Day 2

My adventures in Turking continue :)

Spent some time today trying to figure out how to get some more qualifications so I can work on "better" HITs. Turns out, a lot of it is based on your HIT acceptance rate (keep it above 95%) and your total number of completed and approved HITs. There are thresholds where new opportunities open up: 10, 50, 100, 200, 1000 -- any requester (company or individual creating the HIT and thereby also dictating the terms) can filter out Turkers based on combinations of these statistics about a Turker's work. Then there are specialized qualifications that you can get based on taking a test or demonstrating that you can handle their lower level HITs.

So I wanted to do more HITs today. I wanted get closer to reaching that 100 approved HITs mark. About 2/3 of my HITs from yesterday wound up being approved. I still have several that are "pending," and I've learned that they can stay pending for up to 30 days. A pending HIT doesn't count towards your successful HIT count.

So today, in addition to exploring a few new options, I went back to the requesters who were quick to approve my HITs... and in my spare bits and pieces of time, I completed 59 HITs total today. Some are still pending. But I'm closer to that first big milestone: 100 approved and completed HITs.

Unfortunately, I also reached a different, less pleasant milestone today: my first rejection. It was a HIT worth less than a dime (most of them are worth less than a dime)... but it still stung! How could a college educated, literate, tech savvy, middle-aged woman fail at a simple task? The truth is, I'll probably never know what I did wrong. And it WILL haunt me on some level as I work on additional HITs from that requester. But life goes on...

So after two days of Turking, I've made less than $1.50 and have a slightly bruised ego. Yeah, off to a GREAT start!