31–40 of 51 posts
They didn't even address the wellbeing of players, managing addiction and overwork etc.
> Failing a test will cost a user 600 points, or roughly the equivalent of 15 minutes of work on the platform. A correctly tuned penalty system removes the need for setting reviewer accuracy minimums; poor performers will simply not earn enough money to continue on the platform. This still sets a reviewer accuracy minimum, but it is determined implicitly by the arbitrary test penalty instead of consciously chosen bas…
> All labellers are either licensed pilots or controllers (or VATSIM pilots/controllers). I would think such people can make better money by actually working as a pilot or controller?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But rather, under a punishing set of Kafkaesque rules, like someone was thinking only of computer programs, oops. "Gamified", with huge negative points penalties and everything. To be under threat of not getting paid at all. I'm not defending these practices, but to share some context: One of the problems with getting workers to review ML output is it's incredibly, unbelievably boring. When the task is to review mo…
Stack Overflow does this by sometimes prompting you with known bad changes that you shouldn't approve. But then they're managing volunteers, not paying for bad reviews, so they have no money to waste.
> Still, expert reviewers will occasionally disagree in their labelling. To ensure quality, an audio clip [box characters], at which point [...] Have they censored their own article?
I think this didn't age well, for HN, and it prompts some serious questions about our techbro startup culture. > Obvious but necessary: to incentivize productive work, we tie compensation to the number of characters transcribed, and assess financial penalties for failed tests (more on tests below). Penalties are priced such that subpar performance will result in little to no earnings for the labeller. So, these aren'…
What do you mean “didn’t age well”, its a brand new article. It hasn’t aged at all.
If the writer had the benefit of seeing the few-post outrage on the 25th, they probably would've written the article differently, and maybe also reflected on the dynamic with the workers.
In a startup, when you have to do all the things, and you're constantly learning, it's easy to miss some things. Also, a lot of the funded tech startups are of founders of rich parents and sheltered upbringings, for various reasons. So (like all humans) they often have little understanding of the situations of people who are not them, and therefore little automatic empathy for the not understood. Often (this can also be normal human reaction), they will implicitly imagine themselves as deserving whatever privileges they have, and therefore having superior merit over others who don't have that. So, without reflection, one might accept the situation of one person calling themselves CEO at 20, and taking the lion's share of the entire effort's wealth, while another person is belittled and treated like shit, since (the implicit belief goes) they both must merit their lots in life.
Unless and until we stop and think about it. I think that most people here on HN, when we're distracted from empathy, by all the commotion of all things we have to pay attention to, will care once it's pointed out. We stop and reflect, and then we try to learn and do better.
Where I'm from, "in house" means employees. I see "contractors" and "negative earnings" in the same article. They do say that reviewers have to have some kind of aviation experience. I'd be more curious reading an article about how they source the talent here.
So they are building a system which has all the hallmarks of an extremely addictive game. But that's ok because they pay the players a small amount of money? They didn't even address the wellbeing of players, managing addiction and overwork etc.
"and assess financial penalties for failed tests" That's an immediate nope for me. I don't care if I can file a dispute, unless I can resolve it then and there, I'm not going to be at the whim of some faceless escalation system, or an uninformed CS agent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stack Overflow does this by sometimes prompting you with known bad changes that you shouldn't approve. But then they're managing volunteers, not paying for bad reviews, so they have no money to waste.
I honestly still have trouble believing there are people willing to moderate SO content for free. Do a boring job to make a rich company richer, get paid nothing and occasionally get yelled at.