this is what we call timing: LJ GenderFail

[rm]

LJ is about to require that all users specify whether they are male or female. This will apply both to new account creation and existing accounts. The current "unspecified" option will be removed.

Requiring people to specify their gender is surely just an attempt to acquire demographic data either for ad sales or an attempt to sell LJ once again. However, this is probably a bad strategy -- leave the "unspecified" option and only 1% or 2% of your userbase will choose it. Tell us you're taking it away, and watch 20% of us choose it.

Why does this matter? Really?

Well, it says people like me don't exist (although I just discovered I didn't have unspecified selected until like ten minutes ago, so I fail there, just in terms of full disclosure and all that). It tells people that they know less about their gender than a company. And that the needs of advertising are more important than who they really are. It implies that people have a right to know what's in your pants (whether you're male, female or somewhere else on a spectrum) regardless of whether they'll ever meet you.

But particularly, it's unwelcoming to many LGBTQIA people, and LJ already has a history of being, at best, clumsy towards this community (a community of which I identify with more letters than not).

Additionally, it may be (working on links) once the code push goes through, after you choose your gender when creating an account, you can't change it later (can anyone confirm that gender is to be removed from the editable profile fields? commenters are discussing, may just be rumour, leaving in here for now). That's a lovely bit of bullshit there for people who transition to deal with; I wonder what "proof" LJ will require to change it -- if they'll change it.

And what happens to people who are basically forced to lie because of only two options? Lying on account creation is a TOS'able offense. Do you really think anyone should have to ask if their man or woman enough to be on LJ? Isn't this ludicrous? And offensive? And sort of a disaster?

Practically, this is one of those things that probably has no relevance for most of you. But for some of us it's a tiny little splinter that yet somehow manages to hobble. And for some of us, it's just simply everything.

So many of us learn to construct and define our gender on LJ. It's pretty tacky when they effectively ask us to lie about ourselves and claim it never happened.

Details and what you can do here: http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/366609.html

Comments

[elffin.livejournal.com]

ditto.

[cozzene.livejournal.com]

I feel as if I'm just being pacified.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Coming from QA experience, I have to say that I don't know what they could say better. Someone didn't think through code consequences, this wasn't the intended behavior, it won't go live now that it's been noticed.

I have seen enough coders write in enough unintended consequences that I honestly don't presume malice here. It obviously cannot be allowed to stand, but it sounds like the management agrees with us on that for once.

Is there something I'm missing?

[cozzene.livejournal.com]

Well, as someone who's participated in numerous video game betas I've never been forced to choose a gender. It was something to be skipped. Hell, more than one of them even allowed you to choose male & female at the same time.

[gement.livejournal.com]

I would suggest that this kind of error is more likely to occur in a social networking application like LJ where identity is a major function of the site. A video game, it's much less important and thus much less likely to be fiddled with.

What I'm saying is, this looks like it was a legitimate error to me (possibly propelled by a coder who comes from a much more gender-binary culture, from the comments above). The management says it wasn't an intended function and it won't go out to live code. I am wondering what you would like them to say differently.

(I am somewhat concerned that any mistake LJ makes is impossible for them to correct at this point, from a PR standpoint, due to past history. When they screw up, when they don't communicate, when they push through changes, yes, I want to hold them accountable. But in this case it looks to me like they had a coding error brought to their attention and responded appropriately. I am worried that either I am missing something or they are doomed to be assumed malicious for all time. If the latter, they'll have no incentive to do the right thing.)

[marcmagus]

I agree with your conclusion: programmer checked in some bad code which might or might not have been caught in later testing had it not been caught first by someone looking over the code.

That said, the last paragraph could have, say, acknowledged that the fears about gender being displayed in the profile weren't completely baseless [the initial patch did exactly that, with a default of hidden in most but not all cases, though that part of the change was undone by a second, less seen, patch 5 hours later]. This could have been handled like the preceding paragraph, describing it as a code change that was committed but deemed unacceptable before being pushed out to the live server.

I'm also not a fan of that "...some erroneous information has been spread..." bit, which is just shy of suggesting this was a malicious rumor intentionally spread to discredit LiveJournal. Especially since, as I just described, it wasn't exactly erroneous so much as under-researched.

Overall, I think they've done a good job of handling this: they responded fairly quickly and rolled back the change. They still could have done better.

[gement.livejournal.com]

Aye! Thank you for this analysis, which puts it much more firmly in the "fail better" category. We can always do better. :)