What is Gems?
Gems is a decentralized micro task platform. Think about it as a decentralized version of Amazon's Mechanical Turk marketplace (MTurk).
Okay.. What is Amazon's Mechanical Turk marketplace?
MTurk is a marketplace where a company or individual may request a micro task to be performed, offering money for those that complete the requested task. Individuals may then sign up for the marketplace as a part of the workforce and take on requested tasks that they have expertise for.
Basically, I have a small task I need done. I put money up in front of a room full of people and those that are qualified to perform the task step up.
Tell me more about these micro tasks.
These micro tasks all have one thing in common: They require human intelligence. If they didn't I could just run a script, or use a program to perform said task. This is why MTurk actually refers to each task as a HIT (Human Intelligence Task).
Examples:
Choose what color the car is in each picture.
Categorize picture based on the attitude of the people in the pictures.
Fill out a survey on your outlook for the United States.
Choose which emotion you associate the following words with.
Before we go on, let's make sure we're clear.
Rodney needs to create a suitable online advertisement for a local burger joint. He wants to know which words/images/colors are met with positivity by the general populous. This will help give him a good idea of what his advertisement should include. To this end, he creates a HIT on MTurk that requests workers match their emotions with a list of words, phrases, colors, and pictures. He offers $0.05 (USD) to whoever completes this task.
Sarah, Jane, and Joseph all accept Rodney's task and make their selections. Each of them get paid the $0.05.
This is the idea.
So it sounds like MTurk works great...right?
Amazon MTurk does a great job of getting the requesters the labor they need. Amazon MTurk also does a great job at shaving a large portion of the money off the top.
The payout made by a requester is charged a 20% fee off the top. If the requester chooses to pay a bonus for exemplary service, this bonus is also subject to the 20% fee. There's a 5% extra fee for the requester asking for workers with a good track record.
At best Amazon takes 1/5th of the money off the top. At worst, it's nearly half.
Most reports I've read report the average laborer making $5 an hour, with an estimated half of users making below. I've seen reports up to $10 an hour but that seems to be very few and where income tops out. With such a low payout you have to ask yourself, should Amazon be taking so much off the top?
Average minimum wage across the United States is $7.25 and hour. Is a job that you can be expected to make below minimum wage really an appealing use of your time?
To quote Trent Hamm at thesimpledollar.com:
"If you can't finish a fifty cent task in less than four minutes and move on to the next one, you're earning less than minimum wage at this."
50 cents every 4 minutes is $7.50 an hour. So without breaks you will be making just over minimum wage at this pace.
Ok so how does Gems solve the pay problem?
Gems does not charge a centralized fee. Instead, when a laborer performs their work a token is mined. Part of this token is taken by the network to supply to the verification process of new laborers and to pay for the Ethereum gas requirement for transactions.
With no middle man taking money off of the top this frees up a larger amount of the money requesters are putting up for these jobs. This benefits the laborers by allowing them a much larger amount of money without asking the requester to put up more.
Is the pay issue all Gems is good for?
Gems solves a number of issues. Two very important ones are the weak verification processes from other micro task platforms, and the absurdly high cost of building the interfaces required for the laborers to provide the sought data.
Conclusion
Gems seems like the legitimate form of crowd sourcing micro tasks. They seek to turn it into more than sweatshop labor work. MTurk's existence is proof of the demand for a micro task platform such as this, it's just that up until now it hasn't felt like there's been an actual solution that people can make careers out of. The more that make careers out of micro tasks, the higher quality the work. This could have a legitimate impact on how individuals, startups, and smaller businesses approach crowd sourcing human intelligence required tasks.
Please read the white paper for more details on the issues of the crowd sourced micro task market and how Gems addresses all of these problems. Also, stop by their website to review their team and their expertise. You can also join their Telegram for important news and updates.
Site: https://gems.org/
White Paper: https://gems.org/whitepaper.pdf
Telegram: https://t.me/gemsorg