November 2, 2025
Click farms, mall spies & grandma’s recipes
MTurk is 20 years old today – what did you create with it?
MTurk at 20: mall spies, recipe rescues, and gig worker drama
TLDR: MTurk turns 20, and commenters spill wild stories—from mall surveillance and recipe rescues to automated task hustles. The crowd debates fair pay, commission hikes, and bot-like behavior, showing how crowdsourcing shaped internet work and why human judgment still matters in the age of AI.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) just turned 20, and the internet’s gig OG is getting a chaotic, heartfelt birthday roast on Hacker News. One veteran said they ran millions of tasks for U.S. malls—checking store hours, tracking restaurant reservations, and even catching kiosk links that suddenly redirected to adult sites. Cue the lingerie vs. “skin detection” algorithm fail memes and pro tips like “pay people fairly” and “run tasks multiple times to build consensus.”
Then came the drama: folks admit an automation arms race—one commenter confessed they “automated some HITs” (HITs = tiny paid tasks) for cash, while another warned that banning super-fast workers triggered a wave of unexpected fallout. Nostalgia poured in from early days of awful audio transcriptions and cheap surveys, contrasted with a bittersweet story of a family’s handwritten recipes lovingly transcribed by a single dedicated Turker. And academia chimed in: it used to be cheap and popular, until Amazon allegedly hiked commissions and quality dipped. The community split between “pay humans well, design better tasks” and “lol, people clicked ‘left’ even when images didn’t load.” MTurk’s birthday party is equal parts gratitude, gig hustle confessions, and a warning shot for the AI era: humans are clever, messy, and still very, very necessary.
Key Points
- •MTurk was developed by two “two-pizza” teams at AWS over about a year.
- •The platform launched on November 2, 2005, and saw activity ramp up after a short discovery period.
- •At launch, AWS had roughly 100 employees, with broad on-call responsibilities across all of AWS.
- •Amazon’s overall headcount at that time was about 10,000 employees.
- •When MTurk launched, Amazon S3 was in private beta and Amazon EC2 existed only as a whitepaper.