Courtesy is a fine thing. Close your mouth when you chew. Put the toilet seat down. Don't wipe your ass with the cat. The usual stuff.
But what happens when you get a ton of messages here and you aren't interested in some of them, or you just don't have time for all of them? You're inundated, but flattered. Some are rude or creepy, but some may have potential. There are a few you'd actually like to follow up on, but most are of no interest whatsoever.
Some people (primarily Doms) think that you should respond to all of them anyway. But to go out of your way to answer every single message you receive from every random person out of some notion that it is impolite not to do so is not only impractical, it's silly.
Yes, it seems that to have much hope that your profile will attract the desired attention necessary for you to find any success at all, you must accept and even expect a certain amount of messages that do not specifically serve that goal. But to suggest that the only two ways of addressing that are to either make your profile less interesting (thereby attracting less attention resulting in fewer messages) or to answer Every Single Message, is not only counterproductive, it's silly.
So how about this - don't answer every single message.
Because, realistically, how far could you extend this courtesy anyway? One message? 10? More?
If a person sends you 10 messages and you respond each time, first with "hello" then each time adding "no thanks" or "no, not interested" or "no, not looking" or "no, really, I'm flattered, but no" at what point to do finally decide that - despite their efforts, despite the fact that they a person, despite your manners - you have had enough of telling that person No! Then what? (And before you answer, saying that you don't have to be nice any more because they spammed you is the self-righteous adult equivalent of a child crying "you started it!")
It is typical of a Dom who periodically receives a handful of messages to think that he is doing the rest of the community a favor by granting the courtesy of his response. But as many subs here will attest, their experiences differ greatly from his. They will tell you that far too often just replying to random messages, even if only to say "not interested" is interpreted by the faceless senders (again, primarily Doms) as an invitation to send another, and then another, and so on. Some subs receive 100+ messages daily, mostly from assjackets and wannadoms (yes, sometimes even from people with genuine interest in them) but they feel that sifting through ridiculous, cut-and-paste nonsense, and drowning in the deep end of the domfish pond is a waste of time.
To help make the point lets say it takes only 30 seconds to open, read, and reply to a message saying that you are not interested, and 100 people message you every day. 30x100=3,000 seconds, or 50 minutes. You just spent nearly an hour saying No Thank You over and over and over in the name of courtesy. And that's just on this site. There are other, bigger sites that many of us are also members of where a sub could also get 100+ messages every day. And if you don't get to all of them, they add up, and so would the amount of time it takes to answer all of them. If you grant the courtesy of your time to every person that infringes on it how much of your time is wasted just communicating to people that you don't want to communicate with them?
If your profile already made you seem like an intelligent, thoughtful, wonderful person (before you broke the unspoken rules of courteous messaging etiquette, that is) that could actually be a small part of why your box got so stuffed in the first place. But if there are not enough free minutes in your day to give the courtesy of a reply to everyone - or anyone at all - that shouldn't automatically overshadow everything else that your profile says about you because time doesn't give a shit about your manners or how thoughtful you are or what you look like or how nice you are to strangers.
So how about this - don't answer every single message.
(You don't have to answer me right now. Just consider that for a time and get back to me later.)
(LongerJohnny, co-founder of ⭐The Elite Dream Team⭐️)
