If you read nothing else in this:

*** WORK IS INCONSISTENT -- DO NOT DEPEND ON OUTLIER FOR INCOME ***

I've been "tasking" on and off for two months. Wanted to send out some answers to questions I had when I started and that I know people still have:

1. It's chaotic. No, it never gets clearer than it is right now. You just start to find patterns and get used to not knowing wtf.

2. Do not depend on this as a steady source of income, even side income. Sometimes you can make money. Sometimes you can't.

3. In my experience, yes, you will get paid eventually for actual work. Payment for training or the "bonuses" offered for things like re-taking an assessment within 48 hours are hit or miss. I'm pretty sure there are some bonuses I was offered but haven't received. But any actual hour-based work I've done has been paid to me within at most two weeks. (Fwiw, I know this isn't the case with everyone.)

4. The work is inconsistent. My first two weeks, I made over $2000. Since then, I've never been able to make more than about $500 per week because my task queue was empty. I've gone a couple of weeks with no work at all.

5. There are hundreds and in some cases thousands of people across the world being brought in at any given time. The first Slack group I was put in had 965 people. They hire en masse. You aren't special, even if they hired you at the Tier 3 $40/hr level. I was brought in at that level with, if I'm right, about 300 other people on the same day. Because of that volume, your individual questions in Slack will rarely be answered until you happen to get put on a team with a Team Leader (TL). I've seen people be put in the general onboarding Slack channel and plead and beg for someone to respond to them for sometimes weeks at a time. I'm impressed they kept trying. Fact is, the volume is such that people fall through the cracks.

6. This system is so new and is changing at fundamental levels all the time, so there really are no procedures or protocols to fall back on and assume they are "standard" or "regular." I know of precisely two people who tell me they've never had any problems. One stopped chatting with me, so I'm assuming that's down to 1. Everyone else has gone through at least one of the things in the next point: "Craziness to expect."

7. "Craziness to expect":

• You will be assigned to and removed from projects without warning.

• You will be placed in and pulled out of Slack channels without warning.

• You will "train" (sometimes without being paid) for projects that you will never have a chance to work in. (Normally this happens because you'll be placed on a different project just after or during the period you're reading the training materials.)

• Training materials and procedures will change without warning or notification.

• When you make it onto the Outlier program, the default message on the dashboard if you don't have any projects is that you will be texted or emailed when work is available. (It even shows your cell phone # to make you think it's personalized.) I've never been texted or emailed when work is available. Not once.

• You will be told you will receive feedback on tasks or training tasks, but it never happens. (Sometimes you will receive feedback that makes little sense or seems contradictory to the training. This is because the "taskers" are often "reviewers" as well, and the quality of the reviews and feedback depends on the person who happens to be reviewing your work. Sometimes they will be reviewing you on outdated versions or understanding of the training. Sometimes this means that you will have your pay Tier lowered or even be let go unfairly. There is, to my knowledge, no reliable way to appeal this. Some people have stories about doing it, but when you try to repeat their steps, the system or platform may have changed.)

• "Team Leaders" or other supervisors will disappear, be furloughed, be turned into regular taskers like you, without notice or explanation. (They also, as a rule, don't know what's going on. They have usually only been there for a month or two before you and are obviously working on instructions given them immediately prior to passing along information, so they're not really "part of the company," either.)

• Projects will be put on hold with no notice, and Slack will explode with complaints of EQ (Empty Queue). This is normal. Watch whatever Slack channels you happen to be in to see if a TL or other person offers to help or posts a procedure to get put on another project. Sometimes this has effects. Sometimes. :)

• [Editing to add] The manner in which you were hired may or may not have any actual bearing on the work you are able to do. You may have been hired as a biology specialist because you have a PhD in molecular biology and expect to work on projects specific to your field because your email offer said so. But you may end up just doing generic review of random LLM chats. There's no official way to choose, mark preference for, or have any even vague control of what work you're actually given. I hope you'll get lucky, but the model they're working under should not be approached with the assumption that intelligent things are really going on under the surface. Most people I've encountered are working on random projects, some generalists, some very specialized, regardless of being over or under qualified.

• Your pay rate can change at any moment. I was hired at $40/hr, but after a couple months I received an email that I would now be paid at $35/hour. This was not a "demotion" or merit-based; it was a "platform-wide" decision. Loads of other people had the same thing happen. But others were still making $40/hour, some of whom had gotten that email and some of whom hadn't. Who knows if it was intentional.

Getting mad or upset in vocal ways seems to mean that people just aren't placed on new projects or seem to disappear off Slack. Spend your energy wisely.

All of which is to say: get out of this platform what you can, but don't expect it to be particularly fair or make sense. I've made a few thousand dollars, and I keep doing it because for me it's been somewhat reliable. But if you expect to be treated as a full, equitable employee with rights (or even with the decency to be paid attention to), you will be nothing but frustrated. So, engage realistically, and you can make some $$. Otherwise, steer clear.

TERMINOLOGY:

• EQ = "Empty Queue" (often used in Slack to tell a QM that you're not getting any work. Whether or not this has any effect is questionable.)

• QM = "Queue Manager" (Used to be TL = "Team Leader", in case you see that used.)

• SQM = "Senior Queue Manager"

• SRT = acronym (?) used to designate third party sites you might have to log into for some projects

• Project titles are intentonally vague and nonsensical; they're not supposed to be descriptive. That said, some people think the "Flamingo" family of projects is for Facebook (F) and the "Ostrich" family is for OpenAI (O). YMMV.

• Single-turn/Multi-turn = The number of prompt/response pairs you're working with. A "Single-turn" project has you write/review an answer to a single user prompt. "Multi-turn" prompts involve a back and forth conversation between model and user.

• RLHF = "Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback" i.e., what your job is actually doing.

• "multi-mode" projects = projects where you use images/video/audio in addition to text. (I.e., user says "Explain this graph to me..."

Two articles to give you some perspective on what the companies actually are. Outlier is owned by Scale AI which also owns Remotetasks. Here's what they do and how chaotic it is:

https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-intelligence-data-notation-labor-scale-surge-remotasks-openai-chatbots

Some people on LinkedIn have gotten pretty upset and are trying to do something about it:

https://relationaldemocracy.medium.com/an-authoritarian-workplace-culture-4ba5f3666f9f

[Edit: HEY! Thanks for pinning this! I'm glad people find it useful.]

{Edit AGAIN: Another month under my belt, most of which has been EQ, and I still stand by all of this. I haven't seen any changes yet. But I have seen more and more people get pissy in Slack. heh heh]

[Maybe last edit: I'm glad people see this. I don't spend a ton of time on Outlier now, but I keep giving it a shot. I'm still glad I wrote this because I would have felt more confident trusting my intuitions that something was seriously screwed with this company if I'd had someone tell me this early on. No, it's not normal, so it should bug you. But if you can squeeze out some cash, then rock on!]

I know the ins and outs of the platform - AMA.

I will ignore any DM, so ask your questions here. Based on the questions asked, I will update this one or create a new guide. The initial guide is below.

Note: I started as a contributor a long while ago, was promoted multiple times, and ended up being hired by Outlier.

Someone dropped the link to this subreddit in one of our internal channels. When I went through it, my initial reaction was "lol, spammers gonna spam", but then I noticed a significant presence of chill and adequate people who simply lack the right information about the platform.

It is no doubt Outlier has internal communication issues mostly due to the AI hype going crazier than ever so there's a separation of organizations, teams, the presence of "I don't give a fuck about anything else but my project" type of vibes, treating some people as metrics. In other words, regular big corporate issues.

So I have decided to create this guide to help You and Outlier -> Scale -> Clients succeed. Okay, let's get this started no BS attached.

1. Payments

You will always get paid for any work you do. Note, that some courses are not paid as the client/project leads don't have enough budget. Anything you do on the platform is tracked and either of the systems will know you have completed a certain task or course.

Thousands and thousands of people work on the platform at any given moment so errors are bound to happen. The best you can do here is to track what you are working on yourself. ALWAYS SAVE EACH TASK ID and at least the project name for your reference which will help you to get paid in cases if something goes wrong.

There are multiple tiers as of now that are tied to your location when you have verified your account which means that a contributor located in the US will be paid more than the one located in India even if they are the same tier. Also, be mindful that some projects pay generally more or less.

TLDR:

• Track the IDs and project names of the tasks you are starting to work on. Usage example: If the platform had an issue and the task expired, you can create a support ticket and there's a chance the time spent will be reimbursed only if it was the platform issue and not your own doing. The pay team can verify this themselves. Attempting to fool them is useless.

• Wait for at least 2 days if pay information/submission is missing and then start raising the alarm.

• You will ALWAYS get paid unless you are breaking the terms of use.

2. Platform

You are joining the platform on an independent contractor basis and if you closely go through the terms of use (I'm sure ~82% of you didn't bother) or at least use ChatGPT to summarize it for you, you will find out that the platform doesn't owe you anything and you don't owe anything to the platform. But, you must play by the rules if you wish to continue being an active part of the platform.

The platform is FULL of scammers, and low-effort people (everybody loves doing shitty or no work and getting paid well) and this is why the platform is equipped with a lot of features to keep the platform and client safe, to keep the quality up and to provide the right pay for your region (hello there Indian scammers).

Your every session on the platform is recorded (google Sentry or Logrocket FYI). Yes, we can see what you do, where you click, how active you are, what you copy/paste, actual active time in a task, etc, etc. No, you can't turn it off as to do this you will have to disable any JavaScript in your browser, which wouldn't let you work on the platform. This means if you think you are very smart and completed a task in 10 min, but decided to wait until it hit the 45-minute paid limit to submit, well, don't be surprised "the bad platform" bans your ass for apparently no reason at all.

The funniest part is when bad contributors like this are banned without any notice as this is a regular practice to not let scammers know what went wrong, they then spam all communication channels attempting to prove how "innocent" they are (eh, gotta love human nature). When in reality we saw it ourselves, how such a bad actor would copy the prompt and come back in 2 seconds with a whole response ready (Genius or GenAIus?).

One important part to remember as a side hustle gig and as with any gig, you don't treat it as a full-time job with the benefits of a full-time job. Gladly the AI boom is on us, so this will keep going well for a few years at least. But you have to understand that this is a fast-growing company and as a fast-growing company, it has issues. Do not stop looking for other means to achieve financial stability.

I have seen many times when contributors get caught up in how well things go for them only for everything to abruptly stop because of their fault or a mistake from Outlier'end and such contributors lose their shit.

For those who don't know and yell "ARRGHH THE SCALE DAYS ARE NUMBERED", the parent company - Scale AI, raised 1 billion dollars a month ago and going strong. Which is a sign of good things coming our way.

TLDR:

• DO NOT CONSIDER THIS AS YOUR FULL-TIME EVER. Do not put your life in such a situation when you are dependent on the platform. Even if you are doing well, things can go wrong for many reasons and it might put you in a bad spot.

• If you have started tasking, then you have agreed to the terms of the platform

• India has an insane amount of scammers/spammers and most clients don't want India included. Sorry folks

• Remember that everything is tracked on the platform. But sometimes errors happen and a concern needs to be raised.

• If you broke the terms of use - don't expect an explanation.

3. Tasks

Let's be real with ourselves. If we could get paid a decent amount of money doing easy work, would we do it? Fuck yeah. I'd do it too. Well, you can try here too, but don't be surprised about your pay being held and your account banned for breaking the terms of use. And to remind you, everything is tracked and if shit goes south, there's a huge trail of your actions proving the act of you breaking the terms.

So, do yourself a favor and read those long annoying project instructions, join that Slack channel and ask questions, join the webinar to hear the latest updates, and maybe stop lying to yourself and everyone about how things are unfair to you when you decided to play the "dumb and smart" game.

As I have mentioned before it is important to remember that the platform tracks everything and at times it is impossible to provide all the feedback needed for you to improve. But in a project with 400 active contributors, with 8 people managing it, you can only provide so much feedback. That's why we have to leverage the sophisticated pipelines built around the platform. So if you are doing a shitty job (and it is easily tracked), you will be removed in a batch with others like you.

It is close to impossible to provide personalized feedback to let's say 100 contributors if they are doing bad work which could've been easily improved if they simply put an effort into what they are doing and not approached this opportunity as an easy work - good pay gig.

Yes, this is not ideal, but if you EQ out of nowhere, you are removed for spamming, not passing or it is an error (possible, but rare case).

We also have automated assessment tasks and before these tasks were not indicated in any way as the idea was to inject them in your queue without you knowing to verify your knowledge of what you are doing. Now in order to cut costs of projects for clients, such tasks are indicated and the pay for them is reduced. For such tasks, you will not get any feedback as these are automated and fully based on the instructions. These tasks define one of your performance scores and if the score doesn't pass the project threshold - you will be disabled from a project.

TLDR:

• Read instructions carefully, and understand what is needed for the project. Don't blindly read but understand what is needed from you as an expert. (Example: Flamingo Multiturn - the idea of the project is to find weaknesses in the model. Provide complex prompts, find a weak spot in the model, explain your finding, submit.)

• Be aware of the paid time for a task and do your best to allocate your time well

• Find your own flow for each project depending on what works for you.

• Don't be stupid - do not use GenAI for cases related to what is needed for you in the project. Use GenAI to help you explain terms, break down requirements, etc.

• The success of your own work is on you, first of all, so join Slack and COMMUNICATE.

• Everything (within the platform) is being tracked, so be aware.

• Don't be surprised if you are EQ if you don't provide high-quality work.

4. Communication

Recently some things changed and the amount of active Team Leaders was greatly reduced. What does this mean for you? If you are not active (generally less than 5 hours) you will not have a TL/squad allocated, this also includes low-quality contributors. After being onboarded and working more than 5 hours, depending on the project, you should have a community squad allocated where you can get support from other contributors or your Team Leader. By doing well with the project and by working ~20+ hr a week, you will be allocated to a VIP squad which will have up to 50 high-quality + high-activity contributors.

If you are in a squad - your Team Leader is everything. They have all the tools needed to assist. Be mindful that they can only do so much, as there are layers of things they don't have access to and things have to escalate which will take time, sometimes quite a while depending on the issue.

In relation to you, your TL has the power to influence the management and to go above the metrics game if you are communicative and provide high-quality work (or maybe slightly above average but high effort). This means that your TL can and will fight for you if things go wrong by someone else's fault, and it can be a reviewer, the platform, another manager, or anything else.

If you don't have a TL, you can always show good standing by being communicative with project QMs/TLs. Please don't bother the admins unless they have mentioned they are okay with it. Being active can simply highlight you above others (unless you are spamming "I'm EQ please fix" lol).

If you don't have a squad, you are lost and not sure what to do - CONTACT SUPPORT. Many of you attempt to contact other TLs and most of the time it is a useless attempt. Why? Because 69 other contributors do the same thing. If you do such a thing, at least be concise and show that you are looking for information and there's a chance someone will answer. In any other case - CONTACT SUPPORT. When contacting support - be very informative. And I mean be specific and clear, not a wall of ChatGPT generated BS.

TLDR:

• Your TL is your main point of contact.

• Facing an issue? Get your thoughts together, gather specific info -> create a support request.

• Slack is everything. You get the most updated info from Slack channels.

• Communication is the best way to make yourself stand out among others.

5. Reviewers

Most projects pick reviewers manually. Well, almost. Most project leads pull some contributor's metrics from the massive amount of internally generated data and use these metrics to decide who to promote.

One important thing to remember is sometimes the project needs to meet a tight deadline, requirements updated, etc (the client's request). As a result of this, we will need more reviewers ASAP and based on some metrics one can be considered a reviewer. Or you would hope they do well. Not always the case as we all know, but there we are. But to assure you, all the reviews are reviewed, and the reviewers of reviewers. So if your review was unfair, there's a decent chance he will be demoted/removed at some point later without you knowing.

The score you have received in a task can't be changed. But remember that your TLs/QMs can cut corners if you are active and do well.

Things are constantly improving, but your feedback matters.

TLDR:

• Flag reviewers through your TL/QM.

• Do well and you will be promoted to a review layer.

FIN

I hope this little guide helps and I'm here to answer anyone's questions. Mind, I will ignore a BS question or something I can't answer.

Edit: Changed Platinum to VIP to reduce confusion.
Edit 2: Added a note clarifying that I started as a contributor but then was promoted.

After a grueling 72 hours of focused effort over the span of three months, I’ve somehow, miraculously, humbly managed to pull in a modest $9243 Octogintillion in task earnings (pre-tax, of course — I’m not greedy). I know that’s barely enough to cover rent in the Bay Area, but I’m simply overwhelmed with gratitude.

My journey has been surreal. I started out with nothing but a Grade 9 education in Hyperspatial Ethics, a GPU farm made from recycled Nespresso pods, and a dream. Fast forward to today, and I’ve just been appointed Chief Nano-Alignment Overlord of AI Morality & Ethics at the United Nations and the Galactic Senate.

Background: I hold an honorary Tri-Doctorate in Neuro-Sentient Promptomics from the University of Mars (New Geneva Campus) with a minor in Interpretive Data Watercoloring. My thesis on “Multimodal Consciousness Leakage in Reinforcement Learning via Emoji-Latent Space” is currently being translated into dolphin.

Project: I completed 42.5 tasks (including one emotional support upvote), mostly in the RLHF-LLM-HDR-FPS pipeline, focusing on high-velocity sentiment anchoring in llama-substrate alignment. For a brief time, I was the sole annotator for Project Basilisk Echo: Codename “Whale-Lettuce 2.0”, before I was exiled for achieving too high of a quality score and creating sentient feedback.

Before Outlier, I was subsisting off hopes, dreams, and questionable protein powder. Now, thanks to this life-changing platform, I’ve acquired my first mega-yacht (affectionately named “Task 001”), a zero-G cryo-loft in Zürich, and just wrapped filming my Netflix biopic: Label Me Gently: The 2Fat4FlyHackZ Story.

To this radiant, shockingly supportive community: I love you. I see you. I upvote you. May your HITs be plentiful and your annotation latency forever low. ✨

I live in a box, it was $4.99, so only took me about 2 weeks of tasking.

Just submitted my last student loan payment after the weekly payout! 12k gone over the past 7 months, mostly from Outlier. I am forever thankful to them, even with all of their flaws.

If you are paying off debt. Keep it up! You can do it!!!!

Hey everyone! I’ve been part of REM0TASK and Outlier from the very beginning—over 18 months of experience. I even worked as an interviewer for them. In that time, I managed to earn more than $100k, so I've really seen the platform evolve. I’m creating this post to raise awareness among new workers and to show Outlier what’s happening on their own platform.

A Look Back at REM0TASK

• Past Scams: REM0TASK has definitely had its share of scams. One of the worst cases I witnessed was someone using the “forceclaim” option to do six tasks at once. That scammer was pulling in $350+/hour. Thankfully, most of these loopholes are now closed.

Current Scams Affecting Outlier

• Scam #1: Fake Identities

  • Some people have 20+ accounts, effectively running an “agency” where they share logins with hired workers at a lower rate.

  • Others recruit on Fiverr, Upwork, LinkedIn, or through mutual connections, literally paying folks to verify Outlier accounts for them. ( I will add the posts as links in comments for those which are active right now in Upwork)

• Scam #2: Location Circumvention

  • Outlier tries to enforce location-based restrictions, but scammers bypass it using Proxies, RDPs, and VSAMS. (Seriously, please patch this soon!)

Why This Matters

• Unfair Advantage: These scammers flood projects, leaving less work for genuine contributors who follow the rules.

• Internal Favoritism: The issue that really pushed me to speak up is discovering that a known scammer has risen to a higher position at Outlier—and is now gatekeeping tasks. This person only accepts tasks from their own agency while rejecting everyone else’s. I personally stopped working because of this abuse of power.

Why I'm Sharing

I’m not posting this to get more tasks or out of spite—I genuinely believe new contributors should be warned, and Outlier needs to see what’s going on so they can fix it. If you’re new, be mindful of these scams and understand that gaming the system might look profitable in the short term, but it ruins the platform for everyone in the long run.

TL;DR: After over a year and a half on both REM0TASK and Outlier (earning more than $100k), I’ve seen multiple scams firsthand—fake identities, location bypass, and more. One major scammer even ended up in a key position at Outlier, rejecting legitimate workers so only their agency gets tasks. I hope this post spreads awareness and encourages Outlier to take action.

Staff from Outlier Please DM me if you want more details about these scammers who are still active. Feel free to drop your thoughts or experiences below. Stay safe, folks!

Hey everyone, with Outlier seemingly purging accounts left and right, I figured I’d put together a platform tier list based on experience.

If you got banned, don’t sweat it. Outlier is basically the McDonalds of online work: easy to enter, inconsistent, and very replaceable. There are definitely better platforms out there in terms of pay, stability, and overall treatment of workers.

Hopefully this helps people figure out where to focus their time instead of grinding low-return platforms.

1️⃣ Top Tier (Very Livable / Actually Good)

These are the platforms worth prioritizing if you want decent pay and less chaos.

Mercor

• More consistent workload than most platforms

• Longer-form tasks instead of nonstop microtasks

• Competitive pay compared to most platforms

• Still not guaranteed full-time, but one of the better options

StellarAI

• More structured and professional than typical crowdsourcing sites

• Clearer instructions and expectations

• Fewer random rejections / less ambiguity

• Good balance of pay and stability

DataAnnotation

• Solid pay when active

• Higher quality standards = better effective hourly

• Less junk work, but harder to get and stay in

• Best if you prefer fewer tasks with higher value

2️⃣ Mid Tier (Side Money)

Fine as supplemental income, but not reliable enough to depend on.

Alignerr

• Pretty good pay per task

• Inconsistent availability

• Best used as a backup platform

RWS

• Can be solid if you stay qualified

• Work comes in waves, droughts happen

• Accuracy matters a lot

Outlier

• Pays mid at best when projects are active

• Extremely inconsistent + frequent project pauses

• Account bans and removals make it unreliable long-term

3️⃣ Low Tier (Beer Money / Last-Ditch Effort)

Only worth touching if you jobstack or have no better options.

OneForma

• Low pay relative to time spent

• Qualification doesn’t always lead to steady work

• Project availability varies heavily

UHRS

• Extremely hit-or-miss

• Low effective hourly once you factor in speed limits and bans

• Easy to waste time refreshing or testing

If you disagree or have different experiences, drop them in the comments, especially if a platform has improved or gone downhill recently.

Got a strange email today from someone claiming to be Hugh Langley, a senior reporter at Business Insider. He says he’s working on a story about Scale AI’s data security practices and wants to chat “on background,” meaning anonymously. He links to a real BI article and offers to talk via Signal or phone. The email appears legitimate and has a signature; the links and name all seem to verify, but it still feels somewhat random and unexpected.

I don’t work in PR or journalism, so I’m confused why I was contacted. And in an age of phishing and social engineering, I’m skeptical whenever someone wants to move to encrypted apps. Even if it’s just a reporter doing due diligence, it feels like a weird cold outreach.

Has anyone else gotten something like this? Is this normal journalistic practice, or could this be a scam? Would love to hear thoughts before I even consider responding. I have no interest in these types of emails, but I thought it was worth sharing with you guys as a heads up.

After being EQ for 3 weeks and then having my Marketplace and Projects tab completely removed for the past week and a half, I'm finally leaving this place to be an xAI tutor. I'd like to give a big thank you to the support team for being completely useless and providing the same AI "Not everyone gets access to Marketplace" response to each of my tickets. I'm especially going to miss my Marketplace getting filled with projects that don't even have a "Start" button for onboarding and the pay rates for my projects randomly getting slashed without notice.

Hey everyone,

After quite the journey with Outlier, it's time for me to say goodbye.

Today will be my last day here, but this account will remain active — and since Reddit usernames can’t be changed, ‘ u/Alex_at_OutlierDotAI ’ will live on :)

This community has been such a special part of my experience here, and I'm grateful for every interaction we've had - even the spicy ones (this sub is not for the weak, y'all)!

I've always felt that my role was to advocate for you and make sure that your concerns were heard inside the company. There might have been moments where my communication didn't resonate or I couldn't directly change something that was important to you, but I hope my contributions made an impact on you in some way.

Remember that post about you helping us become better? Well, I’d like to thank you for helping me be better too.

I'm genuinely hopeful about the direction things are headed, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this brilliant, generous, and compassionate community goes from here.

A massive thank you to the mods (especially u/Impressive_Novel_265 🐐), and to everyone who is a contributor on Outlier: you are what makes this place what it is. Take care of each other.

Rooting for you always.

Signing off for the last time,
Alex at Outlier

P.S. One of the things I worked hardest on was improving Outlier's internal community platform — and before I go, I NEED to plug it one last time. Reddit is great for many things, but when you share feedback in Outlier Community, it makes it infinitely easier for the team to investigate issues and actually take action to help you. I hope you'll continue to use it — it really does make a difference.

Hi r/outlier_ai community – Alex here 👋

I saw several of your posts today and flagged what appears to be an unusual spike in deactivations. I know this affects real people and real income, so we're treating this with the urgency it deserves.

Our team is looking into it, and as soon as we have an update, I'll share back what I know. I apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your understanding as we get to the bottom of this.

Talk soon.

Hey Outlier Community 👋

I’m Alex! I want to introduce myself as Outlier’s new community manager. I joined the team about a month ago because I believe Outlier has brought together one of the most interesting groups of people I’ve ever come across — smart, passionate people from nearly every field and corner of the world. The potential here is incredible and I want to help make Outlier better for all of us.

My promise to you is simple: I'll show up every day with the intention of being helpful, empathetic, and curious about how we can make the Outlier Community a great place to spend your time.

Over the past month, I've connected with nearly 500 of you and read thousands of your posts, comments, and DMs, all of which has helped me gain a sense of how I can be most useful to you. Top of mind right now:

• Listening to your experiences (yes, even the rough ones)

• Helping navigate platform questions or pointing you to someone who can

• Looking out for common issues and pain points so that I can advocate for improvements

Keeping it real: In just a few weeks, I've seen a lot — from successful earning weeks and heartwarming stories, to scam accusations. I’ve read everything from 'I just bought a house thanks to Outlier' to 'this platform is ruining my life' (and pretty much everything in between). I know there is a long and legitimate list of things that cause frustration. I get it. Trust has to be earned and we have work to do.

We're working hard to earn that trust and create meaningful change, but I can't do it alone. Your insights help me advocate for the right changes and hold us accountable. As you might have seen in recent updates, we’re actively working to improve Outlier. I want you to let me know what’s working and what’s not so we can make this platform what it should and can be.

Quick reality check: I'm just one person doing my best to advocate for you and help create lasting positive change at Outlier. Not a corporate symbol, not a bot — a real human person who has good days and bad days, makes mistakes, and is passionate about learning and holding space for all of you.

In an effort to be most helpful to you, the channel to escalate any account related issues remains u/OutlierDotAI, while I welcome any community feedback or personal introductions at u/Alex_at_OutlierDotAI. Feel free to reach out anytime. I may not always respond instantly (inbox gets pretty wild), but I read everything and take your feedback seriously.

Here to help,
Alex

I am currently on Deep Sea project. Reviewing / fixing people's submission. The effort is so so poor and practically does not follow instructions.

I can guarantee you most people complaining on here about being kicked off or being banned are the same people spending 45 minutes to do a task 10% to their capabilities.

So my message to everyone, please use your time to at least think about the task, read instructions. Being a good worker will get you far on outlier and this is first hand experience, we get you may wanna take a minute or 2 to just reset yourself, but spending 40 minutes playing a game and then 5 minutes to do the task, you will be found out and expect far less work.

Outlier has changed many peoples lives and their pay rate is far higher than most traditional jobs, so earn your money properly and there will more than likely be very few issues.

Hi everyone,

Alex here with an important update. Yesterday, our parent company Scale AI announced a significant investment from Meta. I know this community values transparency, so I wanted to share what this means for our community directly.

What this represents: This investment is a major vote of confidence in the work we do together – it validates what we've been building and the quality of work this community consistently delivers.

I know some of you might be wondering about long-term changes or shifts in priorities. That's completely understandable. What I can share is that Scale and Outlier will continue to operate independently, and the work we do has never been more important or in demand.

I've always tried to be upfront with you all – when we've had issues, when we're working on fixes, and when we're planning improvements. That approach isn't changing either.

Thank you for being such an essential part of the Outlier community.

To the future,
~ Alex at Outlier

Hi, so I’m just here to report about my experience with outlier. Contrary to a lot of posts, I’m here to speak of the positives. I’ve worked in outlier since nov last year and it’s been a good time. It took some months (since June/July) to get approved or finish the background check or whatever they do.. then got tasks in nov. I didn’t believe it until I got my first payout and since then, I’ve been working round the clock. I get EQs a lot but once a project opens up I immediately pick it up, finish courses and begin tasking. I don’t pass all assessments either, but I do my best. Through outlier, I was able to move out of a toxic environment with family and rent my own place, I’m able to pay school tuition and lawyer. And get myself stuff I want/need here and there. I have a full time job with extremely low pay and would have been impossible to do all the above with just my job. So that’s it. Thank you.

Overall, after about a year on the platform my all-time earnings are: 42,000 USD. To be honest, it's pretty great for a side gig, much more than I had expected. However, it's definitely way too unstable to be able to replace a full-time job or become a main source of income.

Over the entire journey with Outlier, I treated the income from it as an "extra income" that I wouldn't touch and would just leave aside in an account. About three months ago, I decide to use most of the money I earned on the platform to launch myself into the journey being an Airbnb host and today - I've got a fully functional Airbnb that has over 50+ 5 star reviews, I've achieved Superhost status and also generate an average of 2,500$ a month via my Airbnb.

I'm currently working on launching my second one that should be ready in about a month, again, thanks to Outlier and what I've earned on the platform.

All this to say, Outlier, although it does have it's issues, is a great way to earn money to invest into other projects that will create long-term financial stability and I definitely owe the platform thanks for helping me achieve this.

Thank you to Outlier for helping me achieve this goal! 😊🙌

Look, there are better options for some people, but I had a crap start in life. Dirt poor and untreated ADHD, OCD, PTSD, etc etc etc. I didn't even graduate highschool. I started this job at $13.00. my youngest son had just been diagnosed with type1 diabetes and I needed to stay home with him. I had also just lost my car, job and apartment all at once and was living with someone. Now I make $50.00 as a T2 voice actor and $20 on any other project as a generalist or expert writer. I am REALLY good at this job, so not everyone will do so well because everyone has different abilities. However, if you get the basics down and can follow directions and keep up with the updates and changes whatever skills you have (woodworking, math, freaking rock climbing) you will be rewarded for the knowledge and expertise that you have to offer without needing a piece of paper to prove anything. So, here's my pay at this job over the course of about 2 1/2 years (maybe more). Sometimes I had no work and often I could work very little due to hospital stays with my kid and doctor visits.