'In retrospect, it might have been foolish to assume that every member of an anonymous crowd would act according to our best interests.'
In my experience with crowdsourcing, most people actually will complete your task honestly and genuinely. Some may not understand it, but they generally just give back noise and cancel each other out. You'll almost always get a few malicious people though, even if their motivations aren't as straightforward as this case.
If you forget to account for this adversarial subset of folks, eventually you're gonna get got. Very cool story/use-case though.
I wonder what someone who writes for a living thinks of it. Oh wait:
"The Hemingway app is fun to experiment with, and it’s useful in that it calls out in your writing places of friction—allowing you to decide whether they are necessary or merely sloppy. No one is above clarity. And the app, based on the experience of running examples of my own writing through it today, is, like a good editor, attuned to the places where vanity seems to be getting the better of things."
$0.03 per email seems awfully low, and if you do 1 article per minute, you're making $2 an hour, which is definitely not cool.
But how long does it actually take to find one email from an article? Maybe 10-15 seconds? Then you're talking about $7-$10 per hour, which for unskilled work doesn't feel especially exploitative.
The real draw of systems like mechanical turk is not that labor is cheaper (it usually isn't), but that's it's more flexible, i.e. you don't have to hire and train people for any particular task.
In my experience with crowdsourcing, most people actually will complete your task honestly and genuinely. Some may not understand it, but they generally just give back noise and cancel each other out. You'll almost always get a few malicious people though, even if their motivations aren't as straightforward as this case.
If you forget to account for this adversarial subset of folks, eventually you're gonna get got. Very cool story/use-case though.