Moving from Surveys to batches.

Hogendaz

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Hello,

I am new here and have been turking over a year now. I have about 5800 approved and now I do $20-30 a day. I mostly do surveys but I would be lying if I said they are enjoyable. So are okay but for the most part I feel like I am starting to lose my mind. Some days I just cannot bring myself to do any because I do not feel like answering the same questions again and again.

To make it quick, would moving to batches primarily help me with this? Are they easier to do large amounts of or am I better off doing what works now?
 
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aveline

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I think more money can be made from batches, but it's not that easy until you start getting some decent quals for batch work. Money can be made from non-qual batches of course, but there are generally more people fighting over them. It really helps if you can write scripts to get the most out of those batches when they do post, whether it be javascript or even just autohotkey.

I don't blame you for feeling that way about surveys, though. I did primarily surveys for about the first year that I worked on mturk and I burned out on them really hard. Even today, years later, I still find it to be a major chore to do surveys that don't pay at least $15 per hour.

I struggled though, when I tried to start doing batches exclusively, mostly because I didn't really have any good quals at that time. You might need to do a mix of both while keeping an eye out for quals that pop up, or while you work on any skills that could help improve your workflow, at least for a while. I think most people generally do a mix of both anyway, unless they have extensive scripting knowledge or a lot of good, reliable quals. And, to be honest, MTurk has been pretty slow lately, so it's difficult to really focus on any one thing right now.
 

pcdoctor

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I'm currently sitting at 565 approved hits and have been looking myself to get that number up to 1000 as soon as possible. My big issue though is finding trusted requesters that won't just hand out rejections. I've had two rejections already since I've started turking almost a year ago.
 
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jan

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I'm currently sitting at 565 approved hits and have been looking myself to get that number up to 1000 as soon as possible. My big issue though is finding trusted requesters that won't just hand out rejections. I've had two rejections already since I've started turking almost a year ago.
have you installed scripts? do you read TO?
When I didn't have a lot approved, I would watch to see how many rejections I could withstand before going under 99% approval. I (almost) never did more than that. If you follow the thread, you will see requesters that we trust. But at this point, your big task is to get your approvals up. Once you have a cushion - you'll feel a lot better about batches.
 

pcdoctor

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Yup I'm using lots of scripts. When I get back to the computer, I'll try to let you know what all I use and what other scripts you all think I should be using
 

Achilles2357

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Hello,

I am new here and have been turking over a year now. I have about 5800 approved and now I do $20-30 a day. I mostly do surveys but I would be lying if I said they are enjoyable. So are okay but for the most part I feel like I am starting to lose my mind. Some days I just cannot bring myself to do any because I do not feel like answering the same questions again and again.

To make it quick, would moving to batches primarily help me with this? Are they easier to do large amounts of or am I better off doing what works now?
Answering the same questions over and over can be a good thing, since you can get faster at it. The questions are likely to be either: 1) pro forma questions, like "Do you consent to doing this survey?", etc.; 2) demographic questions; 3) Questions from standard question sets used by researchers. Also, many of the attention checks are the same... literally. Answer YES to all consent questions, recognize a demo question immediately and give your answer, and know your answers to all question bank questions. For instance, one set of questions on moral issue surveys has a question that asks how much it matters, in a moral decision, whether someone was good at math. When I see that question, I just go for my answer, although I suspect I vary up or down one or so. On all "question set" questions, I am at most making a decision between two or three answers depending on how I feel at the moment, and if I am optimizing my keystrokes this takes less than a second.
To plow through surveys at a good rate it is best not to use the mouse/mousepad/etc, but you need to make sure that you have some "unchecker" script, since a small minority of surveys use "don't answer this" as an attention check, and so if you advance to an answer line via keystrokes you will not be able to "unanswer" a radio/bubble question.
Maybe this is all obvious. I should probably get to work myself. Also, I most definitely need to get better with batches....
 

Hogendaz

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Answering the same questions over and over can be a good thing, since you can get faster at it. The questions are likely to be either: 1) pro forma questions, like "Do you consent to doing this survey?", etc.; 2) demographic questions; 3) Questions from standard question sets used by researchers. Also, many of the attention checks are the same... literally. Answer YES to all consent questions, recognize a demo question immediately and give your answer, and know your answers to all question bank questions. For instance, one set of questions on moral issue surveys has a question that asks how much it matters, in a moral decision, whether someone was good at math. When I see that question, I just go for my answer, although I suspect I vary up or down one or so. On all "question set" questions, I am at most making a decision between two or three answers depending on how I feel at the moment, and if I am optimizing my keystrokes this takes less than a second.
To plow through surveys at a good rate it is best not to use the mouse/mousepad/etc, but you need to make sure that you have some "unchecker" script, since a small minority of surveys use "don't answer this" as an attention check, and so if you advance to an answer line via keystrokes you will not be able to "unanswer" a radio/bubble question.
Maybe this is all obvious. I should probably get to work myself. Also, I most definitely need to get better with batches....
No actually that's a lot of good information. I spend a lot of time on those surveys to get to 20-30 dollars a day but if there are faster methods I will definitely take them up. I never even thought about an unchecker script and I have fallen for those before and luckily returned the survey instead of taking the rejection.
Instead of using the mouse what do you use? Do you simply tab?

Thanks!
 

Achilles2357

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No actually that's a lot of good information. I spend a lot of time on those surveys to get to 20-30 dollars a day but if there are faster methods I will definitely take them up. I never even thought about an unchecker script and I have fallen for those before and luckily returned the survey instead of taking the rejection.
Instead of using the mouse what do you use? Do you simply tab?

Thanks!
For clearing radio buttons, I've been using this: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/2037-clear-radio-button

One problem with going through standard question sets very quickly is that sometimes the order of the answers is reversed, so that the AGREE options are on the left. I've had to return several surveys after I realized I might have answered whole pages without realizing that the order was reversed. I'd rather return them than have some good requester mark me as a bot giving nonsensical answers. I now try to check this very quickly.

For moving through the survey, at the moment I'm just using TAB and arrow keys, but that is because I got somewhat stuck trying to switch between other tools. I was using the Vimium extension but was trying to switch to SurfingKeys and had some issues. These have a lot of options for quick maneuvering and there are probably others too. They have a mode that overlays a number on every clickable page element, so typing the number functions as a click, and there is no usually no need to move the cursor. Actually the other big problem with these extensions is that I kept forgetting to turn them off when I started some bigger study with its own set of keystrokes, and I had to throw back some nice hits after screwing them up. I'll probably go back to Vimium in the short term.