Have you heard of Amazon's Mechanical Turk?
It is a crowdsourcing platform run by Amazon where many people can do many small tasks to earn lots of very small payments.
Sounds a bit like Steem doesn't it?
This is Wikipedia's fuller description....
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing Internet marketplace enabling individuals and businesses (known as Requesters) to coordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks that computers are currently unable to do. It is owned by Amazon. Employers are able to post jobs known as Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs), such as choosing the best among several photographs of a storefront, writing product descriptions, or identifying performers on music CDs. Workers, colloquially known as Turkers, can then browse among existing jobs and complete them in exchange for a monetary payment set by the employer.
That looks interesting. Steem has lots of people willing to do small 'proof-of-brain' tasks to earn small payments.
The problem is with the current model, as Matt of
as eloquently conveyed, you can't keep taking out of the Reward Pool if nothing is being put in. Otherwise the price of STEEM will just keep going down...
Could a Steem Mechanical Turk be part of a solution?
Steem is perfectly equipped to make multiple micropayments.
And Oracle-D have demonstrated 'proof-of-concept' for operating a system not too dissimilar, albeit with fewer workers and larger tasks. External clients invest in Steem, steemians do tasks for them and get paid in upvotes.
Could something like the Oracle-D system be retooled to build a Mechanical Turk for Steem...?
I have not worked for the Amazon Mechanical Turk, nor do I have much more knowledge of it, but it was just another little idea I found at the bottom of my Upcycling STEEM toolbox.
Anyone out there worked for the Amazon Mechanical Turk?
Would this be a way of bringing money into the platform from 'Requesters'
Am I way off balance on this? Or is it a possibility worth exploring?
Here are a few links that give a bit more information and opinion...
Finally, Amazon Pays You: Earn $15 an Hour with Amazon Mechanical Turk
Mechanical Turk Review : How I Made $21,000 a Quarter at a Time