Who Let The Blogs Out?

A day in the life of an internet performer in the adult entertainment industry can be quite the experience, for an outsider looking in. Be forewarned: this article may contain sexual themes and suggestive situations. Viewer erection is advised.

I had a fun-filled shift last night at work. While members, guests and anonymous people with whom I hadn’t a clue why they were even there, crowded the room, a strange, but somehow familiar handle appeared in my chat.  Someone who chose the handle (or more likely the ‘display name’) uBitch came in and said “hey sexy i like the big phalic microphone”. How coincidental! My friendly neighbourhood studio pimp/stalker/harrasser used to like to comment that way on my mic, too and the word ‘bitch’ was one of his favorite words to use on me during his many visits to my room, each time, playing another random character right out of his big book of imaginary friends. I’ve never seen someone with so many personalities yet such consistency in his portrayal of them all!

Oh how wonderful this site would be if they only stopped allowing members to choose display handles. Integrity is a hard thing to find in this industry. Every single site I’ve worked on left lingering doubts and questions pertaining to information I felt I had the right to, yet wasn’t being given. It always felt like pieces of the puzzle were missing, and indeed they were. Streamate isn’t quite as bad as the others I’ve come across but there are some areas, like the aforementioned, that could really use some tweaking.   

I clicked on bob78 in my stats last night, to view his profile and info and it showed another name as his handle: Jo36. I clicked his name again, just to be sure I didn’t mis-click the first time. No mistake there. I left a note  (there’s an area where we can leave notes to ourself about members), stating “Comes in with the handle Kyle74. Shows in stats as Bob78. Never uses the chat.”. Today, revisiting my stats from last night, the handle bob78 was nowhere to be found . Instead, I found my ‘note to self’ under kyle74 in my stats! So as not to confuse this issue too much, I’ll summarize this in the simplest form of english I know how to string together:

He enters my room as kyle74, but uses the display name bob78.

Appears in my stats as bob78.

When I click bob78, up pops a profile for Jo36.

At some point, between last night and today, bob78 morphed into kyle74.

Pretty simple. I don’t have trouble understanding what happened. My problem is understanding why this needs to be so confusing! Obviously it isn’t reported this way in the site’s stats.Why aren’t our stats reported more clearly? Why do members need the ability to change their display handle anytime they want on one account? The ‘display handle’ only confuses things more on the hosts’ end and makes it impossible to recognize our good members. It also allows studios and those who like to play games with their competition, the ability to enter our rooms to play games using these display names (under their member accounts) free of charge. For those of us who look closely at our stats and work hard at retaining a good customer base, this is a huge obstacle. Why even put these obstacles in our way? It stops us from thriving on the potential this site offers by limiting our ability to interact properly with our regulars, not to mention, have to put up with all the bullshit that our own competition can so easily can bring on by playing these games in our rooms. All it does, ultimately, is cause problems both short and long-term.

I don’t think I’m going to make any changes here because it’s more than likely noone else will step up to bat, but I do believe that sometimes, it just takes a little spark to start a fire. So, let me start this little spark and see if it ignites.

“It is better to have done something and failed than to have done nothing and succeeded” – Anonymous