Amazon There are now hundreds of thousands of HITs hidden from us. (Jun 2016)

clickhappier

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As the number of available HITs claimed at the top of each MTurk page has been over 1 million for a couple weeks now, some people keep thinking there's not nearly as many HITs as there ought to be for that number. It's not like when there was a half-million-plus up from that one requester anyone could work on (the one who had that Thanksgiving mass rejection incident, don't recall the name at the moment), on top of the usual hundreds of thousands of receipt HITs and IIRC some constant huge piles of CrowdSource back then, that got us to a total in the high 900,000s back in fall 2014, as previously seen in ChicagoK's avatar.

Other people kept insisting they thought there was plenty of HITs currently listed to justify the total, on the basis of seeing the 200k+ of Crowdsurf and 200k+ of ScoutIt. But I thought they weren't properly considering the massive drop-off after those largest few groups. So I made a script tonight to allow me to quickly and accurately add up every single visible HIT.

With 2491 HIT groups visible in 'All HITs', sorted by 'HITs Available (most first)', the totals with 100 HIT groups per page as of a few minutes ago (late night on Sat Jun 4, 2016) are:

715,683 + 3711 + 525 + 400 + 347 + 300*2 + 216 + 200*3 + 137 + 100*12 + 91
= 723,510 total HITs

At the same time that the header claimed "1,095,904 HITs available now".

That's a difference of 372,394. This is similar in scope to the several hundred thousand I suspected based on rough estimates from the few largest HIT groups when it first went over a million a couple weeks ago.

This definitively proves that there are now hundreds of thousands of HITs being hidden from us, using the feature Amazon added for requesters a month or two ago that allows them to choose to make HIT groups completely invisible to workers who aren't qualified for them.

My theory is that Amazon added that feature specifically by request to convince some new client to come onboard with a huge amount of work for a private worker base.

This now-constantly-high volume of hidden HITs being counted in it makes the 'HITs available now' number completely meaningless to the general workers, and seeing it over a million - which was a point of interest because it had never before been seen that high when it first happened a couple weeks ago - is hollow now; the last real max was what ChicagoK's old avatar had. The number was never really important because a lot of it is always stuff most people can't or won't do, but at least we knew what went into it before.
 
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DCI

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This definitively proves that there are now hundreds of thousands of HITs being hidden from us
No it doesn't. That total HITs number may never have even been accurate in the first place.
 
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clickhappier

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No it doesn't. That total HITs number may never have even been accurate in the first place.
It was accurate. I don't have records saved but I added things up back when the 900k day happened and it was in the right vicinity then; and I added everything up in the MTG price-increase thread back when the price increase and the CrowdSource departure were announced last summer (to show what a huge chunk of the HITs that would be lost by them leaving, and how many of the remaining HITs were of what kind, etc) and it all checked out. The reason I and others initially noticed it seemed off this time was that there weren't enough large batches to make it seem realistic, when in the past it was; it wouldn't have just now suddenly seemed off to me if it had been off all along.
 
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essjay

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I kind of want to shove the link to this post in the face of that woman a few weeks ago who was insistent that she should have been able to see a HIT even if she wasn't qualified for it.
 
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I kind of want to shove the link to this post in the face of that woman a few weeks ago who was insistent that she should have been able to see a HIT even if she wasn't qualified for it.
Yeah, fortunately most requesters aren't using that option, but some definitely are / have been. Somewhere I saw a screenshot someone with a requester account posted of the new 'hidden/invisible' option when it first appeared; I'll add it to this thread along with the date of it whenever I get around to digging it up again.
 
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PhantomCatt

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I know for a fact that requesters can hide hits. A few months ago when a requester (not sure if I can/should say the requester name) decided to qual his hits, he made a mistake with setting up hit new qual hits. Long story short, he had given me a probationary qual and added it to the hit along with the "real" qual. However, because I was the only one with the probationary qual I was the only one who could see the batch of 14k hits. There were several other worker's who had the "real" qual who thought I had lost my marbles when I told them that there was a huge batch up. I realized this was my own private batch when the numbers were only going down by what I did and people were telling me that there was nothing up. :bode: Sadly, my little private batch of 14k only lasted a few hours before he realized his mistake, took the batch completely down, and relisted it so that everyone else could see it. It's a nice feature when you're the one with the qual! Lol
 
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clickhappier

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If anyone else wants to check up on the difference in HIT totals themselves occasionally, chat member StubbornlyDesigned made a script to grab the real visible HIT total with, that's a little more simple to use than my unreleased solution: Fetch Total Number of Viewable Hits. For desktop Chrome 43+.
 
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T. Leela

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Thanks, that is interesting. And I feel really dumb asking, and maybe it's because I am somewhat new and I just woke up and whatever other excuses I can't think of, but I don't understand what these hidden hits are, so if I (we) can't see certain hits, it's because they unhide some at a time, or I'm just not qualified? I am not understanding the reason for hiding them and what the impact is.
 

T. Leela

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wait a min...why when I used that script I got a lower number? I was thinking that it would be higher...ok sorry not posting again until caffeine kicks in.
 

clickhappier

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Thanks, that is interesting. And I feel really dumb asking, and maybe it's because I am somewhat new and I just woke up and whatever other excuses I can't think of, but I don't understand what these hidden hits are, so if I (we) can't see certain hits, it's because they unhide some at a time, or I'm just not qualified? I am not understanding the reason for hiding them and what the impact is.
A requester who wants to keep their HITs secret (using the recently-introduced 'hidden' HIT mode) from everyone who they haven't given their private qual to, has had hundreds of thousands of HITs up for weeks now. There is no further information that we have access to.

wait a min...why when I used that script I got a lower number? I was thinking that it would be higher...ok sorry not posting again until caffeine kicks in.
The script is telling you how many HITs you can actually see (not necessarily work on yourself, just see in the 'All HITs' list). It is proving that the "HITs available now" number at the top of each page is hundreds of thousands of HITs higher than it ought to be, to demonstrate the scope of the existence of hidden HITs.
 

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A requester who wants to keep their HITs secret (using the recently-introduced 'hidden' HIT mode) from everyone who they haven't given their private qual to, has had hundreds of thousands of HITs up for weeks now. There is no further information that we have access to.


The script is telling you how many HITs you can actually see (not necessarily work on yourself, just see in the 'All HITs' list). It is proving that the "HITs available now" number at the top of each page is hundreds of thousands of HITs higher than it ought to be, to demonstrate the scope of the existence of hidden HITs.
Thanks...I had it backwards, appreciate the info! :D
 
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