Thanks for this post. I should add, for us writers:
"I want high-quality NATIVE English writers ONLY! No spinning/re-writes, ORIGINAL WORK ONLY!) (there's your barking orders).... then followed by a LONG list of extensive qualifications: 5 years writing experience, high scores on multitudes of Odesk tests, 100 Odesk hours, and another rant reiterating the high quality they expect. Then the pay: 1 dollar per article.
Right. Yeah. Good luck with that. For 1 dollar an article, you'll be lucky to get spun stuff.
Second: Those job posts about editing, which look good upfront. "I just need someone to edit this _____ I wrote. It's about 50 pages". You take the job, thinking you're going to read through and correct punctuation errors, maybe re-word some awkward sentences. Pay seems reasonable.... and then you receive your 50 pages of stuff to go through, and the amount of work ends up equaling out to about 50 cents per hour.... because the person is completely illiterate. Probably it's an ebook they paid someone else on here 30 dollars to write.