Helium Problems / Questions

I had checked out Helium before because I read it before on some myLot discussions. I checked it out and my impression was it is a respectable site. I haven't signed up there though because I have read some not good reviews about it. I do love their rating feature.

I quite like helium, as I find it easy to write for, in the sense that you just for an assignment, and that's it. On the rating, the rating stars are based on ratings over 90 days. Going off at a tangent here, I have type 1 diabetes and have a little blood sugar monitor, and it gives an average score, over 30 days, and sometimes I can have really good blood sugars for a few days, but the average still goes up,above what I want, in this case low is good. But this is because every day it covers a different 30 days, so if I lose some really good scores, and there are some really bad ones in the middle, it can make it look worse not better. The same applies to helium. If 89 days ago you did a load of ratings on one day, say 30, you will lose those ratings when they become 91 days old. So if you then had a few slack days where you didn't do much, you would lose the 20 but still still keep the low ratings, until their 90 days was up. So the rating scores aren't based just on what you do now, but on what you did over the last 90 days, so if you lose a high scoring day, because its gone past its 90 days, your figures can look bad. Does that make sense, I am not sure if I have explained it well. But its only because I spent so long looking at average scores on the blood sugar monitor that I realised that your average can look bad even when you put in good scores, because of what happens earlier on in the 30 days, and because of what you have just lost. So the ratings you lose, because of the 90 days period, may be better than those you put in. They do say a consistent 5 a day is the best way to keep a good rating score, and thats what I do now, because if your rating is a bit erratic when you lose a few days of really good ratings, because they have passed the 90 days, it can go down unexpectedly. I think I have made this too complicated, but never mind. that's my theory.

Hi Bostonphil, it is not fishy at all. Most writers leapfrog their content at the end of the month. Sometimes they rate the articles at the end of the month too. That means when you rate one article as good, and 10 other writers rate it as bad, the rating will change. If another 20 writers rate it as good the next day, the rating change again.

I was with that site many years ago, even before Mylot and I think I had written close to 200 articles. Then I started asking questions about how they rate writers, etc. and then I found out one day that I could no longer log in to my account. It is a scammish and scheming site.

I did not know that one can earn from rating articles. I think they can be a scam. I made 2 assignment articles and they paid me but on my next articles, they publish it but says my articles did not pass their standard and I will just earn through revenue sharing. I had one article which is on top of other articles but they did not pay the 1 dollar.

I had a friend who talked a lot about Helium two or three years ago. She seemed happy there. But then I read a hub about Helium after I joined HubPages and it was very negative and related experiences such as you have mentioned. I decided to stay away from it. There are plenty of other sites. I'm spending a lot of time at Gather these day. I started going back there when the notifications stopped for MyLot and it was just too hard to keep track. Now I love Gather because I can do things on my own schedule and according to how I feel. I've cashed out once now and will soon cash out again. A lot of my friends here are also there. I don't like the shallowness of most comments but I am earning points to cash in and I'm having fun. From what I've heard about Helium, it's not worth getting first hand experience before deciding if the rumors are true. Time is too precious.