Bootstrapping the social web on pennies a day

Social websites often suffer from the cold-start problem--no one wants to use them unless other people are already using them. Attracting and retaining those first users is one of the biggest challenges faced by these sites.

So I wasn't totally surprised to find people using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to build interest/traffic in their sites. What I was surprised by was how low people would go--both in terms of tasks and payment--with their HITs (human intelligence tasks).

For example, Steve “Blogging for Money” Stedman pays workers to write blog posts and comment on his blog.

Here's one of his many HITs:

And here's my comment on one of his blog posts, for which I got paid two cents:

I've heard of people making millions of dollars blogging. There's so much potential... the sky's the limit. Thanks for all the tips... I hope to put myself through school by blogging.

Yup, two cents.

There are about 20 of these kinds of HITs on Mechanical Turk now (you'll probably have to set up a worker account to see them).

It's pretty clear where I stand on this. Collective intelligence and the wisdom of crowds can have real benefits under the right conditions, and independence is one of those conditions. Paying Mechanical Turk workers to write comments as if they were real--like a cross between gold-farming and astro-turfing--is pretty odious.

At the same time, you have to admire the pluck it takes to outsource your blog's content and comments to virtual day labourers, leaving yourself free to collect ad revenue.