I joined mturk in 2008, thought I could make money. I'm not sure what happened then, I forgot all about mturk. Made a few pennies here and there. I've gotten a little desperate this year and need to make some money. The first few days I did really good and wondered why I quit. Now I'm starting to remember, work for hours on end, get some rejections, find jobs you like and can only do so many, and need qualifications for others, which pay 2 cents more. Is mturk hurting the work at home field, YES. There was tons of work at home opportunities not that long ago and now they're pretty much washed up. Companies were willing to pay you at least minimum wage for the jobs we're all fighting for on mturk. Now companies can pay a penny and everyone jumps. We need to all ban together and not accept a penny per task, we are all worth something!
a penny for one click. i agree on hits that take more work. but sets, and other things? nah. you're on your own.
You're speaking to an audience that simply doesn't care. Almost everyone here is completely fine working for 5 bucks an hour, no matter that it is bad for turkers as a whole. These are the same people that post batches for the myriad of people within their little clique to eat up, causing the batches to disappear for all the turkers out there, and for requesters to in turn lower prices as their work is done so quickly no matter what they pay. No one gives a flying **** about turkers as a whole, not even turkers themselves, trust me.
You will need to cultivate a relationship with regular requesters in order to thrive as a worker on AMT. Sit and watch the scroll on TurkAlert one day; you will see some significant dollar amounts changing hands over private HITs. Just waiting for someone else to post Great HITs is not the best strategy. That is the easy thing to do, and you will be competing with too many people for table scraps. ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons