Originally Posted by
atomic sagebrush
Help! Why is there so much info on this site?
This is a complaint I get at least a couple times a week. Some people seem to take pleasure telling me how awful the site is, how it has too much information on it, how it takes too much reading, blahdi-blahdi-blah. But I think that’s the awesome thing about this site! There is so much on here and it is practically all FREE, FREE, FREE!
Why so much, though? After much thought and some market research, I think it’s a superior way to arrange a swaying site. When I was back on Ingender, the way it worked was that they have their short little things they called FAQ’s and while they may have been brief, they weren’t really FAQ’s at all. They weren’t FAQ’s because people still asked lots of questions frequently. A FAQ is only effective if it actually answers the Questions that are Frequently Asked which the IG FAQ did not. People were always asking way more questions than were answered in the FAQ and most people weren’t reading the FAQ anyway. So that would leave poor Tamara and whoever had gotten roped into assisting her at the time saying “that is in the FAQ” (and sorry but I always thought that was super duperly rude) or explaining the same darn thing for the billionth time. Or, of course, what happened most of the time - the questions went unanswered. :/ And this is true for lots of the sway sites - they really have very little info on them (at least for free) leaving people to band together on Facebook to figure out how it works, which has sadly devolved into people exchanging bad and dangerous information between themselves and no one getting solid, safe, sane swaying advice.
So when we started this site back in 2010 I thought, “what I’m going to do, instead of making some cookie cutter generic FAQ that doesn’t work doesn’t answer 90% of the questions anyway, is write a lot of different essays that cover as much ground as possible, so instead of bitterly chastising people to read the FAQ I could just pop in and post a link that will answer all their questions”. And that’s what I've done. 8 years and 82,000+ posts later that is still my personal goal - to answer all the swaying questions that are asked, to the very best of my ability. I have arranged things in this way, with the essays and the links, because I think it’s the best way to organize the site, giving my customers the most info for the least amount of time expenditure for me. And overall I think it’s worked pretty well. Not perfect, but nothing is perfect.
Lets pretend that this site was a book. If I sold you a book and it had 2 pages in it that answered .01% of your questions, you would be all like “hey, what gives, atomic?” It would be even worse if I simply told you “read the FAQ” (when the FAQ isn’t even remotely good enough) or I didn’t even bother answering your questions at all. But I don’t do that. I have tried, very hard, to give the denizens of the Internetz the best, most comprehensive sway info that exists online. You know why there’s a lot of it? Because swaying is really complicated, there is a lot of conflicting information and I try to give you guys ALL of that, the whys and the wherefores, the pros and the cons, the history and the present scientific thinking, written in a way that is fairly entertaining and easier to understand than a dry old study or a bland, generic FAQ, or somebody’s add your sway where you don’t even know if they’re telling the truth about what they did.
Warning - rant alert. I deserve this rant though IMVVHO. Because in all honesty this little game is hurting my feelings and sapping my enthusiasm for working on the site.
I am well aware that some people do not like this approach. Because they tell me so. They tell me things like “it’s too much reading” and “it would take forever” and “it’s boring” but funnily enough the exact same people will then turn around and spend months analyzing the statistics and going over old sways tallying them all up and tracking down studies done in 1972 to interrogate me about (which BTW - boring as heck to me). They’ll happily send me 9 million, long, drawn out messages about this that or the other thing that they think they discovered that I’ve actually known about for the better part of a decade. Or they’re drawing some erroneous conclusion from the data and they’d have known it already if only they’d read even the most basic of the essays. So it is NOT that it is too time consuming to read the essays, because the same people are perfectly willing to expend quite a lot of time investigating swaying and peppering me with questions. It is simply that they don’t wanna read the essays because, reasons, and are perfectly willing to utilize or even waste, my time and energy instead of their own by forcing me to go over ground I’ve already covered in the essays.
You don’t want to read essays, whatever, your prerogative. I’ll never tell ya to read the FAQ. But it gets to me when the same people are perfectly willing to waste MY time - because like I mentioned, in a feat of dedication or possibly insanity, I really DO answer every question on the site. It seems like a personal point of pride for some, to inform me that they did not read the essays and have no intention to and also BTW this site sucks thanks for nothing atomic, but can I please spend 4 hours doing an indepth analysis of a study they dug up on the Banana-Sucking Tarantulas of Coastal Belize who don’t even reproduce in the same way human beings do. I don’t think that’s fair, to complain in a feeling-hurty way about the level of reading required to navigate this site - that I have put out there for you guys, for FREE - whilst then taking up hours and hours more of my time demanding that your every whim of a question be answered.
Now let me be perfectly clear, I don’t mind answering questions. I don’t mind answering the same questions 10,000 times in a row (and I have - Dr. Shettles, looking at you here). That is not at all what I’m saying here. Please continue to ask me questions, that is what I am here for. I simply do not appreciate it when people act jerkishly to me telling me in exacting detail how much they despise this site - my gift to you guys because I truly do want you all to get your desired gender - only to turn around and then expend WAY more time (both theirs and my own) reinventing the wheel simply because they don’t want to read a few essays. If you don’t want to read the essays, don’t read the essays. Ask me your questions, I promise I'll answer them. But please cease and desist with the “constructive criticism” in which you tell me all about how crappy, boring, and unnecessary you think my life’s work is, while taking my time and energy going over things that I've gone over already really very thoroughly in my essays.
If you want it easy and broken down for you, get a sway plan, that’s what they’re for. If you’re willing to spend time planning your own sway, great, I have a huge amount of info available for you to do that and I’ll even answer your every question for free. And I promise I’ll even add new and better information for you as I get it. Just don’t spit in my face when I do it, ok?
There’s always room for improvement, I know. I’m working on it. I recently updated all the essays (which took me 2 months of almost constant work in addition to answering questions, making plans, and somehow keeping my family functional). There are still many topics I haven't written about, but I’ll keep posting new essays every month or so till every aspect of swaying has been investigated thoroughly. Then I will probably keel over dead since I'll be 101 by then.
In my opinion, that is actually the biggest strength of the Gender Dreaming approach. There’s always something new to read here. There is always something more to discover. The site is a work in progress and not some stale time capsule of information that is all totally debunked and hasn’t been updated since 2004. Gender Dreaming is the equivalent of getting a 300 page, regularly updated book all about swaying, for free. It’s yours for the taking and I’m happy to give it to you guys. Investigating swaying and writing about it is fun to me. If it was up to me I’d do it all for free - and in fact I wish I could since I could have a day off once in a while.
Long story short (too late) the reason why there is so much information on this site is because I like it this way, I’m going for something here, and I’m the one put in charge of doing it. Long involved explanations with lots of info, well that’s just the way I roll, dawgettes. Terse answers are not a service I am capable of providing. I did this cool thing for YOU GUYS, you guys. It represents years of my time, energy, and effort. That means I get to do it my way. And I like this way. If you don’t like it this way, may I direct you to one of the many fine webpages for you to create your own swaying site upon which you can wax poetic all you'd like about the Banana-Sucking Tarantulas of Belize.
If you do find things of value here, awesome. We’re happy to have you. Just quit telling me how much it sucks, if you don't mind.
