Welcome to your Turkopticon Newsletter 

We have had a busy year so far and with your help, we can carry on trying to make turking better for us all.

To leave reviews please visit our homepage turkopticon.net.

Have you been affected by a mass rejection? We’d love to hear your story. Please contact us.

See the bottom of the newsletter for how you can submit short articles.

 

Our Next Open Forum

If you have thoughts on Turkopticon’s mass rejection campaign or any other issues facing turkers, we would like to invite you to our open community forum on Thursday, November 10th. Turkers can stop by between the hours of 1-3 pm EST. As always, we will try to answer questions about the platform itself, turker tools and forums, how to get started on AMT, and more. Please fill out the registration form at the link below and we will provide the Zoom link. Camera use is optional. Feel free to come for 2 minutes or the full 2 hours. We look forward to chatting with you all next week!

Signup at https://turkopticon.net/open-forum

If you want to learn more or have questions, please email us at volunteercoms@turkopticon.net.

 

Amazon, we need some answers.

It was August 19th when Turkopticon first heard of the mass rejection dropped on turkers by AI Insights. Over the next thirty days, workers emailed the requester, workers emailed Amazon, and allies (some of them requesters) turned to Twitter to petition Amazon to overturn the rejections. The 30-day rejection reversal deadline came and went with no action. Just as turkers were trying to find a way to bounce back from the damage caused by this incident, a post showed up on a forum from a worker who claimed to have had their AI Insight rejections overturned.

 

Throughout the day, we watched more turkers chime in with stories of their own. Great news, albeit a little strange. Turkers have always been told that rejections cannot be reversed after thirty days yet there we were, more than 40 days in.  The requester’s AMT approval rating went to 5% and then to 9%. Was it Amazon overturning the rejections, or was it the requester? We wouldn’t find out because the reversals suddenly stopped on the very same day they started. We posted a form that people affected by the mass rejection could fill out in hope that we could identify a pattern or learn more. Instead, we were left with more questions.

 

To date, 35 people have completed the form, totaling 3639 HITs submissions. Of those 35 people, 4 had rejections overturned for a total of 121 out of 152 completed HITs. The calculations from our sample set put AI Insight’s approval rating increase on AMT at 3.3%, which is fairly close to the 4% increase shown on Mturk after the rejections were overturned. Some turkers chose to contact the requester and/or AMT, and some of them did not. There is no pattern of contact that led directly to the reversals.

 

Why is the amount of overturned rejections so small? Why were some workers paid and not others? When can we expect to see the rest of the rejections overturned now that we all know it can happen after the 30-day period?

 

Turkers: Please continue to email AMT if you were affected by this issue and ask for your rejections to be overturned.

 

Requesters: Please stand with the turkers who complete your batches of work and your surveys by asking AMT to overturn these rejections.

 

Amazon: Many workers depend on the platform to supplement their income or even as a full-time job. There are now people who have approval ratings too low to qualify for any work because of the rejections. There are legitimately people who have lost incomes because you won’t step in and implement the turkers’ recommendation of limiting the number of rejections that impact a worker’s approval rating to ten rejections per day.

 

Turkopticon is looking for suggestions!

Do you have suggestions for how to make Turkopticon better and would like to share them with us?

 

Please email volunteercoms@turkopticon.net and someone will be in contact to further hear about your suggestions and see how we all can work together to make Turk better for all of us.

 

Even if you think your ideas are ones we should know please don’t be afraid to send them our way because we listen to all suggestions and want everyone to be heard!