I found that a lot of these workers learned insights about themselves as they commented on the tasks. Some tried to look for thought distortions in what I was saying, others tried to reframe it in a more positive light and some just validated and empathised with me. I would pay random workers from Amazon a few cents to read about my problems and then craft a response. I was also using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to prototype it. I’d then collect all these bite-sized feedback from anonymous peers who trained to help me in a specific way and was basically crowdsourcing cognitive therapy. I would write down what I was struggling with-at the time it was the craziness of being a grad student at MIT.
The project actually started as a tool that I used for myself. You’ve done a lot of research on how helping others will actually help yourself. As quickly as possible, the chatbot gets out of the way and either sends the user to a lifeline or acts as an intermediary between peers on the network by connecting someone seeking help with others who are looking to help. Once they get started, users are immediately greeted by a chatbot that welcomes them to the service, onboards them, orients them to what's going on and asks them what's bothering them. It can be used on Twitter by direct messaging our account and on Kik and Telegram just as you would another contact in your app, while users on Tumblr get routed to a web-based version of our service. We route them to crisis lifelines in a way that maximises the likelihood they might use these services.
But a lot of our work now is trying to quickly and effectively identify users who are in acute distress and are expressing suicidal thoughts. What we do now is a lot of crisis triage by sending the majority of our users to the peer support service that we started with. We then became a referral partner for many of the large social networks like Tumblr and Pinterest. We modified our platform so that users wouldn't have to leave the platforms they were using and converted everything to a text-based interface. We worked with Kik, a messaging platform primarily used by teens and we built something on Twitter. So, we thought if a good user design principle is to meet people where they are, maybe we should build our system in a way that could be used directly on social networks. At worst, they were bullied and preyed upon, but more commonly they were ignored. They were hacking the platforms they use every day to get emotional support with mixed results. We started as a downloadable app, but in the course of building it out more, we realised that more people were going on social networks to publicly disclose their emotional vulnerability, anxiety, stress, depression, self-harm and suicidal ideation.