A word of advice to researchers everywhere
If you lurk here as a researcher you probably have noticed a massive uptick in bad practices across the board. From the platform itself, from participants who think they're smarter than the arbiters and the researchers who either do not give a fuuuuuuck about the rules and the ones who just don't know any better.
Here's some things you can do fairly easily to improve your studies to attract better participants and avoid problems with your studies:
Avoid strong or threatening language in your start pages and syllabuses: If we as participants see you going on about rejections and non-payment before we even start, that's a no-go situation for me. It's bad enough one rejection is enough to get your account nuked and support does not answer, we do not need threats before even doing your work.
Raise your mother loving pay rates: There's constant work for most of us at $5 a pop for 15 minutes. That's the benchmark for decent work. If you're not willing to pay a decent rate, take your studies elsewhere. The good participants here will completely blacklist you for repeatedly paying like shit leaving you with only the worst of the pool.
ANSWER. YOUR. MESSAGES: There's a very good reason this is a feature on Prolific. It's so we can fix problems and ask you questions about issues, rules or whatever about your study. We expect you to answer us, and when you don't it makes life harder for all involved. Nobody wants to have to contact support, and if you just answer and help we may not have to. It also helps the trust factor going both ways.
Do not delegate EVERYTHING to AI: It just doesn't work that well, it gums up the works and it could go forever without being fixed before you realize there's a problem. The "good AI" studies everyone does basically does this and now they let things sit for the month that don't pass the automated system, never checking it.
Be punctual, and expect fast study responses: There was a time when this platform was small and modest and things may have taken a while to fill up back then, this is no longer the case. I would bet that 95% of studies are full and done with within 30 minutes or less. Use this as your benchmark for beginning to check your submissions. 22 days is ludicrous as a wait time to have our work approved in the new landscape. CRC has moved this timeframe down to 7 days for some studies because of the massive growth of study platforms in the last few years.
These are just some easy, quick things to think about going forward because we, the participants are beyond tired of the lack of support from all sides and a simple tweak could massively improve data quality for you and approve morale for us.
And to those who are going to rabble rabble about how much they never want change of any kind, you know what you can do