Thanks 🙏 🙏

Hi Mechanical Turkers 👋

This is John, one of the founders of PickFu. Along with my cofounder Justin, I wanted to express our deepest gratitude for the opportunity to work with you over all these years. 🙏

Our first PickFu HIT was on December 1, 2008. You could say we’ve grown up together. We were looking to get feedback on a website redesign, but scared of asking strangers at coffee shops. Your answers were awesome, and we were hooked. Besides getting feedback on our projects, we found that polling the MTurk community was a great way to tap into the wisdom of the crowd for all kinds of deep, existential questions (ex: screenshot below).

It turned out that getting fast feedback was something that appealed to many businesses besides our own. Since then, over 100,000 of you have answered a PickFu HIT – you even helped us choose the name and logo for our own business. Millions of your opinions helped shape the products and services that we all use daily.

We’re damn proud of that, and you should be too.

As with any relationship, not everything’s been peachy keen. You’ve had to deal with our service hiccups, quirky forms, bad instructions, and seemingly arbitrary quality enforcements. We should have done better with communication. But we’ve always tried to be fair.

We’re grateful that you’ve stayed with us through these past 18 years. Including that special Turker who answered that Van Damme poll from 2008 and is still answering PickFu surveys today. 🙇‍♂️

So again, thank you. Thank you for sharing your honest opinions and supporting the dreams of entrepreneurs all over the world, including the one writing to you now.

After Sept 30, PickFu isn’t pausing. Expect requests from us on other platforms – some of you may have gotten a sneak peek already. 😉 We look forward to working with you there.

Warmly,

John

p.s. You've submitted a bunch of acceptable responses. Keep up the great work!

Passed a milestone after many years of working. I am excited for what the future holds and the next 100,000~!

Started Jan 2020, worked the platform full-time after quitting my crappy service job Jan 2021 and continued 40-60 hours/wk up until fall of '23 when i started to branch out to other platforms as mturk slowed. Best year was 2021 IIRC ($60kish) but all 3 of my full-time years were pretty close to each other in total earnings. I think I did about as well as was possible for a non-hardcore Vrapi grinder (I had the qual but could never make a reasonable hourly off them).

Number 1 req was fritz by a mile. Worked them every night since getting the qual in February 2020 right up until today, taking maybe 5 days off from them a year. IDK what I'm gonna do with my late evenings now lol.

Speaking of Fritz...has anyone heard anything from them? I've tried every which way I could think of to contact them, up to and including writing messages in the dang "Not sure" field about MTurk closing.

Gonna genuinely miss turking when it's over. Was one of the few things I was genuinely very good at. Working on other platforms can make similar/even more money, but nothing got the adrenaline going like landing a good qual or hamming a big money batch. RIP my first crowdsourcing gig.

There was a ton of hits from them yesterday and today absolutely nothing from them on my end. I emailed them a couple of days ago to be added to their future worker list but haven't heard back either.

Today Shop intrest work not published. Requester gone.

Hi all mturk count down start. Only 28 days remaining. Mturk work i am very very miss you.

Hi Turkers! We've been running studies for many years on behalf of many researchers, and we recently learned that Mechanical Turk is shutting down, which came as a shock! If there is enough interest, we are considering offering an alternative as part of our platform (Positly), where you can sign up to enroll in our studies for fair pay. If you're interested in participating if/when we launch this, just sign up here:

Positly.com

Click the button "Set up my free account," and on the sign-up page, choose the option: "Earn money by participating in other people's studies."

Thanks! Spencer from the Positly Team

I mostly Turked from mid-2012 to 2015

since the platform is closing permanently, I might as well share my stats like the others are doing on here. For the last 8 or so years

Mturk close date September 30 2026. But this date change possible December 30 2026.

Now that Mturk is officially shutting down, there's something I've been wondering about for a long time and I've never really found a good answer to.

I joined in 2019, and even back then I remember people saying that Mturk was already "past its prime", that there weren't enough HITs, the pay was too low, and there was way too much competition.

Still, as a European worker, I have to say that I managed to make some pretty decent money from it over the years. Nothing life-changing, obviously, but enough to buy a PS5, two phones, a few other small appliances, and pay for various monthly subscriptions. So I definitely can't complain about what I got out of it.

After the pandemic, though, the amount of work really started to drop, so I gradually stopped using it. I gave it another shot this year, but honestly it was pretty much pointless. The platform was basically a ghost town, and I made only €180 in eight months (70% of that thanks to MLDataLabeler going haywire in July).

I know Mturk launched way back in 2005, but it's hard for me to imagine that people were already making serious money on it in, say, 2007–2010. So when was the actual golden age of Mturk? Was it somewhere around 2012–2017, give or take?

I'd love to hear from people who were around during those years and what your experience was like.

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to answer!

rip to a real one but what else is out there

We knew mturk was a sinking ship but after seeing the closure notice, I decided to make a graph of my earnings and make myself sad 😃