How Do Crowdworker Communities and Microtask Markets Influence Each Other? A Data-Driven Study on Amazon Mechanical Turk

Abstract

Crowdworker online communities — operating in fora like mTurkForum and TurkerNation — are an important actor in microwork markets. Albeit central to market dynamics, how the behavior of crowdworker communities and the dynamics of online marketplaces influence each other is yet to be understood. To provide quantitative evidence of such influence, we performed an analysis on 6-years worth of mTurk market activities and community discussions in six fora. We investigated the nature of the relationships that exist between activities in fora, tasks published in mTurk, requesters for such tasks, and task completion speed. We validate -- and expand upon — results from previous work by showing that (i) there are differences between market demand and community activities that are specific to fora and task types; (ii) the temporal progression of HIT availability in the market is predictive of the upcoming amount of crowdworker discussions, with significant differences across fora and discussion categories; (iii) activities in fora can have a significant positive impact on the completion speed of tasks available in the market.