As embarrassed as I am to admit it –
I signed up for one of those crowd-sourced micropayment labor mills.
you know the drill – “Work from home!”, “Make money completing simple tasks”
They of course use “Work”, “Money”, and “Simple” VERY loosely here.
And I feel like I’ve been taken advantage of in the back of a dirty van.
“Dear God, why? are you that hard up for cash?” I hear you scream –
No. I’m not. So why did I sign up? Hell if I know. maybe I was bored. Maybe I cant justify a new gaming laptop and thought that over the course of a month I could scrape together enough pennies from something like this to buy one.
But of course I cant. nobody can. I effectively made maybe $0.25/hour, and to make matters worse they pay other “workers” to verify your work. These people can’t read, and they can’t think critically. They reviewed my work, rejected half of it, wrote their reasoning in barely comprehensible broken English, and now my “credibility” rating is wrecked so badly I cant even complete basic tasks.
“But mister stress” I hear you say – “Why would you EVER do something like this in your leisure time?”
I don’t know. I feel sick. I’ve been around long enough to know better. These labor mills are arguably the worst things to come out of capitalism in the last 100 years – And if this were the late 1800’s, we’d have burned cloudcrowd headquarters to the ground.
And I just realized that I often make more per day, hands off, from my meager investment in Lendingclub than I would make in a full 8 hours on CloudCrowd (And I have no money in LC)
Moral of this story? Even if you don’t value your leisure time as much or more than your work time, some tasks simply aren’t worth doing. This goes doubly for tasks that allow others to make money off of your back.
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