social turkers:

crowdsourced dating

MTurk options:

Avg MTurk interaction rating: 2.7

I meet him on the internet, he says, let’s cut to the chase and just meet up, and I am all about that. This is my first experiment, I don’t know if the system will technically work well, I don’t know what the worker response will be like, and so I’m pretty nervous. On top of all that, meeting new people is the #1 thing that terrifies me, which is one reason I wanted to do this project and one reason why I felt like I really wanted to vomit on my walk over. Oddly, knowing that the workers are watching me made feel a sense of reassurance, like I’m not all alone in this situation.

At first, my attention is really divided between trying to make sure the camera is well positioned and working, and trying to engage with him. Once I feel everything was set, I start to relax a little and get into the conversation. Very quickly though, he starts talking about his relationship to knives, his transcendent experience of locating, owning and maintaining them, and how it makes him feel powerful, and about his family, and I suddenly feel really guilty. Is it wrong to be exposing this guy like this? I turn the camera toward myself. I remind myself, this is a tool for myself, it’s about monitoring and determining my own interactions. After an hour and a half my phone starts blowing up with messages saying LEAVE, so I do.

The turk test I did was simple, I asked the workers to describe in one sentence what was happening, to rate the interaction, and to choose from a set of actions (stay, leave, say _____, ask _____). Based on the responses, I realized I need to be more specific in the description I ask for. I had set the system to notify me when the average leave response was > 0.75, but I realized it was easiest for workers to choose leave or stay as they didn’t require a fill in the blank. To even things out, I think I will require an explanation for these choices.

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