04/21 - The What? Thursday!

[Pippa]

Speaking of newbies. I hit my 1 year turking anniversary next week. I'm not sure when the newbie cutoff date is, but these are my stats.

HITs Submitted 96495 —
... Approved 96203 99.9%
... Rejected 112 0.1%

and I've made $9,023.59 to date.

I think I will stick with it.

Thanks to you all!

 

[Blue]

I miss cosplay.

Total tangent. but I miss it. I haven't been to a con in years, tho, so no need for cosplay in my life anymore

It seems to have become very popular... I've had a large number of requests in the last year and half for boudoir style cosplay shoots... the most common being boudoir league of legends cosplay... followed very closely by a whole group of anime cosplay.

 

[Aydiarose]

@Kadauchi
I hate to keep bugging you but I don't know whats a bug and whats not.

 

[SpookyMyers]

I need to find a quick .30 so I can end on an even #.

 

[electrolyte]

Like, 3 minutes.

Title: Fun 15 Minute Task: Fill in the ____! | PANDA Requester: UMD Linguistics Research Group [A2DK3VTMC9CF32] (TO) TO Ratings: ★★★★★ 4.54 Communicativity ★★★★★ 4.29 Generosity ★★★★★ 5.00 Fairness ★★★★★ 4.96 Promptness Number of Reviews: 34 | TOS Flags: 0 Submit a new TO review Description: Read unfinished sentences and complete them with the first thing that comes to mind. Time: 25 minutes HITs Available: 1 Reward: $1.50 Qualifications: Lara_Prevent_retake has not been granted;Test for native proficiency in American English, v2.0 is not less than 7;HIT approval rate (%) is not less than 95;Location is US

 

[Lepi]

It is, and I'm basically a newbie. But I think you still have to have gumption and stick it out for it to be worthwhile. Maybe it's different for me since turking is my second job, but we do need the money turking brings in. There are days I just do NOT want to turk, to spend the time monitoring HS and pandaing the crap out of hits I missed, or getting up at 5 am for Zoltars. But I do cuz...well, we could use the cash.

I would have stuck it out in the old days, too...but I wouldn't make as much as I do without all the scripts and forums and input from veteran turkers.

(I do admit to being sad when I see good hits post I can't do because I'm at work...)

I think a lot of people have those kinds of days, full time employment or not. Turking is...kinda exhausting, honestly. Because it requires you to be consistently engaged. Most jobs have predictable periods of downtime- you know when you get a break, and you know when you get to go home. The random nature of Mturk can burn you out. Or it can really energize you, I guess it depends on your personality.

I used to have people ask me about Mturk and I would try to help them get in to it, but it was always a failure. Too many people get thrown off by the microlabor concept. If you're used to thinking about your earnings in terms of hourly rate, 5 cents per task doesn't translate well, even if each task takes 10 seconds. I've had actual conversations with people where I told them I make 30 cents a minute and they thought it sounded like a BAD pay rate. Retraining your brain to think in terms of pay per minute is hard.

All the scripts and stuff and the diversity of forums and guides and things makes the whole landscape easier to navigate, so fewer people are getting turned off by that initial hurdle of getting numbers.

I guess the only down side is that a lot of people are developing over reliance on scripts and stuff... I wanna bang my cane and yell "BACK IN MY DAY WE HAD TO ACCEPT OUR HITS MANUALLY! AND WE LIKED IT!"

 

[Tuesday]

The numbers of people willing to stick it out have significantly increased in the past few years though... the public release of scripting and tools to make turking easier lowered the bar of entry significantly, along with all the accumulated/documented turking knowledge that used to be kept much more secretive. They don't have to learn as much to succeed anymore... and the people who have spent gobs of time learning new skills have had those skills somewhat devalued... which means the less motivated among us are no longer at as great a disadvantage to the motivated, and can continue to expend less effort for the same relative results... so there's incentive to stay.

Do you really think this is true? Perhaps there are more people willing to stick it out, but then again I see a lot of newer members asking the same questions over and over again. That puzzles me. There is a steep learning curve here despite the scripts and pointers. Maybe even because of the scripts. Not only that, but some long term workers have quals that don't seem to be offered any longer. That's not an insignificant thing. I tend to think it has a whole lot to do with work ethic as much as anything else. I'm here for the grind.

 

[Blue]

I think a lot of people have those kinds of days, full time employment or not. Turking is...kinda exhausting, honestly. Because it requires you to be consistently engaged. Most jobs have predictable periods of downtime- you know when you get a break, and you know when you get to go home. The random nature of Mturk can burn you out. Or it can really energize you, I guess it depends on your personality.

I used to have people ask me about Mturk and I would try to help them get in to it, but it was always a failure. Too many people get thrown off by the microlabor concept. If you're used to thinking about your earnings in terms of hourly rate, 5 cents per task doesn't translate well, even if each task takes 10 seconds. I've had actual conversations with people where I told them I make 30 cents a minute and they thought it sounded like a BAD pay rate. Retraining your brain to think in terms of pay per minute is hard.

All the scripts and stuff and the diversity of forums and guides and things makes the whole landscape easier to navigate, so fewer people are getting turned off by that initial hurdle of getting numbers.

I guess the only down side is that a lot of people are developing over reliance on scripts and stuff... I wanna bang my cane and yell "BACK IN MY DAY WE HAD TO ACCEPT OUR HITS MANUALLY! AND WE LIKED IT!"

We've had to fill in a lot of the gaps that mturk itself couldn't be arsed with... which has definitely contributed to worker retention as well.

 

[Kerek]

Do you really think this is true? Perhaps there are more people willing to stick it out, but then again I see a lot of newer members asking the same questions over and over again. That puzzles me. There is a steep learning curve here despite the scripts and pointers. Maybe even because of the scripts. Not only that, but some long term workers have quals that don't seem to be offered any longer. That's not an insignificant thing. I tend to think it has a whole lot to do with work ethic as much as anything else. I'm here for the grind.

I'm here for the crowd.

 

[PhantomCatt]

@PhantomCatt

but wait..theres more.
http://www.wcnc.com/news/crime/us-marshals-swat-on-scene-of-concord-standoff/147964915

Is this near you too? Wow they are busy over there! This is a different guy than the one you posted about earlier right?

EDIT: NM... This guy is just having one last party before they take him in for a long time. I wonder how this will end? You've got me hooked to following this story now! Lol

 

[tricker]

I think a lot of people have those kinds of days, full time employment or not. Turking is...kinda exhausting, honestly. Because it requires you to be consistently engaged. Most jobs have predictable periods of downtime- you know when you get a break, and you know when you get to go home. The random nature of Mturk can burn you out. Or it can really energize you, I guess it depends on your personality.

I used to have people ask me about Mturk and I would try to help them get in to it, but it was always a failure. Too many people get thrown off by the microlabor concept. If you're used to thinking about your earnings in terms of hourly rate, 5 cents per task doesn't translate well, even if each task takes 10 seconds. I've had actual conversations with people where I told them I make 30 cents a minute and they thought it sounded like a BAD pay rate. Retraining your brain to think in terms of pay per minute is hard.

All the scripts and stuff and the diversity of forums and guides and things makes the whole landscape easier to navigate, so fewer people are getting turned off by that initial hurdle of getting numbers.

I guess the only down side is that a lot of people are developing over reliance on scripts and stuff... I wanna bang my cane and yell "BACK IN MY DAY WE HAD TO ACCEPT OUR HITS MANUALLY! AND WE LIKED IT!"

I've been asked to help people get started turking and have tried, but I just won't do it anymore. Very few are even willing to put in the time to get the scripts, monitor regularly, watch for quals, stay in a forum, set alerts, etc. They want me to do that for them and, uh, no.

My earnings have sucked hard lately but that is because I'm not putting in the time to do the work. I'm doing the easy stuff lately...virals, zoltar, HOTD surveys...that still pays but not nearly as much as if I paid more attention.

I think I've hit a "fried" point right now. Life is crrrrraaaazy at the moment, so I'm guessing that is normal and I'll get back to turking more soon.

 

[Mistahjslover]

Sharing accounts is against the TOS.

Seriously? I've been sharing my account with my boyfriend about 10% of the time over the last 2 years. He had an account before we needed to give SSN but he gave up and when he came back... payments wouldn't accept the activation info

 

[Krikket]

I'm here for the crowd.

I'm here for the gifs.

 

[electrolyte]

Seriously? I've been sharing my account with my boyfriend about 10% of the time over the last 2 years. He had an account before we needed to give SSN but he gave up and when he came back... payments wouldn't accept the activation info

Seriously.

"You may not permit any other person to perform Services as Provider using your Amazon Account."
https://www.mturk.com/mturk/conditionsofuse

 

[Lepi]

We've had to fill in a lot of the gaps that mturk itself couldn't be arsed with... which has definitely contributed to worker retention as well.

The Mturk community would make a fascinating anthropology project some day. Because the worker community has essentially taken it upon itself to improve the Mturk platform waaaaay more than Amazon ever did. Workers are also the primary source of information for requesters... because Amazon doesn't put any effort in to educating them, or worse, just flat out lies to them.

I opened Mturk in the wrong browser the other day and I was all freaked out because I had forgotten what the default dashboard looks like. I'm so used to having HIT DB and WCS and my pending earnings on display that I thought something was broken at first.

Kind of reminds me of the modding community on video games... where a company drops out a game that's kind of basically OK, and then the modding community shows up and makes more content than the original publisher. Better content, too.

 

[Tuesday]

I'm here for the crowd.

I lied Kerek, I'm here for the red panda avatars.

 

[Aydiarose]

Is this near you too? Wow they are busy over there! This is a different guy than the one you posted about earlier right?

EDIT: NM... This guy is just having one last party before they take him in for a long time. I wonder how this will end? You've got me hooked to following this story now! Lol

yep. this one is 20 minutes away I think the other was about 45

 

[Bode "Emo Barry" Miller]

 

[Blue]

Do you really think this is true? Perhaps there are more people willing to stick it out, but then again I see a lot of newer members asking the same questions over and over again. That puzzles me. There is a steep learning curve here despite the scripts and pointers. Maybe even because of the scripts. Not only that, but some long term workers have quals that don't seem to be offered any longer. That's not an insignificant thing. I tend to think it has a whole lot to do with work ethic as much as anything else. I'm here for the grind.

Yes. I do think that is true.

The scripts don't make learning any easier... they make the work easier and more profitable. That isn't an insignificant thing. Having better tools for parsing out the hits makes it easier and more profitable. Things like turkmaster have made catching hits very much easier than the older manual ways we started with... having tools like scraper to keep an eye on what is posting... and tools like hitmonitor to instantly notify you when good work posts. Those things are not insignificant... they are very very significant and contribute a great deal to the ease with which a person can achieve success.

People still need to learn other things... but don't devalue the work the community has put in to make the turking life easier, more profitable, and less frustrating.

 

[Kerek]

I'm here for the gifs.

I lied Kerek, I'm here for the red panda avatars.