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Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website

• tziki 9y ago
  Since the post is framed as a gender issue, let me offer another view that I think is evidently good to remember in the conversation: according to studies, men are more likely to experience online harrasment [1]. [1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/07/11/online-harassment-2017/ http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/07/11/online-harassment-2017...
  • gouggoug 9y ago
    There was a great blog post[0] recently regarding the recent Aziz Ansari story about sexual harassement. (If you haven't heard of this case, I encourage you to Google it.) It made a really great point that I believe -whichever side (if any) you take in the Ansari story- is very enlightening (at least it was for me), and that potentially applies to your study. I can't possibly explain it as well as the author, so please go read the article, but, in essence, the author explains that women have been conditioned from the beginning of time to endure pain and as such don't report it as much. The study you linked to, is based on reports of men and women, and indeed, according to this study, men are more likely to experience online harassement. But now, is it because men report it more because they are more sensitive than women to online harassement, or are they really more likely to be harassed online? When I ask myself, "have I ever been harassed online?", I can definitely say "absolutely never". This is of course only my personal experience, but I'm eager to believe the exact opposite the study you linked to concludes: women are definitely more likely to experience online harassement, and OP's article is one demonstration of it. [0] http://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasure http://theweek.com/articles/749978/female-price-male-pleasur...
    • yorwba 9y ago
      The study doesn't say that women are less likely to experience sexual harassment online, but harassment overall: Men and women experience and respond to online harassment in different ways. Overall, men are somewhat more likely to experience any form of harassing behavior online: 44% of men and 37% of women have experienced at least one of the six behaviors this study uses to define online harassment. In terms of specific experiences, men (30%) are modestly more likely than women (23%) to have been called offensive names online or to have received physical threats (12% vs. 8%). By contrast, women – and especially young women – encounter sexualized forms of abuse at much higher rates than men. Some 21% of women ages 18 to 29 report being sexually harassed online, a figure that is more than double the share among men in the same age group (9%). In addition, roughly half (53%) of young women ages 18 to 29 say that someone has sent them explicit images they did not ask for. For many women, online harassment leaves a strong impression: 35% of women who have experienced any type of online harassment describe their most recent incident as either extremely or very upsetting, about twice the share among men (16%).
    • baud147258 9y ago
      The Aziz Ansari story is more a bad date than actual harassement.
      • baud147258 9y ago
        But I think this story show the power imbalance between men and women that enable the real cases of harassement.
  • urahara 9y ago
    General harrasment, not sexual one. Women are significantly more likely to experience sexual harrasment. This is what this research states.
• tomlock 9y ago
  How many more instances of this happening do we need before people believe there's actually a problem in society surrounding sexism? Honestly I expect to see equivocation more than indictment in the comments section here.
  • savanaly 9y ago
    Do comments like this help the situation in any meaningful way either, though?
    • JoachimSchipper 9y ago
      Any discussion of gender (or race, or ...) on HN tends to degrade into, well, look around in an hour. It would be good to change that.
    • tomlock 9y ago
      If you want, let me know if you think my comment helps or not and why, and we can talk about it.
  • mirimir 9y ago
    Its more than sexism. It's misogyny. Or sarcastic emulation of misogyny, for trolling. Which has the same impact on targets. However, it's hard to know how prevalent these attitudes and behavior are. Because observations aren't independent. One asshole posts on some chan about a fun target, and then his friends compete with each other. And it could even be scripted.
    • tomlock 9y ago
      Or it could be a pattern repeated over thousands of years that requires serious intervention.
    • b6 9y ago
      > misogyny I keep seeing this word being used, and I don't think it's apt. I don't think we're seeing "dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women", much less "hatred of women". I think it's much closer to the truth to say that people everywhere are extremely interested in and enamored of women, but that women provide some kind of easy target for expression of bad feelings or trolling. As a former troll, I can say nobody really wants to mess with Eric Lu because there's just no troll juice there. A guy would just laugh at those "mean" comments. I certainly have laughed at comments like that. Nobody wants to troll me because the comments just can't get any purchase. So, please, let's stop with the myth that people hate women. People love women, guys have been dying for women since forever, and it's certainly not because they have contempt for them or hate them. There's clearly a discriminatory thing going on here, but its root is not hatred of women.
• walrus01 9y ago
  even without the "audience" part, still valid: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19 https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
  • tomlock 9y ago
    But Eric and Kapwing Team got significantly less of the anonymous hate than the two women.
• moonka 9y ago
  I always assumed these messages were automated helper bots, I didn't realize they are people on the other end. Now I feel a little bad about being so curt when I use them like I'm searching an FAQ.
  • vim_wannabe 9y ago
    I would wager most people would think these are bots, especially when photos are used. Internet users are a little too accustomed to stock photos of happy company employees gathering and customer support smiling for the camera. Then they want to see how the bot responds to stupid memes.
    • pluma 9y ago
      TBH even when I see a chatbox that isn't a bot (aside the automated greeting) I assume it's a minimum wage tech support drone in some low cost country. Especially when they have a cliché American name ("Dave", "John", "Adam", etc). I'm not the kind of person that routinely insults chatbots but if I'd see a portrait photo of a woman I'd likely assume it's a bot, simply because too many companies use fake photos of smiling women because someone told them it's good for business (though this article makes me wonder if that trend might finally change).
  • nraynaud 9y ago
    Yeah, recently I have seen the other side of one of those tools, I felt like Dorothy pulling the curtain.
  • jenthoven 9y ago
    Yes, I noticed that people hated when they thought they were talking to a bot. [This is Julia, the OC.] Sometimes I would respond to a sequence of four or five messages from a user, and they would immediately stop messaging, as if they didn’t realize a human was there. I tried that tactic for a while - a user would message me or Rachel some inappropriate demand and I would respond with “Absolutley not.” Many users would stop messaging, but some would get even more fired up and become really aggresssive or threatening. So I stopped responding to any message that was inappropriate, mean, or nonsense. It’s a waste of time and energy when you’re trying to grow the company.
• adventured 9y ago
  After reading through the entire post, what I found lacking is a break down of what percentage of actual visitors & unique message senders were abusive. It appears to be extraorinarily low. One in a thousand visitors or so. There's no question she was being abused because she was a woman. From what I can tell by their stats, that abuse appears to be coming from literally a handful of bad actors over a month's time, with many of the messages deriving from single persons. So the question is: how do you deal with one bad person out of a thousand? I can't imagine there's any scenario, any technical implementation, that can eliminate abuse down much further than that no matter what you do. If you assume that even 1 in 100 men are going to be assholes, abusive, whatever, it's nearly impossible to stop them from behaving badly. You can take action after the fact, including in both anonymous and registered account situations. I also see no cultural scenario where you can pre-emptively stop that guy from being an asshole until he identifies himself through behavior. One consideration would be pre-screening the chat for abusive language, abusive actors. That might catch a couple of the particularly bad examples. When a post is sent, you have to check it before it reaches the support agent. That's not difficult to do, except in the most heavily dodged scenarios of character replacement (s3x etc., some of which can still be pretty easily caught). Monsters will be monsters, there are at least a few options for dealing with them.
  • valar_m 9y ago
    I suspect that you're deliberately missing the point, but I'll tell it to you anyway. It's not about the percentage of visitors that were abusive. It's the number of people who were abusive when they thought they were talking to a female vs. a male.
    • bloak 9y ago
      We don't know what they thought, obviously. We can only hypothesise about that. Psychology would be so much easier if we could directly observe other people's thoughts...
• mozumder 9y ago
  A lot of this has to do with the target audience you're drawing: meme makers. Meme makers are all pretty much going to be unsocialized and autistic douche boys & gamers and who seek to make memes for 4chan or Reddit. They're trolling, so obviously you're going to draw terrible people. If your site was selling expensive fashion items, you're going to see a completely different reaction. Know your audience.
• javadocmd 9y ago
  I think anyone remotely familiar with the internet won't be surprised by these outcomes. Of course the occasional reality check is always good. I wonder to what extent plucky startups expect abuse when they put pop-up chat dialogs in their products. I imagine it's inescapable that some percentage of your user base is going to see it as an invitation to respond poorly. Something door-to-door salespeople and telemarketers learned long ago. I suppose abuse filtering is still an unsolved problem waiting to make someone rich.
  • laci27 9y ago
    I'm using the net (As a guy) for 20 years now, and I was surprised. This is taking place at an alarming scale. Some parents really missed the mark in teaching their kids basic human manners, and I'm not even talking about the golden rule...
    • TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
      I am really curious. You say you have used the net for 20 years now, so how can you be surprised about this? Have you not exposed yourself to other anonymous forums? They're all filled with vitriol and disrespect.
      • tim333 9y ago
        As another surprised guy I'm aware people post bad things on the internet but I wasn't aware of the degree of difference between having a male and female picture as I haven't tried that.
        • Jaruzel 9y ago
          Surprised here also (I'm a guy in my 40s; 25 years online) - I know there are people online with no manners, and I go out of my way not to interact with them, but the sheer level of abuse shown here (and sadly elsewhere too) constantly amazes and upsets me. The obvious thing to do is to remove anonymity from the Internet. However then what do we do about peoples rights[1] to free speech? --- [1] Not every country gives this right to it's populous.
• dazc 9y ago
  These chat messenger pop-ups can be quite annoying, the example on the site mentioned is typically 'in your face'. What's particularly frustrating with this one is that there is already a prominent speech bubble icon in the corner of the screen that suggests they have a chat feature - if I want it. It doesn't need to crack open after a second and slap me. I am not defending the obvious misogyny here but I think an experiment that starts out by peeing off its subjects can not be fully objective?
  • codedokode 9y ago
    They are absolutely inexcusable. Website developers should make simpler design rather than make everyone search for close button and consider every user an idiot. Also it can make user feel uncomfortable, as if there is someone behind their back standing and looking what they are doing with the site. This popup is also deceiving users. For example on the screenshot [1] we can see a human user thinking that a real person wrote a greeting to him and wasting time of his life replying to a bot. [1] https://i.imgur.com/yEtgHbr.png?1 https://i.imgur.com/yEtgHbr.png?1
    • nitrogen 9y ago
      Also it can make user feel uncomfortable, as if there is someone behind their back standing and looking what they are doing with the site. You should check out Inspectlet.
      • codedokode 9y ago
        In this case they not only look, but also bother you with unneeded greetings. Like an annoying staff in a shop asking whether you need help.
        • salvar 9y ago
          > Like an annoying staff in a shop asking whether you need help. Would you call that a dark sales pattern?
• lancebeet 9y ago
  It may also be that people are more likely to assume it's a bot if it's a female, given that almost all chat bots claim to be female.
  • Legogris 9y ago
    I don't want to trivialize the misogyny and sexism that shines through in the behavior you're seeing, but I think this is a big part of it. By now many users assume that any unsolicited message from a female is a bot, phishing, or both. Definitely becomes a problem when you're an actual person just trying to engage your users.
  • wnevets 9y ago
    Not only that but if the image is of a swimsuit model I would absolutely assume its fake.
  • Chriky 9y ago
    Showering abuse on a female bot still demonstrates deep misogyny imo, even if there is no victim in that case.
    • StanislavPetrov 9y ago
      If its a bot, is it really "male" or "female"? The larger point that many people are trying to make is that if websites and corporations didn't always try to disguise their bots behind the face of a pretty girl then perhaps people would consider that their messages were being sent to actual human beings.
  • UncleMeat 9y ago
    That would still be sexism. Im not sure people care why others are being jerks to them. If people are a jerk to you because you are a woman then that's sexism.
• weeksie 9y ago
  I have a friend that had a _very_ similar experience when changing her LinkedIn profile photo. She's an expert in her industry and the vast difference in the lack of patronizing comments and unsolicited weird messages was pretty striking.
• laci27 9y ago
  Wow.. Never done it myself, nor any of my friends, I never realized that this was such a huge problem. I read articles in the past but I always though they were exaggerating. Like I can't believe boys can be so rude online. Thanks for making time and writing the article and including the comments.
  • T2_t2 9y ago
    Don't over extrapolate this one instance to a rule. I think what was interesting was the testing. An audience that is mostly, say, pensioners, will likely have a very different result than a site that has as its first claim: "Meme Maker The most popular video meme maker on the Internet. Also works for images!" I really found the testing and the changes enlightening, and that is what strikes me as really interesting here.
    • laci27 9y ago
      I agree that pensioners don't do this:), I meant people 15-40. I did run a chat on our site, and as one commenter noted, I also took a stock girl photo as profile pic. The thing that socked me in this article is actually my own ignorance. I got ,probably, just as many nasty comments, but I blanked them out completely. When someone was being a jerk, i would just close the chat, ban the user, and that's it. It didn't even register as a particular problem, or sexism, for that matter...
• throwaway613834 9y ago
  Honest question: What's the logic behind being so utterly rude from the first moment to someone you find attractive? Is it supposed to attract them back somehow?
  • dazc 9y ago
    Just guessing based on behaviours I have witnessed amongst school friends and work colleagues. If you're not an attractive person yourself there are women and girls who are out of your reach. This breeds resentment at an early age, and a weapon of choice, for some, is derogatory language. Why, because what else can you do to hurt someone so easily without fear of repercussion? The problem is not just confined to misogynists btw. If you're a man and have an attractive wife or girlfriend the insulting behaviour still goes on, but usually behind your back - these people are generally cowards after all.
  • jamra 9y ago
    I don't have an answer based on any kind of scientific information, but I have a theory about this. I think that young boys who are learning how to behave towards women test their boundaries. Since they are anonymous, they go way too far into aggression. So I think the combination of being at the bottom of the food chain in terms of being a mate combines with their anonymity and their lack of actual social skills in behaving towards women.
    • mentos 9y ago
      Ha maybe the response to this type of abuse is to link the offender to research like that
  • InclinedPlane 9y ago
    Objectification. Performative masculinity.
  • guitarbill 9y ago
    Sour grapes. If you know you can't have or get something, pretend you never wanted it. Thus your ego is preserved.
• laci27 9y ago
  I wonder if this is a mainly US problem or an international one? While I could imagine some of the people I know would do this 'for harmless fun', it's only 1-2 idiots (out of all the people I talked to in my life), but those are jerks in real life too...
  • laumars 9y ago
    The article did state comments came from all parts of the globe (presumably they're doing some kind of GeoIP look up)? I'd love to say it's just 1 or 2 idiots but stories like these are so common that Ive come to the conclusion that there is a very real gender bias at play. Which makes me both sad from the perspective of equality and disappointed as a representative of the male species. :(
    • laci27 9y ago
      All parts of the globe, but I can't imagine comments like this coming from The Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland... you know 'from countries such as Norway' (presidential quote here)
      • carlmr 9y ago
        Coming from Germany (the one country in that area you didn't mention), we have a fair share of idiots here. We just don't expose them to the world in the manner America does. Some of it, of course, is due to the language barrier.
      • raquo 9y ago
        One of my more depressing findings in life is that no matter how you slice and dice the population, you'll find an abundance of assholes in every slice.
      • BBlarat 9y ago
        Plenty of that kind of people in Sweden.
  • cm2187 9y ago
• waytogo 9y ago
  I can't relate to her post. We use on purpose attractive female profiles for our support chat avatars (our product is a SaaS) and the cases where a user behaves like this are 0.5% and for us not a problem at all, we just ignore them. FYI, we tested a while different pics, female, male, average looking, good looking and we just got the best conversion rates with the above mentioned.
  • laci27 9y ago
    0.5% of users behaving like this is not a problem to you, cause you're a guy, and you don't care about sexual harassment cause you're not bombarded apparently all day. This is exactly how I felt before I read this post. But even 0.5% seem a very high number to me, cause in my opinion, you have to be mentally retarted to think that this is 'accepted' behaviour in any way, or that it will actually land you a date, a nude pic or a sexchat?!
    • laci27 9y ago
      Thank you down voter for proving my point:)
      • tempestn 9y ago
        I expect your downvotes are for the unnecessary and offensive inclusion of, "have to be mentally retarted [sic]." Without that I might have up-voted you for the other points made. (Although they could have been made with a less confrontational tone as well.)
        • laci27 9y ago
          upvoted your comment:) You're right. I'm sorry.
    • T2_t2 9y ago
      Also likely not a site that deals with meme makers: http://kapwing.com http://kapwing.com
    • 9y ago
• n0tme 9y ago
  I think that removing this chat box from the website completely will greatly improve it and solve this problem. Just have a page with a feedback form somewhere, so people who realy want to leave a feedback or a question could contact you. Stop annoying your users and random visitors!
• chappi42 9y ago
  TBH if such an annoying chat robot pops up, my answer could also be a very unfriendly 'go away'. Regarding photo difference this has likely to do with part of the audience which use such a mem maker kapwing site: idiots. An ip lookup who they are and/or coming from would have been interesting.
  • jenthoven 9y ago
    We didn't include "Go away" or "get out of my way" or even "shut up" in the count of rude messages. I only counted messages where a user swore, called me a name, or said something clearly aggressive or mean.
    • guy98238710 9y ago
      When I used Windows 10 for the first time and Microsoft's chatbot popped up, the first thing I asked it to do is "f*ck off". This might be the gender bias you are seeing. People assume it's a safe-to-swear chatbot when the photo is a pretty woman.
    • chappi42 9y ago
      Well ;-) I didn't want to write what I potentially might have fired away emotionally when such chats appear (something with f* or p* maybe). But many of the examples in the blog I could never ever imagine to write. No happy man or women would. Thus I'm interested who would? Are there any (aggregated) trends? That there are idiots is a given. Neverthelesss, I would still present a down to earth real picture (not from you personally of course, but also not some stock foto or robot). Reason: if you spend the time/cost to provide high-quality personal assistance (opposed to some random chat-center no-help) you might as well show it (and filter out the idiots - you wouldn't want to provide services to them anyway!).
• DrScump 9y ago
  Is a grand total of 6 trolling messages in a week statistically significant in the first place? The number I'm missing is how many legitimate prospect interactions resulted from each avatar. It wouldn't surprise me if the rude/harassing messages came from utter trolls who were not useful user prospects in the first place. If so, it could be worth keeping Rachel around just as a high-level troll trap to weed out the time wasters.
• codedokode 9y ago
  I wonder what is the percent of users who really need help and use the popup for it? If it is a minority than maybe it is better to make the popup closed by default so the majority of the users doesn't get distracted?
• vortico 9y ago
  It's without a doubt that there is extreme misogyny on the internet and in the real world, but I would be interested in the demographics of the bad responses you got: country, age, gender, etc. This is the natural next step to understand how to solve this problem.
  • guy98238710 9y ago
    It's not without a doubt. See other comments. It might be that people think the pretty woman photo is fake or that it's all a scripted bot. The sexism might actually go the other way round - some people assuming these web devs are ugly antisocial men hiding behind fake photo of a pretty woman.
    • orthecreedence 9y ago
      You have doubts that sexism and misogyny exist on the internet and the real world? And you think that all sexism exists only because people assume the person they're talking to is a bot? What are your double-blind studies that have confirmed this claim? I'm very interested in your sources. > See other comments. Oh, oh. Nevermind. You already cited.
• AnsisMalins 9y ago
  I don't understand. Why would you ask a random website chat on a date? The chances that you're anywhere near her are nil. Do you intend to fly out to meet her? What is happening in your head, random visitor?
  • draugadrotten 9y ago
    I am male and used to work in a call centre. I apparently have a good voice, and I was repeatedly asked out by random women calling the service desk. I even got a virtual stalker who kept inventing issues and calling daily just to speak with me. Since I am male, I was not threatened but amused, but I can see how a woman would feel vulnerable in the same situation.
    • hycaria 9y ago
      >Since I am male, I was not threatened but amused, but I can see how a woman would feel vulnerable in the same situation. Why ?
      • totalZero 9y ago
        In the US, the average guy is five inches taller and about 30 pounds heavier than the average lady. Also, given a particular body weight, men tend to be stronger than women. Furthermore, 80% of people arrested for violent crime are men. Seems pretty clear to me.
        • hycaria 9y ago
          This is happening by phone.
          • totalZero 9y ago
            You don't think it's possible to scare or intimidate someone over the phone?
• JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  I don't know what's worse[0], the fact that Ms. Enthoven has to go through all this simply because she's a woman, or the fact that half the comments on this story are people trying to make excuses[1] for this type of behavior. Wow! [0] I do. Obviously what Ms. Enthoven has to go through is worse. [1] People think it's a bot. People hate chat popups. The photo is fake. Your math is wrong! Etc... SMH...
  • cyberferret 9y ago
    I concur. I am finding the level of conformance rationalisation in here almost as shocking as the original blog post. My previous comment on this thread merely expressing my shock at the article and stating that we would not condone anything even mildly approaching it on our site got downvoted! And here I was thinking that HN was one of the last bastions of internet civility and manners... SMH indeed...
• logicallee 9y ago
  This was extremely interesting. 1. It would be interesting to know to what extent she would have received the same messages if she had had the message (this matches the style of the message they used): >Hey! Thanks for visiting Kapwing. I'm Julia [or Rachel], founder of Kapwing. If you run into any issues making your video, feel free to let me know, and I'll do my best to help! By identifying herself as a founder this would separate the message from the chatbots who use female avatars, as mentioned in our comments here in this thread. 2. I'd also be interested in an even less breezy version (to make it even less like a chatbot), such as: >Hello and thank you for visiting Kapwing. I'm Julia [or Rachel], founder of Kapwing. If you run into any issues making your video, please do let me know and I'll investigate the issue. I don't have a guess as to what the results would be: perhaps exactly the same regardless of style and introduction. But it would be interesting to know. 3. For comparison it would also have also been interesting to use a male model who matches the same description ("I found a stock photo of a blonde woman who was attractive in an obvious way", so a stock photo of a male model who was attractive in an obvious way.) For this one I do have a guess: - I expect that in the article/study, 100% of the rude messages came from heterosexual males. - But there are homosexual males so my guess is that an equally "obviously attractive" man would get 10% as many lewd messages, i.e. from homosexual males. (if use the old figure of "1 in 10" being gay.) But as far as it goes the study was extremely interesting and worth reporting. EDIT: I updated men to males above, actually especially since it's a meme site I bet most of the puerile messages were from teenagers - they show striking levels of immaturity.
• jakobegger 9y ago
  Amazing. The author spends a lot of time to tell us a very convincing story how sexism affects people in our industry, and the Hacker News thread is full of people rationalizing it. - it's only because people think you're a bot - it's because of your target audience - it's because chat widgets are annoying - you don't really have enough data to make any conclusions How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere?
  • verroq 9y ago
    "Rude people are sexist" or "Sexist people are rude" is about the only conclusion you can draw here (maybe not even that, correlation != causation etc etc) It doesn't even come close to showing how "sexism is everywhere". For all we know the sample could be entirely edgy 12 year olds. Tell me again how this self-admittedly "non-rigorous scientific study" proves "sexism is everywhere"? It could easily be that more attractive profiles result in more interactions and receive the same proportion of sexist responses. Their data measures sexist messages not the proportion of sexist messages over all of their interactions.
    • jakobegger 9y ago
      You're probably new to HN, so you might not have seen all the other stories about sexism posted in the last year or so. A single story like this doesn't prove anything, but the flood of stories just like that paint a pretty clear picture. At some point you can no longer say: "This is an isolated incident".
      • verroq 9y ago
        I'm not new to HN, I've been here for far longer than you have. And yes some of those stories have merit, but this is not one of them.
        • aepiepaey 9y ago
          (account age is not a good proxy for "time on HN")
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• bpanon 9y ago
  Shocking.
• ponderatul 9y ago
  It's funny how Silicon Valley is like a fish in the water. They don't see the water, because they are in it. Technology is like putting a V8 engine on the skateboard of evolution. It accelerates the shit out of everything. These people that are commenting and being sexist, trolls etc. are hurting. Most of them don't have the awareness to realize it. Their attention has been hijacked by the superstimulus of the 21st century. The 24/7 media, sensationalist headlines, addictive apps ( facebook, twitter, instagram, snapchat ). Everything there comes to them in a blink of an eye. But life is not like that. Real life doesn't move at that blistering speed. And it creates dissonance, that hurts. Everything is amplified with technology. I've been there. I've been an addict, but I got my head out of the water as well. Once you see it, you can't go back.
• nukeop 9y ago
  A popup window with a female avatar starting a chat with you with a generated message reminds everybody of a "hot singles in your area" ad that pretends to be a chat window. That's all there is to it. Receiving nasty messages is not sexual harassment, especially if people assume it's a bot/ad, or an indian sweatshop worker.
  • userbinator 9y ago
    A popup window with a female avatar starting a chat with you with a generated message reminds everybody of a "hot singles in your area" ad that pretends to be a chat window. That was my first thought too; combine that with a userbase containing a majority of heterosexual males and it's easy to see why you got the responses you did: they all thought it was that ad, so reacted accordingly.
• alex_duf 9y ago
  As a guy, both reading this article and the horrendous comments in this thread I kind of want to put a female avatar picture on my social media accounts. Just to see what it's like to be in someone else's shoes...
  • kpao 9y ago
    I'm wearing someone else's shoes every day so I can give you a quick feedback of my experience. I'm trans, blonde, pass relatively well and on the feminine side. I have seen a drastic shift in messages I get from people online. I regularly get mansplained obvious things about aviation, tech, coding on social media. People don't assume I'm the CEO of my company or that I have anything to do with engineering anymore. Glad we hired someone else to do support for us...
  • colmvp 9y ago
    I recall using a very attractive photo of a woman (not a model as that would be too obviously fake) on a forum and asking about salary ranges in a city. The next morning, the thread had over a hundred replies and I even got one private message offering an interview. I hadn’t even linked to my work. That said I think this has a lot more to do with attractiveness and race than gender. Anytime you see someone post a photo of an attractive man holding a cute animal on /r/aww the comments from women are equally extremely cringey and weird.
  • Caveman_Coder 9y ago
    I did this with job applications when I was getting rejected using my real name and sex. I changed it from Joe to Joanna and re-applied. Every single company that turned me down originally called me back when they thought I was a female developer...so from my perspective, their shoes look pretty good...It was an interesting little experiment...turns out my experience was good, but my sex was wrong for the "desired" team makeup.
  • ThinkingGuy 9y ago
    I was first awakened to the problem of sexism back in the days of IRC. The client (or maybe it was the server) I was using truncated nicks to 9 characters, so "ThinkingGuy" became the non-gender-specific "ThinkingG." And the barrage of "a/s/l?"s began...
• jaclaz 9y ago
  I would tentatively shift the focus on age groups. I believe (maybe wrongly, raise your hand if you never did this) that any (male) kid in - say the 10-14 age range has made some "harassment", possibly of sexual nature, toward females (not necessarily of the same age group). Once they were "jokes" or "pranks" on the phone (of very dubious humour but that amused the kids a lot). I am not particularly surprised that on the internet, a new media where the kids have the same basic "protections" (anonimity and no need to show their appearances) the "tradition" continues.
• tomcam 9y ago
  Quite depressing. I wonder what would happen if they eliminated all pictures.
• knorker 9y ago
  I read just the headline and just thought "because you're a woman?". Clicked through. Yes, this was a woman. Sad, but predictable.
• hutzlibu 9y ago
  I don't think you can generalize the results at all, when the product was a "meme generator" for which the target group is reddit, 4chan, etc. Because inside those groups are some really depressed, miserable and angry lonley single male (teens) who are horny, but got mostly rejection (or beeing ignored) from women in real life ... where they would not even dare to talk to them. But so they built up great anger because of their frustration. So quite some of them go for fantasys of the old ways, where women had no rights, could be used and they would therefore finally get real sex. (rape videos are really liked in some forums) So actually it surprised me, that there was only so little hateful trolling. But I would have suspected more racism, though.
  • Slansitartop 9y ago
    > I don't think you can generalize the results at all, when the product was a "meme generator" for which the target group is reddit, 4chan, etc. So we're selecting a socially maladjusted population here, then trying to generalize to society as a whole?
    • ignoramceisblis 9y ago
      That is exactly what many of the commentors in this discussion are attempting to do, taking cues from the article.
• hycaria 9y ago
  Why would you want to be someone for customer support anyways
• alkonaut 9y ago
  Kids who grew up in an environment where anonymous interaction is the norm (such as kids who have anonymous social chats at school, or do in-game chats etc) have grown so accustomed to it that I don't think they even see it as sexist, racist, bullying etc. Most would probably never say any of this to someones' face, not out of fear of consequences but simply because they know better. Yet in anonymous contact they don't think twice about it. It also doesn't help that these interactions are ephemeral. Tomorrow you play against someone else, or chat with a different person. What you said yesterday doesn't matter, you may not even be the same persona. So as far as human relatoins go, they know that the chat interaction isn't a human relation, it's a short anonymous interaction. So I think the important thing for us parents to convey is that being an asshat isn't ok just because you are anonymous. It might help to explain that everthing typed anywhere online is usually recorded forever, and that true anonymity doesn't exist either. That, and of course that real people deserved being treated like real people, even when anonymous.
  • jsjohnst 9y ago
    I think you hit the nail on the head, anonymity can bring out the worst in someone, especially when they feel there is zero repercussions. It’s partly why I hate the throw away accounts here.
    • rocqua 9y ago
      It's not quite anonymity, its ephemerality. People know that their actions will never come back to them. An anonymous but long-standing account will see less of this than a throw-away account.
      • BlackFly 9y ago
        Exactly. There is no serious consequence for their actions. If it was more common to be permanently banned for such language, people would probably think twice. You are pretty anonymous if you walk into a bar and don't tell anyone your name. (Depending on the bar) They will kick you out and put your picture on the wall if you start talking aggressively to the civil regulars. More than that there is the immediate risk of a fist to the face. Just like bar owners ask themselves what kind of patronage they want, online operators should ask themselves the same question.
• madez 9y ago
  Given how even small differences in social treatment can make one feel, this must have a dramatic effect. And looking at this evidence suggests it's very systematic, not random and isolated. This is outrageous!
• acemv 9y ago
  I find the sexual harrassment to be appalling and it upsets me that she had to face those types of challenges when her only goal was to increase engagement with the user base. Though I have to wonder how many of the total user base were responsible for the harrassment. They should be able to track this through logs etc to better understand the scale of the harrassers. One must equally be prepared to ask if this is an expected outcome from selection bias? Her user base appears to be onlya sub section of a subsection of a slice which is only a slither of the meme following community. I a going to generalize here but when you cater to a community which runs off dark humor, sarscasm, and the occasional debauchery - I wouldn't be surprised of the possibility and abundance of users that are non-pc and disregard most of the norms established in society. To be very honest, I feel like her post is the equivalent of a female prison guard complaining of the lack of empathy and manners in the male prisoner population... One could also make the comparison of female guards in a female prison. Females are not as physically strong as males on average and due to this and other societial factors, they are exposed to an over adbundance of harrassment. It's a problem yes, but it is an obvious expectation of unfettered anonymous communication on this the internet. Just as the potential for violence, injury and bodily harm is there for many professions that engaged with large the populations - cops, guards, public relations, celebrities, journalist, etc. Unless the internet is regulated, I believe all users should be very aware of it's faults, and perpensity for unusual and harrassing behavior. To control that aspect of the internet would be to implement censorship which would cause way more harm. [Edited based on feedback.]
  • madez 9y ago
    > To be very honest, I feel like her post is the equivalent of an prison guard complaining of the lack of empathy and manners in prisoner population... This is not a valid comparison because when posing as a male she did bit receive the abuse. That's like a female prison guard being harrased while the male one isn't.
• cyberferret 9y ago
  I found this post deeply upsetting and alarming. I guess I am lucky that my co-founder and I run a B2B SaaS, and not a B2C company - in over two years of running a chat agent on our website and within our app, we have never had anything even close to this. Frankly, seeing the interactions on that blog post was like opening a door into some sort of hell hole. Maybe I lead some sort of cloistered life online, but I don't think I have ever seen anything like it. And yes, I am male and my co-founder is female, and all of our team use our own profile pics within our chat widget. I will never tolerate even a paying customer treating any of my team with anything but courtesy and respect.
  • jpalomaki 9y ago
    Some time ago there was a write up about a very similar problem, in B2B context. It was not about chat, but about email. The experience was quite similar as described in this article. [1] [1] https://twitter.com/i/moments/839950218099576832 https://twitter.com/i/moments/839950218099576832
    • woodrowbarlow 9y ago
      do you have a non-twitter link? thank you.
      • philipodonnell 9y ago
        Wow, twitter is a really inferior way of telling a story like that.
        • brobert 9y ago
          threadreaderapp dot com is a great way to "collect"/"rollup" tweets into a single page/long form for reading. Unfortunately, it doesn't support twitter moments yet (you have to copy the original tweet url) and, really, REALLY unfortunately, doesn't support this particular "old" tweet because the twitter API doesn't allow fetching tweets more than a few months old. :/
  • 9y ago
• JepZ 9y ago
  As disturbing as the story is, I find it quite intriguing. Obviously meme makers often have some crude humor, but somehow I assume that most of the visitors who wrote inappropriate comments were male. So I wonder if you could tell a similar story from some other website with a primary female user base. I supposed it would be very different. The other thing is, it seems that the 'sexier' (from a hetero male perspective) the contact picture was, the more rude comments arrived. An interesting hypothesis is, if the picture activated some sort of 'sexual brain area' which lead to the creation of the rude comments. Does anybody know of any scientific research related to that topic (sexual activation leading to rude behavior)?
  • closed 9y ago
    I don't know a lot about the topic, but remember this article called "The effect of sexual arousal on sexual decision making", by Dan Ariely http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~gl20/GeorgeLoewenstein/Papers_files/pdf/HeatMoment.pdf http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~gl20/GeorgeLoewenstein/Pa...
  • staticelf 9y ago
    > So I wonder if you could tell a similar story from some other website with a primary female user base. I supposed it would be very different. It is not, I have worked on an app with many female users and they are just as mean and snarky as anyone. "Fire the developers", "piece of shit xxx" etc was common.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• AndrewKhan12 9y ago
  I also use a different phone for business. " https://www.yourtripdubai.com/dubai-city-bus https://www.yourtripdubai.com/dubai-city-bus "
• jtbayly 9y ago
  Unpopular opinion ahead: For all we know, the majority of the rude comments are coming from women. And if you are assuming, without evidence, that these comments all come from males, then you are either sexist or there really are differences between men and women that ought to inform things like what jobs we put people in as a society, for the sake of everybody involved.
  • orthecreedence 9y ago
    Donny, please.
• z3t4 9y ago
  I think those chat boxes are rude. Here I'm am browsing the web in my underpants and some dude sneaks up on me like "hey, I see you are visiting our site! Wanna chat ?". Instead make it so that the user needs to make active action, eg clicking on a link to start the chat.
  • orthecreedence 9y ago
    Strongly agree. Whenever something annoys me, I find the first person I can who is remotely associated with that thing and hold nothing back as I verbally abuse them and sexually harass them.
    • z3t4 9y ago
      Although it's hard to sympathize with an anonymous fake picture most likely chat bot, I'm not defending it's abuse. Only stating that it can be annoying for users.
    • prepend 9y ago
      Comically, that’s sort of what I do. They annoy me, so I take out my frustrations on them. I don’t say the stuff in the article, but my typical response is to close, or if it seems like an actual human type a quick “fuck yourself.” Every once in a while, I engage them to explain how their intrusion is annoying.
• kelvin0 9y ago
  Well there's missing the avatar picture taking a backside selfie in yoga pants, for scientific completeness of the tests... All jokes aside, I can't say I'm surprised by the results. The internet allows to remove 2 important things humans use for communication: Physical presence (5 senses) and body language (non verbal communication). I doubt any of the 'offenders' in the tests would do anything even remotely close to the blatant sexism displayed if they were in the presence of the young woman. Maybe such experiments actually 'force' communication to it's lowest common denominator, and any other conclusions on the character of the 'offenders' might be quite tainted. That being said, I completely agree with the conclusion that changing the avatar picture is a good idea, and avoids all the bad signal/noise ratio.
  • alex_duf 9y ago
    I don't think the conclusion should be "Oh well let's just make sure to be careful about our avatars". It should be let's stop to be complete twats.
  • matt4077 9y ago
    > backside selfie in yoga pants See... that right there is sexual harassment. But it’s just a joke, right? > changing the avatar is a good idea “It’s so easy to avoid harassment! Just make sure nobody knows you’re a woman!”
• sergiotapia 9y ago
  I don’t think it’s sexism. It’s just meme spewing permavirgins doing what they do online all the time. Think of your target audience. “How to make a video meme?” - of course they’re one of those show u de wae types.
  • notriddle 9y ago
    How does that not count as sexism? They're literally treating the support tech differently based on which photo is shown!
• throwaway-hn123 9y ago
  If anyone wants to see how many males talk to females online, go to chatous.com, use a female name, and start chatting. "wanna fuck baby" "look at the pic of my cock hoe" "i hv big dik u lik" "sned ur nudes" "u cunt" "ima rape ur n ur mothr" all that in a 1 hour session. Anyone rationalising this should be ashamed of themeselves.
• JabavuAdams 9y ago
  This matches what I've heard from a female friend who was doing support in a mobile game forum. Pretty stark and hard to explain away. I did LOL at "lick my balls nigga". It's so dumb it's kind of cute.
  • mixmastamyk 9y ago
    Reminded me of Tokyo Breakfast. :D
• radioo75555 9y ago
  Whenever one of those chat widgets pops up I always use it to say "fuck off." Perhaps when someone shows their face I'll insult them too.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• 2474 9y ago
  Ironically enough, as I type this comment on the internet, it's my general feeling that the internet has made the world a far worse place.
• contravariant 9y ago
  It would be nice to have some labels on the bar graph. I assume that orange represents the rude messages and blue the heckling, but for all I know it's the other way around. It's even possible that one column is for normal messages and one for rude/heckling messages, especially since I'm not entirely sure what the difference is between between rude/trolling and sexual-harassment/heckling (I'd understand if it were rude/sexual-harassment vs. trolling/heckling). I would also be interested in whether there was any effect on the number of 'normal' messages.
  • riskable 9y ago
    I don't know what did it but something changed inside me a number of years ago where now I have this uncontrollable reaction of disgust whenever I see graphs and charts like this. Maybe I've viewed too many "reports" from places like the Heartland Institute and Fox News. Seeing charts with missing information or misleading/inaccurate heights for things kicks off my bullshit detector and throws me in defensive mode thinking, "what agenda are they pushing here?" There's an instant assumption of nefarious intent. I can't be the only one, can I?
    • contravariant 9y ago
      Well in this case you're on your own I'm afraid. Making clear unambiguous graphs is incredibly hard so minor nitpicks like missing labels can hardly be called 'nefarious'.
  • jenthoven 9y ago
    Hey this is Julia, the post’s author. Sorry there’s no legend; I kind of included it in the title of the graph but orange was “Rude or trolling messages” and blue was “Sexual harassment or heckling”
    • jaaames 9y ago
      Did you consider that this maybe not be representative of a systemic bias against women across all demographics, rather, the demographic that searches for video meme makers on the internet is skewed towards horny rude teenage boys that bask in anonymity?
• newman8r 9y ago
  I wonder if this article will cause additional heckling in the future - can the OP comment as to whether there's been an increase in trolling today from this?
  • romanovcode 9y ago
    100% it will.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• nathan_f77 9y ago
  I like the "Team Kapwing" mascot, I think that's a good approach. I also have a chat widget on FormAPI [1], and I don't like pretending to be someone else. I looked through some stock photos [2], but it just feels wrong to me. I also don't like the "automatic popup" setting, so I turned that off. Those really annoy me, so I struggle to see how it could lead to more customers. But maybe I'm wrong about that. [1] https://formapi.io https://formapi.io [2] https://www.pexels.com/search/person/ https://www.pexels.com/search/person/
• vitro 9y ago
  Sometimes I think how difficult it must be to be a women, being bombarded by the looks all the time, feeling like a pray... Partly it is in our nature, partly in the culture and education. We as men have still a long way to go to fully respect women. If you haven't seen, I recommend the movie Whores' Glory http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1327628/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1327628/ to have a peek into the women's life as a sexual worker. If only we could offer them a better life.. Imagine being a woman trapped there for your lifetime. Unimaginable..
  • andrewmcwatters 9y ago
    > We as men have still a long way to go to fully respect women. These types of generalizations are akin to saying, "We as Americans have a long way to go to make better student loan investment decisions." The effects are so personal that it's worthless to make blanket statements like this; that is to say–speak for yourself.
    • vitro 9y ago
      You're right. Thanks.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• jopsen 9y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if choice of avaatar also affects the likelihood that people will contact you.. This would be an interesting thing for someone to study. Did anyone look for published studies? Regardless, I'm sure simple things like wording of the text and picture affects how people precieve the product, and behave when replying. Obviously, such effects can also be exploited for the better - one should hope :)
• cimmanom 9y ago
  It's disappointing that so many comments in this discussion are trying to explain away the problem rather than to come up with a solution for it.
  • slantyyz 9y ago
    While there might be some valid solutions that can be conceived for the problem, I highly doubt the problem will ever go away. People on the Internet use the veneer of anonymity afforded to them by the Internet to behave in a manner very different from a face-to-face interaction. The chat box in the post isn't very different from being approached in a retail store by a salesperson. And while I'm sure retail salespeople receive their share of abuse/rude comments from customers for asking "Can I help you", I think it's a safe bet that abuse/rudeness is still way lower than the same interaction online. When I read that article, I just felt sad. I'm probably a little older than the average HN'er -- the Internet didn't become "a big thing" until my 20s, and in my lifetime, I've seen how technology has undeniably advanced and changed the world for the better. But I often wonder whether that same technology has made people better or worse.
    • zimpenfish 9y ago
      > I often wonder whether that same technology has made people better or worse. I don't think it's either - it's just exposed what people always were but now there's zero friction to telling hundreds (thousands, etc.) of people your beliefs whereas before you'd, what, write to a paper and maybe it got published and 600 people would see it.
• bhouston 9y ago
  Just today our chat agent was told "Annoying popup, annoying face, annoying smile, annoying papillon... Please shut up!" And it was a white guy. A lot of people are rude to the chat people unfortunately.
  • sleepychu 9y ago
    OC measured the responses to different chat personas though and it seems pretty clear that gender plays a role in the volume of vitirol received, what's your point here?
• intrasight 9y ago
  Why wouldn't you leave it as Rachel Grey, and then fire those abusive customers?
• grasshopperpurp 9y ago
  And, no one should have any issue reporting those people to their employers. If you act like scum, particularly with your employer in your profile, society should punish you.
  • Nadya 9y ago
    People are always so quick to jump to this line of reasoning when popular opinion agrees with them. Would you be fine with losing your job for wrongthink if - or rather, when - social opinion swings the other way? It doesn't matter if you're right or wrong - you should be punished for disagreeing with society! Societal retribution for "wrongthink" is not the right answer. It's how you end up with LGBT losing their jobs where it's "wrong" to be LGBT - because the actual wrongness/rightness doesn't matter, just that society doesn't agree with them and that it's okay for society to punish them for being "wrong".
    • enlightenedfool 9y ago
      Excellent point. The idea that someone should lose the job and livelihood because of a wrong doing is madness. The punishment should cause a behavior correction and not end of life. Such vengeful society we live in today!
      • tammer 9y ago
        Western society's concept of justice is largely focused on punitive retribution. A transformation to restorative action is needed here.
      • rectang 9y ago
        I wait with 'bated breath for this reformation to apply in the case of the United States' unprecedentedly large general prison population.
      • ethbro 9y ago
        I've seen the distinction between "disagreement" and "being a dick" disappear. I could phrase a hypothetical opinion two ways: 1) "I think abortion is wrong because I believe in the sanctity of life and that life begins at conception." 2) "Anyone who is pro-abortion is a baby murder." In the first, a viewpoint is stated in a respectful manner. You may agree or disagree, but the speaker wasn't deliberately demeaning or hostile. In the second, the same opinion was expressed, but in an overtly hostile way. If we'd like a plural society in which many viewpoints are exchanged, we have to continually challenge ourselves not to conflate the two when hearing or responding to someone else. And I get it -- it's not easy when one is passionate about something, even when one is willfully trying not to knee-jerk. But if I either speak disrespectfully, or assume that someone else is being disrespectful regardless of their actual phrasing, then we all end up in the gutter.
• pm24601 9y ago
  She is trying to get a service going and doesn't need to deal with shit. However, later on maybe use "Rachel" as a way to start banning "customers". How about selected comments are attached to their videos as metatext :-) ? There needs to be less internet witch hunts and more corrective action. On the internet, response goes from 0 to 100 with no steps in between. Its either ignored in the hope anti-social behavior gets corrected or it turns into a full on witch hunt of internet shaming. I really wish Google would age out search results on people.
• lr4444lr 9y ago
  I’m a 24-year-old female Could've stopped the article right there. No more justification needed.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• tobyhinloopen 9y ago
  lol u cute marry me? /jk dont hate me
• bayofpigs 9y ago
  If there's anything unusual or peculiar about a photo you will get hate/troll comments on it. If you had a picture of a fat/overweieght person this would happen. A picture of a very dark black person wearing 'gang' clothing would get racist comments. If the asian person had looked more stereotypical, like thick glasses and a bowl haircut, they too would have received them. People like to make fun of what's different and anonymity gives them the courage to do so. I just hope the victims of them don't jump to the conclusion this proves inherent racism, or sexism, etc. People will find a way to hate and troll regardless of those things.
• JungleGymSam 9y ago
  This is ridiculous (not the article; the treatment she received)! I'm a bit surprised no one has mentioned here the thought of passing every message through a sentiment analysis system. This seems like a perfect application for that. Site Visitor * Message blocked [inappropriate language] *
• oh_sigh 9y ago
  Wow, that sucks. Side note: What is the harassment of asking 'Do YoU lIkE tO eAt BaNaNaS'? I know the banana<->penis euphemism, but it doesn't seem like that is the case here.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• newscracker 9y ago
  Since she seems surprised about this, I wonder if the author has had any social media profiles at all, because these kind of responses come through every channel — be it website customer support chat or Facebook messenger or chat sites or matchmaking/dating sites or even plain old IRC. All that you need are to have a female sounding name and (if the platform supports it,) a picture that looks like a girl or woman. It used to be that such names would get private "asl?" (standing for "age, sex, location?") messages before social media came into existence. Any mention of "f" and a somewhat younger age would get lots of messages of different kinds — enough to prevent real girls/women from using female sounding names or nicknames online. As for anonymous nicknames or handles, I'm all for it. While people who want to say nasty stuff will do it even with their real names attached to it (there are many examples from Facebook), the negative effect that real names (or forcing them) has is two fold — it increases harassment for girls/women (and some others who are normally discriminated against), and it makes people censor themselves more than they need to (more so in environments like Facebook where most people have one identity to interact with different circles and relationships in their lives). The Internet was always a place to use self-chosen nicknames and handles, and the kind of community shapes the interactions more than the mere ability to use a nickname/handle. As someone who values privacy and is strongly opposed to profiling, censorship and surveillance, I wouldn't want a world where anonymous/pseudo-anonymous communication doesn't exist
• f4rker 9y ago
  "Im a girl and my life is hard lets talk about me"
• taurath 9y ago
  What an interesting experiment! I wonder how users would react if she did an uber attractive guy
• tomxor 9y ago
  The author characterises these messages as either aggressive and threatening, sexist _or_ trolls. Yet all of the comments are anonymous, generic, obscene or extreme, there is no subtlety or personality to the insults, they are completely generic and transferable as far as the individual is concerned. It's hard to see them as anything _other_ than trolls. If they are all trolls, isn't this analysis really just about which profile pictures trolls find the easiest to find politically incorrect, offensive or sexist thing to say about? and isn't that just a reflection of what society finds the most offensive rather than what a bunch of trolls sincerely think? [edit] I'm downvoted because I think they are trolls, really? how lame... Try to come up with an argument group thinkers, or must we all cry in defence of anything even vaguely resembling sexism without thinking.
• jenthoven 9y ago
  A few thoughts from Julia (the OC) 24 hours after this post caught on: 1. Thank you all for the kind words and thoughts - The Kapwing chat box has been full of supportive and kind messages this morning. 2. I didn’t intend to solicit pity; annoying users are just one small challenge on the way to growing an Internet company and are easy to avoid, thanks to the Drift messaging platform and pseudonyms. But it is one example of a small thing that steepens the path to success for women founders. 3. The discussions in these comments are, for the most part, insightful and interesting. Even though my users and my experience are not representative of everyone’s, I appreciate the conversations this post has started around user behavior on the internet.
• kragen 9y ago
  A woman here is explaining that she prefers to interact anonymously or pseudonymously on the internet in order to avoid vicious abuse, amply demonstrated in screenshots. I find it very alarming that a significant part of the response here is to suggest that we should therefore eliminate anonymity and pseudonymity on the internet in order to force people to behave better. This suggested measure would force this woman, and others, to face this vicious abuse all the time, with no escape except not to use the internet. This seems like a bad idea. Problems like this are precisely why we must protect the rights to anonymity and pseudonymity, and indeed work to make them normative. (And that's without even getting into the fact that real-names policies have been conclusively shown not to make people behave better.)
• jacquesm 9y ago
  I really don't blame her. Years of interaction with end-users on ww.com/camarades.com has taught me that if you do use your real ID and photograph you will most likely end up regretting it. Threats of rape and other niceties will be your lot if you use your real data. Also when you use fake data but at least you will have reduced the possibility for real harm considerably. The same goes for your users, not just for the operators, especially in any context where the site operator allows or encourages end-user interaction.
• logfromblammo 9y ago
  I don't even reveal my real species on the Internet. Apparently, the anecdata from the article backs this decision up, with compound interest. If you can't be the perfect parody toy (for a girl or a boy), like me, be a moderately attractive white dude. And actually, we should probably all be pretending to be the same clip-art business guy that is pointing at the computer screen in all the stock photos. We're all him now.
• b0rsuk 9y ago
  For telephone calls you could use a voice distorter application. The trick would be finding one that sounds quite natural but makes gender hard to identify. Or maybe it's just enough to sound like an old lady?
• rdl 9y ago
  This was an excellent use of data to convince people of something they probably didn't believe before. (I knew harassment was a thing, but not how cleanly it would be split along gender; I'm used to everyone being a target all the time.) Although I think "Apparently, people don’t hit on cats, so I was mostly free from harassment for a while" is not actually true on large enough sample sizes, terrifyingly. I follow cat feeds on instagram and see some terrifying comments.
• Eufjriendj 9y ago
  I used to chat on IRC with a very feminine nick (I'm a man), the difference is night and day. People would PM me out of nowhere, pay me all kinds of undue attention. If you don't believe the author, try it yourself, it's easy to reproduce their results.
• stesch 9y ago
  If it looks like an ad people will treat it like an ad. In this case annoying ads with chat bots.
• prepend 9y ago
  This has got to be exhausting for someone going through this and appreciate the ideas for others who can reduce trolling and harassment. I sometimes wonder about ways to measure something subjective like attractiveness is an objective enough way that it could be used on dating sites (eg, only dating 6+). In the olden days you could put a photo up on hotornot and get a rating after a few days. But it’s down because of abuse and general jerkiness. If you try to have a nice version, people will bias and signal higher scores. But maybe you could measure troll behavior on bots like this to determine some level of physical, superficial attractiveness. Then you could use those scores for a variety of purposes.
• RikNieu 9y ago
  This is ridiculous behaviour. And I'm curious as to who these visitors are broken down into sub-groups. It would have been interesting to see if the harassment could be correlated to certain countries and regions, age groups, and whether the time of day would make a difference.
• eric_lu 9y ago
  Do YoU llkE tO eAt BaNaNaS?
• eric_lu 9y ago
  lick my balls nigga