Something I just want to mention...

[aveline]

I was typing up a reply to @basketcasey, but I had to stop to work for a bit and didn't get a chance to post it there. So I'll just paste it here and I won't reply any further after this, if this discussion isn't wanted here.

This is an interesting discussion, though I'm not sure it will get us anywhere. It is nice to hear different people's viewpoints on the matter.

I'm still here occasionally, but not very often. I haven't disappeared entirely though. I don't think it boils down to a single reason either, but several. For me, one of the main reasons is the daily thread became pretty depressing/off topic. And I'm not talking about fun gifs and mini water cooler-type work breaks. I'm talking TMI personal issues, existential crises, whining and moaning, and other sorts of things that turned me off. Honestly, it felt like the daily thread had turned into a sad pandas redux thread. I get it, turking sucks. It's hard. Life's hard. I just think there is a time and place for such things, and it's not in the daily thread on an turking forum. Again, this is just my perspective as a person who is pretty private about personal matters. I just found it off-putting to log-in and see pages long serious - and often divisive - discussions going on before I'd even had my coffee.

Another reason - already mentioned by others here - is that this forum lost its work focus. I know I've taken the thread off on a tangent many times, and often ramble on, but I also turk hard and tried to balance my posting between general nonsense and work-related stuff. I felt that people who shared hits were often overlooked, which was also weird to me since it is a turking forum, after all. I even remember at one point the admins had to encourage people to like when users posted hits. I always found it weird that people never did this before. I know this is an almost impossible balance to achieve on a social site for turking. It's something I noticed, and I'm sure several others did as well.

I think TH is definitely more work-related, especially with TV now. I wouldn't say I switched entirely - the only thing I really post there are TV reviews. I haven't mingled or interacted with people as I have done here. I do think it's much more helpful for people that are serious about turking. They offer more tools, they have more activity in the daily thread, requester post there, etc.

I also just don't keep up very much with turking forums anymore. I met a ton of friends here and I'm thankful for that. It feels like most of the users I interacted with most and most of the regular users here, just moved on. So that was probably part of my interacting here less. There are always ebbs and flows to life, and turking forums apparently.

Finally, to me it felt like the mods/admins gave up and this trickled down to the members. The mods/admins here worked hard and did a largely thankless job. I don't blame them for getting burnt out on it. You can't make everyone happy, especially on the internet. But I think they handled it poorly. Most of the mods/admins seemed to check out and left the inmates to run the asylum. Then they wondered what happened to the forum? I'm not pointing fingers, but if you don't seem to care about the forum, why would anyone else? I think that they should have turned it over to different mods/admins before that point, but I understand if no one was willing to step up. I know I offered to help at one point and even suggested we keep the awards with no monetary rewards for morale, but that never happened. It just feels like they gave up, so it's no wonder why so many users followed their lead and did the same.

Excuse the rambles.

I agree very much about the work focus stuff and about it feeling like Sad Pandas in the work thread, and that's kinda what I was talking about above. The forum definitely started to lean too far in that direction. The culture of shitposting that got to be so pervasive here was also a problem, I think. It distracted from the work and when new people would sign up and ask questions in the work threads, they'd be lucky to get a real answer at all because everyone would be falling over themselves trying to post stupid like-bait joke posts in response. I looked in the work thread about a month or two ago and I saw someone saying that the reason the forum died was because all of the shitposters left. If anything, I think that's what got the forum back on track and I'm glad they're mostly gone.

And you're absolutely right about the staff burning out. That was something that we had recognized very early on actually because we were really wanting to take a step back from things (we even had staff meetings about it.) The problem for us was always finding capable people that were active in the community and interested in moderating. We would post that we were looking for new staff members and only like maybe 1 person would ever show any interest at all. Besides @jan, nobody that we added to staff since we started this forum ended up working out (they either had issues with the community/staff or they just up and left.) I know you expressed some interest in helping out, but at that point I was kinda already on my way out and I honestly did not believe the forum was going to last much longer. I was hesitant to add more staff to what I thought was a sinking ship. I tried to get a meeting together to see if we could get things on track and ensure that the forum would be able to continue, and adding more staff was going to be a part of that. But that meeting didn't really turn out to be as productive as I had hoped. At that point I was just so tired and burned out, and I didn't feel like anyone else even cared anymore (I know that's not true, but it's how I was feeling at the time), so I just left.

But for me that burnout wasn't just coming from the community or from being here for a long time.

One thing we never really talked much about openly is the issue with ownership here. We always sorta claimed that the 4 admins owned this forum, but that's wasn't exactly true. None of the admins technically owned this forum. Nearly everything was in the name of the person that maintains the server, who is a relative of Electrolyte. We never got access to the server, despite asking repeatedly to at least have some level of access, so we always had to go through him for everything. Well, at some point, he kinda just stopped having time for us. Things started to break on the forum and we would have people constantly complaining about these things not being fixed (issues with uploading avatars, the 'go to previous post' button on the quotes, etc) and all of our requests to have these things looked at would go ignored. It got to the point where he wasn't responding to any of us at all. For me personally, this led to me feeling like I no longer had any control over my own forum. I got tired of constantly having to come up with excuses for why things weren't working around here and that was a big factor in my burning out. And when Electrolyte left it seemed like we were losing our only connection to him, and that he would no longer have any reason to care about us. So honestly, I just kinda stopped caring at that point. I didn't see this situation ever getting any better, so I just left. Hell, I can't even properly step down because you need server access to remove admin rights (which none of us on staff had.) I have been off staff since early summer though, so any one of these things may have changed by now. I really don't know because I've tried to stay away and let them all do their thing.

Anyways, I'm not sure why I think any of this stuff matters. It probably doesn't. But I feel like I see comments pop up a lot lately that kinda blame a lot on the staff members just not caring or not doing enough, and that's just something that I take personally. I agree that I myself didn't do the best job, but I certainly tried. I put everything I had into this forum (and the one before it) for several years, and always tried to make every decision with as much integrity as I could. But towards the end of my time here a lot of people just made me feel like I couldn't do anything right and I ended up leaving not just the staff, but the community in general, with a very bitter taste in my mouth. So I guess I just still have a lot of things that are unsaid, and this venting kinda helps a bit. But at the end of the day, we are all human, and sometimes we just make mistakes. I'm sorry that we couldn't have done better.

 

[A6_Foul_Out]

@aveline @basketcasey

I would only disagree in the sense that I don't believe the admins had any part in what happened. What happened was simply an exodus of "high quality workers" from the forum for a variety of reasons. Those workers were replaced by /r/mturk quality workers. Which, while it isn't a problem to be a /r/mturk worker, it just leads to a less interesting and less desirable forum occupied solely by redditors and the people who are left from 2016.

The "shit-posters" were 100% needed for the forum because they were also workers who knew the platform, made a bunch of money and offered a fun, engaging social environment for everybody to be a part of. There's nothing of interest left here now that they're gone.

I shilled TurkerView as the one way that these workers can learn how to actually make decent money on the platform (thus making them more valuable forum contributors) and I got told in so many words to fuck off. So there really isn't much more that can be done with who is left.

When one of the forum's current top contributors needs to ask where to find a time on a survey which has 6 total times already posted to TV, and a link to that requester's TV in the export that they are quoting, how much more can you really do?

 

[ChrisTurk]

I'm very sorry to come here and do this (please don't ban, or do, I'm not your boss), but I have a massive problem with something said on that last thread. I will be handling specifics via DM, but the idea that TH is "nasty" when there is a full blown BDSM thread on this website, is an entirely unfair public representation of TH/TV from someone who should be more responsible than that & I want to address it for anyone reading.

Trust me, I totally understand the difficulties of trying to remain fully professional, 100% of the time, when you are basically tied to a social group for the majority of your day things are going to blur. I fail at it on the regular (...like now). A lot of Turkers have to put in hours that don't make sense and it can be lonely, isolating, etc etc. Which is why I've never split the social & work stuff (despite both sides who yell about it constantly, and the sad neg result of occasionally having a BJ joke on the daily thread) very heavily. The truth is for a lot of turkers there is no balance. There is no separation of church/state and we all end up being everyone's funky crazy family. A little understanding there --- especially from requesters (the majority of which do get it) --- goes a long way to improving the condition for everyone. Honestly it hurts to be shoved into a dark corner somewhere on a social website (which is what forums really are, despite our history of twisting them into work tools in weird ways lol) so yeah daily threads aren't going to be the most professionalized space on TH. It is rare that someone coming by for information about MTurk doesn't leave w/ a higher PE, or better understanding/workflow/toolings. The same goes for the pretty large # of requesters who come in to connect & get their thing done when it requires community involvement.

But over the years we've all moved further & further away from needing to rely on social outlets for work (posting HITs, etc etc) even as a starting baseline and so as others have mentioned of course you end up seeing the balance swapping away & now it happens more quickly than ever. Turkers who "get good" at Turking also tend to end up w/ more free/social time, the obvious problem being we're not really all here out of common group dynamics we're mostly all here because we want an extra $50 in our pockets lol. Social conflict is a pre-existing condition in our (MTC, MTG, TN, TH, OHS, et al) community and it always will be. Eliminate the crap that causes people to hate each others soul (religion/politics/yadda), everything else is petty squabbling that should & can be ignored lol.

& just to be clear I really & truly don't mind when folks take shots at me personally, and I basically never bother responding, but if you're going to call my users "nasty" please just don't. I love them all very much, and as humans we all have our flaws, but very few of them (..I don't think any?) are nasty human beings. You can discuss your own matters w/o needing to compare, because frankly the work our community puts in to make MTurk a better place is worth putting up with the occasional penis discussion.

Ofc any & all "our forum skin is cooler than your forum skin" is 100% welcome friendly banter, because if that doesn't exist why on earth is the worker community paying for more than one server to be open

Bless you all, enjoy your evenings, sorry.

 

[kryss]

I'm catching up on the other thread and this one. I'll be replying. Lets please keep the discussion going in a productive and civil manner.

 

[basketcasey]

I was typing up a reply to @basketcasey, but I had to stop to work for a bit and didn't get a chance to post it there. So I'll just paste it here and I won't reply any further after this, if this discussion isn't wanted here.





I agree very much about the work focus stuff and about it feeling like Sad Pandas in the work thread, and that's kinda what I was talking about above. The forum definitely started to lean too far in that direction. The culture of shitposting that got to be so pervasive here was also a problem, I think. It distracted from the work and when new people would sign up and ask questions in the work threads, they'd be lucky to get a real answer at all because everyone would be falling over themselves trying to post stupid like-bait joke posts in response. I looked in the work thread about a month or two ago and I saw someone saying that the reason the forum died was because all of the shitposters left. If anything, I think that's what got the forum back on track and I'm glad they're mostly gone.

And you're absolutely right about the staff burning out. That was something that we had recognized very early on actually because we were really wanting to take a step back from things (we even had staff meetings about it.) The problem for us was always finding capable people that were active in the community and interested in moderating. We would post that we were looking for new staff members and only like maybe 1 person would ever show any interest at all. Besides @jan, nobody that we added to staff since we started this forum ended up working out (they either had issues with the community/staff or they just up and left.) I know you expressed some interest in helping out, but at that point I was kinda already on my way out and I honestly did not believe the forum was going to last much longer. I was hesitant to add more staff to what I thought was a sinking ship. I tried to get a meeting together to see if we could get things on track and ensure that the forum would be able to continue, and adding more staff was going to be a part of that. But that meeting didn't really turn out to be as productive as I had hoped. At that point I was just so tired and burned out, and I didn't feel like anyone else even cared anymore (I know that's not true, but it's how I was feeling at the time), so I just left.

But for me that burnout wasn't just coming from the community or from being here for a long time.

One thing we never really talked much about openly is the issue with ownership here. We always sorta claimed that the 4 admins owned this forum, but that's wasn't exactly true. None of the admins technically owned this forum. Nearly everything was in the name of the person that maintains the server, who is a relative of Electrolyte. We never got access to the server, despite asking repeatedly to at least have some level of access, so we always had to go through him for everything. Well, at some point, he kinda just stopped having time for us. Things started to break on the forum and we would have people constantly complaining about these things not being fixed (issues with uploading avatars, the 'go to previous post' button on the quotes, etc) and all of our requests to have these things looked at would go ignored. It got to the point where he wasn't responding to any of us at all. For me personally, this led to me feeling like I no longer had any control over my own forum. I got tired of constantly having to come up with excuses for why things weren't working around here and that was a big factor in my burning out. And when Electrolyte left it seemed like we were losing our only connection to him, and that he would no longer have any reason to care about us. So honestly, I just kinda stopped caring at that point. I didn't see this situation ever getting any better, so I just left. Hell, I can't even properly step down because you need server access to remove admin rights (which none of us on staff had.) I have been off staff since early summer though, so any one of these things may have changed by now. I really don't know because I've tried to stay away and let them all do their thing.

Anyways, I'm not sure why I think any of this stuff matters. It probably doesn't. But I feel like I see comments pop up a lot lately that kinda blame a lot on the staff members just not caring or not doing enough, and that's just something that I take personally. I agree that I myself didn't do the best job, but I certainly tried. I put everything I had into this forum (and the one before it) for several years, and always tried to make every decision with as much integrity as I could. But towards the end of my time here a lot of people just made me feel like I couldn't do anything right and I ended up leaving not just the staff, but the community in general, with a very bitter taste in my mouth. So I guess I just still have a lot of things that are unsaid, and this venting kinda helps a bit. But at the end of the day, we are all human, and sometimes we just make mistakes. I'm sorry that we couldn't have done better.

I really appreciate the honesty and transparency of your post, Ave. And know I wasn't talking about all admins/mods. I know some of you did all you could, but there is only so much you can do, especially if you don't have access to everything needed to run the forum.

And I don't blame you for burnout one bit. I wasn't on staff or around nearly as long as you, but I've definitely experienced the burnout from both the forum and turking in general. I'm sorry that things didn't end well, and I do appreciate everything you've done for the community, as I'm sure do countless others, even if they've never expressed it.

 

[basketcasey]

I'm very sorry to come here and do this (please don't ban, or do, I'm not your boss), but I have a massive problem with something said on that last thread. I will be handling specifics via DM, but the idea that TH is "nasty" when there is a full blown BDSM thread on this website, and the requester in question has made what sound like pedophilia & kink jokes here, is an entirely unfair public representation of TH/TV from someone who should be more responsible than that & I want to address it for anyone reading.

Tust me, I totally understand the difficulties of trying to remain fully professional, 100% of the time, when you are basically tied to a social group for the majority of your day things are going to blur. I fail at it on the regular (...like now). A lot of Turkers have to put in hours that don't make sense and it can be lonely, isolating, etc etc. Which is why I've never split the social & work stuff (despite both sides who yell about it constantly, and the sad neg result of occasionally having a BJ joke on the daily thread) very heavily. The truth is for a lot of turkers there is no balance. There is no separation of church/state and we all end up being everyone's funky crazy family. A little understanding there --- especially from requesters (the majority of which do get it) --- goes a long way to improving the condition for everyone. Honestly it hurts to be shoved into a dark corner somewhere on a social website (which is what forums really are, despite our history of twisting them into work tools in weird ways lol) so yeah daily threads aren't going to be the most professionalized space on TH. It is rare that someone coming by for information about MTurk doesn't leave w/ a higher PE, or better understanding/workflow/toolings. The same goes for the pretty large # of requesters who come in to connect & get their thing done when it requires community involvement.

But over the years we've all moved further & further away from needing to rely on social outlets for work (posting HITs, etc etc) even as a starting baseline and so as others have mentioned of course you end up seeing the balance swapping away & now it happens more quickly than ever. Turkers who "get good" at Turking also tend to end up w/ more free/social time, the obvious problem being we're not really all here out of common group dynamics we're mostly all here because we want an extra $50 in our pockets lol. Social conflict is a pre-existing condition in our (MTC, MTG, TN, TH, OHS, et al) community and it always will be. Eliminate the crap that causes people to hate each others soul (religion/politics/yadda), everything else is petty squabbling that should & can be ignored lol.

Slightly unrelated, but part of the larger discussion, is that I have been on "the other side" of this forum dynamic. When I first started Turking I joined MTG instead of here and I have got to say it is scary how reminiscent this place is of MTG's dying breathes. Honestly the major gripe from MTG about MTC back in the day was the sex & crap that went on in the daily thread, how difficult it was to keep track of because of the fast moving pace, etc etc. I mean these really are the same conversations on repeat.

& just to be clear I really & truly don't mind when folks take shots at me personally, and I basically never bother responding, but if you're going to call my users "nasty" please just don't. I love them all very much, and as humans we all have our flaws, but very few of them (..I don't think any?) are nasty human beings. You can discuss your own matters w/o needing to compare, because frankly the work our community puts in to make MTurk a better place is worth putting up with the occasional penis discussion.

Ofc any & all "our forum skin is cooler than your forum skin" is 100% welcome friendly banter, because if that doesn't exist why on earth is the worker community paying for more than one server to be open

Bless you all, enjoy your evenings, sorry.

 

[kryss]

@aveline has expressed several sentiments in her post, that I mirror. She's also explained a bit about our server issues:

One thing we never really talked much about openly is the issue with ownership here. We always sorta claimed that the 4 admins owned this forum, but that's wasn't exactly true. None of the admins technically owned this forum. Nearly everything was in the name of the person that maintains the server, who is a relative of Electrolyte. We never got access to the server, despite asking repeatedly to at least have some level of access, so we always had to go through him for everything. Well, at some point, he kinda just stopped having time for us. Things started to break on the forum and we would have people constantly complaining about these things not being fixed (issues with uploading avatars, the 'go to previous post' button on the quotes, etc) and all of our requests to have these things looked at would go ignored. It got to the point where he wasn't responding to any of us at all.

What MTC needs is a volunteer who is willing (and capable) to handle the server. This is where we're at, and what we need first and foremost to turn things around and move in a more positive direction. If we can't find someone to do this, we're absolutely dead in the water. Is there anyone within our community who is capable and willing to take care of the server?


There seems to be several people that are interested in helping with moderation, but the first thing that needs to be addressed is the issues with the server. If we can't solve that, MTC will not be around much longer. I really would love to see a productive discussion on what we can do here to make everyone's experience positive, but we also need to discuss/find/problem solve on how we can get the server taken care of.


I also want to note that I too am guilty in recent months with not contributing around here. Life sometimes gets in the way and I do not have the time to dedicate to it as I once did. It was never that any of us didn't care about MTC.

 

[Jerami]

Since a good, open discussion about what's gone wrong and what could possibly be a way forward was closed before I could even finish reading it, let alone comment, here's the recommended continuation.

First, this isn't about a particular person but I think what happened here is emblematic of a problem a few people brought up in that (actually excellent, useful and aborted) thread.

So if anyone else has thoughts or responses, please feel free to add them here.

It was suggested that anyone who wanted to start a "What I didn't like about this forum" thread I'll say that's a fine use of this space. As is, "What I do like about this forum" and "What I want to see in the future of this forum."

Shutting down discussion just when people are beginning to engage doesn't help rebuild trust or interest. Letting people who want to vent, talk, plan etc. can. But only if we let it.

I was totally cool with the convo continuing but, I felt that we had gotten a few restatements of what happened, I though it may turn into a bash session with some finger pointing and that wasn't really what I was expecting with my OP, which I honestly didn't think anyone but Christopher would read. I wasn't trying to end the conversation, I was asking that if we were moving from my reason for posting, which was, "Hey Christopher, let's use this part of the forum, where it actually should be, and is normally pretty quiet," could we start a new thread moving forward. That's what you did and everything worked out great. Mine was even a dumb Thread title which actually was going to read, "Something I wanted to mention to you Chris" but, came off as, "An open letter to MTC". I felt I had created a monster and it probably could use a better start. I'm glad you did and I'm so

I was typing up a reply to @basketcasey, but I had to stop to work for a bit and didn't get a chance to post it there. So I'll just paste it here and I won't reply any further after this, if this discussion isn't wanted here.





I agree very much about the work focus stuff and about it feeling like Sad Pandas in the work thread, and that's kinda what I was talking about above. The forum definitely started to lean too far in that direction. The culture of shitposting that got to be so pervasive here was also a problem, I think. It distracted from the work and when new people would sign up and ask questions in the work threads, they'd be lucky to get a real answer at all because everyone would be falling over themselves trying to post stupid like-bait joke posts in response. I looked in the work thread about a month or two ago and I saw someone saying that the reason the forum died was because all of the shitposters left. If anything, I think that's what got the forum back on track and I'm glad they're mostly gone.

And you're absolutely right about the staff burning out. That was something that we had recognized very early on actually because we were really wanting to take a step back from things (we even had staff meetings about it.) The problem for us was always finding capable people that were active in the community and interested in moderating. We would post that we were looking for new staff members and only like maybe 1 person would ever show any interest at all. Besides @jan, nobody that we added to staff since we started this forum ended up working out (they either had issues with the community/staff or they just up and left.) I know you expressed some interest in helping out, but at that point I was kinda already on my way out and I honestly did not believe the forum was going to last much longer. I was hesitant to add more staff to what I thought was a sinking ship. I tried to get a meeting together to see if we could get things on track and ensure that the forum would be able to continue, and adding more staff was going to be a part of that. But that meeting didn't really turn out to be as productive as I had hoped. At that point I was just so tired and burned out, and I didn't feel like anyone else even cared anymore (I know that's not true, but it's how I was feeling at the time), so I just left.

But for me that burnout wasn't just coming from the community or from being here for a long time.

One thing we never really talked much about openly is the issue with ownership here. We always sorta claimed that the 4 admins owned this forum, but that's wasn't exactly true. None of the admins technically owned this forum. Nearly everything was in the name of the person that maintains the server, who is a relative of Electrolyte. We never got access to the server, despite asking repeatedly to at least have some level of access, so we always had to go through him for everything. Well, at some point, he kinda just stopped having time for us. Things started to break on the forum and we would have people constantly complaining about these things not being fixed (issues with uploading avatars, the 'go to previous post' button on the quotes, etc) and all of our requests to have these things looked at would go ignored. It got to the point where he wasn't responding to any of us at all. For me personally, this led to me feeling like I no longer had any control over my own forum. I got tired of constantly having to come up with excuses for why things weren't working around here and that was a big factor in my burning out. And when Electrolyte left it seemed like we were losing our only connection to him, and that he would no longer have any reason to care about us. So honestly, I just kinda stopped caring at that point. I didn't see this situation ever getting any better, so I just left. Hell, I can't even properly step down because you need server access to remove admin rights (which none of us on staff had.) I have been off staff since early summer though, so any one of these things may have changed by now. I really don't know because I've tried to stay away and let them all do their thing.

Anyways, I'm not sure why I think any of this stuff matters. It probably doesn't. But I feel like I see comments pop up a lot lately that kinda blame a lot on the staff members just not caring or not doing enough, and that's just something that I take personally. I agree that I myself didn't do the best job, but I certainly tried. I put everything I had into this forum (and the one before it) for several years, and always tried to make every decision with as much integrity as I could. But towards the end of my time here a lot of people just made me feel like I couldn't do anything right and I ended up leaving not just the staff, but the community in general, with a very bitter taste in my mouth. So I guess I just still have a lot of things that are unsaid, and this venting kinda helps a bit. But at the end of the day, we are all human, and sometimes we just make mistakes. I'm sorry that we couldn't have done better.

You did your best. Don't be sorry. You needed help and nothing was working together. People need to realize that nobody makes a decision thinking that it's wrong(unless it's a sacrifice). But most people think they're making the right decision, that's why they made it. We can't ask for any more than that and if we want more, we may need to help facilitate that.
"One thing we never really talked much about openly is the issue with ownership here. We always sorta claimed that the 4 admins owned this forum, but that's wasn't exactly true. None of the admins technically owned this forum. Nearly everything was in the name of the person that maintains the server, who is a relative of Electrolyte. We never got access to the server, despite asking repeatedly to at least have some level of access, so we always had to go through him for everything. Well, at some point, he kinda just stopped having time for us. "
We need to talk about what we can do to fix this. I'm willing to try and help with this. Thank you @aveline

@aveline @basketcasey

I would only disagree in the sense that I don't believe the admins had any part in what happened. What happened was simply an exodus of "high quality workers" from the forum for a variety of reasons. Those workers were replaced by /r/mturk quality workers. Which, while it isn't a problem to be a /r/mturk worker, it just leads to a less interesting and less desirable forum occupied solely by redditors and the people who are left from 2016.

The "shit-posters" were 100% needed for the forum because they were also workers who knew the platform, made a bunch of money and offered a fun, engaging social environment for everybody to be a part of. There's nothing of interest left here now that they're gone.

I shilled TurkerView as the one way that these workers can learn how to actually make decent money on the platform (thus making them more valuable forum contributors) and I got told in so many words to fuck off. So there really isn't much more that can be done with who is left.

When one of the forum's current top contributors needs to ask where to find a time on a survey which has 6 total times already posted to TV, and a link to that requester's TV in the export that they are quoting, how much more can you really do?

I think we can all claim a bit of responsibility, Admins to users, about the state of our little home here. We can agree to disagree and I appreciate your view. But, I feel that, if you remove the banners, our admins are(were) also some of our strongest, most knowledgeable, and also most shitposting people here. They weren't just Admins and Mods, they were also a good portion of our core veterans. So, when they pulled back as admins and mods(which I understand) the forum lost them doubly. That's a big loss when looked at from a users perspective, I think. It was disappointing in a few ways.(I'm not mad about it guys. Just stating observations)

I personally didn't like the way that things were going so, I did what I could, which meant to me becoming a Mentor, actually doing it, posting more HITs, trying to shitpost less, etc. I think that anyone can be a push in a positive or negative direction and only lurkers have little to no impact, since we're all a community.

@aveline has expressed several sentiments in her post, that I mirror. She's also explained a bit about our server issues:

What MTC needs is a volunteer who is willing (and capable) to handle the server. This is where we're at, and what we need first and foremost to turn things around and move in a more positive direction. If we can't find someone to do this, we're absolutely dead in the water. Is there anyone within our community who is capable and willing to take care of the server?


There seems to be several people that are interested in helping with moderation, but the first thing that needs to be addressed is the issues with the server. If we can't solve that, MTC will not be around much longer. I really would love to see a productive discussion on what we can do here to make everyone's experience positive, but we also need to discuss/find/problem solve on how we can get the server taken care of.


I also want to note that I too am guilty in recent months with not contributing around here. Life sometimes gets in the way and I do not have the time to dedicate to it as I once did. It was never that any of us didn't care about MTC.

If you can tell me what this entails, I may be able to help. But, if I don't know, that probably means I won't. Try anyway please. I'm a quick learner and a self-study.

 

[Jaded]

It was never that any of us didn't care about MTC.

 

[JenniLeigh]

I can't wait to be able to use scripts again so I can annoy everyone with my HIT posting.

Oh, wait, wrong forum.

 

[kryss]

I can't wait to be able to use scripts again so I can annoy everyone with my HIT posting.

Oh, wait, wrong forum.

Am I missing something here?

 

[JenniLeigh]

Am I missing something here?

I'm not sure?
I guess you've not been around for my computer/script issues and joking around about the people annoyed about me exporting to the other forum should be happy now

 

[jklmnop]

The mods/admins here worked hard and did a largely thankless job.

Did and still do.

 

[Jerami]

I'm very sorry to come here and do this (please don't ban, or do, I'm not your boss), but I have a massive problem with something said on that last thread. I will be handling specifics via DM, but the idea that TH is "nasty" when there is a full blown BDSM thread on this website, is an entirely unfair public representation of TH/TV from someone who should be more responsible than that & I want to address it for anyone reading.

Trust me, I totally understand the difficulties of trying to remain fully professional, 100% of the time, when you are basically tied to a social group for the majority of your day things are going to blur. I fail at it on the regular (...like now). A lot of Turkers have to put in hours that don't make sense and it can be lonely, isolating, etc etc. Which is why I've never split the social & work stuff (despite both sides who yell about it constantly, and the sad neg result of occasionally having a BJ joke on the daily thread) very heavily. The truth is for a lot of turkers there is no balance. There is no separation of church/state and we all end up being everyone's funky crazy family. A little understanding there --- especially from requesters (the majority of which do get it) --- goes a long way to improving the condition for everyone. Honestly it hurts to be shoved into a dark corner somewhere on a social website (which is what forums really are, despite our history of twisting them into work tools in weird ways lol) so yeah daily threads aren't going to be the most professionalized space on TH. It is rare that someone coming by for information about MTurk doesn't leave w/ a higher PE, or better understanding/workflow/toolings. The same goes for the pretty large # of requesters who come in to connect & get their thing done when it requires community involvement.

But over the years we've all moved further & further away from needing to rely on social outlets for work (posting HITs, etc etc) even as a starting baseline and so as others have mentioned of course you end up seeing the balance swapping away & now it happens more quickly than ever. Turkers who "get good" at Turking also tend to end up w/ more free/social time, the obvious problem being we're not really all here out of common group dynamics we're mostly all here because we want an extra $50 in our pockets lol. Social conflict is a pre-existing condition in our (MTC, MTG, TN, TH, OHS, et al) community and it always will be. Eliminate the crap that causes people to hate each others soul (religion/politics/yadda), everything else is petty squabbling that should & can be ignored lol.

& just to be clear I really & truly don't mind when folks take shots at me personally, and I basically never bother responding, but if you're going to call my users "nasty" please just don't. I love them all very much, and as humans we all have our flaws, but very few of them (..I don't think any?) are nasty human beings. You can discuss your own matters w/o needing to compare, because frankly the work our community puts in to make MTurk a better place is worth putting up with the occasional penis discussion.

Ofc any & all "our forum skin is cooler than your forum skin" is 100% welcome friendly banter, because if that doesn't exist why on earth is the worker community paying for more than one server to be open

Bless you all, enjoy your evenings, sorry.

Hey, not trying to keep anything going and, as I hope you can tell from my posts, I think before I speak and this is not an attack but, an attempt to clarify if this is the post to which you were referring...

"took a look at "the other place" earlier and tbh? their daily thread is NASTY....to be clear i'm not just trying to stir up shit (lol) - to the extent that requesting is still part of my job, it's relevant to me professionally to know what's up in the turker community? and i would not feel comfortable with interacting with posters (from an account that's associated with my employer!) who were responding with fellatio gifs. that's a big yikesaroonie from me"

and the part highlighted in red did actually happen, that wouldn't be acceptable and would be deemed "Nasty" here, as well. Regardless of how far you can go down the rabbit hole in the social areas of a forum "when there is a full blown BDSM thread on this website" I've never seen the thread that you are referring to. I won't ever have to because I'm in the Daily HITs thread. I understand that there's going to be an amount of shitposting and even adult, or infantile humor. But, there's a difference between adult, racy(which we try to reserve for late nights) and Porn, which we just ask the users here keep the trash in it's bin.(Trackpad Thread?)

If it was an isolated instance, I understand things happen and it's a non-issue. If it's a regular occurrence, I appreciate the warning and
I'll have to still stick with my original response about bj gifs in the middle of the Daily, which was...
"JFC! I like a good joke but, just feel like there's no need for that."

I agree that some people don't like the term nasty but, I really hope we can agree that it's highly inappropriate and a thread that contained something like that, to some sensibilities could be considered to be subjectively nasty. When you walk into a BDSM thread, you know what's in there. You don't expect the same in a thread called Daily HITs.

As I said, I've never been to your site but here, a lot of us already feel like we get close to inappropriate sometimes in our Daily thread. So, I don't think that anyone judges TH on any different standards than we would hold ourselves to. If we do, I apologize for that.

I'm not trying to turn this into a thing, and I understand that their description was over the top, to say the least but, felatio gif(and the thread containing)=nasty is a very different statement to TH=Nasty, which is how I felt it may have been taken. "...but the idea that TH is "nasty" when..."

EDIT Also, I feel, maybe wrongly so, that a gif of fellatio and a bj joke are very different. A gif jumps right out while if I'm reading a post and it's going awry, I can stop and read the next one. A gif is just, Bam!

But, honestly, if I'm off base with my understanding of the situation, I apologize. Have a good day.

 

[Jaded]

when there is a full blown BDSM thread on this website,

Stuff in Daily thread != stuff in dedicated threads.

This is the part I chose to respond to. shruggieface.txt

 

[ctraltDel]

Tbh, I think there's some hypocrisy from both sides regarding the types of shitposting allowed on the forums. I am not currently on either forum often these days but have seen posts about illegal porn and other similarly inappropriate topics discussed on here (meaning the daily work thread) without intervention.

 

[Jerami]

Stuff in Daily thread != stuff in dedicated threads.

This is the part I chose to respond to. shruggieface.txt

Oh! (!=) = (≠)
Lol. That took me a minute. Never seen the != before

 

[Jaded]

Tbh, I think there's some hypocrisy from both sides regarding the types of shitposting allowed on the forums. I am not currently on either forum often these days but have seen posts about illegal porn and other similarly inappropriate topics discussed on here (meaning the daily work thread) without intervention.

Honestly if anyone is seeing illegal porn posts in the daily thread, a nice push of that report button would be great, since obviously the admin/mods must have missed it.

 

[Jaded]

Oh! (!=) = (≠)
Lol. That took me a minute. Never seen the != before

I learned it on codecademy when I was learning coding, lol. Easier to type than figuring out how to do the slashy equals sign.

 

[Jerami]

Tbh, I think there's some hypocrisy from both sides regarding the types of shitposting allowed on the forums. I am not currently on either forum often these days but have seen posts about illegal porn and other similarly inappropriate topics discussed on here (meaning the daily work thread) without intervention.

This.

Honestly if anyone is seeing illegal porn posts in the daily thread, a nice push of that report button would be great, since obviously the admin/mods must have missed it.

If that doesn't work, feel free to let a Mentor know, in PM, and we'll try and get the mods for you. Nobody will ever know it was you that pressed the report button. Always better to push it and be wrong on what you felt was inappropriate. You won't get in trouble for reporting a post and the person you reported will never know who reported their post. Please always say something, if you can.