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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

#221

Post by JepZ »

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)?

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

#222

Post by Chris2048 »

jakobegger wrote: post #113
verroq wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 att…

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".

Believing things based on quantity of internet articles on the topic is how fake news works.

If a proper study of incidents like this is done, with good stats relating to the totality of incidents in context - i.e that takes into account the full picture, we could then conclude something.

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

#223

Post by totalZero »

hycaria wrote: post #213
totalZero wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is happening by phone.

You don't think it's possible to scare or intimidate someone over the phone?

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

#224

Post by madez »

acemv wrote: post #215

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…

> 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.

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

#225

Post by Chris2048 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #193
hueving wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plural of anecdote is not data. We need real stats about this because individuals complaining vastly outweighs the silent remaining ones. There are enough murders every day to cover the front page of hacker news with a story about each one. It doesn't mean murder is a rampant problem in our society.

We have real stats. Hundreds, if not thousands of studies. But those get this identical reaction.

> Hundreds, if not thousands of studies

That you personally know of, despite citing even one?

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

#226

Post by acranox »

verroq wrote: post #105
jakobegger wrote: post #101

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 rea…

"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 att…

Ok, but do you think those 12 year olds are going to all grow up to be well behaving adults? Or maybe the problems with this kind of sexism are starting very young. If you are right then the solutions still need to be addressed, but we need to start earlier.

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

#227

Post by rocqua »

jsjohnst wrote: post #214
alkonaut wrote: post #191

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…

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.

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.

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

#228

Post by jpalomaki »

cyberferret wrote: post #218

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…

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

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

#229

Post by BlackFly »

laci27 wrote: post #22
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…

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...

> I'm using the net (As a guy) for 20 years now ...

Early on people said "There are no girls on the internet," and the sentence was supposed to embody the anonymity of the internet and the renaissance notion that a person should be judged by the merits of their arguments and not the labels attached to them. Someone claims to be a girl? No, you are talking to a middle aged dude having a chuckle. Maybe I have rose tinted glasses here, maybe it was always jerks saying there are no girls on the internet.

It morphed into "Tits of GTFO," because, given the anonymity of online dialogue, it seemed to some pernicious few that the only reason to mention being a woman was to seek attention.

Online dialogue grew vitriolic, "Its only the internet," trolls would throw at anyone trying to inject civility and good manners into flame wars. "I f'ed your mom," became a bit of a goto for a general passing derailment since it got to most people. If OP mentioned any detail about themself, (racial, gender, age, relationship status, mental issues) this was used to make more specific insults. Moderators struggled to keep up.

The networks got faster, streaming voice became possible on games. Voice isn't anonymous. The online dialogue started giving away details (age, sex, socioeconomic background), when team mates in pick up groups got frustrated with one another they started to reach for the sexist, the racist, the particular insults. Women learned not to speak up in chat to avoid the onslaught.

A lot of us became inured to that "12 year old claiming to have banged our mom last night", but those ridiculous insults take on a nastier edge when that "12 year old" knows details about your life. If you regularly game with women, you will see it. The mere fact that people believe there are so few women gamers is due to their fear of speaking up, there are more than there appear to be on the surface.

I do think the insults become more frequent when the jerks know you are a woman. They also know you are inured to the generic insults. Few women are inured to rape threats I think. I'm a bit surprised Eric didn't get racist comments in the OP's unscientific study.

I'm happy you haven't experienced the internet as I have, it has always been a nasty place and a lot of us sat by and pretended like it was different than real life as if there weren't real live humans behind the keyboards. I've been guilty of that. I still don't know what to do when I encounter such nastiness, much to my dismay.

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

#230

Post by Chris2048 »

Void_ wrote: post #220
jakobegger wrote: post #101

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 rea…

That’s not sexism, just being disrespectful. But why are you surprised about this if the next article on HN may be about technology in PornHub? It’s okay to treat women as a piece of meat in porn, but suddenly it’s a big deal if people are making sexual comments?

> It’s okay to treat women as a piece of meat in porn, but suddenly it’s a big deal if people are making sexual comments?

No more or less than it's ok to treat people as units of work in corporations. I rarely see sex-tech on HN anyway, plus not every feminist has a problem with porn.

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