The two models offer opposite bargains and almost nobody says so out loud. The deck wants your face and gives you nothing durable in return: you are new to every person who sees you, forever. The community platform will let you be faceless for years and slowly builds you something that a stranger can actually check. I am recognisable in my work, so the choice made itself, and I took the second bargain.
Twenty nine, Manhattan, switch, eight years in. Both of my arrangements began with somebody having read me for months before saying anything, which is a strange courtship and a very well informed one.
The cost is that I am invisible to anybody whose habits were formed on a deck. I do not come up. I cannot be browsed. If you are used to deciding from a picture then there is nothing here for you to decide from, and I have watched people give up on that basis without ever writing.
What I want is ongoing, structured, either direction with a lean towards leading. Weekly, terms written down, a proper conversation each month.
Not looking for anybody who needs a photograph before a first meeting. Not looking to explain the caution more than once. And not looking for a person who thinks a faceless account is a puzzle rather than a decision somebody made carefully.