The Communication Network Within the Crowd

Workers of the Internet unite? Online freelancer organisation among remote gig economy workers in six Asian and African countries

“…Nevertheless, microworkers have been found to make use of the Internet to communicate with each other (Gupta et al ., ; Gray et al ., ; Lehdonvirta, ; Yin et al ., ). Indeed, Yin et al .…”

“…A key finding regarding the collective organisation of microworkers is the importance of Internet forums in structuring worker communications (Martin et al ., ; Yin et al ., ). Yin et al .…”

Tapping into the Collective Creativity of the Crowd: The Effectiveness of Key Incentives in Fostering Creative Crowdsourcing

“…Both of these considerations are relevant to the current study: the former, as the authors observe, can reduce the statistical power of the experimental research, while the latter can help explain why so many workers cheated on the illustration task by uploading pictures from the Internet. Finally, studies show that Mechanical Turk participants also have idiosyncratic attitudes about money, that are not representative to those of a normal population but are in fact similar to the attitudes of student populations [29]. This is a very interesting observation, which could play a significant role in terms of the impact that financial rewards had on the present study's dependent variables.…”

“…As Rogstadius and colleagues note, this is a particularly challenging issue for studies on motivation, "as self-selection is an inherent aspect of a task market" [15]. Furthermore, research has shown that workers frequently talk about requesters and share information about tasks [29], which is also problematic for such studies, because it affects task selection, as well as letting workers know about related studies.…”

The shape of work to come

“…In a more quantitative follow-up study 6 , in which they mapped the social connections among more than 10,000 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, Gray, Suri and their colleagues found that this kind of collaboration can have real pay-offs. Workers who had connections to at least one other person on the platform had higher approval rates, were more likely to gain elite 'master' status, and found out about a new task more quickly than unconnected workers.…”