07/18 - Sour Thursday

Yes, find Bill because Jeff has screwed up everything!

 

I thought is was just my computer..until I cleared cookies, restarted, plugged in the ethernet, etc..

 

I come on between temporary jobs and when the other survey sites are really slow. This is a fill in income only.

 

This is really bad. Takes forever to load, forever to submit. Batches are the worst now... I was trying different browsers, disabling all scripts, everythinig till I gave up and realized Amazon is the one shiting the bed.

 

Matthew Fisher [A2A9OFCBTPCZL3] Easy + Simple Questions - 0482(~ 4 minutes) - $0.45 | PANDA

Unrated

Unrated

Unrated

$19.29 / hour
00:01:24 / completion time

​

Pros:

Cons:

Catchability: Great (HIT Last Seen: a second ago)
Qualifications: Total approved HITs >= 100; Exc: [449989-449400] DoesNotExist ; Total approved HITs <= 100000; islfvr8491 >= 100; HIT approval rate (%) >= 85; Location In US;

To read Matthew Fisher's full profile check out TurkerView!​

 

It's like someone at Amazon lies awake at night thinking of ways to screw MTurk. Getting past $40 today has been nerve racking.

 

Everyone sure is sour today.

 

I'm at 10% PRE Rating today, and yesterday I was up to 8%. Nothing I do makes it go lower outside of just waiting until later in the day.
Does anybody have a fix or is this just because Amazon is going crazy the last two days because of Prime Day?

 

I've noticed it for the past couple weeks. I think they switched us over to dial-up.

 

Dang.
Bezos needed the extra computing power for one of his spaceships so unplugged us.

 

It seems a little better now than it was earlier.

 

MTurk uses 3 servers (54.239.29.125, 54.239.29.158, 54.239.29.163) and distributes the load roughly equally among them. Once your request reaches one of those 3 servers, the server itself has to contact the MTurk's database (where information about HITs and other stuff is stored) and then send the response back to you. Although I've seen (super rare) occasions where one MTurk server was performing significantly worse than the others, usually when it comes to MTurk the chokepoint is that database connection. I'm not sure how exactly it is set up, but I would imagine it probably throttles itself based on the load (how many turkers are turking atm) as to not go above a certain (very limited) budget that the MTurk team set aside for it.

All of this is to say that while you can tinker with your delay / try to reduce PREs, ultimately you can't really make MTurk work any better and you are at the complete mercy of the budget Amazon allocates to MTurk. It's possible this budget adjusts itself automatically based on the $ of all the HITs posted on the platform at any given moment, it's also possible it's just a static number, who knows. But it's definitely not enough to keep the platform functioning smoothly, at least not during peak hours.

 

Texas Tech is deffo HOTD. $5 for 6 min survey WITH ACs.

 

I lost my mturk password again but I remembered my password for here. so I'm logging in here and pretending it's the same thing.

*tries to find something to work on*

 

to be fair, this has always been mturk

 

CWP [A3HVP2O7ZQ5294] Collect data from websites (~3 min.)(~ 3 minutes) - $0.60 | PANDA

Unrated

Unrated

Unrated

$8.09 / hour
00:04:27 / completion time

Approved! ​

Pros:
Super quick and easy data collection + a brief creative task. I tend to overthink on anything requiring creativity, so despite it simply asking for a one-word answer, half of my time went into that (so slowness is on me). :)

Cons:

Catchability: Great (HIT Last Seen: a second ago)
Qualifications: SurveyGroup [8245] DoesNotExist ; Exc: [2101526956-447500] DoesNotExist ; islfvr8491 >= 100; Location In US;

To read CWP's full profile check out TurkerView!​