“There is no formal relationship between the platforms and the workers. If the tasks disappear, they are simply no longer called,” he said.

Fuentes and 19 other Venezuelan taskers have a WhatsApp group where they take turns to alert members when a task becomes available. “If someone has insomnia, they say, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye out tonight,’” she said.

I used to do online gig work like this. The good part is you don’t really have to directly interact with anyone, the bad part is this stuff, garbage pay, and the platforms not giving a fuck about whether clients scam you or falsely tank your approval rating. To even obtain decent tasks you basically have to do what these people did with an active group chat, or cheat and use scripts to automatically snipe them and notify you.

The most memorable ones were stuff like, transcribing videos of maintenance people describing what they were doing, and watching video feeds of surgery robots and rating the skills of their operators.

Despite all the shitty aspects of it, I think it sucks this kind of work is going away, because it is really convenient to have as an option and used to be an effective way to avoid getting a traditional job if you were really dead set on that. And I guess a good option in general for people in countries with very low cost of living.