Hello Lemmy, I have been wondering about this for a while. A few years ago I, a man nearing his 40s, got snap because my niece was using it and wanted someone to snap with. I downloaded it and we played around sending snap pictures to each other.
Then I looked around in the stories section, where you can see what other are posting. All I could see was very attractive half-naked women doing lewd poses with suggestive text. This was what snaps algorithm apparently thought I would be interested in, nothing but what is basically clothed softcore porn. I don't see anything meaningful. Occasionally there are videos of bloopers and "funny" clips, often super old and reused a thousand times. Lots of pranks too, usually involving attractive half-dressed women or tight fitting clothes.
Then there is weird girls that want to add you to chat and about three texts in they start sending half nudes, usually in underwear. I don't know if these are real women or bots, some feel very bot like, other don't. I don't really know what they want or why they do that. Is it scams? Or do women and men these days actually do that? Send nudes to each other for no reason? It is very jarring to me and I am not traditionalist or moralist, I consider myself very open and progressive, but this is just bizarre to me.
Either way I got snap to chat with my niece and now these women are sending unsolicited almost-nudes (they never ask if they can send it, it just comes out of the blue, often out of context). This feel very in appropriate and like a very inappropriate app for my 12 year old niece and her now 9 years old younger sister who also have snap now. They probably aren't being shown such content, but they will soon and perhaps be encourage to produce such content too, to get views or whatever.
Is this normal for snap? Is it because the algorithm knows that I am a upper 30s man and it just assumes we want to be fed with porn and funny videos? What are you experiences of snap? What is snap showing to women? Snaps feels like a distinctly sexual app, not to mention that it encourages very very unrealistic standards, some women there don't even look real, like they are using some filter or something.
I have been wanting to bring this up with my brother and his wife, but haven't really mustered the courage.
It's normal for all social media, particularly anything requiring a camera.
Your niece knows and participates in it. So do her friends. So do your brother and his wife.
Those aren't women messaging you.
You are a in very, very small minority who don't just accept this as how life is now. When they think nobody is looking, most people feed this sex addiction with most of their free time.
100% this. I've gotten the same spam even on Mastodon. They are cat fishing. They will get you engaged with photos they stole off the Internet (sometimes you find them with reverse search), then try to get more personal on a less moderated medium like email or text, maybe Signal or something. It's a long con, but can go as far as "pig butchering" scams that can cost you everything.
When you get these, just report and block. They're most likely a bot, or worse: people who are victims of human trafficking forced to scam people. (I suggest not researching this if you have any shred of faith in humanity left.)
Most honest comment on the internet.