Greetings fellow freelancers; I have a couple of stories for you that I hope will brighten your day and improve your attitude about working on amazon mechanical turk. A new requester named Todd Curry posted around a hundred hits yesterday that required making a phone call. He was paying .30 cents per hit. I decided to do some and see what happened. But when I read the instructions I noticed that he planned to use the answers of other workers as a tool for accepting/rejecting work. Since I had been burned by this method before, I decided to write to him and see if he would consider changing his mind.. He wrote back immediately: He took down his HITS. I replied that the compensation was fair, as some of the phone numbers would not be working so the HIT wouldn’t take longer than ten seconds. I also made a suggestion as to how he might avoid “cheaters” etc. And he wrote back immediately: He then re-posted his HITS at .35 per hit (.05 higher than originally) and I proceeded to work on them. There were still some bugs so I wrote again explaining how he could improve the HIT. He wrote back and thanked me for the good advice. And then a $10.00 bonus magically appeared in my account. Guess who it was from? Todd Curry! So before you think for one minute that your feedback goes unnoticed, think again. Most of the time it will fall on deaf ears because many requesters just don’t care. But not always and you never know when you will reach that special one who actually has our best interest at heart!
Good work Shego, keep it up. It is heartening to see that there are good requesters around who are ready to listen to us and make necessary changes to their hits. I have been doing the same with some requesters and at times get postive results as they increase the alloted time on their hits or increase pay/pay bonus to deserving workers.
Mechanical Turk could use more requesters like Todd -- and users like you and Sonica. Communication can go a long way toward improving the MTurk experience for everyone, workers and requesters alike.