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.
Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website
151–160 of 666 posts
Re: Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website
#152Honest 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?
Sour grapes. If you know you can't have or get something, pretend you never wanted it. Thus your ego is preserved.
I don't think anybody thinks in these terms about an internet chatbot.
Re: Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website
#153I 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.
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.
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).
Re: Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve heard that before. Guys will get aggressive if a woman ignores them. I don’t get it and it’s sketchy as hell. It shows how superficial so many guys can be - they want to sound sweet until it’s clear they’re not getting anything, and then they become aggressive. It’s always about their satisfaction - they reveal that they were not being nice in order for the woman to feel better, or they wouldn’t have turned aggr…
Actually anger is a normal reaction to frustration, not to mention to the rude rejection. It shows how the society is broken. Wolves prey on the streets for trusting victims. They won't listen to polite no. People learn to just walk away quietly without saying anything polite. Wolves don't mind it, but ordinary people find such silent treatment infuriating. They respond with more rudeness back.
> to the rude rejection
Saying "Hi cutie" isn't exactly a polite or respectful way to start a conversation. Ignoring it is frankly the most polite way to deal with it.
Re: Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, people are colder and more abusive towards those less good-looking. The case described in the article is not due to beauty. It's because people think it's a bot or at least a fake photo. That's what irritates them.
Ahh, yes, that would explain it. I guess the next step here would be to put a note that says this is a human and see how people respond!
Yes! They should definitely try that experiment!
When reading the article my first questions were: do these people think there is a real human at the other end, and, if so, do they think the photo is of that human? It's probably impossible to answer that question directly, but putting up a notice similar to "you are talking to a real person, not a bot" and seeing how that affects the behaviour would give some indication, perhaps.
Re: Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website
#156As 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...
Re: Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
> Like an annoying staff in a shop asking whether you need help.
Would you call that a dark sales pattern?
Re: Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Article: "Here is absolutely convincing evidence of the extreme sexism enabled by/encountered on the internet" Top comment: "Pop up chat boxes are really annoying. Also I don't know what objective means. But I have added a token: Not defending the sexism sentence."
How can you call this "absolutely convincing evidence"? The data is not available, the methodology is not disclosed, there's little discussion of confounding factors(server outage mentioned once)... I believe that sexual harassment is a serious problem women have to deal with, thanks to excellent studies like the one done by Pew on survey data in 2014( http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/ ). Calli…
It's not evidence at the scientific level, but not far from it either. Raw data would be nice, but given the dramatic effect size reported I don't see it as absolutely crucial (it wouldn't be in a scientific context either). Also the methodology is described reasonably clearly (change the chat avatar and nothing else). Further the blog post even does discuss that this is not a scientific study, and what some of the possible confounders were.
I'll concede that my statement is to general. But the article to me is strong evidence that the women involved experienced a strong sexist reaction from her customers. Are you not convinced that she did?
The set up is as close to perfect for confounding variables as possible in an evolving production environment (as someone noted, it's basically A/B testing).
I'm not saying it's convincing on its own in a vacuum of course. The prior formed by all the other studies (including the one you mentioned) is important in making it convincing. But it's certainly as clear evidence as 99% of what get's posted here.
Put another way: If this was a blog post that shows that one configuration of a database leads to latencies consistently 10 times smaller than another configuration, with experiments run over three months of production use, I would call that convincing evidence.
It's certainly a lot more coherent than the post I was replying to which somehow argues that this is not objective because chat boxes are annoying. (????) Luckily it's no longer the top comment either.
Re: Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, people are colder and more abusive towards those less good-looking. The case described in the article is not due to beauty. It's because people think it's a bot or at least a fake photo. That's what irritates them.
But then why would you harass a bot?
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Re: Why I don't use my real photo when messaging with customers on my website
#160After 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, w…
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.
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...