Vortex Oasis - Prolific Researcher Reviews

Swift payment. Task descriptions are often a little vague / leave you guessing.

Always the best studies, quick pay out and easy instructions

Easily the best surveys on Prolific and have 10x'ed my earnings over the past year. A fixed 15 minute time no matter exactly how many tasks you do (so no worries if you need to use the bathroom or answer the door for a minute, as long as it's not at the very end, you will never go over time) so you will always get the amazing $20/hr pay rate. Almost always it instantly approves too so you can guarantee you get $30-50+ dollars the same day. Only downside is the fact they release so many with a very small amount of total places so it's a scramble to get in and often it will appear in your dashboard with 300 places but you still can't get in as you click "Start Survey" over and over and over and Prolific just says "try again" until eventually on the 5th time it's like "whoops, it's full now! sorry" but that's more Prolific's issue than the studies.

I'd review much higher, but for one thing. Recently Vortex Oasis has been releasing clearly broken/incorrectly setup studies. Be that due to them delegating the creation of said studies solely to AI or them deliberately setting them up incorrectly themselves manually. Such examples, AI Video, requesting I select which video matches the "provided prompt" better? What Prompt? No prompt is given for any video. Or AI Video tasks, clearly loading an AI Audio task in place of a video task... These types of tasks seem like obvious warning inducing tasks and just aren't worth spending the time completing in a lot if instances. 15 minutes of your time and 5 dollars only to receive a warning over THEM not setting up a study correctly. 🤷 Math doesn't math, especially considering the researcher behind these tasks. You'd think they'd take due care and attention when releasing such studies/tasks.

One of the best researchers on Prolific. 4 stars only because I really wish they'd find a better way to do attention checks without blasting static through my headphones and into my ears.

No fuss studies! Instant pay. If only those anxiety inducing warnings had a logic! Wish they were permanent on my dashboard.

These are super awesome, pay off immediately. I haven't done any in such a long time though

They're pretty simple and can be fun. Usually fairly quick approval.

Done many of these had one message to say the quality wasn't as they expected and to pay more attention but at least 25-30 been approved since. Pay quickly as well. Would just be nice if people were told exactly what led to the warning email

It would be nice if there was better communication about what people are doing wrong in these studies when we get a warning about quality. I pay extra close attention, I triple check sometimes before submitting anything, and I try my best so to get hit with something and being scolded but not knowing what that is, it's frustrating and it's not constructive. You can't improve if you don't know what you're doing wrong. I rarely get the warnings thankfully but also, we're all just human and make mistakes and I think this is not a great way to let participants know they've done something wrong. Especially by threatening to leave them out of the studies. The pay is good. The studies are usually fine, rarely have technical issues. It's the warnings that has lead to me leave 3 stars instead of 4 or 5, they just aren't fair to participants who want to improve their work.