I thought that I should follow up and have another look at mturk to see if Amazon has addressed the performance and functionality quirks and issues. Nope.
Granted, the home page loads quickly, but when you actually get into the meat of the app and try to do something with it, it is still crap. For example, viewing the list of ‘HITs’ available shows one with 350 available. Ok, request a HIT for that one. Buzz. Returns a screen that states:
There are no more available HITs in this group.
Great. Honest mistake. Wrong again. The same HIT group shows up on the screen again, stating that it has 350 HITs available. In fact, clicking on any HIT group other than the one that lists 30000+ HITS available (and also has the lowest per HIT payoff) gets you the same message.
It’s amazing to me that this thing has been around for weeks now and still operates like some CS101 I-just-learned-how-to-code-sort-of web app; especially with all of the resources of Amazon behind it.