So I recently discovered Mturk and I was wondering how do I go about starting since it seems like a good opportunity for me considering I've nothing to do during summer. I watched a couple of videos and I seem to have the concept and basic steps down but I'd appreciate any other advice. What scripts do I need to have and how do I get them, etc. I'm also curious as to which HITS I should be doing (I have the list of easy HITS to do) but I'm not sure if I those are the ones I should be doing since there are people telling me to avoid the ones that have low payout($.01-$.03). What's the most optimal method to begin with and once I hit 1000 HITS what should I be doing?(I'm pretty sure I can figure this out myself once I watch tutorials on how to use the scripts).
First I would get the MTS extension. <-- Click the link. If it were me starting out again, I would do the 100 hits per day limit for the first 10 (11?) days of the probation period to get to 1k asap. Try to stick to "safe" hits. In the beginning it's extremely important to not get any rejections if you can help it. There is nothing wrong with doing low paying hits; especially when you're new. Figure that after the probation period you can accept a max of 3800 hits per day. If they each pay .02 then that's $76 in a day. Don't do p9r, they are easy but reject randomly and you can't always get them reversed. Watch the daily thread, ask questions and do 'safe' hits that don't reject at first.
www.mturksuite.com is probably the only script you really need to get started. Its actually an extension, not a script, but its more or less a big bundle of @Kadauchi 's most important & helpful scripts. It'll keep you from getting overloaded with 10 different tutorials for 8 different scripts that may or may not be up to date blah blah blah. Its simple (relative to other scripts especially) and works right out the gate. It also integrates turkopticon which is something you should familiarize yourself with because one of the most important things for new turkers is to avoid rejections. Its like Yelp for workers to review requesters. Not perfect, but an amazing resource for newbies. You'll see scores next to requester names if you have MTS installed, that's turkopticon. During your probation you'll only be able to do 100 HITs for 10 days, so you'll have tons of free time to follow the daily thread and reading/asking questions when something confusing comes up. Most of us congregate there in the mornings and folks filter in/out through the day and chat about their work, post HITs/scripts, etc etc so its a good resource to become acquainted with as a new worker. What you work on doesn't really matter, you can focus on making money with surveys that you may qualify for but do try and max out that 100 since 1k and 5k total approved HITs are fairly important "milestones" on mTurk. So if you're nearing the end of your work time and still have room, panda some of the penny HITs to get the most out of your #s. Once probation is over, well you'll have a whole slew of new questions I'm sure. Don't ask why you're doing this, just let the penny addiction take hold and don't look back
They are bad, really bad. But they do not reject randomly. They even reply back at you to tell why you got a reject every time if you ask. Yeah, do not do them.
Pay attention especially to the 'Fair' rating on turkopticon. Your approval rate as a worker is very important. Once you have more hits approved you can afford to take some rejections but early on you'll want to be very careful to only work on safe hits. One thing to keep in mind when deciding what to work on is that the time it takes to complete a hit is just as important as the pay for it. If you spend an hour on a hit that pays $2, you would have made less than you could by doing a lot of lower paying hits in the same amount of time. Don't automatically dismiss hits just because the pay is low and don't automatically assume a hit with high pay is good either.
Ones I found were Leonardo Monteiro, Written Paper, and Scotty Alto. Of over 4k Hits done, I've only gotten 1 rejection from these three, which was written paper and well deserved. Also a side note, Written paper gives bonuses on theirs.
