Sunday 3 April 2016

I've been working on another post, but it's taking me some time to put my thoughts together.  In the meantime I was reading a few message forums and saw this:

the flag system gives the Task Authors the power to be the Judge, Jury and Executioner

I've spent weeks writing on this blog, and this person sums up what I've been trying to get across in one sentence.

_____

And the wisdom continues:

 This isn't giving me a lot of motivation for working minijobs, it's more of creating atmosphere of fear of being flagged again, even though I am doing my best...

I'm beginning to think I was the wrong person to create this blog.  Others are coming up with much better ways to express the frustration

_____

You know what?  As someone posted on a message forum today,"It’s clear by now that the Task Authors don’t really understand the impact of a flag on contributor profile"

And I agree.

I'm reminded of some situations on mTurk where a requester would "block" a worker to prevent them from completing a survey more than once.  They didn't realize the impact of a block.  Fortunately, on mTurk a worker can contact a requester.  And it took the workers to let the requesters know the effect of blocks, and that the correct way to prevent a worker from doing a survey more than once was to give a qualification, and then only allow workers who did NOT have the qualification to do the survey.

Unfortunately, Crowdflower does not give the workers the right to contact the TAs.  And I have zero confidence that Crowdflower has made clear the impact of a flag, just as mTurk does not make it clear to the requesters the impact of a block.

One additional note - Microworkers just added a function that allows the workers to add an employer to an "ignore" list so we can eliminate his jobs from the list.  Also, a "dissatisfied" rating from an employer will lower a worker's percentage rate, but the bad rating will disappear in around 30 days, allowing the percentage rating to increase. It's not a life sentence as it is on Crowdflower.

Why is it that in some ways, Microworkers and mTurk are light years ahead of CF?  And why is CF so danged stubborn?