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Amazon makes it more expensive to get people to do stuff for you
Mechanical Turk, Amazon's "human intelligence task" marketplace is about to get slightly more expensive. For the first time since 2005, the company is going to increase the cut it takes from each transaction, upping the figure from 10 to 20 percent. Amazon is justifying the change by saying that it'll use the extra cash that it raises to improve the service to the benefit of both requesters and workers. It's probably not going to go down too well with "Mechanical Turks" based in countries like India, who are effectively seeing their wages drop by 10 percent. As the Wall Street Journal reports, there's also plenty of consternation from one of the site's biggest customers: university researchers.
