Sebastian Darr REJECTED ALL MY HITs

Discussion in 'Statistics' started by callltb, Apr 17, 2012.

  1. chuck_h

    chuck_h User

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    They're gone. I suspect Sebastian Darr withdrew his HITs because anyone savvy isn't working on them, considering his lousy pay and his readiness to reject work, leaving only those who are desperate and don't know any better to attempt them, and probably with less than stellar results, meaning that he's got a database full of garbage E-mail accounts.

    That's completely fine with me. MTurk without Sebastian Darr is MTurk with one less crappy requester, in my opinion.
     
  2. Scott

    Scott User

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    And that's why hits are 88k down too :)
     
  3. chuck_h

    chuck_h User

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    I don't think Sebastian Darr was deliberately trying to scam people, but I think he had unrealistic expectations about what he was asking for and how much he had to pay for it.

    Contrary to what the good doctor might think, it is hard to find an E-mail address for someone given only a name and a research paper they wrote. I finally had developed a method that worked pretty well for me, but even with my method I would say I was only finding a good address 15% -25% of the time. Since there was no pay offered for failing to find the E-mail address, that would mean I did 20-30 minutes worth of work before finally finding an address that I could submit for a 2 cent reward.

    As I said, I was doing them mostly for the challenge; I found it to be quite a puzzle to find the name of someone who wrote a paper 3 or 5 or 8 years ago, then tie that person to an E-mail address.

    However, when Sebastian Darr rejected a dozen of my submissions because he claimed the names and E-mail addresses didn't match, especially when I knew exactly how much work I'd put into finding those E-mail addresses and how sure I was that I was right, well, I was infuriated.:mad: I had to do scores of HITs to get my rating back to over 95%, and only recently have I finally gotten back to the 98%+ rating I enjoyed prior to working on Sebastian Darr's HITs.

    In sum, Sebastian Darr was a bad requester because he designed his HIT poorly, offered a meager reward for success, and improperly validated his results (the last is a cardinal sin who holds himself out to be a scientist, as Herr Doktor Darr does).
     
  4. footballchick29

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    Sebastian Darr is back

    Sebastian Darr is back.. just popped up with a ton of hits available
     
  5. Scott

    Scott User

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    Is it the same request?
     
  6. alian1980

    alian1980 User

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    Yes, same shitty request - find email address of researchers at a garbage pay rate. Some 43142 up now.
     
  7. Turkalicious

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    I can only hope everyone who has [working] TO right now avoids him like the plague he is. Sadly my TO doesn't work but when I saw those HITs earlier I knew the name was familiar so I took a peek over here and on the TO site and promptly fled.
     
  8. Playa_hamm420

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    Hes never really LEFT if anyones paid attention he takes them down for a cpl days then puts them back up hes been doing this for the last cpl weeks now.. leaves for a cpl days comes back puts up small batches at a time then finally all 80K are back up and no ones touching them.
     
  9. chuck_h

    chuck_h User

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    Actually, I've noticed that Sebastian Darr has refined his HITs in the current iteration. He now has 42,435 hits up instead of 80,000+, there are more predefined search queries (9 in all, but still pretty worthless), and he's upped his reward to 5 cents per HIT instead of 2.

    This still means that Sebastian Darr has over 1/6 of all the HITs available on MTurk (17.4% if anyone, wants to be exact about it).

    Somebody's got to be doing his HITs, though. In the time it took me to write this post, the total number dropped by 16. It's just not going to be me that does them.;)
     
  10. Playa_hamm420

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    "Other MTurk workers will evaluate your result. If two workers agree that name and email match/don't match, your hit will be approved/rejected."

    ^^^ A requester who uses those ancient methods should be shot on sight :p
     
  11. Munawar Mohamad

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    Shoot at sight...LOL
     
  12. Scott

    Scott User

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    So If I am right and 2 are wrong - you are wrong.

    I emailed him when it asked for an email for a Professor I had in college. I knew where to look on the university's system. 5 seconds, bam in - Rejected since it didnt match the other two. Using his search provided an old email that would not work for him anymore.

    But what can you do.
    Oh yes, not do his...
     
  13. Scott

    Scott User

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    Update: He now has 36.79% of all hits on Turk with 116,228!

    This is insane. I hope the newbs dont fall for his
     
  14. Playa_hamm420

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    They do.. And they will..
     
  15. mTurkMeister

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    I refused to do his 3c hits, but then last night he upped them to 5c and I decided to take another look. He had a predefined search which found the email in the first result. I couldn't believe it was that easy. I copied the email into the field and got an error on submitting saying the email wasn't valid. It was an Italian address and like most European countries had a suffix of .it after the university URL. I wrote him a nasty note asking why his HIT couldn't handle European emails. I don't expect to get a reply, but I'm not going to waste time with a requester who can't get the basics correct.
     

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