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Thank you for all of this information! I've roughly followed it as a marketer (YMYL ranking factors from the guidelines type stuff) and as an observer-- it is i

by vgeek 4y ago

Thank you for all of this information! I've roughly followed it as a marketer (YMYL ranking factors from the guidelines type stuff) and as an observer-- it is interesting that the shifts lined up with the Porat era. The two people I knew who did Leapforce also did human powered answers for ChaCha(?) where they were paid per answer versus an hourly rate, and then migrated to Leapforce at a lower date. They were both in US and I would remember them complaining on AIM over task availability-- sometimes they'd have work, others they wouldn't. They would take breaks from playing Counterstrike to see if new tasks were available and disappear if there was work available. With Leapforce, were there different rigid time allotments per task? E.g. 30 seconds to classify an image vs 2 minutes for ranking a webpage to be shown as a search result? If you were flagged as a low performer, was there any recourse or remediation, or just getting disabled and hoping for a review?

rater266 4y ago
There were different time allotments per task, yes. In the Raterhub era, each task had an "Average Estimated Time" (AET) set by Google. A typical 5x5 side-by-side search result comparison task would have been 9 minutes, for example. I may be forgetting something but I don't think we ever saw the individual URL rating tasks (which I think I recall were 1.5 mins? maybe it was 2. It's been so long) after the Raterhub switch. AETs were usually reasonable until the Ruth Porat era. After Porat, they seemed to be getting pretty aggressive about reducing them as far as possible to the point of absurdity. We could release tasks for insufficient AET. I suspect they added automated tooling in the Porat era to "optimize" AET in their favor. With only a few exceptions I can remember, AETs only went down, not up. If you were flagged by the bot, there was nothing you could do except wait for Leapforce to review you. That could take anywhere from a few hours to several days depending on how busy they were. I wouldn't say there was any meaningful appeal route; I mean, you could email their quality team, and maybe you could plead for leniency, but I don't know anyone had any real success with that. (I don't have personal experience with that; as I said, I was a PA/senior, which was a quality-based designation, so it follows that I tended to be pretty good at the job! But I always felt bad for other raters in chat who had to deal with that, seeing their livelihoods put at risk in such an arbitrary and robotic manner. If someone isn't a good fit for the job, then yes, it's not going to work out, but I do believe they should be given feedback and guidance on how to improve and a fair chance to do so.)
rater266 4y ago
I'll add that even though the pay rates were nominally quoted per hour, under Leapforce, it was really task-based because they wouldn't pay more than AET. I know raters had their invoices rejected if their productivity was materially under 100%. I assume they pay for all time worked under RaterLabs, due to employee wage and hour laws. Of course, they can still fire a rater for not meeting productivity requirements.

by vgeek 4y ago

rater266 4y ago

There were different time allotments per task, yes. In the Raterhub era, each task had an "Average Estimated Time" (AET) set by Google. A typical 5x5 side-by-side search result comparison task would have been 9 minutes, for example. I may be forgetting something but I don't think we ever saw the individual URL rating tasks (which I think I recall were 1.5 mins? maybe it was 2. It's been so long) after the Raterhub switch. AETs were usually reasonable until the Ruth Porat era. After Porat, they seemed to be getting pretty aggressive about reducing them as far as possible to the point of absurdity. We could release tasks for insufficient AET. I suspect they added automated tooling in the Porat era to "optimize" AET in their favor. With only a few exceptions I can remember, AETs only went down, not up. If you were flagged by the bot, there was nothing you could do except wait for Leapforce to review you. That could take anywhere from a few hours to several days depending on how busy they were. I wouldn't say there was any meaningful appeal route; I mean, you could email their quality team, and maybe you could plead for leniency, but I don't know anyone had any real success with that. (I don't have personal experience with that; as I said, I was a PA/senior, which was a quality-based designation, so it follows that I tended to be pretty good at the job! But I always felt bad for other raters in chat who had to deal with that, seeing their livelihoods put at risk in such an arbitrary and robotic manner. If someone isn't a good fit for the job, then yes, it's not going to work out, but I do believe they should be given feedback and guidance on how to improve and a fair chance to do so.)

rater266 4y ago

I'll add that even though the pay rates were nominally quoted per hour, under Leapforce, it was really task-based because they wouldn't pay more than AET. I know raters had their invoices rejected if their productivity was materially under 100%. I assume they pay for all time worked under RaterLabs, due to employee wage and hour laws. Of course, they can still fire a rater for not meeting productivity requirements.