7 ms·

As AMT's largest requester for the past 10 years, this news was relayed to requesters at the same time as respondents. It's also worth noting that our lead cont

As AMT's largest requester for the past 10 years, this news was relayed to requesters at the same time as respondents. It's also worth noting that our lead contact, the Sr Program Manager at AWS leading AMT, transitioned to Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker Model Evaluations a ~2-3 years ago.. Leaving behind essential zero team managing the project after they migrated over the stored value accounts to native AWS billing.

jan_Inkepa 1mo ago
our of curiosity, can you say what your use of it was?
- x0xMaximus 1mo ago
  Initially the annotation of biomedical literature (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/) but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, their commission algorithm would round down to the nearest whole cent when their 20% commission resulted in a fractional cent on the unit transaction level, not the monthly invoice level. Was ultimately worth it to have implemented https://git.generalresearch.com/panels/amt-jb/tree/jb/flow/assignment_tasks.py#n527 https://git.generalresearch.com/panels/amt-jb/tree/jb/flow/a...
  - loremm 1mo ago
    I truly have no idea what this website is saying https://generalresearch.com/ https://generalresearch.com/
    - skinfaxi 1mo ago
      Why it's Transactional Systems for Ephemeral Tasks, don't you know? No but same here. The other pages lead to more confusion.
      - freehorse 1mo ago
        My favourite part is the "our customers" section [0], starting with > Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation I am not sure if they want to convey what I think I am reading or not. [0] https://generalresearch.com/mission/#:~:text=Our%20Customers https://generalresearch.com/mission/#:~:text=Our%20Customers
        x0xMaximus 1mo ago
        Buyer A is presented with the following rate card: < 10min targeting gen pop: $3 10 <= 15min targeting gen pop: $5 Of course they'll bid saying their 14 min survey only takes 9 min to complete. Buyers try to cheat pricing strategies of exchanges just as much as respondents try to cheat buyers on survey platforms. Both parties can't be trusted and have adverse incentives.
    - tourist2d 1mo ago
      It smells like they don't know what they're doing. Had a lol at the mission page accidentally implying their customers are unethical though: > Our Customers > Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation; our customers demand the best tools and security ...
      - DrewADesign 1mo ago
        At least they’re ripe! I hate unripe customers, rife with astringency, sharp vegetal notes, and an unpleasant, unyielding texture.
    - DrewADesign 1mo ago
      It kind of reminds me of those fake tech ads those guys put up in the NYC subway: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZacltqHMjT/?img_index=8&igsi=bTM2bjhvOHIzYnk5 https://www.instagram.com/p/DZacltqHMjT/?img_index=8&igsi=bT...
      - inigyou 1mo ago
        I can't see this because I don't have an Instagram account
        zzzzpknk 1mo ago
        replace instagram.com with kittygr.am
        DrewADesign 1mo ago
        Sweet, thx.
        DrewADesign 1mo ago
        Yes, that’s true. Of course, I didn’t put it there, and I don’t know them, so there’s not much I can do about that, right?
        extra88 1mo ago
        I can see it, the Sign Up dialog has a Close button.
    - rajamaka 1mo ago
      I think it's a satirical website aimed at poking fun at corporate-linkedin-speak
      - x0xMaximus 1mo ago
        Wish we didn’t even need one
    - sswaner 1mo ago
      “ General Research combines coordinated operations to identify and neutralize foreign actors using technological advancements, international covert operations, and networking analysis as an Internet Service Provider.” What is so hard to understand????
      - neaden 1mo ago
        This makes it sound like they kill spies.
    - muragekibicho 1mo ago
      Perhaps they're targeting a super specific niche. Like somebody who sees WXET Ephemereal and yelps in triumph "that's my quant!".
    - MikhailTal 1mo ago
      As usual, the real tldr is in the privacy policy https://generalresearch.com/supplier/privacy-policy/notice-to-respondents/ https://generalresearch.com/supplier/privacy-policy/notice-t... > General Research Laboratories, LLC (“GRL”) is an aggregator of market research surveys in multiple marketplaces for business customers. GRL does not typically host consumer surveys which are conducted by other consumer-facing organizations.... So, just a middleman to give you fake/shady at best survey responses to pad your numbers, so big enterprises/concultancies can have data that say whatever they want. The rest of the website is just BS
      - x0xMaximus 1mo ago
        Finally you get it. Only exception is that we run our own exchange now to do task bidding so we don’t need to deal exclusively with other companies to middleman. Core business is what’s called yield management (akin to DSP in adtech) where the best survey (is the user qualified for it, does it have the best pay, etc) is selected for traffic in <100ms. I’d only argue the shady companies are the ones paying proxies (like cint.com) and pushing paid user acquisition instead of surveys. We actively fund ontology development for better profiling targeting. but yes, big enterprises/consultancies can use and interpret the collected data however they want, not our responsibility and we have no legal rights over it anyway
    - internet_points 1mo ago
      > Our Customers > Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation; our customers demand the best tools and security for reaching global audiences and securing respondent reliability at any scale. wat
      - yellow_lead 1mo ago
        Misplaced modifier? Wow
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
  - m3rc 1mo ago
    What's up with the part of the website where you are talking about "neutralized foreign actors", was that also using contracted Mechanical Turk labor?
    - x0xMaximus 1mo ago
      The industry is so backwards, there are residential proxy companies that are directly paid by one of the largest market research firms. I have discussed this at length https://www.reddit.com/r/Marketresearch/comments/1s2tl0o/open_letter_to_cint_supplier_quality_issues/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Marketresearch/comments/1s2tl0o/ope... It should be a bipartisan issue that a Swedish company is paying a UAE Residential Proxy company [1] to build tools that allow people from anywhere in the world to take US political polls that are used by both parties to collect election data. Just for starters, you can't even think about soliciting online work from a panel without a robust residential proxy detection methods. We had to build our own: `wget -N 'https://grip.net/files/grip-proxy-30d.mmdb https://grip.net/files/grip-proxy-30d.mmdb'` [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOmeQcwSK3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOmeQcwSK3o flagged by Nokia Deepfield and CTRL for it's involvement in botnets
      - charcircuit 1mo ago
        Someone using an IP that a geoip database says is US, doesn't mean that person is a US voter. The existence of proxies on the internet is a feature.
        x0xMaximus 1mo ago
        Obviously, a problem not even fully addressed by L2’s datasets. Sure, but the use of proxies to masquerade the identity of users being sold to researcher buyers that paid for a different service is fraud
        charcircuit 1mo ago
        It makes me question why the surveys don't ask for the users country. That way they cd can figure it out without trying to guess it based off of IP.
  - swyx 1mo ago
    > My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, their commission algorithm would round down to the nearest whole cent when their 20% commission resulted in a fractional cent on the unit transaction level, not the monthly invoice level. can someone ELI5 because what in the office space
    - ramses0 1mo ago
      Go watch Superman III for more details...
      - libria 1mo ago
        Or Office Space
    - owebmaster 1mo ago
      20% of 0.07 was billed as 1 cent, not 1.4 nor rounded up to 2.
      - x0xMaximus 1mo ago
        1
      - rkozik1989 1mo ago
        Imagine your favorite feature of a product was spend 1 cent on a real human being time and effort rather than 2 cents.
        ShinyLeftPad 1mo ago
        Or spend the same and let the human earn more?
        aftbit 1mo ago
        That's on the commission that Amazon took, not on the human.
        1mo ago
  - BobbyTables2 1mo ago
    That’s top-tier “OfficeSpace” thinking there…
  - Nition 1mo ago
    > Can you say what your use of it was? > Initially the annotation of biomedical literature but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space. Reading this is similar to how I feel when I've asked Claude about something it coded for me. As with Claude, I think I get it after reading it three times; you guys were a middleman that provided a simplified interface for Mechanical Turk?
    - ShinyLeftPad 1mo ago
      > Reading this is similar to how I feel when I've asked Claude about something it coded for me I didn't feel like that at all.
  - wuschel 1mo ago
    > My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, That is hilarious! Was it a semi-random discovery due to interaction with the system and people, or did you intentionally looked to game the algorithm?
    - x0xMaximus 1mo ago
      Do you know how much inn-n-out you can buy when saving ~$50 a day and still be in the positive! It came out of building our own ledger system and abandoning any Decimal or float operations early on.. then it sparks "I wonder how they do it and if it's correct??"
testbjjl 1mo ago
Sounds like your program manager was smart and valuable to the company. Do you have any plans to replace the service/data provided by MTurk?

jan_Inkepa 1mo ago

our of curiosity, can you say what your use of it was?

x0xMaximus 1mo ago
Initially the annotation of biomedical literature (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/) but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, their commission algorithm would round down to the nearest whole cent when their 20% commission resulted in a fractional cent on the unit transaction level, not the monthly invoice level. Was ultimately worth it to have implemented https://git.generalresearch.com/panels/amt-jb/tree/jb/flow/assignment_tasks.py#n527 https://git.generalresearch.com/panels/amt-jb/tree/jb/flow/a...
- loremm 1mo ago
  I truly have no idea what this website is saying https://generalresearch.com/ https://generalresearch.com/
  - skinfaxi 1mo ago
    Why it's Transactional Systems for Ephemeral Tasks, don't you know? No but same here. The other pages lead to more confusion.
    - freehorse 1mo ago
      My favourite part is the "our customers" section [0], starting with > Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation I am not sure if they want to convey what I think I am reading or not. [0] https://generalresearch.com/mission/#:~:text=Our%20Customers https://generalresearch.com/mission/#:~:text=Our%20Customers
      - x0xMaximus 1mo ago
        Buyer A is presented with the following rate card: < 10min targeting gen pop: $3 10 <= 15min targeting gen pop: $5 Of course they'll bid saying their 14 min survey only takes 9 min to complete. Buyers try to cheat pricing strategies of exchanges just as much as respondents try to cheat buyers on survey platforms. Both parties can't be trusted and have adverse incentives.
  - tourist2d 1mo ago
    It smells like they don't know what they're doing. Had a lol at the mission page accidentally implying their customers are unethical though: > Our Customers > Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation; our customers demand the best tools and security ...
    - DrewADesign 1mo ago
      At least they’re ripe! I hate unripe customers, rife with astringency, sharp vegetal notes, and an unpleasant, unyielding texture.
  - DrewADesign 1mo ago
    It kind of reminds me of those fake tech ads those guys put up in the NYC subway: https://www.instagram.com/p/DZacltqHMjT/?img_index=8&igsi=bTM2bjhvOHIzYnk5 https://www.instagram.com/p/DZacltqHMjT/?img_index=8&igsi=bT...
    - inigyou 1mo ago
      I can't see this because I don't have an Instagram account
      - zzzzpknk 1mo ago
        replace instagram.com with kittygr.am
        DrewADesign 1mo ago
        Sweet, thx.
      - DrewADesign 1mo ago
        Yes, that’s true. Of course, I didn’t put it there, and I don’t know them, so there’s not much I can do about that, right?
      - extra88 1mo ago
        I can see it, the Sign Up dialog has a Close button.
  - rajamaka 1mo ago
    I think it's a satirical website aimed at poking fun at corporate-linkedin-speak
    - x0xMaximus 1mo ago
      Wish we didn’t even need one
  - sswaner 1mo ago
    “ General Research combines coordinated operations to identify and neutralize foreign actors using technological advancements, international covert operations, and networking analysis as an Internet Service Provider.” What is so hard to understand????
    - neaden 1mo ago
      This makes it sound like they kill spies.
  - muragekibicho 1mo ago
    Perhaps they're targeting a super specific niche. Like somebody who sees WXET Ephemereal and yelps in triumph "that's my quant!".
  - MikhailTal 1mo ago
    As usual, the real tldr is in the privacy policy https://generalresearch.com/supplier/privacy-policy/notice-to-respondents/ https://generalresearch.com/supplier/privacy-policy/notice-t... > General Research Laboratories, LLC (“GRL”) is an aggregator of market research surveys in multiple marketplaces for business customers. GRL does not typically host consumer surveys which are conducted by other consumer-facing organizations.... So, just a middleman to give you fake/shady at best survey responses to pad your numbers, so big enterprises/concultancies can have data that say whatever they want. The rest of the website is just BS
    - x0xMaximus 1mo ago
      Finally you get it. Only exception is that we run our own exchange now to do task bidding so we don’t need to deal exclusively with other companies to middleman. Core business is what’s called yield management (akin to DSP in adtech) where the best survey (is the user qualified for it, does it have the best pay, etc) is selected for traffic in <100ms. I’d only argue the shady companies are the ones paying proxies (like cint.com) and pushing paid user acquisition instead of surveys. We actively fund ontology development for better profiling targeting. but yes, big enterprises/consultancies can use and interpret the collected data however they want, not our responsibility and we have no legal rights over it anyway
  - internet_points 1mo ago
    > Our Customers > Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation; our customers demand the best tools and security for reaching global audiences and securing respondent reliability at any scale. wat
    - yellow_lead 1mo ago
      Misplaced modifier? Wow
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
- m3rc 1mo ago
  What's up with the part of the website where you are talking about "neutralized foreign actors", was that also using contracted Mechanical Turk labor?
  - x0xMaximus 1mo ago
    The industry is so backwards, there are residential proxy companies that are directly paid by one of the largest market research firms. I have discussed this at length https://www.reddit.com/r/Marketresearch/comments/1s2tl0o/open_letter_to_cint_supplier_quality_issues/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Marketresearch/comments/1s2tl0o/ope... It should be a bipartisan issue that a Swedish company is paying a UAE Residential Proxy company [1] to build tools that allow people from anywhere in the world to take US political polls that are used by both parties to collect election data. Just for starters, you can't even think about soliciting online work from a panel without a robust residential proxy detection methods. We had to build our own: `wget -N 'https://grip.net/files/grip-proxy-30d.mmdb https://grip.net/files/grip-proxy-30d.mmdb'` [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOmeQcwSK3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOmeQcwSK3o flagged by Nokia Deepfield and CTRL for it's involvement in botnets
    - charcircuit 1mo ago
      Someone using an IP that a geoip database says is US, doesn't mean that person is a US voter. The existence of proxies on the internet is a feature.
      - x0xMaximus 1mo ago
        Obviously, a problem not even fully addressed by L2’s datasets. Sure, but the use of proxies to masquerade the identity of users being sold to researcher buyers that paid for a different service is fraud
        charcircuit 1mo ago
        It makes me question why the surveys don't ask for the users country. That way they cd can figure it out without trying to guess it based off of IP.
- swyx 1mo ago
  > My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, their commission algorithm would round down to the nearest whole cent when their 20% commission resulted in a fractional cent on the unit transaction level, not the monthly invoice level. can someone ELI5 because what in the office space
  - ramses0 1mo ago
    Go watch Superman III for more details...
    - libria 1mo ago
      Or Office Space
  - owebmaster 1mo ago
    20% of 0.07 was billed as 1 cent, not 1.4 nor rounded up to 2.
    - x0xMaximus 1mo ago
      1
    - rkozik1989 1mo ago
      Imagine your favorite feature of a product was spend 1 cent on a real human being time and effort rather than 2 cents.
      - ShinyLeftPad 1mo ago
        Or spend the same and let the human earn more?
      - aftbit 1mo ago
        That's on the commission that Amazon took, not on the human.
      - 1mo ago
- BobbyTables2 1mo ago
  That’s top-tier “OfficeSpace” thinking there…
- Nition 1mo ago
  > Can you say what your use of it was? > Initially the annotation of biomedical literature but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space. Reading this is similar to how I feel when I've asked Claude about something it coded for me. As with Claude, I think I get it after reading it three times; you guys were a middleman that provided a simplified interface for Mechanical Turk?
  - ShinyLeftPad 1mo ago
    > Reading this is similar to how I feel when I've asked Claude about something it coded for me I didn't feel like that at all.
- wuschel 1mo ago
  > My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, That is hilarious! Was it a semi-random discovery due to interaction with the system and people, or did you intentionally looked to game the algorithm?
  - x0xMaximus 1mo ago
    Do you know how much inn-n-out you can buy when saving ~$50 a day and still be in the positive! It came out of building our own ledger system and abandoning any Decimal or float operations early on.. then it sparks "I wonder how they do it and if it's correct??"

testbjjl 1mo ago

Sounds like your program manager was smart and valuable to the company. Do you have any plans to replace the service/data provided by MTurk?