AW is what it is, very hit and miss but with plenty of gold nuggets within it.
Fully agreed, but this is UKP-dependent. What I mean is that my experience without UKP, even visiting 'high-AW-feedback' WG's (and yes, I know feedback is mostly fake), has been really hit and miss (more misses honestly, especially appearance wise). I haven't had a lot of AW experience though.
- Use the various filters....
- ...Read the AW reviews / feedback which may immediately knock a few promising ones out.
From the selection process you describe, I basically follow that minus the part where I buy private gallery photos. I don't believe in paying for photos so it's more of a 'me' thing, but thanks for that piece of advice. I mean, out of the steps you outlined, the one which is most important is the UKP part. If you discarded the part where you look for reviews of WG on UKP, what happens is that your punt success rate takes a severe hit, i.e filtering for services, looks etc is good, but without UKP it doesn't really mean a lot..
As for the telephone #'s not being displayed, that isn't AW's fault other than I believe there is a 'cost' to SP to do so.
I agree with what you say about phones. I think what I mean is that (perhaps, although this is an assumption) WG's may not want to pay to display a phone number and hence don't display it because there is a price to it. It isn't AW's problem that SP's don't want to pay, but it is AW who made the decision for phone numbers to be non-displayable by default.
When I am talking about 'philosophy', these nuances are kind of what I mean. For example, is AW's philosophy is to provide punters with highest satisfaction possible, they can change things about platform (i.e be more proactive in removing fake profiles, taking into consideration punter queries, etc) i.e employ a customer-centric approach towards punters. Yet, at least from what I gather when interacting with our community members, they are a commercial machine and just want to reap profits, preferring them over punter satisfaction. The phone number issue is in accordance with their commercial 'philosophy' - they could make SP's post phone numbers for free, truly due to whether they want to or not, but they introduce certain monetary restrictions for a phone number to be revealed. Who are they catering to? What is their mission?
For me, other than agencies and X (plus FetLife and ProDomme listing sites for kink) I do not use other platforms such a vivastreet (which I just find awful and from reviews the quality isn't even as good as the hit and miss AW listings).
Same over here. Mostly agencies for me. Thanks for response, Jamie.