Hello, been lurking for a few days since I registered with MTurk before the weekend. I've been reading this and a few other forums non-stop to try and get as educated as possible. I had one question, and it's about this Great HITS sub-Forum. Why are there so many photos in each daily thread? It's like I have to comb through 85% random GIFs and memes just to find a worthwhile HIT. Is this how it always has been? I would think it would help to keep these Great HITS threads... I don't know, wouldn't it make more sense to separate business and play? I don't want to criticize anything, because I'm obviously new. I don't want to step on any toes! I'm just a little confused, as the caption of this sub-Forum is "The most valuable forum you will ever find," yet it's almost all memes and GIFs hiding the actual HITS listings. Hope I didn't offend any long-time Turkers. I understand it's good to take a break and look at some pictures and have a laugh.
Imagine there are a bunch of people who have been doing this for a while...They get together..they discuss mturk..they discuss themselves.. they entertain one another....what should you do? shut up and listen? Join in? find another group? That is up to you, man.
I totally understand. Like I said, not trying to criticize. Just trying to understand. I honestly thought, at first, that there were hidden threads with the actual HITS in them that I was missing, since almost all I saw were photos and people discussing TV and movies.
Welcome. A lot of new people ask that question. It's been like that as long as I've been here and I think you can count on it staying that way. The Great Hit thread is like a water cooler. People post both to share hits and to chat. When it's very GIF heavy that usually means there aren't many good hits up. If you find the pictures and GIFs too distracting you can go into settings and disable images. Then you won't see them. If you've spotted a couple of people who you think post too many GIFs you can put them on your ignore list. Then you won't see the content of their posts. When there are a lot of good hits up you'll notice an increase in hit posting.
Thanks for the info! I like the idea of a water cooler, just wasn't sure! Still trying to get a feel for this place and MTurk as a whole. Thanks for the response.
best thing you can do is to turn off those gifs as RockinRobin said. That's what i did. Afterwards u'll find a lot more hit suggestions...
It's been tried and it doesn't work. Maybe you could keep photos out of it but people will still chatter like squirrels at a nut convention. A hit about whatever may start people talking and the conversation grow. Then you need mods to constantly tell people to shut up and only post hits and talk about hits in a different thread and actually socialize in another and not go beyond that in that forum and delete and move posts. There's a forum that does this. That forum is a ghost town. The whole reason people come here and want to share is because they enjoy it. That dies when you place a ton of strict rules on it.
I'm also curious just how far into a single day's "Great HITs" thread you looked... The first page is ALWAYS a ton of GIFs because the new thread is created at midnight PST, and since there aren't usually a lot of HITs being posted at that time of day/night, the thread is opened with everyone posting GIF-bombs (it's like... a celebration of a new day of turking? just because...). When you click on the thread for the day, immediately skip to the last page to see the most recent posts (typically, the later pages are much less GIF/image-heavy than the beginning of the thread unless the day is supremely slow, or perhaps someone has just posted something inflammatory that everyone is responding to with the drama-llama or images of people eating popcorn, etc., and of course, we do get carried away into non-turking related topics as well). There is also an option in settings to re-order the thread so that the *newest* posts on the thread show first. Otherwise, yeah... it's a water cooler. The point isn't quite so much to feed HITs on to the thread, as it is to make sure everyone else gets notice when something really awesome that we all love pops up (you'll see a post that only says "Endor", "Lakes", "Giphy" as a form of quick announcement that their HITs are live). But what there is a lot of is sharing of tips on how to improve your own searching for HITs, what tools/scripts/extensions to use when and how, and double-checking with one another to confirm a requester's actions (ensuring as a community that we don't get scammed by requesters, and that if that does happen, there is a strong response to move them to fix it).
i think it's time of day- if you don't start till afternoon or evenings us time, you've missed the money most days.