Because the HIT takes a while to be validated, and they reject the HITs constantly, for BAD REASONS. Eg: I submitted a HIT that asked for the brand name of a product. The rejection came back with this note: The 'Brand Name' of the product is: 'Immune Support with 20+ Ingredients Helps Support Joint Function Antioxidants' I"m sure you can see that that is not even remotely a brand name. The requester in question has done this to me several times, and also rejects HITs for failing to include information that their system itself prohibits you from inputting. For example, if you try to use mL measurements for a HIT, it will say "mL is a junk or null value" and will blank the text box, and if you try to work around that by just listing the number and not the measurement format (I forget the correct word) they will reject the HIT. They will also reject the HIT for failing to include the copyright symbol or the trademark symbol in brand names and product names, which their system also will not allow to be input into the field and requires you to remove that copyright symbol in order to submit the HIT. You can't enter the word "Home" into the text box, either, so any brand names that include the word "home" in them can't be submitted. NatureWise cannot be entered into the box, either. I keep contacting them to get them to try and fix this, but they won't answer me. I've reported them to Amazon, but nothing is being done. My acceptance rating has dropped to the point where I'm close to losing access to some HITs because these guys keep rejecting HITs from me. So, I want to post a review on them to warn other users about this. I keep seeing mention of scripts, but I'm not a techie. I don't know what a script is, what it does, or how to use one. I probably haven't looked around enough on that, but I only signed up for this site because it said you had to have one of these accounts to post a review on the TV platform. This is the first thread I've seen on posting reviews on the platform; what it's telling me is I can't review the HIT because the problem didn't show up immediately. This seems a little flawed, although I do admit that keeping out the negative reviews because people can use it to spite and revenge people they don't like is an admirable idea, but if a requester has a habit of rejecting HITs for spurious reasons, that information really ought to be made available. What's the TO that's mentioned above, as well, which is apparently where these review tend to be?
So, your post is a little long & has a lot in it, so let me try to extract this part out to try to reply to the gist of it since its the most pertinent part to TV. I agree with you 100% that if a Requester is "bad" we should have information available that warn users of that fact. For sure. Its difficult, especially as a new worker, to navigate the sea of jobs available on the platform & not get burned. TV in general is really not all that great for that use yet which is why a lot of folks recommend TO to newbies. TV was built in one month by me & sadly my perspective is skewed by a lot of experience and its turned out far more useful to "experienced" workers than originally even intended, though it has been nice for some of us to have our own kind of platform to use since TO was lacking for many of us in that department. Anyway, the point is that TV has a lot more seasoned workers, and the thing is most of those folks don't really get rejected on tasks to begin with. The majority hold a >99% approval rate, so reality is even if TV was fantastic about taking in after-the-fact data, we really wouldn't get a whole lot to begin with haha. With that said - the reason TV is set up as is is to prevent people from only sharing their negative experiences. The majority of workers have a >99% approval rating. Which means for every 1 rejection they have over 100 HITs approved. Now, if you look up someone's profile on TO (which is another review website) and the only thing they report are rejections - do you think that's actually super indicative of their total experience on the platform? Its highly unlikely, because accounts kind of become obsolete/heavily restricted below a certain approval %, so where is all the positive data? To me, its super easy to find crap work on the platform. So in building TV originally I really wanted to focus on the opposite experiences.. finding good work. That has kind of morphed into more or less not even taking in the negative experiences, but even that at this point isn't on purpose or a main goal, its just a side effect of how TV accepts data & the type of people who tend to prefer leaving those data points. If the only thing you want to share w/ other workers is the negative experiences, TO will take in that data & transmit it way better than TV will - and that's OK. It just means the sites tend to do different things really well. Now, if you want to leave those negative experiences on TV you totally, 100% can, but you have to also share your normal/good experiences too. So instead of waiting for something to be rejected, people on TV review it same-day, and then if its rejected later they go update the review to indicate that. Or if its approved, they update to show that instead. What we end up with is super time-pertinent information that doesn't naturally skew towards incredibly nasty/negative experiences like you'll see many times when a Requester is "one-bombed" on TO. Hope that all kind of makes sense, I know its long, but its a design principle that the site has kind of "grown" in to & I think its worth typing out occasionally when these questions pop up. A lot of folks share your frustration/criticism of TV, so I am looking at ways to expand what kind of data & how we transmit it, but IMO this is honestly a way for us to give workers everywhere a much more complete view of the platform Totally different tangent, but please stop doing work for them! Haha. There is TONS of good work on mTurk, there really is no reason to continue to put your own account in jeopardy when you kind of have an idea of the outcome going into it https://turkopticon.ucsd.edu There are no restrictions/scripts/qualifications required to leave a review there so you can just sign up to their site & shoot folks a heads up about the requester in question! Scripts are INCREDIBLY important to working efficiently on mTurk. Definitely check out MTS: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mturk-suite/iglbakfobmoijpbigmlfklckogbefnlf?hl=en-US Their wiki: https://github.com/Kadauchi/mturk-suite/wiki It includes data from TV & TO so will give you a good heads up from pretty much everywhere on Requesters. TV has some scripts & a quick intro to them as well here: https://turkerview.com/mturk-scripts/ Anyway this post gives a really good overview of scripts, IMO:
Thank you, that was actually super informative. It might be helpful, however, to suggest on the TV site that it's more useful for seasoned workers, that beginners might be better looking elsewhere, or noting that it requires a script installed in order to perform the reviews - I found the TV reviews through a google search, and I didn't find out any of the info about how scripts were required to review and the rules and such on the site itself, but rather reading through the forums here... I'm guessing a lot of people come originally from here to TV, but I'm thinking it might be nice for those of us who go the other way to have that stuff mentioned on the site itself, so you don't get a lot of people coming on here wondering "how do I add a review on TV" and so on. As far as the repeated rejections go, and me going back to them, I thought they might have fixed the problem... turns out they didn't. And I do have a bit of trouble finding good HITs, in no small part because... I don't actually know. Crowdsurf keeps having technical issues, and there's one that's good right up until the point that working on it causes my browser to lag and suddenly stop working (I don't know why; but that HIT and only that HIT fries Chrome for some reason). I have to admit, I'm still unsure about the whole scripts thing. I'm really nervous about doing anything to my computer, a habit I picked up from my dad, who is an engineer specializing in internet servers and power units, and whose response to anything going wrong on any computer was to scream at me about not downloading stuff from the internet, even though I never did. I guess that's something I'm just going to have to get over at some point, though.
Hah, that's neat. What were you searching? Just curious since you're right most users are from here That's definitely something I can work on improving on the site though. TV was built as an extension of TH, so yeah pretty much all the users have been TH members or otherwise in the community one way or another for the most part. For turking.. pretty much most definitely. If you have to start somewhere, start w/ MTS. Its simple, its basic, it does pretty much everything either OK to very well, and its "all in one" so you have less things to manage/worry about. Scripts can definitely be unsafe if you don't know what you're getting in to, but MTS is run by @Kadauchi who is about as long standing in the community as they come & hasn't gone evil robot on us yet lol. He also spends a lot of time perfecting his code so its less likely to blow up / do weird things / etc etc. Its definitely the best starting / intro point for a new turker worried about all that comes w/ that area of the game.
You can also view the code, download then pack/load unpacked the extension yourself if you want to be extra cautious. This would prevent auto updates and any issues that could arise from that. https://github.com/Kadauchi/mturk-suite/ Disabling auto updates for userscripts is much simpler in Tampermonkey than disabling a Chrome extension from updating.
I was searching the name of the requester + Amazon Mechanical Turk. I've done that before with ones that had some oddities (one in particular was masquerading as an Amazon official account and other weirdness) to look up more info if I had questions on them.
Hits are "pre-reviewed" by people that know what they are doing before they ever make it to TV. Bad work, rarely makes it to TV because most people on the platform refuse to do garbage work. Amazon AA's all hits after 30 days. https://turkerview.com/requesters/A1US9OZPJX72XM-trevor-owens If you can find other well-paid requesters on the platform with 30 day AA, please list them. The vast majority of others with 30 day AA likely weren't paying a fair wage to US workers, and are irrelevant to the platform.
