I am afraid some unethical methods or scripts are being used to snatch hits.I used to start turking from 3 am IST would finish by 7 am and could do moderate number of hits.But of late I am experiencing a kind of snatching hits from my grasp.The moment the hit appears it is gone !.
I am not sure what is happening.Only thing is I am not able to accept high paying hits.I have been turking since 2012 and I have never experienced anything like this before.Today also I have been sitting before the computer since 4 am still not able to accept a single hit paying more than 50cents. .May be same workers employing people to click from multiple computers and thus preventing others from accepting the hits,or may be using some scripts to auto click the moment high value hits appear.
On the subject of ethics: there is almost certainly someone more ethical and less ethical than you are in any given situation. People use all manner of automated scripts these days to try to grab high-dollar HITs before anyone else can. Not saying I do or that I agree with it - but that is the way it is. If AMT gets tired of it, they will start looking for these sort of jackhammer URL requests and dealing with it. I am betting if they were going to address it, they already would have.
Is it a violation of AMT's TOS to use such automated scripts ? If not,would you share details of such scripts?
You can find out all you want to know by searching for “Mechanical Turk scripting” in your favorite search engine. As to whether it is a violation of AMT’s rules to use them, I suggest you ask AMT directly: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/contactus