CrowdSurf Thoughts?

if you are fine with doing them you can make decent money on them. The base pay for the HITs alone is not that good, but the bonuses make up for this. if you are a fast typer and get in 500+ HITs per week it should be ok.
if you do not meet above mentioned criterias there is way better stuff to make money on MTurk.

 

I have been turking for about a month so I am very new to it as well. I like the Crowdsurf HITs for the same reasons as you, they pay pretty well considering the amount of time and work and they do for the most part get approved almost instantly.

I think the key is to find high paying batches for HITs to work on in order to make the most money. Remember the more HIT's you have and keep your rejects low, the more HITs are available to you. Also, keep requesting qualifications.

 

I agree, some of them are very interesting, while others I think to myself, where did these people learn to speak? The business meeting ones are the worst when everyone is talking over each other.

Regarding the Jon Brelig receipts... I do these when I am idle on my full time job. The 1-2 hour allotment for completing them allow me to start and stop and at least I am making something as well as increasing my numbers.

 

Some of my best days have come from Crowdsurf, especially when they have extra bonuses in place. I keep an eye out for the smaller batches of urgent priority ones, too. They tend to be news broadcasts that post throughout the day.

 

There have been times when I've looked up a topic or researched more about a subject based on what was in one of the CS videos.

 

I have a love-hate relationship with CrowdSurf so forgive the long post here. I'm venting but I'm telling you everything I think may be useful and everything that is just obnoxious as well. I work on their hits when I can't find anything better, which has unfortunately been more often than not these days, and when I do I make sure to get 1000 that week so I get the bonus otherwise they're totally not worth it. My issue with them is the constant spew of negativity into my inbox. It's better now that they don't send quite as many messages, but still, I think that a system that allows someone to literally produce thousands of high quality transcripts and then make six mistakes and lose their qualifications really sucks. I think the fact that every time I work for CrowdSurf I have to open my email to some stupid "Important message about your qualification" with a dozen messages under it, and each one is 982 then a minute later 1002 and over and over all day long really sucks. If I do 1200 I probably get around 70 messages. Is that really necessary? And now they are sending out the feedback ones on top of it. Now that is a little more helpful, and had it replaced the others I wouldn't care, but at this point it's pretty much like spam to me. I don't even open it, it goes straight in the trash folder because when I actually saw the stupid and often really questionable stuff they're actually sending the other messages for it made me want to never do another hit for them again.

Here's the thing - I'm doing transcription, not copy editing. I can copy edit, and wouldn't mind doing it, though it's hard to do in little fragments like that, but at a certain point the reality is they're paying pennies. One of my first jobs when I was in high school was doing medical transcription. They way transcription has always worked is you have the transcriptionist and a certain amount of error is expected. Then depending on what it is, it either goes to the doctor or editor for a hard edit or straight to copy editing and gets the little changes needed to perfect the document done. This is the review task. Now first of all, the job I had in 1994 actually paid more than they do. That's just plain sorry and it is the problem with all crowdsourcing. You hire non-experts to do a task and pay less and then the market goes further down the drain. This isn't my main point, but it relates to it. Bear with me.

So you're knowingly hiring non-experts and paying a field wage that would have been appropriate 40-50 years ago, maybe. Then you hold those same non-experts to a higher standard than the industry standard for experts? Really? They're not just asking you to transcribe, really, but to copy edit as well. So now they want you to do two jobs for less than the price of one. It is positively revolting to me. I mean, lowering a quality score for a missed word, added word, missing speaker change, that's valid. Dinging people for a missed comma or stutter, though, that's petty. That being said, because I do have the experience I can keep a reasonable pace and an average that hovers between 3.5 and 3.7 and that's good enough for me. I couldn't care less about the review tasks because I rarely do them. They don't count toward the bonus, so the pittance offered is all you get for those. I just wish I could unsubscribe from the messages because they cause me considerable angst and I go through weeks when I'm just not willing to put up with the continual stream of negativity into my inbox.

I should also note here that his is a relatively recent thing for them. They used to be great to work for before they put in the "new" scoring system and changed the bonus system and basically just went down a notch or two on my list. There used to be some great transcription requesters out there, but they either don't post all the time or seem to have disappeared completely. My favorites include Mark Hadfield, Resford Rouzer, Eileen, Daragh, Reese Webmaster, Rachel Garfield, James Luterek and some others that follow that format. Problem is that they are few and far between and it's kind of hard to catch them because everyone wants their work.

So should you work for them? Yeah, probably, but only if there's nothing better out there and don't turn off your Turkmaster for them or anything because there's much better work out there if you can catch it.

 

Really, it is an offense, and the only reason it happens is because people are willing to do it. Why - I've never figured that out, but people should be offended, they need to be. I wish I could make the people that do these tasks understand that if we actually worked together and refused to accept sweatshop wages these requesters would have to step up and pay something reasonable or pack it in and let someone else take over for them. Believe that they are getting paid much, much more for the finished work, so they are lining their pockets and trying to pay you wages that would be illegal in any other format. Get offended, get angry and say no.

This has been an increasing irritation because it seems like a lot of the good requesters are either moving on or jumping on the sweatshop bandwagon, making it harder for real workers to find real work.

 

How much do you think would be a better pay rate (and reasonable on both sides) for transcribing grocery receipts? Or would you rather see them just be gone altogether? What HITS do you consider worth the time and effort and how much do they pay?

 

Does anyone have any idea as to why CrowdSurf HITs always tend to load very slowly these days? It's taking more than 20 seconds to load. I would like to know if anyone is able to load them in less than 10 or 15 seconds like the past.

 

It is a free market and your welcome to do or not do these hits as you see fit. The fact that many requesters require X amount of approved hits just to do their work is a very good reason why penny hits exist. Getting over the 1000, 5000, and 10000 threshold in a short period of time would be impossible without large batch penny hits.

You do realize too that organizing, as you imply, would absolutely kill future business in this format don't you? Remember that you started somewhere too. While this may not be the best money in the world the fact that your doing it at all should tell you something about your situation.

 

Their servers are not capable for their current needs. when i work on CS HITs is use 3 - 4 tabs to avoid waiting time

 

Thanks for the suggestion. I saw one reddit post similar to this and started using both Firefox and Chrome to load two videos at the same time. I don't know if I would be able to do this within the same browser. How do you mute the other videos when you are working on one of the tabs? I just mute the application from the mixer on Windows 7. And how many are you able to do per hour this way? I used to do around 60 around 1 year ago but these days I am doing only around 40.


EDIT: I am now able to mute tabs after installing Chrome Canary, and no longer have to switch between browsers.

 

I have chrome tabs muted by default and use hotkeys to unmute. I have no idea what my HITs per hour ratio is, it depends too much on th audio

 

BloodRayen, until I read your post I didn't think it was possible to mute individual tabs after spending too much time searching through forums that only discussed that Google was not offering that and nothing was mentioned about extensions that could except for a popular one that only helps you locate a tab that is making noise.

So that prompted me to go on the hunt again, and I searched this time for tabs muted by default in the chrome web store. I was able to find an extension called Mute Inactive Tabs. So all the tabs that you are not on do not make sound, although they may continue to play, but the tab you are on is unmuted. There were no transcriptions available, ( it's a Sunday), so I tried some out with Youtube. It seems to work great for me. It shuts the others up and plays the tab I'm on automatically without the need to use a hot key, except only to switch between tabs, but it unmutes it automatically. It appears to have a three star rating because it was causing issues for people who use Pandora and some other streaming sites. So there are definite glitches, but it seems like a valuable tool for doing the Crowdsurf hits. I'm just going to use a different browser if it ever causes glitches with anything.

Came back to add that I tried it with Hulu and there's definitely problems for streaming, like the video starts over if I switch to another tab and come back, but everything is fine if I stay on the tab and it plays. All in all, I still think it's worth it just for the transcriptions, which it shouldn't have a problem with.

 

DenseH, I just installed the Mute Inactive Tabs extension an hour ago and it's been better than manually muting & unmuting tabs.

 

Awesome : ) I've finally got to try it out myself with Crowdsurf and it's so much better, especially since I didn't have anything to even mute it before, I was switching tabs and pushing the pause button every time! : P