✦ Task type · Research and checks
Community research, strictly without joining the conversation
The most useful thing about a forum thread is that nobody wrote it for you. That property survives exactly as long as nobody is paid to contribute to it.
Communities are the last place people describe problems in their own words at length. That makes them the best qualitative source available and the easiest one to spoil, which is why this task type is read-only and says so at the top.
What to put in the public brief
- The topic or problem area, not your brand
- Which communities or platforms, or that the worker should find them
- The language and market
- That the task is read-only, explicitly
- The output format you want
Keep your brand name out of the public brief. It changes what a worker looks for.
What to put in the private instructions
Give the question, not the search terms
"How do people describe the moment they gave up on doing this manually" produces better reading than a keyword list.
Ask for quotes with links
Paraphrase loses the vocabulary, and the vocabulary is most of what you are buying. Five real sentences beat a page of summary.
Ask what surprised them
Someone reading a community cold notices what a person inside it stopped seeing years ago.
Restate the boundary
No posting, no commenting, no voting, no messaging anyone. Say it here as well as in the public brief, because this is the instruction that must not be missed.
Proof worth requiring
Ask for
Quoted passages with links, grouped by theme, plus which communities they searched and which turned out to be empty. The empty ones are useful too.
Do not ask for
Screenshots of private groups, direct messages, or anything behind a membership wall they joined for this task. If it is not publicly readable, it is out of scope.
When this task type is the wrong tool
If you want to ask a question rather than read one, that is a survey or concept feedback, and both are honest ways to get an answer addressed to you.
If what you want is for a community to talk about your product, earn it. There is no version of buying that which survives contact with the community it targets.
Common questions
Can I pay someone to post or comment?
No. Paid participation presented as an ordinary community voice is astroturfing, it breaks the rules of every major platform, and it is a deceptive endorsement in most advertising regimes. This marketplace refuses those briefs, and the refusal is the point rather than a technicality.
Can they mention my product if asked?
If someone genuinely wants to recommend a product they use, that is their choice on their own account and not a task. What cannot happen is a paid task that produces a mention, disclosed or otherwise, because a disclosed paid comment is an advert in a place that did not consent to hosting one.
What reward is fair?
Ten to twenty-five dollars for a proper read of a topic across a few communities with quoted evidence. This is genuinely analytical work and underpricing it produces link lists rather than findings.
Why not just search it myself?
You can, and you should first. What you cannot easily do is read without your own assumptions, and what you definitely cannot do is read communities in a language or market you do not follow. Both are what this is for.
Thinking of taking this task?
The same job, from the other side. Rewards are set by the poster, so treat these as the range this task type usually sits in rather than a promise.
- Usually pays
- $10 to $25
- You need
- Reading fluency in the language and market
- Proof expected
- Quoted passages with links, grouped by theme
Read-only. No posting, commenting, voting or messaging anyone, on any account. A brief that asks you to contribute is one to decline and report.
Create a worker accountBrief community research
Set the reward and the communities or topics you need covered. Workers reserve a spot; your brand and search terms stay private until they do.
Post this task