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This might very well be the case. People write Amazon reviews or Coderific employer ratings for a number of reasons, but usually it's because there's some intrinsic motivation, such as an urge to get some experience with a product or employer off their chest. And it's entirely possible that the Mechanical Turk's apparent failure is due to its extrinsic motivation, paying people for content. When you attach a small price tag to a task rather than making the task its own reward, suddenly the task is that much less appealing.To illustrate this idea, here's an old joke from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
The Coding Horror article claims that Amazon, when making the Mechanical Turk, should have foregone the extrinsic rewards and instead chosen a reward system based on intrinsic motivation. The post then goes on to give supposed examples of intrinsic motivation such as Folding@Home's leaderboards or Reddit's front page.The problem here is that getting onto "top contributor" lists or seeing your links moderated upward on sites like Reddit or Digg involve the exact opposite of intrinsic motivation. When you post a link to Reddit, you're usually not doing so for the sheer fun of it, but rather for the extrinsic reward of seeing your post get moderated upward by other people, thereby overshadowing any internal motivations.There is actually very little difference in the reward system employed by the Mechanical Turk and Reddit. Both replace your internal driving motivation to do some task for its own sake with an external motivating factor. Both involve tying a reward directly to performing the task. The only reason that projects like Reddit and Folding@Home are so much more successful than those like the Mechanical Turk at employing extrinsic rewards to drive user-provided content is that the successful sites rely on the weighty reward of peer recognition.Which would you rather have: Ten cents from Amazon for providing some small amount of content, or the knowledge that some link you provided to Reddit was well-received by a large group of semi-anonymous peers? In either case, you can assume equal intrinsic motivation for the respective tasks (not much), but in Reddit's case, there's the possibility that the content you submit will be greeted with positive recognition.Every time you post something to Reddit and get it moderated up, that's like a little referendum on your worth as a human being. The external reward of course doesn't make you want to do the task any more for its own sake. It's just a very effective means at getting people to share links that they otherwise might not care about sharing.
blog - motivation, Reddit, and Mechanical Turks
posted by witten on April 10, 2007
In an earlier post (http://coderific.com/blog/post/437) I wrote about how adding a tipping system to Coderific would potentially corrupt people's intrinsic motivations for posting employer ratings. Yesterday, Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror wrote about Amazon's Mechanical Turk project as a failure (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000828.html), suggesting that paying for people to perform various menial tasks interferes with their internal motivations for doing those tasks. He then goes on to compare the pay-for-content Mechanical Turk with Amazon's freely provided customer reviews:
The strength of the user reviews is one of the main reasons I frequent Amazon. That's user-submitted content that people invested countless thousands of man-hours on. And Amazon didn't pay anyone a dime to do it.
This might very well be the case. People write Amazon reviews or Coderific employer ratings for a number of reasons, but usually it's because there's some intrinsic motivation, such as an urge to get some experience with a product or employer off their chest. And it's entirely possible that the Mechanical Turk's apparent failure is due to its extrinsic motivation, paying people for content. When you attach a small price tag to a task rather than making the task its own reward, suddenly the task is that much less appealing.To illustrate this idea, here's an old joke from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
An elderly man, harassed by the taunts of neighborhood children, finally devises a scheme. He offered to pay each child a dollar if they would all return Tuesday and yell their insults again. They did so eagerly and received the money, but he told them he could only pay 25 cents on Wednesday. When they returned, insulted him again and collected their quarters, he informed them that Thursday's rate would be just a penny. "Forget it," they said - and never taunted him again.
The Coding Horror article claims that Amazon, when making the Mechanical Turk, should have foregone the extrinsic rewards and instead chosen a reward system based on intrinsic motivation. The post then goes on to give supposed examples of intrinsic motivation such as Folding@Home's leaderboards or Reddit's front page.The problem here is that getting onto "top contributor" lists or seeing your links moderated upward on sites like Reddit or Digg involve the exact opposite of intrinsic motivation. When you post a link to Reddit, you're usually not doing so for the sheer fun of it, but rather for the extrinsic reward of seeing your post get moderated upward by other people, thereby overshadowing any internal motivations.There is actually very little difference in the reward system employed by the Mechanical Turk and Reddit. Both replace your internal driving motivation to do some task for its own sake with an external motivating factor. Both involve tying a reward directly to performing the task. The only reason that projects like Reddit and Folding@Home are so much more successful than those like the Mechanical Turk at employing extrinsic rewards to drive user-provided content is that the successful sites rely on the weighty reward of peer recognition.Which would you rather have: Ten cents from Amazon for providing some small amount of content, or the knowledge that some link you provided to Reddit was well-received by a large group of semi-anonymous peers? In either case, you can assume equal intrinsic motivation for the respective tasks (not much), but in Reddit's case, there's the possibility that the content you submit will be greeted with positive recognition.Every time you post something to Reddit and get it moderated up, that's like a little referendum on your worth as a human being. The external reward of course doesn't make you want to do the task any more for its own sake. It's just a very effective means at getting people to share links that they otherwise might not care about sharing.