Amazon will no longer allow new users on the crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk starting from the end of this month. After twenty years, it seems to be on its last legs.
Amazon appears to be on the verge of closing the doors of Mechanical Turk, a platform that has supported crowdsourcing for twenty years. As of July 30, no new customers will be admitted, according to a banner at the top of the webpage. There is no mention of a final closure yet, but since the platform will only remain ‘in maintenance’, that may not take much longer.
Older than AWS
Mechanical Turk was launched in 2005, making it older than Amazon’s AWS cloud. In its heyday, it was a popular platform for crowdsourcing, where users could post tasks for bidding. These ranged from solving Captcha puzzles to simple automation and completing or labeling databases.
Although the platform’s heyday seems to be over, Mechanical Turk has played an important role in the development of data and training sets for AI systems. Researchers made use of it, as did companies such as the maligned Cambridge Analytica. Over the years, AWS developed its own alternatives for data collection and labeling, such as SageMaker.
Palliative care
It is therefore not surprising that Amazon no longer wants to put effort into Mechanical Turk. Amazon is not saying for now that it will shut down Mechanical Turk, but users see the decision to no longer allow new customers as a sign that it won’t be long. Placing a platform ‘in maintenance’ is the IT equivalent of palliative care. For those who still use the platform, Amazon promises minimal impact.
However, fans from the very beginning and the very end feel that Amazon gave up on the platform years ago. Over the years, it has been flooded by fraudsters and bots, making it useless for both commercial and research purposes. It therefore seems only a matter of time before Amazon finally pulls the plug.