I've never used Mechanical Turk but from what I hear, each action pays out pennies. I think the world is connected enough to where a person should be able to ask a question and get an immediate answer, no matter the subject. People would surely pay for that, in my opinion.
It could work with some sort of verification process where answering gets you the most money but the person confirming an answer gets paid too, albeit a smaller amount. An answer with 5-10 confirmations gets sent to the user, depending on the difficulty of the question. There could be a ranking system where harder questions cost more money to be answered.
Imagine you're visiting a city and want to ask the hive "what's a good hipster cafe?" or, a problem I recently had, construction workers were making lots of noise early in the morning and I wanted to know if that's legal to disturb the peace that early. Big companies want this kind of task to be handled by AI but I'd much prefer a human element to it (like Ask HN/Quora, only on steroids).
- 5$/month: a good windows backup (audited encryption + cloud or easy management of multiple external drives. Single system image once per month, versioned backups for all my documents). Currently trying arq but it has no proven crypto and no system images.
- find me the best nieche software for X with these requirements. On a human level. For many things there are 5 good softwares and one clear winner. Somehow it's still hard to find the winner without skimming a few human authored comparisons (if you find them) and installing 2 or 3. E.g. bulk-crop pdf pages¹ or visual click automation².
¹ https://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/?source=typ_redirect
It might hold you a little accountable for things like exercise and offload some errands and legwork for easy things like PP is asking. There are services for this already but I'm thinking more opinionated and motivational.
I wonder, if it would make sense, to have a service, which would receive all your mail, sorts it for you, throws out the junk, scans the rest and email that to you. In Norway, I rarely receive any important physical mail, especially since the government has started a secure email service[0], where you can receive your payslip and other important documents from government departments. The senders are pre authorized and pay a small fee to send an email to the user but the service is free for the user of the service.
To put it another way, the time and effort of signing up with a new service (password email etc.) and dealing with its payment process is one of those $5 problems. The pain of obtaining the service is about equal to the value of the service.
An answer could be anything as "getting a coffee once a week", "potluck to fix the office's X/get new office X", "stop sublime from notifying you haven't bought the full version"... infinite number of things.
On the other hand, anything for the office has to be worth $100's of dollars before it is worth pursuing. Other wise the productivity lost obtaining and installing it is less than the value.
