Adventures in MyLot

I'll be rotating between blogging about MyLot, Sendearnings, MyPoints, and Ciao. Each post on each respective site will discuss what I've been up to on that website since the last time I talked about it, what sort of progress I've made, general observations, and interesting or amusing incidents.

Initial Observations About MyLot:
I joined MyLot a few months ago, and initially lost interest because I was only making a few cents per day and could never think of anything interesting to post about. I've since started to revise my opinion - but we'll see. I can't recall how I joined it. I may have simply found it through an Internet search.

I think that MyLot would be interesting even if money weren't involved. My new-found interest has a lot to do with how much the community has grown even since I joined. As I described it in a previous post, MyLot feels like a combination of an internet forum and Yahoo! Answers. The minimum payout at Mylot is fairly low, at $10.00.

I've noticed a few things about the community there:

- It's very international. There are a lot of members from the US, Britain, Australia, Germany, India, China - you name it. Some members are even from countries where they can't possibly receive their payout, and just hang around because it's interesting. Before you sign up for it, though, make sure you live in a country where they can actually pay you... if you're in it for the money, anyway.

- There seems to be an obsession with fruit. I don't know why. There are a lot of questions about fruit, the ways fruit is good for you, and how to replace everything in your diet with fruit. I don't understand this. Is there some kind of crazy fruit diet in another country that I don't know about? I suppose I could go on there and ask. In fact, I did.

Other incidents of note:
-There was a user posting entries from an encyclopedia of animals, one entry after another. My guess is that he was doing it to get his post count up. Possibly just to troll. It was amusing for the first few posts, but after about 40, it wore pretty thin. It doesn't matter, since they'll all get deleted. All of that irritating non-effort for nothing. Poor little guy.

My progress:

March 1st:

tl;dr version:
Post Count: 22
3 were Discussions I started
1 was a Top Discussion
I referred one member
I made 25 cents
I am Rank 6 (but I reached Rank 7 between writing this blog entry and posting it)

Long version:
I started out March 1st with 82 posts, and ended the evening at 104... more posts than I've ever made in one go. I received one Best Answer on March 1st. I've been trying to work my way up to 100 posts so I can see my Ranking, which is displayed as a little star with a number next to your name. I reached that goal, and my Ranking is currently 6. I also Referred one member: my brother, the esteemed Scarywizard. He didn't do anything that day.

Despite having made 22 posts, I only earned 25 cents. This was an improvement over the 09 cents I earned the previous day, however. Of these posts, 3 were discussions I started myself. The most popular was Do You Believe In Altruism? with three lengthy replies. I later saw that it had made it into the "Today's Top Discussions" section. I'm sort of proud.

I'm going to see if starting more discussions earns more money.

Rather than having to list and link to all of them, you can see what discussions I started or commented on by taking a look at my profile.

My Thoughts About Ranking:
According to the FAQ, the higher your Ranking, the higher-quality your discussions and responses supposedly tend to be (since it's based on member ratings), and I suspect that it may influence the money you earn per post or reply. Of course, if you just have a ton of friends who up-rate you, I could see how a system like this could be broken - but all in all, it seems like a good system, as the users with the higher Rankings do tend to post the more popular discussions and worthwhile answers.

Spamming in MyLot doesn't do you much good. Most spam posts are deleted, and one-word answers for the sake of answering don't really earn you much money. I don't know their algorithm, nor have I attempted to crack it, but it seems like the more popular your discussion is, the higher rated it is, and the more responses it gets, the more you earn. That's not really a bad system. It seems pretty fair, for the most part, and tends to keep "sh**-posting" down (although it doesn't get rid of it entirely). Whether or not you find what the rest of the community finds interesting relevant to your own interests is another matter.