Mechanical Turk: Now with 40.92% Spam.
At first, I thought MTurk was good for getting translation work done, and checked by others. It worked OK, but I had to be clever to avoid the cheaters who would ignore instructions not to use machine translation. After refining my tactics, talking to a lot of workers, and fending off the crooks, I got a few decent translations (for my iPhone app).<p>Then I tried a new tactic. I hired some pros from various translation websites. All were more expensive (money-wise) than MT, but the results were better, and I spent a lot less time. Some were even close to MTurk prices.<p>So, I don't use MTurk anymore. Maybe if I had a more mindless task I'd try again, but it  is a lot of hassle.<p>I know this isn't exactly what the author means by "spam" - but even the workers on that site are often dishonest. It's a total black market.