General

that has totally not been my experience there, very much the opposite.

sounds to me like you are targeting a very specific group of people - and that's their prerogative. they're on the site as a means to an end.

so, i am going to go off on a bit of a tangent now, but i'm interested in seeing if anyone else sees things the same way... but first, my qualifiers: i am a (relatively) old guy who has a partner and is not using social media or websites to date anyone.

i see a lot of people - mostly single men - participate on site like feabie (and here, to a much lesser extent) only by responding to the posts of women sharing photos, etc. they don't spend any effort on their profile, they don't post very much of their own material (ie: they aren't contributing - just responding). now, the women who post the most are creators who treat their contributions like a job - because it is, to them. but they're not really that interested in what any one person has to say. some of them are community minded, but i would argue most are not.

now, these guys are following women who are being followed by dozens of other guys. and when the guy feels like he's invested enough (though from what any other user can see, he's contributed nothing), he may ask for something... and this is where the woman essentially says "pay up or shut up." and then they post a message like the one quoted above.

but my thesis is this.... that user is chasing someone who is interested in commerce. they are acting like it's a dating site - it's not (go to wooplus for that - it worked for me!). it's a community, just like this. do people find dates and relationships on it? yes! but it's only 0.1% of users that do! they are the extreme outlier. the fact is that they are being drawn in by someone who is sharing themselves (whether for money or not), but that person almost always has no interest in them. but guys (especially guys, and especially especially guys online) start to feel a sense of entitlement, even just by being acknowledged.

sorry for the length, but i am really interested if anyone else sees this phenomenon?

i am soooo tired of reading guys posts about how everyone else is out to scam them - i know it can't possibly be true because it hardly ever happens to me... but then, i am almost never asking women online for anything. no photos, no fat chat, not to meet me on another website.

thoughts?

There are for sure no end of desperate men who have a minimum of social etiquette on feabie, harassing women and filling their inbox with junk and unwanted exposure as they do on basically any website where women exist.

But I don't think your thesis adds up. Feabie does not bill itself as an e-commerce site. Their own self-description is "Feabie is a social network and community for feeders, feedees, fat admirers and BBW/BHM".

I'm not sure what part of that description implies that it is a website where people sell their wares. "Community" implies that it's a place for likeminded people to hang out and talk about their shared interests.

The frontpage literally has graphics of several couples holding each other close and encourages you to "find friends, dates and mates." Sure, it is not a dating site, but its marketing is leaning infinitely closer to being a dating site than being a marketing platform for webmodels.

If someone came around to my local pub or any other social space I enjoy and started trying to sell me things, I would tell them to get lost and the staff would back me up. I don't think it is remarkable that people are upset at the increasingly transactional nature of basic human interaction as it exists online.

Even this place (like all kink places online at some point) was riddled with it before the mods addressed it. People would get into your DMs and a few messages later they'd straight up ask you for money or else casually reveal they have an OnlyFans, - and once they realised you weren't interested in a transaction, the interaction mysteriously ends.

With credit to the staff, this place remains a genuine community now.

great points, i don't entirely disagree, but maybe your vision of "community" is different than theirs. certainly they have a "verified creator" status that allows users to flog their wares/sites, etc. so they do openly embrace it. i've personally reported non-verified creators who were flogging/begging, and the feabie admins did a good, quick job of removing them. (ff admins are far superior - that is true!)

personally, i have found community on feabie. there is a group of friends there that i've now known for several years. we have even had some in-person gatherings. one of feabie's best features is that you can curate your own experience in who you follow, establishing a personal news feed which filters out all the noise of that "endless stream" of social media noise in the global news feed.

ff is great. feabie is fine, too. they're different. they both suggest you will find a date. sure, maybe you will. i hope you do, if that is what you're looking for! my partner found me on wooplus - a site for which i have read many, many negative things. but it worked for us! and the odds were probably against that, too. and yes, i interacted with some questionable folks there before em, but in those situations i just politely excuse myself from the interaction and move along.