I'm new at this thing,but I am extremely upset with this group and I would very much like to find out who they are working for since they won't respond to me. They give me no explanation for why they are rejecting hits,but I've come to believe that they're doing it because so many of the hits they assigned were for dead websites.Nothing in the instructions says that they don't pay for these sites and they're still using the information provided.I feel as though I'm being cheated.At least 95% of all the hits I've had rejected are from these people and I want to do something about it. I'm pretty sure that they're also cheating the people they're doing the work for by knowingly producing work that's simply gibberish.The only apparent way to be paid for their work is to cheat.
Are you doing this HITs from work, behind a firewall, or with a ad blocker? If so you might have given an answer that didn't agree with the other people that did the exact same site as you. A lot of similar type hits are done by at least three workers each. And sometimes, the requester doesn't care if you made an honest attempt, if you were the odd answer. So in that case if all three give the same answer, all get paid, if two, just the two, and if all were different(in a choice of more than 2 options), none might be paid. This is a bad requester practice to follow. And currently you have no recourse on the rejections. You may want to stay away from this requester, if their rejections weren't valid to you. And please add something in Turkopticon about your experience with them.
Amazon Requesters Inc is usually Amazon, or rather various groups within Amazon. Their identities are secret, they will rarely if ever reply to communication attempts, and yes -- historically their HITs have been risky because of unexplained rejections brought on by the flourishing of cheaters. Lately though I thought they'd addressed the rejections issue and were being more careful. Perhaps not. New users especially should be wary of their HITs. Too much chance of destroying one's approval rating before building up a safety net.
I'm so sorry Underdog. That's absurd. Maybe you could open up a dispute with Amazon... not sure it would get you anywhere though.
As I see it the hit is a contract.Am I the only one that is bound by that contract?Is this or is it not fraud for someone to fail to abide by a contract for reasons that are not specified in the contract and for which they refuse to reveal the reason. I'm really angry at this.If they would tell me that they refuse to pay for honest work I wouldn't waste my time with them.
Absolutely. I feel the same way Underdog. It's a simple agreement: You do ____ work for ____ pay. So to have you do the work then not pay you is basically stealing - stealing your time and energy. Such requesters are thieves.
Raise a stink about it! Send email to jeff@amazon.com and let him know divisions of his company are betraying honest workers. I've done it, but the more people who do, the better. Doubt he reads the emails personally, but they do get more attention than emails sent through the MTurk interface. (But be prepared to be told to please use the MTurk interface in the future! hehe...)
Thanks a lot for the email address after a lot of very loud bitching and threatening legalese Amazon has decided to send me a 50$ gift certifcate on my account.I'm not sure that really satisfies even though it's far more than the work was worth.This just really rubs me the wrong way and they still leave a ton of rejections on me.I have to assume that they understand that I was in the right or they'd tell me to go to hell.Just as likely they looked at this nonsense and saw that they were paying for crap results. These hits reappeared today,but they now tell you about the majority thing and I'd guess you have a better chance of getting paid for a valid answer.Probably isn't worth the risk.I'm still trying to get my acceptance rate back over 95% anyway.It'd probably be well North of 98% if I hadn't gotten involved with this nonsense.
The easier way to do any hit and somewhat be assured of pay is limit the quantites until you get some money. Say you do 100 and they are all rejected..... a very hard bad hit.
The best thing is to simply avoid such kind of HITs. I always ignore any HIT wherein the rule "majority wins" applies.