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

kapwing.com

201–210 of 666 posts

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

#201
post #63

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.

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.

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!).

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

#203

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?

Probably thinks it's a bot, and wants to test the scripted response to an out-of-context question.

given how frequent it seems, chances are that even a bot would have to handle that case...

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

#204

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…

"How much will it take to convince the average HN reader that sexism actually is everywhere?"

I presume those that think this way either have no female friends or have not asked them about it.

Men generally don't get catcalls or get their body fondled by strangers.

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

#205
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.

Just wondering, how do the support people feel about being represented by better looking avatars? "Your real face is too ugly, sorry."

Fake names and fake avatars. They feel safe that no one is going to find them offline.

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

#206
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…

This one thing is obviously not the smoking gun. But in context of the thousands of other similar things it becomes impossible not to see a pattern.

Even I, being not good at statistics, got your parent’s point. We do see patterns easily when there is/maybe none due to how our pattern-detection works. It is evolutionally false-positive, because it is easier to label and avoid than explain and manage (and take damage on mistake).

In this light, the “context of thousands of similar things” is one great generalizing bs.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sexism is actually everywhere" is an extremely strong statement. Such a strong statement requires an extraordinary amount of work (going far beyond mere observations) to be proven. I personally would be very interested to know why "Julia" is being insulted much more than "Eric", but saying "this is because of sexism" is no better than saying that "the sun is bright because it shines".

"Julia" isn't being insulted more than "Eric" because of sexism. "Julia" being insulted more than "Eric" is sexism. The causes of sexism is another subject. But the first step is to acknowledge sexism is going on in the first place.

What? No. "A man and a woman are treated differently" is not sexism unless there's a causal link between their sex and their treatment.

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

#208
post #187
post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, are bullies then mistreating others because they really like them and are just trolling?

The point is that if there is some reason bullies mistreat other children other than hatred of children, maybe there is some reason people mistreat women other than hatred of women.

If we assume that all mistreatment has the same source. I wouldn't make that assumption, but if you want to explain away the possibility of misogyny being a problem then you certainly can.

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

#209
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the female photos get a significantly higher level of harrassed, how does this not indicate sexism?

They also get a higher level of normal responses. That's also sexism, but "positive" for them. Why don't we talk about this, as well?

They specifically didn't mention the level of "normal" responses:

>Other than the creeps, trolls, and bullies, I didn’t notice a shift in the types of questions people were asking - users with problems on Kapwing still asked Rachel for help. But we didn’t analyze the volume of messages, so I can’t say if Rachel got more or fewer messages overall.

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

#210
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

(account age is not a good proxy for "time on HN")

But "you're probably new to HN [lil fella, but here's how it's been]" is a tacky, low-effort quip especially towards an account over 8 years old.
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