Sorry to disappoint guys. I got nothing for you before I leave. 2 other people have left us (1 temporarily, 1 permanantely) so they are shifting things around. I did have a training session with my co-workers today so they can start learning the ropes. Sooner rather than later hopefully they will be posting work for you. New HIT types. ~ Mark L.
All I can really say is best of luck with everything, Mark. You've been the best requester I've dealt with by far and I hope whoever replaces you runs the same kind of ship.
This is my final farewell all. I appreciate your hard work and feedback and wish you all the best of luck in wherever life takes you! =) ~ Mark L.
Good bye Mark! Thanks for making the last year or so of Mturk a fair bit more productive for me! We could use more requester like you.
Echoing what mom2many said. While I didn't do much Medcrowd, your presence and constant help contributed to, in my opinion, one of the most successful uses of the MTurk platform. Good luck with all your endeavors and the family.
If we do, I don't think it will be for another month while the new people test things out. I honestly don't think this is going to continue through the year. The new management seemed pretty down on it so I'm thinking they will want to axe it eventually or cut the pay down. I really hope I'm wrong though.
I agree with it probably not starting up soon again. If Mark had been able to toss out a few batches before he left and the new guys could of watched/helped it might of been different. But now they are all probably trying to figure out how to do what he did. As for Jaks comment about management. I don't think its a matter of them not liking it. I think its more them not understanding it. Its like taking an old school PR/ad guy and telling them to start up a social media campaign. Its daunting and probably a bit scary for them.
While I'm not doomsaying like the guy who keeps proclaiming "no more Medcrowd", I'm also not counting on them coming back anytime soon. I'm suppose I'm a bit skeptical about how things will go with the change. I definitely agree with the worry about the pay being cut down, as this quote from Mark shows that's highly likely... If you want to get really cynical, think about those test HITs awhile back. They were the regular HITs at less than half the regular rate and could've been a test to see if we'll do the same amount of work for less pay.
Yeah, that's what I meant. They won't see the benefits of Mturk and will think it's a waste of resources if they don't see the results they want. I have no idea what exactly the company does other than Vitals.com so I'm not sure what their strategy would be if all of a sudden they don't have any new listings coming in. Last March it seemed like the current boss wasn't pleased with some of the information thus causing that test that resulted in lost quals. I wonder if the master qual is going to be for HITs at the old pay rate if they do cut it. That would suck.
I doubt even they know what the future of this project is going to be yet. They probably won't have a concrete plan until they do some test batches. The master qual was for workers who had been working for Medcrowd for over a year and had shown they are capable of quality work. It was supposed to lead to higher paying HITs, but then all of this happened. I was really looking forward to that pile of money.
I wonder if Medcrowd is even going to come back to mturk. It would be really nice to hear from someone. I know Mark said the work was going to come back but I'm looking at it pretty negatively now. If even he couldn't convince the new boss to start approving stuff then I highly doubt someone else could. He also mentioned cut pay. Sorry, but fast approval and decent pay was the only reason any of us did medcrowd HITs, let's be honest here. The URL HITs weren't even worth it for me and the only reason I worked on them was to get the 15 cent HITs faster. And even the 15 cent HITs could take up to a minute and a half at times. I hope someone from the company reads this post and sees what I have to say.
I think the best thing we can do is hope for the best and expect the worst. Hearing from somebody would be nice, but would be completely useless if they can't give us some concrete answers. Otherwise it would just be more, "We're hoping to put more work out soon, but we don't know when." I totally agree with worrying about the idea of a pay cut (which I mentioned in my previous post) and that would probably cause me to abandon ship. I doubt complaining about it would help however. Even if we all decided to not do the exact same HITs for reduced pay* it means they'd just open the qualification up to people who would be willing to do it for less. Or possibly that they'd just stop using Mechanical Turk to farm out work. * Even this is unlikely, as there are probably more than a few people who have the Medcrowd qualification now who would grumble on forums or whatever about the pay cut but then keep right on doing the HITs. I also felt the exact same way as you about the URL HITs. The pay rate on those was too low to really make them worth it. My biggest reason for doing them was, like you said, to get them out of the way faster. If anything better came up I'd skip the URL HITs and go where the money was instead. Towards the end where people were just turning in complete junk (and losing their qualification for it), I also did some of them towards the end to try and make sure more of them were done correctly so the later, better paying steps, were faster to do because the info was right.
I agree that people would still do them but I think the quality would suffer and their TO would tank. We've all seen TO go in the crapper when someone reduces pay. I am with you on expecting the worst and I will gladly eat crow if I'm wrong.
Thinking about emailing the company Mark used to work for and seeing if Medcrowd is ever coming back. I know they're not, but an email probably couldn't hurt.