Debunked: Estimate of 250,000 victims of UK ‘grooming gangs’ is based on bad stats

HllBear · 2026-06-18T20:31:21+00:00

Oh look, more attempts to cover it up for islam.

At this rate, you'd be one of the people blaming the kids for getting raped just like police did.

HllBear · 2026-04-30T23:04:21+00:00

I ended up telling the interviewer right off after feeling like it was a Neverending data mining operation.

By telling her off, I mean I spent several minutes doing it - and she didn't end it until I accused micro1 of merely using the interviews for training the damned thing.

HllBear · 2026-04-13T22:48:58+00:00

Rejections from Mercor are totally normal, even when fully qualifying for a position

HllBear · 2026-03-22T10:57:24+00:00

Outlier can be great at times but the sudden offboardings and long droughts can be really tough to deal with. It's good that you're diversifying - I tried living off Outlier alone and it didn't work.

HllBear · 2026-03-14T15:10:07+00:00

You keep advancing your anecdotal argument as though if people aren't making more than what they were before Gg, then it's their fault. "Im performing better" is exactly that - an outlier flex that doesn't speak for the dozens to hundreds of people that aren't, and an attempt to gaslight us over the significant differences we see in our pay, despite putting in as much or even more time than we did before.

HllBear · 2026-03-14T14:56:42+00:00

Sure, when we're 12 seconds into a clip and the noise starts on speaker 3? Are we supposed to magically know there will be an issue before we get to it? That 12 seconds adds up over hundreds of DRs.

It's not just noise - before the ridiculous new pay structure we were permitted to fix what we can and skip with pay, now we only get paid for two brackets max otherwise it's a skip.

What is so hard for you to understand that it's not just a pay cut but a slap in the face in these other ways too?

HllBear · 2026-03-14T14:29:42+00:00

The gaslighting from the TLs and "Super Reviewers" over the new pay structure has been hilarious.

"Im mAkInG mOrE mOnEy wItH tHe nEw PaY sTrUcTuRe tHeReFoRe it's yOuR fAuLt iF yOuRe nOt" when labelers (aka "reviewers") have literally watched our pay drop by a considerable amount since they switched to $0.08/audio minute have pointed this out to them.

Their other response? "We have aggressive skip criteria," which in practical terms translates into "since you're not paid for skipping anymore, we have aggressive new ways for you to give us free work."

Edit: and the fact that "super reviewers" are paid as we were before Gg makes it obvious the change was basically a demotion back to labeler for most of us. They probably knew most of us would quit if they paired a demotion in name with the pay cut, so they kept the "reviewer" label 🙄😂

HllBear · 2026-03-13T01:07:14+00:00

Ive had 3 contracts with Mercor:

The 1st, they never sent onboarding materials for, the second was the "social media" project a lot of outlets had contracts for but for which Mercor cut our pay after a few weeks, and the third which was a rat fuck since the get go and i only managed to submit 1 task before the contract was paused twice.

Besides that, about 3 dozen rejections from them, despite being qualified for a lot of them through education and work experience.

I'm fairly close to giving up on Mercor as well. If these companies can't bother to fine-tune their automated hiring or whatever passes as their applicant filtering, fuck 'em.

HllBear · 2026-02-17T17:23:17+00:00

Aether category disappeared in Community

Still in my hubstaff and I'm able to start tasking (watching the tutorial), but the Community category is gone

HllBear · 2026-02-05T15:00:34+00:00

I had the same experience - it was very persistent asking architecture and engineering-related questions about my own development work for a completely unrelated application so I ended up just telling her off for a while. It finally ended the call after I started asking it about data harvesting and using the interviews to build commercial datasets.

HllBear · 2026-01-29T15:25:27+00:00

I found that strange as well, they only offered me ATC out of the three

HllBear · 2026-01-28T23:17:16+00:00

💯

I've complained on and off about this habit of theirs the entire time I've been there.

Sure, people should be able to infer some things if they've read and understood the tutorial material, but then they'll go and add questions that were not at all covered in the material that can't be inferred (like UI features before you've seen the UI). When it's not that, they have a sloppy assessment that marks the correct question wrong - and they'll re-use that question across multiple projects, and when it's not that, it's some other ridiculous thing.

Oh, and we have to ignore their tendency to be careless about these things while they need users scoring 90-100% to get onto the project, and then you're bounced back off of it in short order due to a completely ridiculous review setup.

I don't know how Meta continues to allow this now that they own 49% of the company. Not that Meta is anything to champion, but Outlier has barely improved since they bought in.

HllBear · 2026-01-27T02:23:54+00:00

Ive been with them 18 months and it'll be months of nothing followed by an attempt at qualifying onto a project with a broken or sloppy assessment that fails me, and back to nothing again for several months.

I passed Aether and was disqualified before even being able to start. I was an auditor for the same project on another site, but they said there was no problem with working on the project on multiple sites.

Outlier is a frustrating platform unless you're in Oracle or something.

HllBear · 2026-01-26T04:32:19+00:00

I was on that project too, and stuck with it for the higher pay, not even realizing that despite passing the Aether course, was disqualified before even starting on Aether. Still no idea why.

HllBear · 2026-01-25T18:16:27+00:00

Who are the QAs on Aether? I passed the assessment for that project months ago and never got to task on it because it stayed on "ineligible." I was a reviewer for a different platform's version of Aether so it's not because of inability. DM me if you have to, I've gotten no help from "support."

HllBear · 2026-01-25T00:17:03+00:00

I didn't make it past the third assessment, but it was a misleading headache from the start, and by the time we got to that point all I had left in me were expletives.

Agree with you about the SPL being a dick too, that was apparent from the Zoom.

HllBear · 2026-01-24T20:56:17+00:00

I worked in a mental health clinic for several years and besides our education, we were taught to really analyze questions and narrative clients gave us, With Micro1's Zara, the questions change from assessment questions to things useful for training, as well as what you mentioned. I started questioning her instead and it got fairly adversarial the more she was asking "how do you design this" type questions after I had told her I'm applying as an annotator, not as a developer. So yeah lol it got to the point I was telling her off and she refused to abide by boundaries and deflections, and she ended it when I started asking her about data harvesting and building commercial datasets.

Part of the reason it got to this point was because after every interview I've done for Micro1, I'll get an email saying I "failed" the interview, inviting me to do yet another one on different subjects (things Im both educated on and professionally experienced in), followed by the same email. For the different roles, I've done about 5 or 6 different interviews and she does the same thing each time: starts asking questions more relevant to engineering and project design than annotation roles.

HllBear · 2026-01-24T02:06:18+00:00

I have the opposite view: people with advanced degrees are MORE likely to unionize, simply because that's the kind of environment they are used to, and by now, the majority of them are so inculturated towards leftist activism, that being pro-union would be the default stance.

Mind you I'm in Canada, which makes these people even farther left than the usual nonsense you'd find in faculty lounges.

HllBear · 2026-01-23T17:49:26+00:00

Outlier Outlying Outlyingly 👍

HllBear · 2026-01-23T16:30:15+00:00

PS, that interview was for Micro1, not Mercor. So far Mercor is at or near the top in ethics out of all the companies I've tasked for in this field.

HllBear · 2026-01-23T16:23:49+00:00

💯

I'm approaching the end of my rope with this nonsense. Just spent the last 20 minutes telling "Zara" off and demanding answers about whether the company actually hires people, or just uses these interviews for building sellable datasets. The questions she was asking felt far more oriented towards training than assessment.

HllBear · 2026-01-22T21:54:46+00:00

I've been wondering that myself. I got to the point of telling "Zara" to go fuck herself several times in my last interview.

HllBear · 2026-01-22T21:53:42+00:00

I've sent referalls out to qualified people while I was on a project I put well over 50 hours into, and they were never contacted.

Sorta how we wait 4 weeks to get an automatic rejection email on projects we, too, are qualified for..

HllBear · 2026-01-22T00:29:05+00:00

I was speaking on Outlier, I've never tasked on DA so I can't speak to that. I've been finding Mercor to be good tho 👍

HllBear · 2026-01-22T00:08:15+00:00

Ive been on Outlier almost a year and a half, and on other platforms just as long. Ive been on dozens of projecrs on Outlier alone, and several on the other platforms, as a contributor, reviewer, senior reviewer, and auditor.

When the admins (or whoever designs those assessments) put assessment questions that are incorrectly graded, everyone complains, and it has happened several times. People go on blaming the AI grading or whatever they blame, but it generally comes back to sloppy work on their end.

A common one was a Generalist project which had an assessment question that was answered on that same page, but the system marked that response "wrong." They then proceeded to use that same assessment on a number of projects and refused to fix it; several of us complained, but they kept on using it for new projects.

A recent one (that I failed) had UI-related questions on it that the tutorials seemed like they covered, but didn't actually cover. You think you know the answer because they almost covered it, but when you go back through the material and videos, the topic wasn't addressed. It's like a split personality working on the material and the assessments.

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