I submitted a few weird requests to mturk just to see how it works. I was able to read a bunch of magazines for cheap by paying people $0.01 for every two scanned pages of any magazine that was no older than 3 editions old.

I ended up with a ton of random digitized magazines, and ended up learning a lot about the kinds of people who do mturk tasks from the magazines they scanned. Seems to mostly be bored housewives, at least 10 years ago when I did this.

I paid for my experiments with the ~$50 I earned from doing mturk tasks myself, and let me tell you, it was miserable stuff. Sub-minimum wage drudgery… At least I suffered myself what I made others suffer with my stupid tasks, and all I got out of it was a bunch of articles I didn’t actually want to read.