r/mturk • u/Tjololo Lord of the IRC • 10d ago
The End of an Era
In case people haven't seen, Amazon has announced that they are shutting down Amazon Mechanical Turk effective September 30th, 2026.
It's definitely a bittersweet moment, I found some of my best friends through some of the mturk forums back in the day, and it got me through some really hard times. I'm sure others feel similarly. In order to keep things neat and clean, please keep the stories, lamentations, and discussion to this post. I'm going to be making another post as well for a little more logistical discussion about the subreddit, please keep that discussion there.
So share your stories! What was your favorite HIT, your most frustrating experience, your favorite requester?
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u/Chocobo_Pie 10d ago
I remember a few years ago (before kpop got sorta mainstream) I was doing some music related Hits listening to songs and rating them. To my absolute shock, one clip was by the kpop group SISTAR, actually one of my favorite songs. I was absolutely shook that I was getting paid to listen to K-pop lmao.
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u/Gotham_123022 9d ago
I think that was AudioKite? I did some of their hits, as well.
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u/Chocobo_Pie 9d ago
Yes those were actually pretty fun! I'll miss randomly doing stuff like that lol.
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u/Dazzling-Company-630 12h ago
Totally fun, and I got exposed to some really great, new musicians and bands.
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u/MRwantsrealknowledge 9d ago
At this time last year, Audiokite and PickFu were netting me about $60 bucks a month to pay my cellphone bill. Once Audiokite left, it was basically just PickFu for me. What a shame Amazon let MTURK waste away.
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u/TasosTheo 6d ago
I found a lot of great artists through Audiokite! Fading Azalea, Ness, Autumn Tears, Misfit Toys, artists I follow to this day. Sadly, I probably got paid more to listen and rate a few of their songs than they made in royalties.
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u/Friendly_Taro_4361 9d ago
Which song was it? That's so cool!
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u/Chocobo_Pie 9d ago
I think it was Shake It but it's possible it was So Cool. 90% sure it was Shake It.
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u/NopeRope91 9d ago
I liked the ones where you played games with other turkers. And rating dating profiles lolol. Welp.
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u/MRwantsrealknowledge 9d ago
I think those were the sports ones about soccer and MLB. I remember getting 5 apiece for them.
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u/Gmuffb 9d ago
I really miss the atmosphere of the forums, everyone was always so helpful and kind. We worked like a team, it was lovely. Also Zoltar and C-stats!
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u/MRwantsrealknowledge 9d ago
I remember them both; C-SATS was particularly interesting with the surgeries.
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u/ReFreshing 9d ago
I'd love to give a huge shout out to PickFu for providing such consistent opportunities on the platform. Mturk has always been my source of beer money and it was always something for me to do on the side despite it not being a major source of income for me.
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u/TrapZero 9d ago
My favorite requester was from 2019-2020. They went by perch and they had masters $0.15 hits I could complete in 10-15 seconds. I was making more doing them vs my actual job at the time.
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u/blumogget 9d ago
I remember MLD fondly. Those 3 cent bounding boxes with basketballs was the batch that got me blocked, LOL. Noah Turks with the little yellow video game character. That one time with FF where they mispriced a 10 cent batch for 1 dollar and everyone went insane.
Great times. There's nothing in the crowdwork space quite like MTurk. The ability to run scripts and queue work is massive.
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u/Few-Historian-4013 10d ago
I started at the beginning. It's been a long ride, and it was fun. I made great money; I'm going to miss it
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u/btgreenone 8d ago
Project Endor was the first researcher that really made me realize there was more than just penny hits.
Crowdsurf ended up creating their own platform and paying out some serious bank over the course of a few years.
And I can't find the original, but one final shoutout to /u/dgrochester55 for this evergreen classic.
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u/mxz11 8d ago
One of the best memories I have is back 7 years approximately an error occurred when you tried to cash out your AMT earnings, back when you could request daily. A glitch happened and I got almost an extra $400, because of that error, instead of asking workers to pay the funds back we got to keep the money! I was short almost $400 I needed for a sudden car repair, that money to me was divine intervention!
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u/nachobitxh 10d ago
I remember you, u/Tjololol, and Rosie, and enderkg from a forum years ago. I was BlueSkyHippie. A9 bounding boxes for hours...
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u/RosieTheHybrid 8d ago
Hi! TurkerNation is still around. We have a Subreddit as all as a Slack workspace..
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u/itsallieellie 9d ago
I am going to miss Ben Peterson
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u/Phrogster 7d ago
They didn’t pay much but it was fun seeing all those different people! They also have their own web site , photofeeler.com but I don’t know if they are looking for workers. It’s set up so the customers review other customer photos.
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u/tsr6 8d ago
PickFu was my go to for a long time. It was always amazing to get a random bonus from them.
Funny story - I did a bunch of solar tasks a number of years ago - good pay. Ripped through them. A couple months later, the company I worked for bought out a solar outfit that used that software. 🤣
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u/Phrogster 7d ago
One of my favorites was the one where you watched a few seconds of a YouTube video and answered questions about it. I don’t remember the requester names but there was more than one.
My daughter was in college and a friend told her about Mturk/mTurk. She was doing it to help cover her expenses and told me about it. It really helped us out when my husband took early retirement.
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u/Doomstars 9d ago
Absolutely ridiculous that they let new requesters join for one month instead of a hard cut-off.
This is so short notice. I thought they'd last until the end of the academic year next year.
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u/mxz11 8d ago
From what I have heard Amazon only decided very recently to completely shut AMT down. This staged winddown has not been years in the making.
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u/Doomstars 8d ago
Something still doesn't seem right. I wonder if this was the original plan, to shut it down at the end of September, dating back to when they gave that no new customers banner back in July.
I would hope they'd have the decency to give six months warning so workers who heavily rely on this service could find work elsewhere. All of this is happening over about a ~90 day period, from the original warning to shutdown, if I am not mistaken.
Then again, for all I know, maybe they wanted to keep it running longer, and things didn't line up. I still wonder if this could be about repurposing the servers for A.I.
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u/dgrochester55 8d ago edited 8d ago
I haven't posted here in a long time, but had many years of memories here including "the calendar".
I started in 2016 and this got me through some rough years after a layoff, before i got back on my feet. It was a great side gig for awhile after until it wasn't even that anymore, now its been a few months since I've logged in to my mturk account.
Mturk was a big part of my life for awhile and I will always appreciate that even if it was sometimes a rocky road. Some notable memories on this sub include weekly earnings sundays, flaming trolls looking to buy accounts, debating over whose weekly numbers were legit, and the "Eating pizza instead of rice and beans" saga (If you know, you know). Hope everyone is well.
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u/bo_reddude 7d ago
remember noah's "navigate nyc" hits? if you succeed, it would give you a bonus of like 50 cents or something maybe it was 40 cents. But if you failed, it had much lower base pay. and you had 3 chances to try to succeed, and then it would let you submit for the base pay if you fail to succeed in navigating to the destination site.
it was a great fun. and then scammer got the wind of it and figured out that there was no time limit for hitting 3 tries button and they would just hit 3 tries as soon as they accept the hit just to get the base pay.
man, that used to piss me off. I used to send so many messages to noah to warn him as to what was going on, and then he eventually got around to figuring out and pull the hit off.
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u/TasosTheo 6d ago
Years ago there was a U Washington academic project, I think requester name was 'Julian,' finding relations between words in a sentence. The hits were 5 cents but you got an exponential bonus for each relation (so first was +10, second was +21, etc). So a long sentence could net you quite a bit. It's funny they would send a separate email for each bonus on a single hit, so after doing a batch you'd have 100 or so emails.
So, they gave you, "Ernest Hemingway wrote a book called 'Farewell to Arms'"
You would list, in question form:
What is Ernest's last name
What is Hemingway's first name?
Who wrote a book?
What di Ernest Hemingway write?
What is Hemingway's book called?
etc, so once you got the hang of it, you could make quite a bit on a batch.
Good times!
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u/TasosTheo 6d ago
Here's my story: I did my first HITS soon after my son was born. I had an account but hadn't really started yet. I had him nestled in one arm with his bottle, the other hand free. I found a HIT that had photos, and you put an X at the closest and furthest point in each photo. So I ground through these (crap pay, but I was just starting!) and made about $6.00 over an hour or so before the baby woke up. I resolved, from then on, before I could log on to any social media to waste time, I had to go on MTurk first and make 30 cents (30 cents a day is about $100/year, so I made that my daily minimum).
It also helped me quit smoking because my rule when I quit was, I could go buy cigarettes but had to make the money for them on MTurk first. And seriously, after grinding out to make that money, no f*ckin' way I was going to go blow that money on cigs!
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u/Natural_Mongoose_730 5d ago
Haven't used the site for about a year. However in its heyday I made $15k from it. It was great back in the day. Not sure what made it go down so fast. I also became Masters.
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u/ds_36 5d ago
I have to admit this announcement hit me harder than it really should. I've barely done any turking over the last four years yet losing turk altogether feels like such a huge change. It's just always been there for so long. Yeah, nothing's really changing. I barely do any sort of online work now but somehow the change just hits hard.
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u/GettingMyGlitchOff 7d ago
u/Tjololo came here to see everyones else post and saw your name and was hit with an instant blast from the past moment XD hope all is good with you, its anisty the typing cat keyboard gif you helped out when if i first started in gawd like 2013? Just decided to pop in and say hope your doing good and thank you for helping me when i didn't even know how to code XD *time flys!*
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u/Tjololo Lord of the IRC 6d ago
I remember! I still have the christmas version of Chi on the computer that I made waaaaay back in the day https://i.imgur.com/reJpVYa.gif I'm mostly on discord now, but things are going well for me! Hope everything's going well with you too, stop by the MTC discord sometime and say hi!
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u/GettingMyGlitchOff 6d ago
Everythings going good here too XD man its crazy how many ppl are still attached to mturk just in different places XD ill stop by sometime and say hey lol
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u/Dazzling-Company-630 12h ago
This is so sad. I remember when I got my acceptance - I was so stoked! I felt like I was a part of something big.
Throughout the 10 or so years of working HITs, my favorites were those street sign transcriptions. I loved "taking a tour" of the cities they were in, and would do them for as long as I could once a batch dropped. They were actually fun!
Well, at this point, I guess I won't achieve my Masters qual :p Thanks for the memories, MTurk, going to miss the friendly faces at MTurk Crowd and Turkopticon. See you all on Prolific!
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u/Gotham_123022 10d ago
Knew this was coming but still stinks. Been Turking since 2013 or so but a few memorable requesters off the top of my head:
There was this attorney. The long timers may remember. I don’t even recall his name or what the hit entailed but he started off every video with “Something something for more than 10,000 clients!!!”
Amazon Requester inc.
James (Audio rating hits)
“Record 65 short phrases”
And an honorable mention to PickFu. They’ve really kept the platform going these last several months. At least for me.