I have seen this issue with many sites and have discussed the issues that happen here in chat. That harassment online, especially if you are woman, is out of control. Sub females in chat have mentioned having to keep up with 40+. 60+, even 100+ messages a day, and most of these messages have been disrespectful, belligerent, and/or dick pics. It's gotten so bad that I have actually seen two friends declare that they may leave the site over it and their profiles are no longer here.
These sites are built on engagement: users being able to chat and talk about kink in safe environment and maybe look for a lifestyle dynamic in the meantime. Most of the time, the engagement consists of many men vying for the attention of few women, and the effect is only more drastic with d/s. Most of those messages were already inappropriate, but when you add in the entitlement of a haughty, poorly educated dom, you get another layer of disrespect.
Imagine getting hundreds of these messages. It would get exhausting sifting through the sea of dick picks and crappy "on your knees" one-liners. If you're one of these people, just know you're not unique, and your attempt isn't clever, and you are entirely the problem here. Getting so many of those disheartening messages is probably demotivating to continue through anymore. This makes it harder for people who may write a genuine message as it gets lost in the noise or otherwise loses its effect when the recipient's mood is ruined by the time they find it. This, in turn, makes it demotivating to even send messages to people because why contribute to the stress? Why try when your message is going to be lost in the sea of other harassing messages?
Of course the harassment and abuse wears down on recipients too, particularly sub females. Eventually the harassment becomes too much that they leave the site. This of course lowers engagement, as now there are even less people of that orientation to talk to. My friends are examples of that: they left and before leaving, they cited the abusive messages they had been receiving.
Also unique is the issue with gifting premiums. When a use has a premium, they can be messaged by anyone. This basically enables an user to gift a premium to another user and open the floodgates to all kinds of messages. Having premium itself is a double edged sword as it allows you to connect with more potential matches, but it also enables anyone to message you, opening you to way, way more messages and harassing messages to sift through. Gifting premiums enables people to be given this burden unwillingly.
The worse part is I don't know what the fix for this is. thecage tries to put some safeguards in place like blocking/muting individuals from messaging/chatting, but it's not a perfect system. To feel you need to block/mute somebody, they had to have already sent you an inappropriate message most likely, whilst shutting off your inbox or locking your PM on chat blots out everybody from contacting you, including potential matches. The only way to ensure you do not receive abusive messages is to turn off the feature for everyone, which doesn't seem ideal if you are looking: it's all or nothing.
It is truly unfortunate that the harassment has come to this point, that users receive a wave of these messages and are worn down until they finally leave the site. It is unfortunate that people in chat receive unsolicited PMs and and deal with the same belligerent horndogs. Mostly it is unfortunate that this is the experience or introduction for many into the BDSM lifestyle and that, coupled with this being a larger internet issue all sites suffer from thus having no perfect sanctuary, can be enough to stunt their growth or drive these folks out of the lifestyle altogether.
