Other question: Is there anyone here who used to be creepy, and now is significantly less so? How did that happen?

raises hand

I read this, included the comments thread, and thought about it.

OTOH, there's the huge confounding factor that it was shortly after I came back from Ireland to Italy, and Italians are harder to creep out than Anglo-Saxon people. Stand one metre from (say) an American and they will freak the hell out; stand one metre from an Italian and they'll wonder whether they smell. Also, I can't see any evidence that many women in Italy are anywhere nearly as scared of potential rapists as Starling describes (at least where I am -- in larger cities and/or more fucked-up regions the situation might be different). So, to be sure it's my absolute creepiness that decreased and not the standard by which it's measured that increased, I'd have to go back to an English-speaking country and see how I'm received there.

I used to be a giant creep. I knew I had no social skills, tried to develop some, and it backfired more often than not. For example, I knew I was clingy and unable to tell if people wanted to get rid of me. So I reasoned that I should just hover around people I wanted to talk to and make it unclear whether I was there because of them or by coincidence, so they would feel free to talk to me or not as they wished.

What helped was Internet articles like those linked above. Those actually explain what behaviors are desirable and undesirable, and basics of reading people.

I still don't know the difference between "You should go away" and "Should I go away?" - verbal expressions of these are identical. "I'm leaving, bye" and "I'm leaving, wanna come along?" are also hard to distinguish.

Other question: Is there anyone here who used to be creepy, and now is significantly less so? How did that happen?

I apparently sometimes come across as intense, and am often bad at small talk, but once people get to know me, they tend to like me. The result is that I have a number of social links where I was originally perceived as a creepy guy who thought we were closer than they thought we were when we met, and through continued interaction the social distance has settled at an agreed-on point (around my initial estimate, though generally a bit further than it. I've recalibrated since then, and think I would get it right now for most people).

For example, the first guy I dated told me (after I started dating him) that I was creepy the first time I met him. I basically went to a con just to meet him, and didn't have anything else to do. So... I ended up following him around. At one point, he said to a friend "hey, let's go to dinner!" and I said "Great! I'll come along!" Rookie mistakes fueled by wishful thinking. Later, he told me that he was hoping to get rid of me by going to dinner. At no point did he ask me to leave or make obvious that he didn't want me around; any subtle cues I either didn't notice or didn't want to notice. I must also comment that his friend (who I wasn't paying much attention to) was more creeped out by me than he was, and later warned him about me, and so he may have reinterpreted his memories in light of that warning and not actually been sending those signals. Memories are fuzzy, but looking back on it the behavior I would describe it as closer to creepy than not creepy.

The second time we met, it was again at a con- but I had brought a friend along (which was both social proof and distraction), and I used proper distance (said "Hey, I'll be in this game tonight at 8- you should come play it!" and then left). I also lucked out that the people he came with were irresponsible and so I got an easy opportunity to demonstrate responsibility. I ended up driving him the ~six hours back to his place (it was sort of on our way), and then we started dating shortly afterwards.

That transformation was a response to minimal feedback (I think I basically went home, said "hm, that didn't work. Why might it not have worked?" and guessed correctly), a slight level up in social skills, and a significant level up in social equipment / luck (coming with a friend instead of alone, and his friends bailing on him).

It's also a different situation- this isn't me acting poorly around all women (or men in my case), but trying to get over the obstacle of "someone who I only know from the internet is interested in me." One issue with creeping is underestimating social distance, but that's the primary element that my creeping and general creeping share.

Moderately related, I creeped out one of his friends who visited with a poorly made joke. (I failed to hide my ability to memorize numbers and joked about being able to look up publicly available information.) I learned that people famous on the internet are way more concerned about stalkers than the general populace, and now don't make any stalker-related jokes around people famous on the internet.

The commonality of both of those examples, though, is that I recognized that I wasn't going about things properly and I fixed my behaviors. That's not the problem with these creepers, which is a limited case of someone who is generating social pollution as a byproduct of trying to get what they want. The general case is thorny and hard to deal with.