Frey·ja

A Note on Chat Requests

My policy on unsolicited chats and DMs on social platforms is to not answer them. That’s primarily aimed at chat on Instagram and chat on Reddit, but not exclusive to them. I’m more forgiving of DMs on Reddit because they’re longer form and somewhat resemble an email where thoughts are often more concise and better articulated, but don’t make promises.

I know that comes off as super elitist, so here’s a little rationale as to the why.

After a CD (or really any girl) puts a picture of herself online and it gets voted up into a prominent position, either through upvotes on Reddit or through a lot of Instagram followers, people might have the instinct to open a chat with her. What they might not realize is that they’re not alone – a lot of other people have the same idea.

As that girl, your chat requests get flooded. The number next to my chat icon on Reddit (that’s number of new messages and message requests) has been pinned at 100+ for months. Instagram’s even higher – I used to get somewhere on the order of 5 to 10 new chat requests every day. Instagram eventually prunes unacknowledged requests, so I can’t tell how many I’ve had in total, but it’s easily in the hundreds, and probably closer to 500+ total by now. And that’s with only a more modest “medium-high” follower count (~7k); the gals with 20 or 30k are surely well into the upper thousands.

As a part-time girl with self-esteem issues, it’s super flattering that people think I’m cute and want to talk to me, but even if I wanted to respond to every chat, it’s just not possible. Chatting takes less attention than say, talking on the phone, but it’s still a synchronous activity. You can multi-task a number of chats, but it only takes two or three simultaneous ones before they’re occupying all of your attention. I want to spend my time on things like writing, photography, and dress shopping :) – not in chat windows.

The quality of incoming messages is also a factor. I’ll occasionally skim the lists of incoming requests to see if there’s anything interesting, and something like 95%+ are less than three words long. Usually it’s exactly one word: “hi”, “hello”, hiya”, etc. That gives me no idea as to whether this might be a conversation I want to get into.

On the other hand, if you write me a comment, I will definitely read and appreciate it. I like comments much better because their visibility means that they inherently have to be SFW and the heroic mods in places like /r/crossdressing will remove the ones that are in poor taste.

I hope that all makes sense! And remember that it applies beyond me too, so keep it in mind as a possibility anytime a cute girl online doesn’t message you back. As always, love you all! <3 (And sorry about the extremely self-serving blog post.)

October 29, 2020 (4 years ago) by Frey·ja