So Long, and Thanks for All the HITs

Amazon Mechanical Turk is shutting down soon. I came up with an idea for a small project to say goodbye. I was getting pretty excited to build this, but I just discovered that Amazon has stopped allowing new Mechanical Turk (MTurk) requester signups. Since I don’t already have an account, I cannot execute this idea. So I’m going to offer it up to anyone who’d like to take it and run with it. The idea is to use MTurk itself to help the people who worked on HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) to share their memories. I was thinking of starting with a small HIT asking folks to fill in the blank: Mechanical Turk was . I was going to test that HIT to see what actually happened, but I hoped to hear things like: Mechanical Turk was how I paid for groceries when money was tight. Mechanical Turk was weird little jobs at 2 a.m. Mechanical Turk was the reason I could stay home with my kid. Mechanical Turk was tedious and strangely addictive. For this hit I planned to pay a few cents, collect 1,000…