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.
One of the lessons highlighted in the thread "Less Wrong NYC: Case Study of a Successful Rationalist Chapter" is Gender ratio matters.
There have recently been a number of articles addressing one social skills issue that might be affecting this, from the perspective of a geeky/sciencefiction community with similar attributes to LessWrong, and I want to link to these, not just so the people potentially causing problems get to read them, but also so everyone else knows the resource is there and has a name for the problem, which may facilitate wider discussion and make it easier for others to know when to point towards the resources those who would benefit by them.
However before I do, in the light of RedRobot's comment in the "Of Gender and Rationality" thread, I'd like to echo a sentiment from one of the articles, that people exhibiting this behaviour may be of any gender and may victimise upon any gender. And so, while it may be correlated with a particular gender, it is the behaviour that should be focused upon, and turning this thread into bashing of one gender (or defensiveness against perceived bashing) would be unhelpful.
Ok, disclaimers out of the way, here are the links:
Some of those raise deeper issues about rape culture and audience as enabler, but the TLDR summary is:
EDITED TO ADD:
Despite the way some of the links are framed as being addressed to creepers, this post is aimed at least as much at the community as a whole, intended to trigger a discussion on how the community should best go about handling such a problem once identified, with the TLDR being "set of restraints to place on someone who is burning the commons", rather that a complete description that guarantees that anyone who doesn't meet it isn't creepy. (Thank you to jsteinhardt for clearly verbalising the misinterpretation - for discussion see his reply to this post)