[psb31]

I’m the CTO at an MTurk competitor (Prolific.ac). We’ve written up some thoughts on this below. It’s unlikely that these accounts are ‘true’ bots but rather low effort workers hiding location with a VPN and providing pseudo random responses.

https://blog.prolific.ac/bots-and-data-quality-on-crowdsourc... https://blog.prolific.ac/how-to-improve-your-data-quality/

We’ve done a lot of work on improving data quality on Prolific and filtering out these kind of accounts and heavily invest in making sure our pool are honest, attentive and engaged.

If anyone’s concerned about data quality in online samples please get feel free to get in touch.

[NullPrefix]

Your platform requires quite a lot of data. Is entering all that necessary to be able to participate in studies?

[psb31]

No. All questions are optional and typically studies only filter on 1-3. We realise there’s a too many there by default and we’re working on staggering the demographics more.

[edoceo]

This is a pattern I use, gotta trickle those Qs, not overwhelmed and keeps them engaged after.