Notes from a Day on the Forums: Recommendations for Maintaining a Good Reputation as an Amazon Mechanical Turk Requester

Social scientists are increasingly collecting data online, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mTurk) service has become a ubiquitous platform for recruiting online subjects. While a growing number of academic journal articles investigate the merits of this methodology, its increasing popularity and the rapidly changing nature of the online community demand frequent monitoring of workers’ feedback to ensure best practices. Thus, we decided to spend “a day at the forums” to learn more about workers' thoughts and feedback, and try to establish some best practices. We found that (i) Turkers consistently preferred short studies with only a handful of questions per page, (ii) Accepting HITs (and paying bonuses) on time is as important as the amount paid, (iii) it is important to keep a close eye on what turkers post on websites such as redditt and turkopticon, (iv) accessing the HIT should be as seamless as possible, (v) and that having transparent procedures for payment and disqualification is important. We also provide a set of links to useful MTurk resources.