This requester is out of his mind. This guy has literally 1000s of free hits. They're based on academic questions and you have to supply a good question for some course work or whatever. These hits require a little thinking and probably a background in whatever subject he's posting about at any time. According to Francis, and his (retaliatory) comments on Turkopticon, these hits are all for the sake of science and academia and you should feel privileged to submit them (they each take at LEAST one minute, mostly longer) because, you know--you're helping him out. From the comments section of Turkopticon, Francis states "However, the preview is that my work is basically a pilot study to see if using crowdsourcing is a viable option for generating questions to test student knowledge of specific subjects. In short my results are profoundly "YES". To date over 12,000 questions have been submitted. " So he's hoping for 12K questions to get completed for free...from YOU...and then presumably from that point on he'll "see" if Turk is viable and he'll post some PAYING hits? Is that what he's implying? And by the way--I dare you. I double-dog dare you to post something negative about him on TO because he'll respond with juvenile, sarcastic retorts and even snotty Youtube videos--this, from a supposed academic. I don't get it; I really don't. So you're helping him decide whether Mechanical Turk is a good method of getting his work done. You can help him decide this--for free. And he'll whine like a little you-know-what on Turkopticon if you post anything there, and probably soft-block you while he's at it. Just...so you're aware.
I have never understood why people feel compelled to get into back-and-forth sniping with requesters on TO. Don’t like what he is paying (or not paying)? There are thousands of other HITs to work on, and there is no chain on your foot.
He's the one who got into sniping matches though. People did exactly what they were expected to on TO and rated his pay. He then attacked those people and defended himself for some odd reason.
Look, all I'm saying is that it's not going to take him 12,000 free hits to decide whether or not he thinks MTurk is a good option for whatever he's trying to do. The high volume of hits indicate to me that he's getting a whole season of WORK done for nothing. There's no excuse for this. MTurk is a place for people to go and make money, not a Trial/Testing site for requesters to see if it's viable. That is an enormous amount of work he's stealing, justifying it all in the name of science or academia or whatever and then going onto TO and making a petty, sarcastic ass of himself.
He is not stealing anything. No one is being forced to work on those HITs. The market will set the price for the HITs. If the work gets done for free, then that is what the job is worth.
He is taking advantage of people who don't know any better. This weird free model notion about how the market will dictate the proper price does not apply in this situation at least not completely. There is not a 100% knowledge necessary. I mean look at the number of people who have come on this forum asking what the point of 0 cent hit is and thinking there are some advantages to it and these are the smarter people of mturk since they found a forum. He is no different then a con man selling snake oil. He is relying on the ignorance of people to get his work done so in some way he is stealing work and he knows this.
I agree with twirdman, because the requester is claiming that his 1000s of hits are a trial run to see if Turk works for him, all of this in the name of academic research of course. But there are also 1000s of PAYING hits from universities and study groups all over the world. Obviously, paying the workers is a good thing. He doesn't need to use Turkers as lab rats. He's a con man. Now, I did see this morning that some of his hits (not all) were now offering a penny, so there's some hope.
Are you really suggesting that someone or group of people is going to do "12,000 free hits" because they are ignorant? Someone might do 5 hits accidentally or 10 hits before figuring it out. But that leaves 11, 990 hits remaining. Are you suggesting that he has "conned" 1,200-2,400 people into doing his hits for free? In addition to that, his hits require complex reasoning such as read a passage and write a question. It would be shocking to discover these hoards of cognitively advanced yet gullible mturkers walking around waiting to be paid. I hope all of those princes in nigeria who are looking for a place to send their millions of dollars do not discover them. I prefer to think that people are intelligent enough to make their own decisions.