It's been over a year and a half since i've spent any serious time on Mechanical Turk trying to supplement low income, so some of my experience might be dated. With a bit of a learning curve it's plenty doable to find decently paying jobs in transcription, writing, etc. on MT, especially if you have a strong grasp of the English language. But even with higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs on that platform, the overall experience of working on MT can often end up being plenty demoralizing and unfair in many many ways, such as qualifying for skilled work and also being compensated for work performed.

The most frustrating jobs i've ever performed on the platform were usually approx 5-10 minute tasks that seemed to be decently paying and straightforward, asking you to categorize items based on some arbitrary but seemingly simple system, but later all 5 or more submissions you might have made could be blanket denied / payment refused. In that case not only do you not get payed, but having HIT submissions rejected really seriously hurts your reputation and what jobs you're allowed to apply for on MT; often many more high paying jobs on the system use high acceptance rate and flawless work history as the lowest bar for entry, and so MT workers can be screwed over incredibly by having work rejected through no fault of their own.

To not get seriously screwed newcomers are somehow supposed to know which types of HIT's to definitely avoid that could kill their rating, but without enough information to actually make that judgement. A task might seem easy and give the illusion that it's okay to send 5 or 10 submissions in a row, only to later have them all rejected and serious reputation damage done.

I think it's interesting but also really sad how this mirrors a lot of the unfairness and power imbalance in the larger working world as well. Reputation is everything, but if you just happen to get unlucky to start out your career working for clueless bosses / clients with unrealistic expectations, there's a good chance future job and career prospects are going to be seriously hindered, if not completely derailed.

Transcription work was usually very well paying i found, but doing one long transcription task for a $30 payout is a huge risk the way things were set up. Never mind that you worked for 4 or 5 hours on it; whoever assigned the job can reject it for whatever random reason they want and you get nothing. As nice as it can be to earn a nice wage for more high-skilled tasks, the possibility of being denied any payment for a days work with little recourse is really frustrating and demoralizing; the way Mechanical Turk is structured if anyone's taking a negative financial hit for work done, it's almost without fail going to be the worker.

Though this CMU professor obviously put some work into this write-up, i don't see how somebody can possibly get an accurate picture of what it's like trying to earn an income on one of these platforms by just devoting 4 hours and extrapolating based on that really limited experience. It is really easy to miss all but the most obvious and glaring problems that way, just from not sticking around long enough to even run across them.

There are plenty of MT workers who have spent much more substantial amounts of time on the platform, that are much better able to communicate benefits and pitfalls for the everyday worker. They might not be professors at prestigious universities like CMU, but having a decent amount of hands-on experience should really be the low bar for discussing pros/cons of the platform seriously; just as one example assumptions about longer-term take-home pay in the write-up were pretty naive: many better paying tasks (especially web browsing tasks and surveys paying more than a pittance) are often in limited supply and cannot be repeated either at all, or only a few times per day / week, etc. Even the best employers providing the most decent fairly-compensated work come and go, making a steady healthy income sometimes very difficult to achieve even in the best of circumstances.

Mechanical Turk has experienced a lot of success from the start largely because they created a service that makes it so easy for virtually anybody with internet access and a basic computer, to work from home and perform simple tasks / other types of work when and wherever they want, and actually get paid for it.

By any decent standards of developed-world countries the pay is shit though, and worker protections and benefits are nonexistent; workers can be denied payment and even have their reputation ruined for no good reason, with little in the way of an appeals process. But even now services like MT are still a pretty new thing. Maybe in 10 or even 20 more years most of the bugs will get worked out, and workers of every skill level can be a on more equal footing when negotiating with employers, settling disputes etc.