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| Photo by Michael Jastremski; I played around with it in Paint.net |
I was burned out on CloudCrowd and stopped working there almost entirely for the last few months. But I went back a few days ago and started doing a bit of work there again, lured by higher payments for some writing tasks as well as staff promises to make changes to improve some of the more frustrating aspects of the CC experience.
I noticed that I had accumulated a fair number of referrals, but only one person had done any work at all. I was wondering why almost everyone seemed to get either stuck or turned off before they even got out of the starting gate.
There's definitely a mix of good and bad at CloudCrowd, and I'm not here to plug it. I do have a vested interest, though, in seeing my referrals succeed there. So if anyone has any questions -- whether I've referred you or not -- leave them in the comments below, and I will try to answer what I can. If you wanted to get going there but couldn't -- if you ran into some obstacles -- maybe I can help you figure it out.
(And if you haven't signed up yet and want to give it a shot -- here's my referral link: CloudCrowd signup. You need to have a Facebook account as the site runs as a Facebook app, but it's okay to set up a new acount to use just for CloudCrowd if you don't want to use your regular account for privacy reasons.)
Editing to add: After I wrote this post earlier this evening, a review task I did at CloudCrowd was rejected, and now the reasons I got fed up before are all coming back to me. Also realized that the price quoted per word for the writing task only applies if I get the bonus, which is hard to do. Without the bonus, the price drops from 4 cents/word to 3.36 cents/word. That's still higher than many sites, but lower than what I usually get at WriterAccess. Writing for CloudCrowd may be easier than writing elsewhere, as no one at CC seems to particularly care if the articles are engaging -- only that they are grammatically correct. On the other hand, even if it's easier, writing boring articles is, well, boring. So CC is still a mixed bag.
Editing again to add: I've been doing more there this past week. They had a batch of jobs for movie reviews and previews, which were much more interesting than the usual articles to write, review and edit. The pay for some of the new tasks has improved. The site still has its frustrating aspects but, at least for the moment, I'm back into it.
My experience:
ReplyDelete1) CloudCrowd opens only on insecure mode in facebook. May a times it does not work at all.
2) Passing ClowdCrowd tests is a big challenge for me. One small mistake and out for 14 days. I forget to log in after 14 days.
3) My office has blocked facebook. I do not have much time left at home.
In my opinion, ClowdCrowd should dissociate itself from facebook and become independent, then my participation will increase :-)
I agree -- I would like to see CloudCrowd on its own site, separate from Facebook. I haven't been having the technical problems or access problems that you've been having, but I just don't trust Facebook as far as privacy.
ReplyDeleteI do not like the fact that other workers are able to approve/reject work. How do I know that the qualifications are for other workers? Just because someone has a degree in English Lit, that does not mean they are qualified to distinguish between good copy and bad copy. If you say overeat vs. over eat, should the whole damn article be rejected?
ReplyDeleteThat is the problem that I have with CloudCrowd, their ability to allow workers rejection power. It should come form staff or the client.
I agree that having fellow workers approve/reject our work is the most frustrating thing about working for CloudCrowd, especially when their judgments are wrong.
DeleteI don't think that's going to change. Having workers approve each other's work -- what CloudCrowd calls "peer review" -- seems to be at the heart of the way CC's system works. Why would they pay a salaried staff person to review work, when they can pay a contractor a few pennies or a few dollars to do it instead?
Looking to the clients to do it wouldn't work either, as (presumably) clients outsource work to a service like CloudCrowd so that they don't have to deal with the details themselves.
For me, the trick to working within the CC system has been to try to put my ego aside (easier said than done!) in order to avoid excessive wear-and-tear on my nervous system.
On my first two days there, both my writing and editing credential tests were wrongly rejected, and I was fuming. Eventually, site administrators overturned both rejections and approved the tests, but the whole experience was exhausting, and I couldn't keep on working at that level of emotional intensity.
So nowadays, I just try to detach, to accept that a certain percentage of tasks that I do there are going to be wrongly rejected, and that's just the way it is.
The situation is not nearly as bad as when I started (last July). At that time, we had only a very limited number of appeals and a single rejected appeal meant we couldn't file another one for a month. So there was often nothing we could do about work that was wrongly rejected, except to make time-consuming pleas on the forums for administrators to take a look. Now, they've changed the appeal system to make it easier to appeal more tasks, and the new correction system means that for many tasks, a rejection doesn't mean that you lose everything. The new review system is also getting more long-ish articles approved before they go to editing. So it's better. It's still frustrating, though, because it takes time to appeal, and it's often not worth it to appeal or even correct some of the lower-paying tasks. But it's not as bad as it used to be when you could spend a significant amount of time writing a research-intensive article and then not got paid anything at all.
I do reviewing, editing, and writing there (roughly in that order), and no one at CloudCrowd has ever asked about my education or experience or anything else about my background. Everything goes strictly on the credential tests and the scores. So I'm not sure where you are going with the "English Lit" thing. For better or for worse, that's not a requirement for anything at CC.