As a freelancer, I think part of the problem is that we work online. There is little to no personal interaction with our employers. We simply become content suppliers.
Over the course of several years, the quizzes became more and more important to me financially. Every week, I could go to the spreadsheet and pick the quizzes I wanted to do. If my son went into the hospital, I could take a break. If I needed to work a theater show, I could take a break.
At the same time, my employers began adding more and more work. It began with us entering the quizzes ourselves- sometimes more than once when the system failed to save. It continued when we were no longer allowed to use specific episode questions and had to move on to more general ones. Granted, once the quizzes moved on to movies instead of television, that helped. Then, we were told we needed two sentence answers. This upped the word count to 2500 per quiz and made it more time consuming to do them. Each quiz began requiring more research (although some quiz writers got around this and were not let go).
How? Well, I always tried to vary my answers and write interesting but obscure facts as well as quotes on the subject. Since I occasionally took quizzes and weekly looked at the comments about them, I know that this was not so for others especially when the edict came to make the quizzes really easy with more difficult questions at the end.
This was stupid on multiple levels. The employers believed people were leaving the quizzes because they were too difficult. In part, yes, that is true. People should be able to easily get 80 on every online quiz they take. Less than that on a difficult topic, say Calculus, would be okay. But to get the addictive "completion" feeling, you need to do well, especially on quizzes you take for fun in an area you know well.
When the edict came to make easier quizzes, this is what I aimed for. However, others produced quizzes with questions like: Which of the following is a bird? (a) A cedar tree (b) a rock (c) an umbrella (d) a robin. I wish I were kidding. Needless to say, the dumbing down of quizzes to the point a moron could pass with flying colors was not too popular. People began to complain and in some cases, such as the quiz titled something like 94% of women can't answer these questions about car parts and then the questions were so stupid a five year old could answer them, there was outrage. How did the freelancers that wrote this drivel get around the two sentence answer? Well, they weren't getting paid more so they certainly weren't going to do the research. Which of the following is a bird? A robin is a bird. It has blue eggs. No additional research required.
If you have been following me for any length of time, you know that my goal is to improve the world through writing. I wrote interesting questions, with answers that could actually be answers (although I admit some were funny to make people enjoy the quiz). Given the above, I might have had these answers if I felt the topic of the quiz was exceptionally dumb: Which of the following is a bird? (a) wombat (b) armadillo (c) Superman (d) robin. Because people mistake Superman for a bird quite frequently. :)
The fact of the matter is that the employers made the situation worse by making the quizzes "dumb." The real problem with the quizzes was not only that in the beginning some were quite difficult but also that the quizzes are 35 questions long and with all the ads you could easily spend one hour on one quiz. They needed to shorten the quizzes. When I suggested things like this, I was naturally ignored. The only other solution was to write meaningful content. I can honestly say that instead of wasting an hour on one of my quizzes, you would have learned something by completing them. But my employers saw people taking the quizzes not as those who wanted to learn something, but instead as dollar signs.
There is a certain addicting quality to online clicking. However, with the Internet one does not have to simply waste time checking Facebook and completing quizzes that tell them what pastry they are. You can actually learn something (misinformation most of the time, but there are a few interesting, well-researched facts out there). If you learn, you don't feel as if you are wasting your life. My employers didn't see or care about that, and that is the major problem with what the Internet has become. It is a cesspool of get rich quick without caring that there are real people on the other side of the screen. Then when they wonder why people aren't taking their addictive quizzes, they automatically think it is because they need to make them easier to click instead of making them more fulfilling to click. Now, my employer claims to be the top marketing firm that will get your ad to just the right person. This would be great in my case because there is nothing I hate more than doing an internet search for an employer and getting all sorts of ads based on that search. What do I care? I have no interest in the item for myself. So these ads are supposed to be smarter. They could really use the quizzes to their advantage beyond what they do, but instead they see people as dollars. You click on a Facebook quiz, they give you a cookie. They track all the quizzes you click on and build a personality profile on you to better target their ads. I assume they track a whole lot more than just Facebook quizzes (including Internet searches), but with the quizzes alone they get a much bigger picture of who you are.
When the quizzes are too hard, too dumb, too bogged down with ads, or when you realize they are inserting tracking devices and delete them because you dislike that (I would say 90% of all websites do this by the way), well, they don't get the data that can help them sell the ads. I don't know why they never shortened the quizzes. It would have lightened the freelancer load and the quiz taker load.
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