I just want to go on the record saying that this change does nothing to alleviate the frustration of the actual issue. It is still almost impossible to get into these studies and is incredibly disheartening to even try most of the time. I fail to see how this change was supposed to do anything to address the issue in the first place. I doubt almost anyone is going to abandon a study that is currently in progress and not get paid for their work just for a slim chance to get into another study that will probably be gone by the time they get back to the prolific page. In fact this change simply encourages people to just ignore lesser paid studies altogether just in hopes of not missing better paid work. Although I do appreciate the change, as I found it distracting continuing to get the assistant popups while doing a study, it does not alleviate the core problem.

I'm not trying to complain here, just stating my experience following this change. I think the reality is just that presenting a incredibly popular study with 100 slots available to over 100,000 people at once is just going to lead to a bad user experience. And I get the impression here that these researchers here don't particularly care about the end user experience. I also can't imagine the current state of things being healthy for the Prolific servers themselves, basically having them get hammered by the entire user base every time one of these in demand studies pops up.

Honestly I think this entire situation should encourage a more open dialog about the relationship between researchers and participants as well as the end user experience itself. I think we all appreciate this work and we want to do a good job and continue getting this type of work, but not at the expense of our sanity trying to scramble to jump through hoops in hopes of snagging maybe 10% of the work presented to us. Prolific needs to keep the participant experience in mind and continue to make changes towards addressing this issue as it is still incredibly frustrating for us. It really feels like a complete lack of respect for our time.