Screwed by major online platform, transcription job
Alt account for usual reasons. Sorry for the long post, but I have to share this story somewhere. Minimum wage in my country is about 2.50 USD/hour.
TLDR: half payment (pity prize), terrible communication, managers playing hunger games with real people's lives.
A few months ago I was invited for a transcription job on a popular platform, but by their subsidiary that is based on Asia. It was performed on an in-house tool, and consisted of fragments from sports games. ~20 or 30USD/audio hour.
Communication with project managers (who seemed to be employees) was through a kind of Chinese Telegram, on a massive group with hundreds of workers. Then they made some real life Hunger Games and put some of us on a smaller group of about 50 (and just ignored the workers on the bigger group).
The work was incredibly difficult. You had to type names of players, teams, locations etc perfectly, having to guess which game it was. I transcribed the audio using Whisper from OpenAI, as it was faster (and better) than me most of the time, and then checked the names on the game roster. But I still had to segment it using their interface. Each segment had a few minutes of audio and took a couple hours total, so I'm making about minimum wage, or so I thought.
When time came to wrap things up, review the submissions and send it to the client, there was a bunch of baloney about how the reviewers were overloaded and transcription quality was poor. Then the client returned some batches. And it was Hunger Games again.
Redoing my work I noticed that some reviewers simply didn't have the most basic grasp of the English language, and were selected randomly, for personal reasons or just by order of arrival. Keep in mind that I'm not a native speaker, but a large amount of the more subtle phrasing by game commentators, that I'm 100% sure to have transcribed correctly, was just replaced by complete nonsense. I had to revert those sections to my original transcription and hope it wouldn't be botched again.
Finally there was payment, or half of it. I'm not sure what happened exactly, but it seems that the client rejected the whole thing after all, so out of compassion the platform paid, out of their corporate pockets, 50% of what was due to every worker, and that's it. The group is muted, I've lost all hope, and will just let it go, cause I just don't have any energy left in me to fight for a few dollars. Worked a couple of full time weeks, ended up making less that a day's wage.
So that's it, don't trust strangers on the internet, even if they have a legit parent company. Now I'll just go work on my uncle's hotdog cart or some shit. Thank you guys for the tips and for reading this cry from another 3rd world unemployed guy.
Due to a NDA I won't mention the name of the company, but you can on the comments to lead people here if they search for it. It's the one that reminds you of the snowy mountains of Switzerland. Thanks again and see you around.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/beermoney/comments/13q8wpr/screwed_by_major_online_platform_transcription_job/
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