What am I doing?

I'm always looking to make a few extra dollars and this time my seeking lead me to Amazon Mechanical Turk. As a worker on the site you accept HITs or Human Intelligence Tasks for pay. This is how Amazon describes a HIT:

A Human Intelligence Task, or HIT, is a question that needs an answer. A HIT represents a single, self-contained task that a worker can work on, submit an answer, and collect a reward for completing.

So why are there requests to write articles for one penny on this site? It looks like the requesters are trying use to this platform to exploit workers.

I just started with Turk and I really just wanted to do some basic tasks for a few cents. I'm not sure how much longer I'll pursue Turk. I already feel like I've wasted too much time on it just looking for HITs that pay appropriately.