Mechanical Turd
I don’t really wanna poop on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) program, but I have a huge problem with it: you can’t sign up to deploy the service unless you give them your bank account information first! Are we living in 1990 or something? Have they ever heard of PayPal – or a credit card, at least? Undoubtedly, Amazon is trying to verify that I have the proper funds. I do have adequate funds, but I’m not going to give them access to my bank account to prove it! If Amazon doesn’t want to use PayPal because it’s eBay’s brand, they’re cutting off their nose to spite their face. FWIW, PayPal has a Web service, too! I really want to test some ideas with MTurk, but not if I have to jump through a flaming hoop to do so. Jeff, can you please smack some sense into your employer?
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3 Comments
Jeff Barr
August 7th, 2006
at 5:22pm
Hey Chris,
This is great feedback. We are definitely listening, and I’ve passed this along to the Mechanical Turk team for consideration.
Thanks!
– Jeff;
Crowdsource » Blog Archive » Mechanical Turd
August 15th, 2006
at 1:42pm
[...] Chris Pirillo tried to create some HIT’s on Mechanical Turk and wasn’t too impressed: I don’t really wanna poop on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) program, but I have a huge problem with it: you can’t sign up to deploy the service unless you give them your bank account information first! Are we living in 1990 or something? Have they ever heard of PayPal – or a credit card, at least? [...]
Eric Cranston
August 15th, 2006
at 2:02pm
Haha…Jeff replied. Yes it is an inconvience to have to hook it up to a bank account….but paypal is problematic. Plus a semi-competetor to Amazon (ebay sells stuff…they sell stuff)
Plus everyone mostly agrees…that Paypal sucks. And as well adds in charges on transfers…which would complicate things for Amazon.
Credit card support is needed though…I thought it was there….I use a debit card for s3…and all my mturk HITs so far have been funded from turking funds.