd be taken down and your requester account could be suspended," one wrote (and, in fact, two HITs soliciting comments on other Forbes blogs were removed for violating Amazon's policies).

Ouch .

I needed help. Fortunately, my experience outsourcing on Turk hadn't been a total disaster. I had succeeded in getting Turkers to write articles for me for $1(see "A Turker's Take On Where Apple And Intel Are Going With Thunderbolt"), and for just $4.25 I had hired a Turk to recommend a course of treatment after a blood test hinted at liver problems(see " Rising Cost Of Health Care: Upping What I'll Pay To Fix My Liver "). Moreover, while my digital mob had failed to materialize, several Turks had agreed to comment on my article. Their advice: ask Turkers for advice on how to be a better Turker.

In a recursive sort of way, the suggestion made sense. Who knows more about managing a Turk than a Turk? So after unsuccessfully reaching out to the embassy of the Republic of Turkey , I took the advice of Forbes commenter "toobusytowork," and posted a request to Amazon Turk itself asking for tips. At 20 cents per tip with a 15 cent bonus for comments to my story itself it was cheaper than hiring a management consultant.

I also turned to Amazon. The online retailer is eager to help businesses work with its legion of Turks. Many of them will use the service's software application programming interfaces, or 'hooks,' to build Turk into their own business processes.

For example online shoe retailer Zappos, before it was acquired by Amazon, used the service to select the best reviews for its shoes, edit out information about price (which can quickly go out of date), and put the most relevant stuff in front of shoppers.

Others, such as transcription service Castingwords use the outsourcing service as the basis for their own outsourcing services.

While Amazon Turk has been in ‘beta' for five years, Amazon continues to refine the service. Earlier this week, Amazon unveiled a list of " Master Turkers ," who have tackled thousands of tasks in specialties such as photo moderation and categorization. Consider the fact I'm not on that list an endorsement.

While I'm not a Master Turker, however, I am getting paid. Most requesters were automating the process of approving my work, so while most jobs weren't approved immediately, all I had to do was sit tight for a few days and the money will roll in (thanks TMI 9!). So far I've been paid $17.75 for completing 111 tasks - money I needed to hire Turkers of my own.

To make sure I got the most for that $17.75 I cornered Amazon Turk product manager John Hoskins at a conference . While he looked a little uncomfortable when I explained to him that I had been working as a Turker writing titles for porn films while using the service to try to outsource some my own work, his presentation to a room full of about 100 would-be Turk bosses was very helpful.

First, make jobs consistent, so Turkers can tackle hundreds of small tasks in an hour. Keep jobs small - Turkers don't have to risk a big chunk of their time on an uncertain project, they like to spread that risk around; and make it fun - "if your task is fun, you can get away with paying less," Hoskins says.

Humans aren't computers. Pyschology is important. So tap into each Turk's competitive instincts. Accomplishing a task - any task - any task raises a Turker's qualification rate and unlocks more the opportunity to do more work. For example, when I asked Turkers to do a small task for me, for free (type the word 'hello' - hey, I get lonely sometimes) I was inundated with responses.

Competition only amplifies that dynamic. So when one Amazon Turk requester offered a $200 prize for the best answer to a question, Turkers stopped working for the pennies being offered for a response to a question and began competing for that prize, Hoskins says. As a result, some of the Turkers began offering virtual dissertations.

While Turkers are competitive, they're also cooperative. They'll point each other towards good requesters, Hoskins explains, and they'll help you become a better requester. If you let them.

So maybe I shouldn't take their criticism too personally. Hoskins's remarks gave me the courage I needed to sort through the responses I'd been getting when I posted a request offering to pay Turks for tips (it's not checkbook journalism, it's outsourcing!). To my relief they were uniformly constructive.

Among the tips:

Declutter: define the tasks you want done in as few words as possible. Keep the steps, or action points, a Turker must complete to a minimum. Leave extraneous details out;

Make sure your request works: try doing the job yourself, troubleshoot the task with a small group before opening it up to large numbers of Turkers;

Pay fast: you can automate payment so that everyone who responds to a request is paid - eventually; but requesters who pay within 12 hours of submission tell a Turker that they can continue working with the client without risking rejections that will lower their qualification score.

Don't be a petty tyrant: experienced Turkers look for requesters who don't issue too many rejections. Pettifoggery will cause workers to avoid you.

I'm not going to post all the tips I got here. That's partly because I'm lazy, partly because some of the tips echoed suggestions made by other Turkers, and partly because I'm going to hold back some of the best advice so I can exploit it myself. After all, I paid for it.

Here's a tip of my own, however: if you've got an interesting, well-thought out task for the Turks, don't hesitate to use this service. Just follow the rules - the Turkers themselves will enforce them - and avoid using worker A356ODAVC86ZYSfor anything you want to keep confidential.

Until then, I'm going to try a more lucrative role in this new kind of labor market - one that, if you're especially lucky, may even bring me to your doorstep. Ding-dong.

Details to come.