I am a new requester who has posted 15 HITs in the past month for transcription. The HITs do not have the Masters Qualification option, just the minimum # of HITs completed option and the minimum % accepted option. What is making me wonder is that the past 6 HITs have all been instantly taken by 1 MTurk Worker ID. Why? With all the thousands of workers surfing MTurk at any given moment, why would 1 and only 1 worker snap up my HITs so quickly? It makes me think that maybe this isn't an individual but a middle-man sweatshop. Could that be possible? Are there ways to search for HITs and find them, with some kind of bot program, so that you can take the HIT before anyone else does? I don't want my HITs going to the sweatshop, I want my HIT going to an individual who does an excellent job of transcribing. Thanks for any information about this.
Amazon charges you a 30% premium to use Masters qual - that is why they try to push it on requesters. It seems to be randomly issued to workers. If you were to look through the threads for December in this forum, you will see many new users with a low HIT count and poor approval rating gaining the Masters qual, while other users with 100,000+ HITs and 99.9% approval don't receive it. What you have done for quals is most appropriate, short of using your own custom qual. This is a very common practice, but does not require the use of a script or bot. Many workers, when they find a requester they like to work for, will simply bookmark the URL for the HIT, and then frequently refresh that page. When a HIT pops up, it is accepted. This is a more likely scenario than a sweatshop. The answer here is to use a custom qualification. Set up a test, and issue the qualification to those that meet your standards. Only users that you have issued the qual to will be able to access your HITs. Although, this still will not stop one person from accepting all the HITs.
Thanks, swiftkick. Your reply is very helpful. My choice to NOT EVER use the Masters qualification is a "do unto others as you would have done to you" thing. When Amazon instituted this crazy Masters thing I was devastated. I had been a regular there [since 2009] and was able to eke out a small amount of money every week from transcriptions. All of a sudden my work was gone! Swallowed up by corporate entities paying even less than the $0.40-per-minute rate that was considered standard for a transcription on Mturk. And I could not get the old HITs because I wasn't "qualified." Alas, they drove me away to other crowdsourcing sites. But now I'm back on the other end of things. And I have a thorny problem here. I don't want to burn bridges and ban someone. Their work is just mediocre. It's not bad enough to reject, but it doesn't meet my standards. They are useful when there is absolutely, positively nobody else who wants the hit, but I absolutely, positively do NOT want them to be the first person to grab the HIT before a better worker can even see it. Sooo.. the only solution I can see is to make a "this HIT is only for invited workers" posting. If anyone else has a solution, please let me know.
Set up your own custom qualification. Part of the beauty of that is that you can revoke the qual, that way you don't have to block workers. It's a great tool for quality assurance.
I agree with swiftkick. That is the only way to get the quality you need. You can also make a test qualification so that way even the people who do your hits are already more "prepped" to do your work. Those that pass obviously get what you are looking for and those that don't well wont be able to do your work. Also same with Switfkick said. I really doubt there is a "sweat shop" thing going on (never know but never heard of this?) but it is likely this person did like the pay rate you got going and is looking you up a lot to get that work. Hope it all works out for you!