10/08 - Treats Thursday

[deleted]

 

Oops lol, my last comment had incorrect info. ... Correction:

Related trivia:

The weird-looking "Ac" suffix is a holdover from past years when that platform's website / domain-name had the ".ac" suffix (nowadays the worker-platform site's suffix is ".com").

Related fact: Occasionally you may encounter a buggy study that fails its attempt to automatically complete its submission back to that platform. If the misconfigured study tries to auto-submit the completion back to the platform's old ".ac" website, the attempt will fail and an error page will appear. ... For some dumb reason, the platform devs never fixed that with a simple redirect that could avoid such errors.

(Strange that they haven't fixed that, given that they do have a working redirect for simple visits to the public website home page.)

 

... i.e. their old public website was at: [PlatformName].ac — (worker-site was: app.[PlatformName].ac).
Nowadays their public website is at: [PlatformName].com — (worker-site is: app.[PlatformName].com).

If you try to visit the public website homepage at the "old" .ac domain, they've got an auto-redirect that takes you to the .com website.

Sometimes a buggy study will try to auto-complete to the old app.[PlatformName].ac site, and that will fail with an error, because (for whatever reason) the corrective redirect isn't happening in that case.

(Unless they may have finally fixed that. ... Come to think of it, the last time I noticed the problem was a few months ago, so my understanding may be out of date.)

 

I don't understand why that site can't be named but I'll go with the flow. And you're explanation makes perfect sense. I think there are actually just 5 people working for the company. Not in the know, just feel it.

 

Commenter to whom I previously replied had avoided naming it ...
and I was still going with that in my later comments, for my own (maybe silly) reasons.

(Two other replies, by TotallyLostWithThis and Tripsa, did name it.)

 

Researcher humor (joking with stats terminology), posted on Bluesky:

"RIP to everyone’s favorite p<0.05 factory." [MTurk]
"A significant loss for the research community."
"Is it though? Recent studies showed it was 30-40% bots by the end."
"Oh sorry, I meant 'a significance loss' "​

 

If I had to venture a guess, I'd say probably heavy lobbying by Cash4Surveys.fun. Bribing everyone to try to suppress competition. I know the guy who's running that place, and let me tell you, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if it turned out the whole platform is just one giant scam. Very shady stuff going on there.

 

My own reasons were unrelated to Cash4Surveys, which I've never visited or communicated with.

The name of the platform we were discussing starts with P. lol

TotallyLostWithThis & Tripsa's replies did name it.

 

I can't figure out if its prolific or connect but neither is a [redacted] term unlike get[redacted] so who knows

 

'Twas the former one.

 

A post from the Turkopticon folks reminds me:

"You will have access to your [MTurk] transaction history until Jan 28th, 2027."​

So, I'll limit my procrastination and grab a screenshot before then,
and I won't expect it to still be viewable on-site when I'm doing last-minute taxes in April.

 

Speaking of Connect, I actually had a fun one tonight. First one I could say I actually enjoyed. Perceptions of Slasher Horror Villains. If you can find that one it'll be worth it.

 

oh good old hy bred and being the platform that shall not be named... get fuck hybr ed with your shadow bans.

 

...

 

As some of you Prolific users may know:
Some time ago, a Prolific user made an unofficial site that he calls "ProlificTea", with a purpose roughly comparable to TV/TO: collecting workers' reviews of researchers.

Now a post on one of the subreddits notes that the ProlificTea site has been told to remove researchers' personal names in their listings.

So, researchers' personal names are no longer shown on ProlificTea ...

... but such researchers are still listed, now labeled with their "Prolific IDs" (a hexadecimal ID code of 24 characters) instead of their personal names.

Thus, review pages for such researchers (personal names having been removed) are now listed in this format on the ProlificTea site:

Redacted (xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
— (in place of those x's will be the researcher's Prolific ID).​

A researcher's ID can be found after you click to "reserve" (preparing to start participating) in a study on Prolific.

 

Opinions vary on the usefulness of that unofficial reviews site.
Some workers use the site. Some don't.

Its basic purpose is roughly comparable to TV/TO although it's really not the same.

 

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