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Comment by moonka | Hacker News Reader

I always assumed these messages were automated helper bots, I didn't realize they are people on the other end. Now I feel a little bad about being so curt when I use them like I'm searching an FAQ.

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Yes, I noticed that people hated when they thought they were talking to a bot. [This is Julia, the OC.] Sometimes I would respond to a sequence of four or five messages from a user, and they would immediately stop messaging, as if they didn’t realize a human was there. I tried that tactic for a while - a user would message me or Rachel some inappropriate demand and I would respond with “Absolutley not.” Many users would stop messaging, but some would get even more fired up and become really aggresssive or threatening.

So I stopped responding to any message that was inappropriate, mean, or nonsense. It’s a waste of time and energy when you’re trying to grow the company.

Was thinking about this ... I reflexively hate bots, but it might be a UX thing -- maybe it's the popup. The pop diverts my attention from where I was looking on the site and feels like an intrusion. Same as if someone comes to your desk and grabs your mouse. So .. maybe an improvement would be to have a status-line or ticker-like text field that doesn't pop up or obscure any part of the underlying page design.

Also, IRL anecdote. My ex-wife used to get heckled and cat-called all the time when walking alone (even pushing baby pram). Number of times it happened when she was walking with me? 0. I'm amused and saddened by all the incredulity on display here. I could have said "well I've never seen it, so it's not happening..."

EDIT> You have to be a special kind of ignorant or inexperienced to not have noticed that this is how people talk to women when there are no consequences.

> Was thinking about this ... I reflexively hate bots, but it might be a UX thing -- maybe it's the popup. The pop diverts my attention from where I was looking on the site and feels like an intrusion. Same as if someone comes to your desk and grabs your mouse. So .. maybe an improvement would be to have a status-line or ticker-like text field that doesn't pop up or obscure any part of the underlying page design.

I almost entirely agree with this. Chat pop-ups are _incredibly_ annoying. Many websites have a livechat tab at the bottom, or at the side of the screen that you can click to initiate a chat, and that's fine, but the chat should _never_ be initiated automatically (or appear to be). Once the page loads, any change in the main area of a website should _only_ be initiated by user interaction, such as clicking the 'chat' tab at the bottom. Otherwise, for the interruption it generates in my thought process, you might as well just load another page entirely.

>Was thinking about this ... I reflexively hate bots, but it might be a UX thing -- maybe it's the popup. The pop diverts my attention from where I was looking on the site and feels like an intrusion. Same as if someone comes to your desk and grabs your mouse. So .. maybe an improvement would be to have a status-line or ticker-like text field that doesn't pop up or obscure any part of the underlying page design.

But it wasn't nearly as bad when the avatar was male or nonhuman.

Thanks for the article, really good to see, and reaffirm what most of us guessed already.

Might I suggest another round of trials but changing up the message when someone joins? It reads quite like a bot/automated system/interactive FAQ, as others point out.

I know that personally if I join one of those with a bot you can usually get a real human on the other end if you curtly answer questions and voice dissatisfaction with the bot answers (e.g. "this doesn't help") at which point it offers to give a human.

What I'm saying is I wonder how this gender effect would interact with a 'bot-like' variable—if people would react this way if the message was more along the lines of "hi, I'm Rachel and I'm a real human working for…'

I'm male and I suppose this kind of problems happen much less often than to you, but I also came to the conclusion that not answering to meanness, nonsense, rudeness etc is the best tactic.

I would wager most people would think these are bots, especially when photos are used. Internet users are a little too accustomed to stock photos of happy company employees gathering and customer support smiling for the camera.

Then they want to see how the bot responds to stupid memes.

TBH even when I see a chatbox that isn't a bot (aside the automated greeting) I assume it's a minimum wage tech support drone in some low cost country. Especially when they have a cliché American name ("Dave", "John", "Adam", etc).

I'm not the kind of person that routinely insults chatbots but if I'd see a portrait photo of a woman I'd likely assume it's a bot, simply because too many companies use fake photos of smiling women because someone told them it's good for business (though this article makes me wonder if that trend might finally change).

Without reading this article, I would never, in a million years, have believed there was an actual human being manually operating any of these "chat popups". I probably still won't believe it, but now when I see these things I have to think there's a 99.9% chance it's a bot rather than 100% chance it's a bot.

And even if that isn't the case today you can bet that that is exactly what it will be like in the near future.

I hate those chat popups so much. There are better and worse implementations, but mainly the best ones are the least obtrusive, and the absolute best are not having these at all. Even if I did want to contact the company, this is not how I'd do it, as there are no guarantees made about who will see the message, how it will be handled, etc. (email with a ticketing, or some other form where I'm clearly submitting something and a process exists to handle it, sure.)

Still not as bad as surveys ("Yes, your website was fine until you popped up a modal for this survey which broke my interaction...")

Yeah, recently I have seen the other side of one of those tools, I felt like Dorothy pulling the curtain.

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