About Me

Welcome to my introductory post for working smarter on amazon mechanical turk.  This blog will be geared to helping bother workers and requesters in whatever capacity I can. 

About me - I am DreamScaper formally of TurkerNation and the hunter world of warcraft forums.  Other handles I used on warcraft were DreamsDrunk, DrunkRaven, LostSoul.  I also used to go to 2+2 forums, though I didn't post enough for anyone to know me.  On madrom you can find me playing lostsoul - if you ever heard of mudding and/or madrom.  On chessbase chess program I play under the handle DreamScaper1976 or 76 - I forget which one.  

Since I am not yet a requester, though been thinking this might be something I'd consider starting in the future, my advices for requesters is more limited.  My advices for requesters is geared more towards making your hit fairer for pay for both the requester and worker, how to make it more attractive for workers to work on, and get your favorite workers to stay working on your hits.  If you are a new requester, or checking this blog out because you are an existing requester, I'd suggest reading any posts you might find interesting to see what I consider the smarter ways to turk.  If your workers are reading this then it might help you be a better requester.  The logic is the same as in chess.  I like reading books that counter my favorite opening so if my opponent has read those I know how to answer them.

For workers - I've been a worker for a little over a year.  I've been unemployeed far longer.  My goal for mTurk is simply to make it as close to minimum wage as I can until I can get back on my feet.  As a worker I try to put in volume per day and current daily goal is $19 a day.  That will get me $5k this year and I hope next year to aim for $10k.  Not bad for being unemployeed!  In any case, all my blog posts will be geared towards what I do, or at least try to do.  Is it the best you can?  I don't know.  But if you can tell me how to do something better, please respond.  While I try to help others every day I still try to learn something every day.  So what you see here is pretty much what I try to do daily. 

Just a few disclaimers before my first post:

1.   I hope to initially start posting daily with new guides.  After I have written what I could, I hope to post at least weekly if there is anything new worth posting.  So if you have any questions for a future blog, let me know.

2.  Please do not link publicly any of my posts on turker nation forums.  If you've read this and see someone posting links to this blog on those forums and have access to their forums please ask them to remove it.  I still check their forums daily so I'll find out and I'll do what I can to deny them any use.  This is my intellectual property.  They have already banned me and stole my work so I have no intentions of allowing them to steal more of my work by copy/pasting it (thanks zerd for getting me banned) or even linking to it.

3.  You'll never find anything in these blogs that help you cheat the system, bot, break ToS, or anything else.  Even if you are mad that most of the jobs are low paying and want to abuse the system, that is not the point of this thread.  I'd rather work for peanuts instead of not even having that chance.

4.  If you like something I've written and thinks it can help out anyone, even on TN, feel free to PM them the address.  All I ask is not to make any reference to these blogs public on their site. 

5.  Everything I share is my own thoughts and doesn't represent anything that is factual.  As they are my opinions I'll try to explain my thought logic so you can choose to agree or not.  So if you simply know better or think I'm full of hot air, more power to you. 

6.  I plan on making a spreadsheet I've developed available at a future date when I'm happy about it.  I'm not sure of anything else I plan on making available via download.  In any case, if you download anything from any link I offer, please run your virus scanner and take all normal precautions.  I hope nothing should harm your system, so do what you need to to make sure.