Not always true that a "broken clock is right twice a day" ..

 . because if the clock is just a little hasty, it can be wrong for a very long time.

On 4/05/2016 -- eight days after its unilateral suspension -- the AMT support team finally restored requester data for Babylon's account.

But all twenty-two months' worth of HIT data were tagged as "pending review."  
I had to mark hundreds of old HITs manually as "already reviewed" -- call it 1,100 mouseclicks,

 Laws of the House of God, #8:   THEY CAN ALWAYS HURT YOU MORE.

AMT support team: AMT results have no value

Amazon Web Services may provide cloud-based support for "critical business operations" of major US and international corporations, but they don't know how to restore a dataset.

 Through its own negligence, AMT Support staff wiped out two years worth of HITs for Babylon's account.  

 But wait .. it gets even stupider.

"Our engineering team has investigated the issue and unfortunately they will not be able to restore account A10TCXJSVAY7YJ to its status prior to suspension. We'd like to credit your account for the $5.40 in Prepaid HITs outstanding ,,,"

 (Their cited $5.40 is just an artifact of the AMT system's misbehavior.  It was [apparently] the deposit for the subset of Prepaid HITs which hadn't yet been performed).

 In other words: Amazon values all cumulative data from the compromised account (including the 03/27/2016 batch of 150 HITs plus the entire body of HITs published over two years) at $0.00.

 But I'm sure I paid them more than that ...

Sometimes, the spaghetti sticks to the wall

It isn't easy to distinguish institutional dishonesty from incompetence.

Fourteen hours after AMT said they'd already restored my worker account, they did so.

 As is my custom, I immediately transferred all my account moneys to Amazon Payments.

Then I got this:

I'll take that as a cautionary omen.

 (Such outages are frequent with Amazon Payments, but they're often resolved within the hour).

Since it's regulated as a payment processor, Payments tends to be less high-handed than AMT.

 AMT still hasn't restored the database of past and current HITs for the Babylon requester.

AMT Support: the Interview

AMT: best possible advertisement for Microsoft's Azure?

I got a responsive email from Amazon regarding the suspension of my account!

Amazon now admits that my worker account "was suspended in error and has been reinstated."  
(Veteran workers and requesters won't be surprised to learn that my account has not been reinstated).

 The two requester accounts (says AMT) "were suspended due to policy violations as we identified three objectionable qualification names created by those accounts: “Professed Bitch,” “Puppy Stabber” and “double puppy stabber.” We have unsuspended both accounts. Please re-name the qualification names by March 30, 2016."

 Upon receiving that email, I immediately deleted the qualification "☑ Professed Bitch" [sic], whose proud owner seems no longer to be active on AMT.  With apologies to my friend, veterinary technician hBoBh, I also attempted to delete the qualifications referring to her vaccinations of puppies -- but they weren't there anymore.  Notwithstanding AMT's demand that I delete those quals within less than three hours of their email, it looked as if that AMT staff had 'helpfully' deleted those quals already.  (I couldn't confirm that directly by a systemic alphabetic search for qualifications, since my worker account remains suspended). 

Unsuspension of the Babylon account wasn't competently performed, either. 
The requester can log on now, but here's what she sees she searches for prior research results:

 The account also shows that $5.70 is being withheld for outstanding HITs .. but there are no outstanding HITs.  According to the AMT requester interface, Babylon never published any HITs at all.

 "There are no other planets .. and this one is flat!"

I'm getting too old for this.

Today,  I attempted to work my Amazon Mechanical Turk queue and saw:

My worker account was suspended.  So was my requester account.  So, too, was the account of Babylon by the Bay (aka 'By the Rivers of Babylon'), for which I serve as technical administrator.

  There's no evidence that this was due to my criticisms of Amazon's AMT system.  Except for the collateral damage to another requester, there's nothing to suggest that these arbitrary and capricious actions were anything out of ordinary.  Amazon Customer Service merely refers one to a forthcoming "investigation" from *cough* the same 'Amazon Mechanical Turk team' which made the initial decision.

 It's entirely possible that Amazon's Mechanical Turk team will reverse a bad decision.

(They do that, sometimes).  But  Amazon isn't in the habit of explaining itself to workers.

 Meanwhile, all the records of my worker account, and all records and prior research results from the two requester accounts, are unavailable to me.  (I've written to two of Amazon's attorneys, inviting them to ensure that their people "preserve all prospective evidence from these accounts."  Since they're lawyers -- and thereby 'officers of the court' -- they surely can't countenance the destruction of records in an ongoing controversy of AMT's own making, can they?)

 Amazon summarily removed all money earned from one worker account, and removed the "Prepaid HITs" balances from two requester accounts.   Transferring money out of my worker account every day helped mitigate damages .. but I can't quantify those damages without records I don't have access to anymore.   I haven't even taken stock of my "HITs approved" since 03/17/2016:

 The "AMT team" might, under its own steam, resolve all this in my favor -- or it might not. 

 If this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.  This is why people should never leave any moneys on deposit with Amazon for longer than they absolutely have to.

Ten Years of Beta Tests

Bringing Future Innovation to Mechanical Turk writes of "Growing the Value of the Mechanical Turk Marketplace," and you can believe as much of that as you want.

"...we are considering changing our base commission to somewhere between 20% and 35%.  Today, our base commission is 10%.  We will share the outcome of this analysis in June."

They don't say what they intend with Masters commissions, and (perhaps more important) they don't mention minimum commissions.  Currently, any HIT paying less than five cents must still pay a half-penny commission.   Publishers of penny HITs already pay commissions of 50%.

Requesters have left AMT before, sometimes taking big books of business.  Over a year ago, CrowdFlower-fka-Dolores Labs set up its own shop.  CrowdSource has lately moved away from AMT, in favor of a mix of platforms.  At the margin, aggressive pricing encourages others to look further afield, too.

 Given larger margins for AMT, other corporations may launch competing services.  Google has twice the market capitalization of Amazon.  Microsoft has twice the market cap of Google ... and its cloud operations already compete directly with Amazon Web Services.

I don't see this proposed pricing as clever for Amazon.  It would increase revenue, but neither the departure of marginal requesters, nor the loss of psychological goodwill, can enhance AMT's long term value.  It's probably significant that Amazon still doesn't propose an honest-to-goodness production version of Mechanical Turk.

 If it truly believed it could revitalize AMT, Amazon could increase revenue simply by encouraging the wider use of its ten year-old 'beta test.'