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.
Duh, I'm sorry if this feels rude but obviously the algorithm sees men allocating their attention to ""porn like"" content and will therefore serve that to these demographics. And the fact that women receive them too in my opinion doesn't invalidate that either.
The other aspect of it is that easily influencable kids will look around and think being this sexually suggestive is just the norm and will think "why shouldn't I do it too ?".
I know I have male friends that are on Instagram solely and admittedly just for this "softcore porn" content and when I tried the app myself it was clearly pushing me toward that too.
Since I was not interested I uninstalled but I have no doubt that if you are a man these algorithm will go out of there way to push porn like content and at the other end will encourage inadvertently the content creators to go for that type of content.
That's not rude to say, I believe that myself. But with a dataset of one data point I couldn't be sure...