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

kapwing.com

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

#51

Post by laci27 »

laumars wrote: post #31
laci27 wrote: post #26

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...

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. :(

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)

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

#52

Post by adventured »

tomlock wrote: post #23
javadocmd wrote: post #13

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 telemarket…

But also, the percentage of the userbase responding poorly also responded almost an order of magnitude more when the person on the other end was a woman.

> the percentage of the userbase

That's not what their data is showing. That would be a valuable break-out to see.

What their data is showing is number of messages. If you look at the chats, it appears they're counting multiple abusive messages (one minute to the next and many within the same minute stamp) from single actors.

If one jerk sends eight abusive messages in one minute, they're counting all of those in the order of a magnitude you're referring to. It makes sense the abusive actors will send as many abuse messages as they can as quickly as they can, as one would expect that to get shut-down.

Simply put, the abuse they're showing, which is about ~14 rude + harrassment messages per week to Julia, could easily consist of just two or three individual jerks sending a burst of messages (which again appears to be the case based on the screenshots). By their numbers, they're getting ~4,500 visitors per week. Out of those, it appears that about 0.1% or less of those visitors are likely a problem.

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

#53

Post by laci27 »

laci27 wrote: post #39
waytogo wrote: post #33

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.

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 nu…

Thank you down voter for proving my point:)

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

#54

Post by nitrogen »

codedokode wrote: post #40
dazc wrote: post #14

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 ex…

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 per…

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.

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

#55

Post by b6 »

tomlock wrote: post #43
b6 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>A guy would just laugh at those "mean" comments. >People love women What are these statements based on? Meanwhile, the vast majority of domestic violence victims, and the victims of murders where the assailant was in a relationship with the murderer, are women. This idea that "people love women" is not reality based. Plenty of men have spoken out about how toxic and awful online culture can be. It's not too hard to…

> What are these statements based on?

I have personally laughed at comments much worse than those in the post, directed at me, and so have my friends. All my male friends and my dad and my friends' dads and so forth love women -- they would die for women.

What I'm trying to say is, people bring out this word "misogyny" to make a claim about the origin of a problem, when the origin is unclear, or at least much more complicated than "hatred of women". Let's just agree about the clear evidence that there is discriminatory behavior and not insist on absolute certainty as to why it is happening.

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

#56

Post by dredmorbius »

jenthoven wrote: post #27
dazc wrote: post #14

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 ex…

Hey - I totally agree it can be annoying, especially since Drift asks users to enter their email address and people are worried about spam. So it’s a tradeoff between annoyance at the pop up and the support users get when they have problems. Our website is a video editing tool, so we decided that it’s more important to have someone to answer questions than to avoid “peeing off” users. And, regardless of how annoying…

Not sure if you're familiar with it, but Ling's Cars is a high-touch website with live-chat elements that ... whilst in a different area than yours, may prove useful.

The rationale is given by Ling herself here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xZZ1c7diUI

I've written my own theory of the site (it is ... something else...) at Ello:

https://ello.co/ferdiz/post/p3wjs7hvw0zq-7qdrmyvea

(Also submitted to HN a ways back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9574350 )

Nutshell:

One of the costliest elements for a car sales outlet is tire-kickers: people who come by, look at vehicles, tie up a salesperson's time, and don't buy anything. More to the point, they never planned to buy anything....

The auto dealership (online or off) wants to sort out the tire-kickers as quickly as possible. If you aren't currently and really shopping for a car, you're a liability. And the chances are the salesperson's missing out on one of the four people who might actually have a real interest in buying that day. The goal is to sort you as quickly as possible.(

Ling'sCars.com is optimized for driving away people who don't really, really, REALLY want to buy a car.*

Not saying you want to drive people away. But you also probably want to not spend much time interacting with anyone that's not really interested in your product.

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

#57

Post by endymi0n »

dazc wrote: post #14

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 ex…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

The popup being annoying (to which I personally agree) doesn't change anything about the incredibly clear results. People are placed into all kinds of situations in which they come across as annoying by their employers (inbound tech support being just one example).

The only long term solution is giving women the right to defend themselves in these kind of situations and not having to buckle down because of "business reasons".

We've denied perfectly fine clients because they were fucking misogynists to our all-female sales team, but we're a dime in a dozen.

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

#58

Post by tziki »

tomlock wrote: post #50
tziki wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because according to studies men are actually more likely to experience online harrasment? http://www.pewinternet.org/2017/07/11/online-harassment-2017...

Your interjection here isn't answering a question I asked. Are you saying that because men are more likely to face harassment, that women are not harassed more when they present as women online?

I think it answers the question quite well. Since men are harrassed more online, they tend to be unsympathetical when women complain of online harrasment, knowing women already experience somewhat less harrasment than men.

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

#59

Post by T2_t2 »

laci27 wrote: post #39
waytogo wrote: post #33

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.

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 nu…

Also likely not a site that deals with meme makers: http://kapwing.com

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

#60

Post by carlmr »

laci27 wrote: post #51
laumars wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :(

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)

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.
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