Beyond AMT: An Analysis of Crowd Work Platforms

While many competitor platforms to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (AMT) now exist, little research has considered them. Such near-exclusive focus on AMT risks its particular vagaries and limitations overly shaping our understanding of crowd work and our field’s research questions and directions. To address this, we present a qualitative content analysis of seven alternative platforms. After organizing prior AMT studies around a set of key problem types encountered, we define our process for inducing categories for qualitative assessment of platforms. We then contrast the key problem types with AMT vs. platform features from content analysis, informing both methodology of use and directions for future research. Our cross-platform analysis represents the only such study by researchers for researchers, intended to enrich diversity of research on crowd work and accelerate progress.ye