How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine | The Nation
I did something like this setup with the old Google Answers. I figured I already did freelance work a lot, but I couldn't take really big jobs because of my regular job. So I figured I could just do little research projects instead. It was better than this, but it was still ridiculous in a lot of the same ways. I only did a few because most of them were so low paying or ridiculous that it wasn't worth it, but there were people there who'd bust their asses for some lousy $2 question and then still get their answer rejected, and there were people who were doing it because they really needed the money.
That was some kind of bullshit, but these things are a worse bullshit.