Quote: In Web3, the entire ecosystem, infrastructure, and other resources have a single purpose: to help people create and thrive together. Corporations and other hierarchical organizations will no longer exist.
Here is a new idea for 2022: Together we are going to create ‘off-the-shelf training datasets’ to compete with crowdsourcing platforms such as Appen, Mechanical Turk, DefinedCrowd and Google Crowdsourcing.
Appen.com claims to have a network of more than 1 million so-called ‘crowdworkers’. Those are people primarily from low-income countries who are desperately looking for a means of generating some additional income. Appen uses their time and pays them a tiny amount of money for their work. So, many people from around the world are creating a huge repository of datasets owned by Appen. In return for their labor those crowdworkers get paid just one single time while Appen is going to make lots of money off of the collective work constantly perfomed by the crowd. On the Appen website none of the crowdworkers are even mentioned. There is no profile of even a single croworker let alone tools like training materials, quizzes, a forum or a place to solicialize.
Here is a quote from one of Appens’ competitors:
With over 5000 CloudWorkers and 200 Clients, Delivery is one of the high paced, growing functions in CloudFactory. We’re a team of 165+ core team members who are serving both Cloud Team and the clients towards our mission of 1M+ meaningful jobs.
CloudFactory says that its mission is to create more than one million meaningful jobs. Really? How exactly does CloudFactory define what a ‘meaningful job’ is?
One of the newest additions to the crowdsourcing game is Neevo – a rather obscure company. Here is what one their crowdworkers has to say about them:
Worked simultaneously on two jobs for them. Both had very similar tasks under an exact same set of rules and guidelines. First job got fully paid. not one wrong task, second one (over 1800 tasks done) wasn’t even paid 30 %. I didn’t even receive a notification, that a severe part of my work might not have met their quality standards. They just refused to pay me around $150, I worked many hours for without giving any evidence. Zero transparency. Someone just tells you, your work is not up to their standards (while the exact same other job was) and you’re expected to accept that.
Stay away from this scamming company and look out for a real job. You’re not working for a bright future but for a more polished form of ugly Manchester capitalism. Disgusting experience.
The entire crowdsourcing industry has been creating a new form of digital feudalism. We can do better. We need to move away from the exploitation model. Instead, let’s use an open-source approach based on wealth-sharing mechanisms that allow every community member to equally benefit from the entire value creation process. I know this sounds very technical and complicated when it fact it’s rather simple.
With Web3, you benefit from the value that your data generates. This means that you don’t just get a few cents when you buy a share of the total value of the product, but you contribute to it through social tokens that will be converted into cryptocurrency at a later date: