Ask HN: What is the term for faking automation by using human labor?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11325993

by hotpockets • 10 years ago

8 15 10 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Like early in a startup you fake automation by really using human power. Its supposed to look automated but there is a human behind the scenes doing it. I swear there is a term for this that I can't think of. Best I can think of is meatgearing.

stray• 10 years ago

Work?

hotpockets2• 10 years ago

Ha! I tried editing my text to be clearer what I'm referring to.

jonny_storm2• 10 years ago

Mechanical Turk: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

hotpockets2• 10 years ago

I mean like, you have a 3 person startup and one of you is running around doing work that your customers assume must be already automated.

detaro• 10 years ago

"doing thinks that don't scale"?

jonny_storm2• 10 years ago

Lean Startup had some great stories about beating the pavement and providing services by hand. Perhaps there's some corresponding jargon to be had in there.

boulos• 10 years ago

In addition to mechanical turk, there's also the phrase "Fake it till you make it" which is somewhat appropriate (the connotation is more like "pretend to be a success").

danieltillett• 10 years ago

Unicorn.

brotchie• 10 years ago

Pretty sure one term for it is "concierge MVP" where you make it look like a legit automated service, but in-fact behind the scenes it's all human labour.

kazuyan• 10 years ago

There are two similar but different methods.

Concierge Test is used to understand the mechanics, not user demand. Wizard of Oz (aka Mechanical Turk) is used to evaluate hypotheses.

The more detail in the post by Tristan Kromer below.

https://grasshopperherder.com/concierge-vs-wizard-of-oz-test...

kek918• 10 years ago

I think a lot of small companies does this in the beginning if the task is hard to implement and you have other critical tasks to finish first. I never knew it had a term, fun to know "Mechanical Turk"

"Manual automation" could be another term :)

1472• 10 years ago

I'm very certain the phrase you're looking for is "wizard of oz". That's what Eric Ries called these types of MVPs in The Lean Startup.

1472• 10 years ago

Here's a link: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-Wizard-o...

'Definition of Wizard of Oz testing in Eric Ries' book "The Lean Startup": "where customers believe they are interacting with the actual product, but behind the scenes human beings are doing the work"'

felisml• 10 years ago

More generally, it's a term of art in HCI research, going back to J. F. Kelley in the early 1980s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment

Ask HN: What is the term for faking automation by using human labor?

Related Stories