Comment by loremm

7 hours ago

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.

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

“ 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????

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

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.