08/08 - Fine Friday

I appreciate your response, but none of it helped; I tried all the things you said before, and just for the sake of it, tried it when you said, and the same thing happens. browsers used; brave, chrome, firefox, edge. all the same. even after all were cleared.

 

And as we know, masters quals are apparently not given anymore? So it is a closed pool that won't grow (and is aging as the years go by).

(Silly useless parenthetical anecdote: One 2020 study using 600 workers observed that within that small pool the Masters were "more likely to be female, older, and Republican, than regular workers.")

 

OK ... here's what I would do next:

Try another submission attempt on the laptop, and while doing so, view the browser's "Console" which can be found within the browser's Developer Tools, to see if any suspicious-looking error messages might appear there during the submission attempt.

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One other thing I would consider trying (although it probably won't help) would be to change the network connection — e.g., if your phone has a Wi-Fi hotspot function, fire it up and connect the laptop through there for a quick try. — (I can't think of any actual reason for that to have any effect on the problem you're seeing. But in desperation, lacking better ideas, it would be one of the things that I would try next.)

 

the phone is on the same internet connection as the computer - my wifi.

I'm on windows - the CTRL+U looks normal. the console has inconsequential errors.

in short, I think this has nothing to do with me, personally, but is a problem that is probably wide occurring for a different reason, and I suspect that if you have no issues, you are the one that is different; I've been on mturk almost 15 years now, and this issue only started about 2 weeks ago.

 

Right, when I'm at home that's usually true here too, but my phone plan's Mobile Data service allows hotspot connections. Turning on my phone's hotspot (and setting my laptop to connect through it) can establish this connection configuration:

Laptop —— Wi-Fi —— Phone Hotspot —— Mobile Data —— Internet
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It's just a long-shot Hail-Mary idea to see if the change of network might affect the problem you're seeing – but I admit, it more probably WON'T help. So maybe don't bother with this if it is cumbersome to do.

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If it were me — the next thing I would do is to try using a different laptop or desktop computer (I have 2 laptops and one desktop PC), to see if the problem may be isolated to my main laptop only. If indeed the problem occurs ONLY with the main laptop, that could indicate that the problem is caused by something on that laptop.

 

If you have real-time anti-malware software running (something third-party, more than just Windows Defender), make sure the anti-malware software (possibly a version updated circa 2 weeks ago) isn't reported to be faulty such that it could weirdly interfere with some browser connections.

 

I like how UserCrowd credits $0.20 for screener DQ's, even when the screener takes just 4 clicks under 10 seconds.

 

Is there anything you guys do to avoid the currency conversion rate of paypal? Can you be in the US and go to say amazon and spend your money there from a paypal balance in GBP and not get charged this 4%?

 

as it should be

 

I think this is spot on..seems like most of the proficient non-masters workers have migrated to other platforms from 2021-22 onwards or so(along with the requesters). Now, majority of the non-master workers seem to be bots or scammy workers randomly clicking. Every time I msg a requester about their sub 50% approval rate they tell me it was from scammy work that came from non-master submissions.

 

In that scenario, you're better off using a Chase Prime Visa, assuming you have Prime and assuming you are a responsible credit card user who pays the full statement balance every month, and just eating the conversion cost.

Edit: also for Amazon to charge you in pounds, you have to use their UK site, which I assume is gonna set you back even more now, unless I'm missing something obvious.

 

i know it's a long shot but amazon really needs to invest in mturk again, just by a tiny bit, especially with all the AI stuff going around. The workpool is already there and it's just going to waste.

 

Yeah, I used to hear some really good things about Mturk, but it has gone downhill, and I barely do HITs anymore.

 

In the corporate boardroom world, (especially Amazon) the whole point of AI is to get rid of us. So they probably don't see mturk as a worthwhile investment (even though they're wrong)