When Good Requesters Go Bad on MTurk

Well Summer's here, and as usual not finding a whole lot of time to do MTurk work. But there's some valuable lessons I relearned this week when what was one of my favorite requesters posted a lot of work on MTurk.

It's really important to keep up with reviews on Turkopticon and Turker Nation. Even though I've previously done thousands of HITs for ProdUniverse without any problems, I noticed several forum posts about them rejecting tons of work. As in, the vast majority of work submitted. Most of the posters in the forum had sent emails to both ProdUniverse and MTurk and had heard nothing in return. Something is fishy with this. I did do 11 HITs to test the waters, so far all are still pending. I have enough HITs approved prior that it wouldn't put a ding in my approval rating.

It just goes to show how vigilant a Turker needs to be to protect their best interests. Why put in a bunch of time for nothing? And for those who don't have large amounts of HITs approved already, a big batch all rejected could wreak havoc on their approval rating, limiting what work they can do. I rebounded mostly from my big hit at Christmas, but it was a long hard road to do so. I'm not about to give ProdUniverse a chance to make me do that all over again.

All in all, I do enjoy their HITs. They won't make you rich, but they're easy time killers and the money isn't horribly bad. If ProdUniverse can fix whatever seems to be the problem, I'll be back. If they can't, I'll have to chalk them up to a good requester gone bad and stay away. Life's too short to play with scammers.  

***Edit: The eleven HITs I did yesterday did all approve today. I'm still not confident enough to jump in and do a bunch. Turker Nation is still showing several posters who are getting the vast majority of their work rejected from ProdUniverse.