If there's no real appeal process, what reason is there for any MT employer to make any payouts at all? Honesty and not realising this about the system?
Maybe i read it wrong, but from the article it sounds like the Amazon MT team is at least trying to do more in the way of preventing unnecessary rejections and bad faith task-giving. Not sure if any sort of appeals process was ever put in place, but i really doubt it, since that would create a new non-trivial administrative burden on Amazon that is likely much larger than they are willing to handle.
Seemingly arbitrary rejections always seemed to be a much bigger problem by my estimation, especially for workers already somewhat invested in the system, and needing to maintain approval ratings to even qualify for higher-paying types of work.
If Amazon hasn't implemented anything like a way of expunging old rejection records, it would be a huge benefit to their workers to have some sort of reasonable, semi-automated way of doing so, at least after enough time has passed, or enough more recent positive approvals have occurred.
I'm really out of the loop though, and don't know much about the current state of things. It would just be really nice to have some more in-depth write-ups on the MT worker experience. The article was great but from first-hand experience i know there is a lot more ground to cover.
Senior project / undergrad thesis anyone? Researching / investigating MT from a user interface, user interaction design side of things, giving recommendations for improvements to the worker experience, for HIT providers, etc. would be very interesting and potentially very beneficial for the platform.
There's an unofficial ratings system for those who post the jobs[1] that most people who use MT with any sort of regularity (including myself back in the day) use. If a requester consistently fails to pay out, they'll stop getting as many workers who are willing to work on their tasks.
That's a great point! Though still really hoping the default experience has improved in the past year or so as well. Not every new or even semi-experienced user is going to be savvy and aware of external rating systems, or other peripheral tools to help improve the worker experience. I know i wasn't (first time hearing about turkopticon, sadly -_-), but that doesn't reflect at all on how qualified someone is to do the mostly very simple tasks available to work on.
