Hi all! Lurker here. I started turking (again) about 2 months ago after finding the need to make some sort of income after leaving my full time job to stay at home with my 5.5 month old daughter. I had previously signed up with mturk back in 2011, made a few bucks, and forgot about it. But, of course, necessity is the mother of invention, and so it led me back to mturk. I'm mostly a lurker, but I thought I'd introduce myself in case I feel the urge to post at some point!
Welcome. This is @Polar Bear and I am @Girl Polar Bear. We are polar bears. You can let us know if you need anything.
Well this is the perfect place to hone your turking craft. Visit the daily thread to keep up with things. Welcome.
Welcome. It is good that you are staying home. You can't get that time back from newborn to 5. I had to work away from home my daughters 1st 3 and a half year and then from 9 to 16 (I worked from home in between 3 and 9) and regret it because I felt I had missed so much from the 1st word to school parties.. money isn't everything.
God-willing, I'm going to try to stay home with her as long as I possibly can. Although I do miss working very, very slightly, I think I'm more suited to self-employment. I'll mturk for a while, but I'm also going to be looking into other avenues for working from home. But we'll see how the future goes.
We have quite a few stay-at-home parents here, mTurk is great for what it is but yeah its always good to have options. FWIW I know the other "big" sites are Prolific.ac, usertesting.com, & UHRS (I think signups are closed atm?) as far as "mturk-like" sites I see others doing alright on. + stuff like appen/lionbridge which are more traditional employment but from home (taxes, PTO, etc) but I'm less familiar with them.
Thanks for the links! I actually applied to Appen, Lionbridge, and the other one...forget its name right now. I was approved for Appen, but there are no projects available ever. Lionbridge sent me a decline email the day I was scheduled to take their test, lol. I'll check out those other avenues you mentioned, though, for sure. I have been working for a few transcription sites as well, as I found through working on mturk that I love doing transcription (Speechpad, Crowdsurf, and just got approved with Rev).
I think Leapforce is the big third one. IIRC Crowdsurf has their own platform now (for a long time) and they pay higher than on mTurk.. Saw a comment the other day about it: So might want to hit that up! Also maybe add "Transcribe This" to your requester watch list, they pay a little better than Speechpad IME. Their TO is kind of spotty but people I know who do them have always sworn that as long as you do it correctly they don't have any problems with rejections. I'm not a huge transcription guy so I don't know all the super special requesters haha but I know there are some very well paid transcription tasks on mTurk if you keep an eye out for the good ones (or buddy up with @jessers who is a bit of a pro lol)
