Dawn of the Digital Sweatshop

I think the real problem here is that the systems (being built by people making far more than minimum wage) and beneficiaries of those systems (also making far more than minimum wage) haven't yet been able to extract enough value from HITs to pay a decent wage. If a worker can only produce $3/hr in economic value, there's no way he can or should be paid $10/hr.<p>Once a work system is good enough to provide 5 minute highly qualified answers to questions like "is this CT indicative of cancer?", there will be a lot of people making good wages on task marketplaces. I think we're just in a transitional period right now.

MobileWorks was one of the few companies that joined YC with an explicit social agenda tied up with our commercial goals. Our idea's always been that you can get much higher-quality results than Mechanical Turk by treating people better, paying more fairly, and focusing on the worker -- the opposite of Turk's anonymous high-volume approach.<p>Still, it's funny to see how surprised crowd workers are when they first find a crowd platform that takes their interests into account more than Turk, even through small steps like maintaining a friendly community of workers and a gentle onboarding process. One guy told us that "going from Mturk to MobileWorks is like going from a seedy motel to a 5-star hotel".

Why is an article like that (quality long form journalism) published in a local alt-weekly paper vs. something national?

Yet another indication skill development is the key to a decent life. Just like nobody will pay much for unskilled labor, nobody is going to pay much for unskilled button clicking.<p>People who depend on laws to extract more than their labor is worth are swimming against the current.

Here's one way Facebook has benefited from this type of model - <a href="http://gawker.com/5885714/" rel="nofollow">http://gawker.com/5885714/</a> - "Inside Facebook’s Outsourced Anti-Porn and Gore Brigade, Where ‘Camel Toes’ are More Offensive Than ‘Crushed Heads’"

It's hardly a "sweatshop", since performing online tasks is not really physically demanding.