I feel horrible...

Tweet

I created a project on freelancer.com. The directions were VERY specific. Native level English skills. No using spinners, auto-translators, etc. No farming this out to other people. (Because then I cannot communicate with the actual writer and my instructions get garbled.) Also. at least FOUR different, legitimate sources. (no wiki, content farm sites, etc) I got a bid for the project from someone from India. He had scored 'high' on the English test the site offers, (although it was only 73rd percentile, I found out later.) His profile was long and detailed, and written in beautiful flawless English I could have expected from one of my intelligent Canadian friends. My communication with him back and forth was also in very good English. So I offer him the job, and the higher end rate of pay that I was considering. The article I got 12 hours later was garbage. Barely coherent, rambling, didn't address the question in the title at all. It was obvious that either a spinner had been used, or someone with little English knowledge had used a thesaurus to swap random words and add adjectives that made no sense and were simply too much in an informative article. Whole chunks of sentences has obviously been transposed, awkwardly, from something else. And the sources? Three (not four) articles from the SAME site, which was some random newsletter/ezine, claiming to have articles from professionals that were written in choppy, loony English, like someone with poor writing skills had been on a powerful drug while writing them! Sure enough, among those articles I found whole chunks of text from the article submitted to me! After much internal debate about the wording, and convincing myself that as an employer who had made my desires VERY clear, I had every right to reject this piece, I sent a message. I stated that this piece was useless without extensive rewriting, and that he had clearly a) hired someone else because his English skills were far better than the article or b) used a spinner or auto-translator. Because I am a pushover, I offered him 25 cents per academic source he could find for me for future articles (good income for the work involved compared to other stuff on freelancer) I shouldn't even have offered that considering how terrible his sources were. A day and a half later, I receive this: Forget about it, Rebecca; I have no intention to do your project. So here I am, hours later, worrying that maybe he tried his best and I crushed his feelings. Yet I KNOW that whoever wrote his profile did not write that article, and that maybe it wasn't even produced by a human. And clearly he DID have an intention to do my project, as my needs were clear and he bid, didn't he? But I still can't help feeling like a terrible person. But I can't pay someone for nothing, and I had to rewrite that whole piece from scratch! Am I a bad person? Did I react within my rights? What would you have done, and why?