Title: As of 22nd August (tomorrow for the hermits among us), Mechanical Turk is giving the huge middle finger to anyone who wants to be a requester and create HITs on MTurk if they aren&#x27;t a US resident.<p>I have used MTurk for years and it is infinitely easier than using alternative websites. For example, my startup which is still in somewhat of it&#x27;s early stage launch (I plan on doing a Show HN next week) has used it for about a hundred thousand HITs already.<p>I run a vacation rental marketing platform ( edit: www.rentivo.com for the curious) that also builds websites for home owners and agents and handles their payment processing issues. We need to do things like detect watermarks, tag images for inside&#x2F;outside. Label images. Do data transcription for one website to a strict scheme and we validate thousands of URLs to categorize them based on set questions that we provide.<p>Being able to have everything returned in a fixed CSV is so useful. We have have dozens&#x2F;hundreds of workers handle our HITs simulatenously...<p>But now Mechanical Turk is impossible to use if you don&#x27;t have a social security number. This is because you need to sign up to Amazon Payments to use Mechanical Turk.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;requester.mturk.com&#x2F;mturk&#x2F;amazonpaymentsacctreqmts<p>There are no alternatives that exist from what I can gather. You have sites like CloudSource, CloudFlower, ClickWorker etc but all of these are just wrappers around Mechanical Turk and require a budget in the thousands.<p>The simplicity of MTurk meant that I could create a HIT with 70k HITs and have it completed over the weekend in the format I need.<p>If I hire someone on Freelancers or oDesk.. it would take weeks to do this!!<p>What solutions exist to overcome this huge gap! We really need to use MTurk.. and I don&#x27;t believe that any true alternatives exist.<p>Edit: Dont&#x27; CloudFlower have a minimum spend of $2,500 per month? That&#x27;s like 5 times our current monthly costs. There is no way we would ever be able to pay this. Plus, I want to handle the creation of the HITs myself. I don&#x27;t need someone to do it all for me. I typically managed to create HITs that would only cost a $400 at most!
Upvote: