Sending a message to someone for the first time can be scary, so it’s incredibly disappointing when you send a connection request and don’t receive a response. Especially if you're in a less active community and trying to get things going.

We’d love it if everyone responded to every connection request they receive, even if it's just to say, "thanks, but I'm not interested in making new connections right now".

That's not always going to be possible, of course, for any number of reasons. Sometimes other members are traveling on vacation, and aren't currently checking Stitch regularly. Or they might simply have missed seeing the email notification about your message completely.

Some members, on the other hand, consistently choose to ignore the majority of messages they receive.

To help you understand how responsive another member is to new messages, Stitch will indicate their level of responsiveness on their profile. You can learn about the feature and why it's important in the following video:

Knowing how responsive someone is likely to be helps you focus your energies on the people who are most likely to respond, and it gives you more confidence to reach out to someone new.

To calculate how responsive you are, Stitch looks at how many new connection messages you reply to within seven days of receiving the message. The algorithm looks at all messages you've received over the last 2 years, giving the highest priority to the messages received more recently.

Members who consistently don't respond will become less visible on Stitch over time.

We encourage all members to reply to every message they receive (unless the message is inappropriate — in which case it should be reported to Stitch as soon as possible).

A member’s responsiveness will be labeled in one of the following ways:

If Stitch doesn't have enough information to determine how responsive a member is, it will try to give you some indication of how recently they’ve been active instead.