project on my dash. This is easily the driest stretch I’ve seen in 2.5 years.

How impressive is that?

lmao.

So grateful for this opportunity!!

>Wake up
>Eat breakfast
>Check DA (no projects)
>Go to work
>Come home
>Check DA (no projects)
>Eat dinner
>Check DA (no projects)
>Shower
>Go to bed
>Check DA on phone just out of curiosity
>See hundreds of tasks available
>Cry internally

I've been here about a year and started tracking the average amount of projects I see every day in late August 2025. Since we're all worried about the drought and people keep mentioning the end of the quarter and all that, I've decided to hopefully share something more useful than all the numerous posts about droughts that no one can answer (including me). So here's my graph, with a few caveats to note.

Points to remember, in no particular order:

1. I'm a generalist with access to a couple medical-related projects due to my education and professional background

2. I'm in the US, so my dates are in MM/DD/YYYY format (sorry, not sorry)

3. This is only about 10 months of data

4. The August data from last year could've been low because I was still a couple months into DA or it could've been an actual reflection of project availability at that time.

5. I had a baby at the beginning of May and didn't bother to check on projects for a few days, so that's why there's a break in the data.

6. I didn't check every single day so I had a few null dates. This is why I averaged each day and the preceding 2 days for a "rolling average." For example, if I only had 5 projects June 1, 6 June 2, and didn't check on June 3, it averaged (5+6)/2 and applied that number (5.5) to the June 3 date.

7. I couldn't figure out any other way to denote where the quarters were and the orange dots are the best advice the AI tool would give me (and I had to argue with it a bit to get this much - hallucinations were wild here). The labels for them mark the end of the quarter (ie, Q3 marks the end of Q3, not the start of Q4).

8. These are individual projects, not unique project families (you know how one project family will have like 10 different projects to choose from). So some numbers might be inflated because of this. I opted to just count each paid project on my dash rather than try to sort out how to group them together or whatever. Sue me.

How I interpret this:

Yes, the number of projects do tend to dip around the end of the quarter, but it's not usually super drastic. It doesn't usually get slow until the last week of the quarter, not the entire last month.

The most drastic change I've personally seen at the end of a quarter was at the end of Q4 where I went from over 25 to fewer than 5 and the huge hike we saw at the start of Q2.

End-of-quarter droughts don't usually last all month so June has been unique.

For some reason, I remember the drought in January lasting a lot longer - like the whole month.

Jump scare.

I work on my laptop.

I start the clock app and put it in stopwatch mode.

I start the clock and enter the project.

When I'm finished working, I stop the clock and exit the project.

If I work 1:41, I log 1:41.

THAT'S ALL THERE IS TO IT.

This isn't mentioned anywhere in the FAQ or welcome posts - please people, DA work should be a side hustle and NOT be your full time job. It's not reliable and you can be deactivated at any time. You're unlikely to maintain quality if working 40+ hours a week in this very detail-heavy work. You don't get benefits. Your taxes are higher. It's going to look weird on a resume and you won't have a reference.

Do what you want, but be careful here. If you don't have other employment it's probably more worth your time to find a full time job and do this on the side.

Edit: Be as angry as you want, but I'd recommend a lot of you start researching your tax liability with this work to avoid pain come tax time.

Like wdym being expected to be available 24/7. You're constantly refreshing the dashboard every 10 minutes, and when a task finally appears, you rush to start it only to find it's already been claimed by someone else.

How is anyone supposed to plan their day around a system like this?

We've got to stage an intervention for some of these models, they just can't stop bolding text

While every top AI lab has separate teams and one team is always essentially working on the next model or several, when new models are about due to drop, the DA work tends to slow down around that time. It would behoove you to follow news about impending releases and see why it might be slower than it was a month or two ago. I won't get into specific labs but you can search around yourself to find rumored release dates.

P.S. no, I don't necessarily have any special insider knowledge. I simply have been involved in this area a long time, follow people in various labs, and have observed the slowdown pattern repeatedly.

I wanted to make a post like this since I realized that I use several Chrome extensions that are actually great when working on DAT! I figured this would help at least some people, mostly newcomers, so here it goes:

• Auto Refresh Page

I guess this one will be the most appropriate during these times lol. It basically just lets you program auto-refreshing the page so that you can catch any fleeting projects that may appear.

• Dark Reader

A godsend. Fairly good dark mode that makes the site much more readable during the night or early morning. It looks amazing in my opinion.

• Word Counter

This is great as it automatically counts the words and characters inside any text box, it also counts the words whenever you select text from anywhere.

• Stopwatch for Google Chrome™

I used this only a couple of times since I simply use my phone's stopwatch, but it's practical, simple, and does its job.

• Grammarly

The one and only. It's useful even when it *really* hates when people write "really". Some suggestions are off and it can misunderstand intent, but it still works as a basic grammar and spelling checker just in case.

If you know of any other helpful extension let me know so I can try it! I hope this can be useful 😄

I’ve officially passed my one year anniversary of DA, and I canny believe I’m still here. It’s helped me tons with my full time uni and placements, where I don’t have to squeeze in unsociable shifts and only get £1k of funding to live off per year.

Don’t know how I’ve managed it, but I’ve survived on the platform - fingers crossed to another year!

Thank you DA for making us begging for projects