NEW and want advice

Hey there to everyone! I am fresh in this little biz and would love some hints on success. I am a stay at home mom so any income is worth the work. I am on daily checking for HITs or tests to try to qualify. Yet nothing seems to really come along that actually goes through. Some previews let me submit answers and some don't. Alot of receipt HITs are not even in English and that is my only language. I keep researching because I don't know the best ways to qualify or get approved for anything. I have yet to know what these "vacation rental" means or consists of. HELP!

 

MTurk is pretty much dead. Most of the available work is locked behind closed qualifications, so your best approach is to take every qualification test you can and try to catch a qualification HIT at the right time. I recommend keeping an eye on https://turkerview.com/qualifeye/; it tracks most of the tests for you and saves time. However, as I mentioned, the platform is in decline, so even Qualifeye doesn't catch much these days.

Your best bet is to diversify and sign up for Prolific and Cloud Research:

• https://www.cloudresearch.com/products/connect-for-participants/
• https://www.prolific.com/participants

One important thing to note: you shouldn't be able to submit anything from a preview. If you're submitting something directly from the iframe without first accepting the HIT, you won’t get credit. Always make sure to accept the HIT before completing it.

 

Thanks. Of course, I find something I can actually benefit from and bam it's not even making people money anymore. I have been requesting qualification anywhere I can and I'm not getting anything back. I'm always trying the "ctrl + F" for taking tests and none ever pop up either. I will consider the other 2 options you mentioned and try my luck there. Thanks again!

 

That's how it usually goes, but TBF, this platform has been around for about two decades. You can thank MTurk for its decline, though. They let companies like Cloud Research flood the platform with HITs. Once Cloud Research realized they could cut out the middleman (MTurk), they poached all the requesters and moved them to their own platform.

I wouldn’t bother with requesting qualifications. You might get lucky, but in practice, it doesn’t really work. For finding tests, Qualifeye does that for you. It basically scans all the available HITs every few seconds and grabs the test link. Qualifeye only pulls data from new HITs and shows it for 7 days, though.

If you poke around, you might find some active tests that don’t have a HIT anymore. Sometimes requesters will reuse the same test or qualification across multiple HITs, but you never really know. That’s why I said you should just take them all—it’s the best way to have a chance at qualifying for something.

 

100%! Amazon did virtually nothing to keep the platform updated, nor improve the ease of use for Requesters, while also raising their prices. This was a complaint of some of the AWS folks involved with MTurk (they had a tiny budget & no support for growth), and certainly this opened the door for other platforms to siphon-off countless requesters.

Especially problematic for MTurk requesters was the volumes of useless data they'd receive and waste money on, due to HITs submitted by careless or scammy Workers. Numerous academic researchers struggle with receiving bad submissions from Workers, and it gets discussed in papers and at research conferences (https://www.humancomputation.com/papers.html)

This isn't only an MTurk problem, and is a fundamental issue with all crowd sourced work. Now, it's largely the consensus that the wide-open feeding frenzy approach releasing un-restricted work on MTurk yield too much useless data, which is why many of the remaining MTurk requesters, and entire platforms (like Cloud Research), rely much more on Qualifications.

It was super cool to see lots of really dedicated MTurk workers who were crushing it back in Mturk's heyday and making upwards of $200/day regularly, and I was fortunate to catch the tail-end of that era... But that's almost 10 years ago at this point.