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Comment by x0xMaximus | Hacker News Reader

As AMT's largest requester for the past 10 years, this news was relayed to requesters at the same time as respondents. It's also worth noting that our lead contact, the Sr Program Manager at AWS leading AMT, transitioned to Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker Model Evaluations a ~2-3 years ago.. Leaving behind essential zero team managing the project after they migrated over the stored value accounts to native AWS billing.

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our of curiosity, can you say what your use of it was?

Initially the annotation of biomedical literature (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25592589/) but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space

My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, their commission algorithm would round down to the nearest whole cent when their 20% commission resulted in a fractional cent on the unit transaction level, not the monthly invoice level. Was ultimately worth it to have implemented https://git.generalresearch.com/panels/amt-jb/tree/jb/flow/a...

I truly have no idea what this website is saying https://generalresearch.com/

Why it's Transactional Systems for Ephemeral Tasks, don't you know? No but same here. The other pages lead to more confusion.

My favourite part is the "our customers" section [0], starting with

> Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation

I am not sure if they want to convey what I think I am reading or not.

[0] https://generalresearch.com/mission/#:~:text=Our%20Customers

Buyer A is presented with the following rate card:

< 10min targeting gen pop: $3 10 <= 15min targeting gen pop: $5

Of course they'll bid saying their 14 min survey only takes 9 min to complete. Buyers try to cheat pricing strategies of exchanges just as much as respondents try to cheat buyers on survey platforms. Both parties can't be trusted and have adverse incentives.

It smells like they don't know what they're doing. Had a lol at the mission page accidentally implying their customers are unethical though:

> Our Customers

> Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation; our customers demand the best tools and security ...

At least they’re ripe! I hate unripe customers, rife with astringency, sharp vegetal notes, and an unpleasant, unyielding texture.

It kind of reminds me of those fake tech ads those guys put up in the NYC subway:

https://www.instagram.com/p/DZacltqHMjT/?img_index=8&igsi=bT...

I can't see this because I don't have an Instagram account

replace instagram.com with kittygr.am

Sweet, thx.

Yes, that’s true.

Of course, I didn’t put it there, and I don’t know them, so there’s not much I can do about that, right?

I can see it, the Sign Up dialog has a Close button.

I think it's a satirical website aimed at poking fun at corporate-linkedin-speak

Wish we didn’t even need one

“ General Research combines coordinated operations to identify and neutralize foreign actors using technological advancements, international covert operations, and networking analysis as an Internet Service Provider.”

What is so hard to understand????

This makes it sound like they kill spies.

Perhaps they're targeting a super specific niche. Like somebody who sees WXET Ephemereal and yelps in triumph "that's my quant!".

As usual, the real tldr is in the privacy policy https://generalresearch.com/supplier/privacy-policy/notice-t...

> General Research Laboratories, LLC (“GRL”) is an aggregator of market research surveys in multiple marketplaces for business customers. GRL does not typically host consumer surveys which are conducted by other consumer-facing organizations....

So, just a middleman to give you fake/shady at best survey responses to pad your numbers, so big enterprises/concultancies can have data that say whatever they want. The rest of the website is just BS

Finally you get it. Only exception is that we run our own exchange now to do task bidding so we don’t need to deal exclusively with other companies to middleman. Core business is what’s called yield management (akin to DSP in adtech) where the best survey (is the user qualified for it, does it have the best pay, etc) is selected for traffic in <100ms. I’d only argue the shady companies are the ones paying proxies (like cint.com) and pushing paid user acquisition instead of surveys. We actively fund ontology development for better profiling targeting. but yes, big enterprises/consultancies can use and interpret the collected data however they want, not our responsibility and we have no legal rights over it anyway

> Our Customers

> Ripe with fraud, labor exploitation, political polling manipulation; our customers demand the best tools and security for reaching global audiences and securing respondent reliability at any scale.

wat

Misplaced modifier? Wow

What's up with the part of the website where you are talking about "neutralized foreign actors", was that also using contracted Mechanical Turk labor?

The industry is so backwards, there are residential proxy companies that are directly paid by one of the largest market research firms. I have discussed this at length https://www.reddit.com/r/Marketresearch/comments/1s2tl0o/ope...

It should be a bipartisan issue that a Swedish company is paying a UAE Residential Proxy company [1] to build tools that allow people from anywhere in the world to take US political polls that are used by both parties to collect election data.

Just for starters, you can't even think about soliciting online work from a panel without a robust residential proxy detection methods. We had to build our own:

`wget -N 'https://grip.net/files/grip-proxy-30d.mmdb'`

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOmeQcwSK3o flagged by Nokia Deepfield and CTRL for it's involvement in botnets

Someone using an IP that a geoip database says is US, doesn't mean that person is a US voter. The existence of proxies on the internet is a feature.

Obviously, a problem not even fully addressed by L2’s datasets. Sure, but the use of proxies to masquerade the identity of users being sold to researcher buyers that paid for a different service is fraud

It makes me question why the surveys don't ask for the users country. That way they cd can figure it out without trying to guess it based off of IP.

Users/respondents lie, and many buyers/researchers are neo-luddites; most C level still come from the telemarketing days. A fun example: mobile targeting is terrible when off wifi because all survey platforms uniq identify users based off their IPv4, so any T-Mobile LTE users in the same city going through the same CGNAT often share profiling data that ends up conflicting, which ends up meaning they don't get sent into the best survey(s). The issue is even worse in heavy IPv6 countries like India+France.

The fact that you can sell a product that doesn't work and become a billionaire proves capitalism is broken.

Yes. Much better to leave these decisions to the Dear Leader who is infinitely wise and cannot be misled. Or to the People's Central Planning Committee, where they decide all the allocations and strip rich people's wealth if they aren't on board with the correct ideology. Such systems are non-broken and have yielded unmeasurable prosperity throughout the world wherever implemented.

... What?

Polling data isn't some guaranteed right or something. If you ask the Internet questions and then sell the collated answers, it's your job to authenticate the responses or your polls will be wildly wrong and people will stop buying them.

Which is already the case and nobody but a bunch of campaign contractors who can't justify their do nothing jobs anymore cares.

Exactly, it’s a beautiful thing when the market is rational https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CINT.ST/

I just remembered that in the story "Simulacron-3", there is ostensibly a law requiring people to respond to opinion polls. It is illegal to refuse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacron-3

Spoiler: gur jbeyq va juvpu gur ynj fhccbfrqyl rkvfgf vf n fvzhyngvba, perngrq ol be sbe cbyyfgref!

> My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals, their commission algorithm would round down to the nearest whole cent when their 20% commission resulted in a fractional cent on the unit transaction level, not the monthly invoice level.

can someone ELI5 because what in the office space

Go watch Superman III for more details...

Or Office Space

20% of 0.07 was billed as 1 cent, not 1.4 nor rounded up to 2.

Imagine your favorite feature of a product was spend 1 cent on a real human being time and effort rather than 2 cents.

Or spend the same and let the human earn more?

That's on the commission that Amazon took, not on the human.

Amazon took 20% of all workers earnings for doing essentially nothing for years and years.. of course I take great joy in giving AWS as little money as possible.

It was cheaper and looser automated billing practices than current AI “solutions”?

That’s top-tier “OfficeSpace” thinking there…

> Can you say what your use of it was?

> Initially the annotation of biomedical literature but left academia for commercial use where we transitioned to arbitrage the market research and ephemeral task markets. It was essentially a research panel with a underdeveloped UI for tasks.. so abstract away AMT's tooling so it can be used by any buyer in the ResTech, Political Polling and Data Annotation space.

Reading this is similar to how I feel when I've asked Claude about something it coded for me. As with Claude, I think I get it after reading it three times; you guys were a middleman that provided a simplified interface for Mechanical Turk?

> Reading this is similar to how I feel when I've asked Claude about something it coded for me

I didn't feel like that at all.

> My favorite part of AMT is always going to be figuring out that if we only paid in $0.07 intervals,

That is hilarious! Was it a semi-random discovery due to interaction with the system and people, or did you intentionally looked to game the algorithm?

Do you know how much inn-n-out you can buy when saving ~$50 a day and still be in the positive! It came out of building our own ledger system and abandoning any Decimal or float operations early on.. then it sparks "I wonder how they do it and if it's correct??"

Sounds like your program manager was smart and valuable to the company. Do you have any plans to replace the service/data provided by MTurk?

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