I was selected to moderate a dating site by doing absolutely nothing.
I accepted the terms and conditions and as the site said, “this isn’t a position for the light hearted.”
My experience moderating opened up a new world of what happens in other people’s online dating lives.
Appropriate or not, messages tend to land in my inbox with an orange flag.
The most common “flagged message” is the person having a profile picture that is of an object instead of them. I don’t care about that, it didn’t make me want to delete the person’s profile because he/she can’t follow directions.
I am not the only one who decides to delete a profile, instead it is a collaboration of randomly selected moderators on the site. It doesn’t rely heavily on just me to make the decision.
Being on the other side has definitely shown me that there are some creepers out there but mostly it is just spam.
The most explicit message I have seen is some man messaged a woman asking her to meet him so he could cuff her and “pretend rape” her. It was explicit enough to get a flag from me: “recommended for deletion.”
There have been some cases where child pornography has been involved but moderators follow a strict guideline where we have to notify the FBI on accounts like that. It is very rare this happens.
Naked pictures aren’t common but I have seen my fair share of naked people on the site. The best thing is just don’t do it because chances are a moderator ends up having to sort through a bunch of naked people to decide whether to recommend banning him/her or tossing it out as a stupid move.
Mostly, being a moderator means seeing people make idiots of themselves online. Being explicit like “are you into licking my arse hole or having anal” isn’t going to get you far.
Being on the other side of the reported messages opened up my eyes in seeing how people mess up where he/she shows his/her frustration or goes too sexual too soon.
No one wants to know what you are into and the WHOLE message gets forwarded to all moderators to vote if your content is a violation of the terms of conditions or just plain stupidity.
I have lost my faith in humanity when it comes to online dating. It either goes from normal conversation to “I want to f*** you so hard in the ass that you won’t be walking straight for a week” to:
“Let’s meet up.”
“I can’t.”
“Well too bad because you could have had my 9 inch cock. I hate how fake people are on here.”
Those types of messages besides the usual spam, links to suspicious websites such as porn sites and naked pictures get flagged.
Be classy about the online dating scene because getting your profile and messages is not fun for the moderator like me or you.
Chantal Richards can be reached at [email protected] or
@ChantieRichards on Twitter
