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This post follows on from the one I made last week and covers the same issues. These being, the ever-increasing predominance of males on the site and the problems this can cause new female members being overwhelmed with messages. This was exemplified by a new female member I was recently chatting with who closed her account and left after just five days
I suggest that the ‘Who can contact me?’ button be removed from the top of the Profile page and placed in the lefthand column instead – directly below ‘Profile’ in the list (and maybe shortened to ‘Contact Options’).
Clicking this link would open a righthand sub-page in which the member can select preferences from several options. These being –
Which Members Can Contact Me?
1. Verified Members Only
2. AnyoneWhich Area Can Contact Me?
1. My City or Region Only
2. Within 50 Miles of Where I Live
3. My Country Only
4. AnywhereChoosing the ‘Verified Members Only’ option would essentially extend the current ’three day rule’ until a new member felt settled-in and comfortable enough on the site to receive a greater inflow of messages and not be completely overwhelmed by them. It would also provide an ongoing privilege to male members who are serious enough about ABF to pay for site verification.
I would also include a boxed NOTE below these options recommending that new female members start out with ‘Verified Members Only’ in order to feel fully in control of their experience on the site at least during their initial time here.
A member could change their options at any time and as often as they like. An already established exchange of messages with a member falling outside of a changed option would be retained. Also, an ‘Exclude From My Contact Options’ button could be used for sending a message to a member who falls outside any currently selected options.
Any on-topic feedback welcome
I’m going to push back on the premise here.
Women do not need this much protecting from our own inboxes.
Receiving a message does not create an obligation. I can read it or not. Answer it or not. Delete it unopened. Block the sender. Restrict contact. Ignore 100 messages while I happily talk to the one person who interests me.
An inbox is not a queue of obligations.
And women receiving disproportionate attention on a site where men dramatically outnumber us is hardly unique to ABF Heaven. It happens on dating sites, kink sites and social platforms everywhere. There will always be some sorting involved when strangers are allowed to approach one another.
What bothers me is the assumption that the solution is to decide, on behalf of new women, that we’re likely to become overwhelmed and should therefore be encouraged to limit access to ourselves until we’re sufficiently “settled in.”
I’m a grown woman. I don’t need training wheels on my inbox!
Give me good privacy tools? Absolutely. Give me blocking, filtering and control over who can contact me? Yes please.
Then trust me to use them.
I’m also uncomfortable with verification being described as an “ongoing privilege” that gives paying male members greater access to women. Verification may tell me something about a member. It does not move him to the front of my line.
And one woman leaving after five days tells us that one woman left after five days. We don’t actually know that a different set of contact settings would have made her stay, and her experience certainly doesn’t establish what women collectively need.
Some women will hate a packed inbox. Some will enjoy the attention. Some will skim. Some will delete 40 messages without opening them and never give it another thought.
That’s autonomy.
There’s an odd contradiction in trying to give women more control by prescribing how women should manage the attention we receive.
Give us the controls.
We’ll take it from there.
Both of the above observations are totally valid.
I have noticed over the course of many months that a new woman member’s profile will pop up, with the notice that she can be contacted in X number of days. That day arrives. On that day, or very shortly thereafter, that woman’s new profile is gone for good.
Why is this happening? What can be done to reduce or eliminate this exodus of new women members? What comes to my mind as the primary reason? The sudden pent up bombardment of messages from hyperaggressive guys. I don’t think anything can be done about this. It is what it is.
Thoughts?
“I’m going to push back on the premise here.”
Please do challenge me, Lola. But an argument based on ‘All women should be strong and confident like me, therefore there’s no need to provide tools by which they can feel empowered and in control of managing their presence on here’ isn’t really very helpful is it?
Peter, that would be an excellent rebuttal to an argument I didn’t make. 😂
In fact, I said almost the exact opposite.
I explicitly said women should be given tools that allow them to control their own experience. Filters, blocking, contact preferences, privacy settings, reporting tools, give us all of them.
My objection is to deciding for women how those tools should be used, or restricting women preemptively because someone has decided certain women may be too overwhelmed to manage their own inboxes.
That has absolutely nothing to do with women needing to be “strong and confident like me.” And frankly, I find that characterization a little patronizing in its own right.
A woman can be shy, anxious, inexperienced, overwhelmed, wildly confident or somewhere in between and still be entitled to make her own decisions.
That’s the entire fucking point.
Give her the tools.
Let HER decide which ones she needs.
What you’ve done here is take my argument for individual female autonomy and rewrite it as an argument against giving women tools for autonomy.
Which is quite a trick. 🙄
So by all means, challenge what I actually said.
But don’t invent a weaker argument for me and then congratulate yourself for defeating it.
I can speak for myself, Peter.
Ironically, that was rather the point of my post.
“Why is this happening? What can be done to reduce or eliminate this exodus of new women members?”
Your experience matches mine. The new female member I was chatting with (as a Verified member) was responsive and enjoying our exchanges over the first three days – as was I and I’m sure whichever other Verified members she was chatting with. Things began to change on day 4 – at first she expressed amusement that messages had started flooding into her in-box. By the next day it was beginning to annoy her and she mentioned it feeling overwhelming (her word). Later that day she announced she’d had enough of it and had decided to close her account… we said our goodbyes and she was gone.
This experience new female members are having cannot be separated from the fact that new male members are flooding onto the site all the time. The two events are obviously linked and is the cause of new females quickly leaving again. This of course, creates a snowball effect only exacerbating the problem.
“Give her the tools… Let HER decide which ones she needs”
This is nuts. I haven’t suggested anywhere that a new female member shouldn’t decide which of the tools I’ve outlined to use (if, indeed she chose to use any of them).
If she feels more comfortable at first chatting just with ‘verified’ members then she’ll have the option to do that. Likewise if she wants to limit her engagement to males living close by.
I’m up for a challenge, but please make it a coherent one.
Peter, my challenge is perfectly coherent. You just keep removing the parts of your own proposal that I’m challenging.
I have never objected to optional contact controls. In fact, for the THIRD time: I support them!
I challenged the framing around them.
You specifically proposed recommending that new female members start with “Verified Members Only.”
You described that as an “ongoing privilege to male members” who pay for verification.
And you based the recommendation on the premise that new women are likely to be overwhelmed by male attention.
Those are your words, not mine.
So no, you aren’t forcing women to choose anything. I never said you were.
I questioned why the site should recommend a particular choice to women based on an assumption about what new women can comfortably handle, and why something supposedly intended to give women control is simultaneously being sold as a privilege that gives certain men greater access to them.
That is the premise I challenged.
And now you’re saying the flood of messages is “obviously” the cause of new women leaving.
You know it was the cause for one woman, because she told you.
You do not know why all the other women left.
That distinction matters.
One woman saying, “This overwhelmed me and I’m leaving” tells us what she needed. It does not tell us what new female members collectively need.
And Peter, there is a rather spectacular irony in telling me my argument is incoherent while once again explaining to me what my argument supposedly is.🙄
I understand your proposal.
I disagree with part of its premise.
Those are not the same thing.
And perhaps the most ironic part of this entire exchange is that I wrote a post arguing that women are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves what they think and need…
…and you’ve now spent two replies trying to tell me what I think.
You’re making my point for me. Thanks!
I second @lolamayi12345!!
You are so right on this!!“I questioned why the site should recommend a particular choice to women based on an assumption about what new women can comfortably handle, and why something supposedly intended to give women control is simultaneously being sold as a privilege that gives certain men greater access to them.”
Because the site doesn’t currently have to recommend a particular choice to new female members – if forces them to agree to it (the three-day verified members only contact rule). Presumably, this rule exists a) because the site is already keenly aware of the problem of new female members getting bombarded with messages and b) it incentivises male verification and the influx of new funds.
Because my suggestion empowers all new members to decide for themselves when this restriction is lifted, it becomes incumbent upon the site to inform new female members of what they might expect to happen should they choose to do so (at least during the early days of membership).
If the three day rule and its privileges upsets you so much you’d be much better off taking it up with the site’s Admin rather than attacking me. It’s their rule, not mine… I’ve merely suggested giving members the ability to choose for how long something that already exists stays in place.
BTW, on my last thread there was a consensus among female members that the high level of incoming messages initially was felt to be overwhelming. And they’re just the females who stuck it out rather than leaving… we’ll not be hearing from them again.
Peter, the clarification about the existing three-day rule is useful. If your proposal is simply to give women control over when that existing restriction ends, then I have no objection to that part of it. More individual control is exactly what I’ve been advocating.
But you keep attaching other assumptions to it, and those are what I’m challenging.
If women tell the site, “I was overwhelmed by the number of messages I received,” then absolutely listen to them. Give them better tools. Tell new members what they may encounter. I have no problem with any of that.
What I object to is turning some women’s experience into the female experience, and then treating women who left as further evidence for the theory when you don’t actually know why they left.
“We’ll not be hearing from them again” is precisely the problem.
You can’t hear from them.
So you cannot use their silence as confirmation of your hypothesis.
Maybe they were overwhelmed. Maybe they weren’t. We simply do not know.
And Peter, I’m not “attacking” you. You posted a proposal, explicitly invited on-topic feedback, and I disagreed with parts of your reasoning.
Calling disagreement an attack—and telling me that if your argument “upsets me so much” I should take it elsewhere—is a rather convenient way of avoiding the substance of the disagreement.
I’m not upset by the three-day rule.
I’m not confused about your proposal.
And I’m not attacking you.
I disagree with you.
You invited a challenge.
This is what one looks like.
“If your proposal is simply to give women control over when that existing restriction ends, then I have no objection to that part of it”
My stated proposal is self-evidently to give women control over the duration of a pre-exiting restriction. Just as the proposal is also that, in doing so, the site lets its new female members know of the likely consequences of their lifting that restriction prematurely (eg, before a membership is no longer considered to be ’new’) so that they can make an informed decision.
“But you keep attaching other assumptions to it, and those are what I’m challenging.”
The only assumption I’ve attached to it is that an unknown number of new female users leave quickly because they are overwhelmed with unwanted messages. This is based on my own experience from a recent chat and on the recounted experiences of women who haven’t left (including you). The question is whether or not that assumption is a sound enough one to be acted upon. I believe it is. There is nothing to lose by implementing the proposed change and – if the assumption is correct – everything to gain.
“And Peter, I’m not “attacking” you”
When a well-reasoned and measured proposal is met with an unwarranted muddled and frantic response, that constitutes an attack in my view. But I’m pleased to see you’re backtracking a little now – hopefully to a position from where you can make a challenge which is actually relevant to my post.
@lolamayi12345
I agree with you. We were all new members once and dealt with it as for the most part, this is the female experience wherever you go online!
I absolutely detest this assumption that because one female left, other females now require additional ‘assistance’.Peter, “muddled and frantic”? 😂
And there it is.
I disagreed with part of your reasoning, quoted your own words back to you, clarified repeatedly exactly what I agreed with and exactly what I challenged, and somehow we’ve now arrived at frantic.
That’s not a rebuttal. That’s what you reach for when you’re running out of argument.
And no, I’m not “backtracking.” I’ve said from my very first response that I support giving women more control over who can contact them. You repeatedly argued against a position I never held, and when I finally managed to drag you back to the actual point of disagreement, you decided my tone was the problem instead.
You invited “on-topic feedback,” Peter. Apparently what you meant was on-topic agreement.
But I do appreciate the demonstration.
A woman disagrees with you, explains herself several times, refuses to let you redefine her argument, and eventually she becomes “muddled,” “frantic,” “upset” and “attacking.”
For a thread ostensibly about empowering women, you have an absolutely fascinating way of responding when one exercises her own voice.
I think I’ve made my point. And at this point, so have you.
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