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Comment by x0xMaximus

7 hours ago

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...

34 comments

x0xMaximus

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Nition  4 hours ago

> 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?

swyx  6 hours ago

> 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

loremm  7 hours ago

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

  • muragekibicho  4 hours ago

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

  • sswaner  5 hours ago

    “ 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????

  • MikhailTal  3 hours ago

    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

    • x0xMaximus  3 hours ago

      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

  • tourist2d  7 hours ago

    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 ...

    • DrewADesign  6 hours ago

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

m3rc  7 hours ago

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?

  • x0xMaximus  6 hours ago

    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

    • parineum  6 hours ago

      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.

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