As most of the regular users will have noticed, we're undergoing a period of churn at G@G in the last few months. Lots of regular users have left. Many I never spoke to, but I did see them around, and in most cases, my general feeling is that this is to the detriment of the site.
Another user recently said to me that he felt that G@G had ceased to be a community, as it lacked a sense of permanence, combined with a turnover of new blood, and had instead become more of a drop-in centre. I thought that was an excellent analogy.
This got me thinking about exactly what has happened here. My working hypothesis is as follows.
We've had a huge recent influx of what I will call 'pest accounts'. Here is an example of the kind of question a pest account asks
"Do girls like watching dick of boy while like pervert they flash now a days and mastrubating it." (sic)
Identifying characteristics
1. Only asks questions of a s*xual nature.
2. Ignores male answerers and pesters female answerers.
3. Highly likely to originate from a part of the world where interaction between the genders is highly regulated, and hence unaware that most of their conduct on the site is highly inappropriate. Or they view western women as wh0res and simply don't care (this varies).
What impact have pest accounts had?
1. Driving women away due to harrassment.
2. Driving men away due to irritation at the above.
3. Driving standards down ever lower.
So, what *could* G@G do about it? Here are a few suggestions.
1. Take the Private Messaging facility away from Level 2 accounts, and set it higher. These guys don't seem to have the patience to get very high.
2. Don't allow Level 1 or Level 2 to post questions in S*xual Behaviour, and if they post them elsewhere, delete them. See note 1 above.
3. Allow other users to filter out questions from Level 1 users. This would, in my humble opinion, remove a lot of the more annoying, pointless, perverted questions that are alienating to so many people.
4. Publish the statistics behind the questions that are removed by Admin. That could be split out by Xper Level, Age, Gender etc. I'd be especially interested to see IP address country of origin, personally.
G@G, you don't have to do any of the things I suggest, I realise that. But in terms of improving most people's experience with the site, might I respectfully suggest that these could be more valuable than adding in a series of badges?
Most Helpful Opinions