LJ fucks up some more

[piranha]

i am mostly immune to it by now, except this one is so very clearly geared towards advertising instead of making people feel welcome and safe:

m/f gender will be a mandatory field at account creation.

LJ has never been terribly good about this; years of gender petition have resulted in no action that might make TG people feel considered. but now they're removing even the piddly "unspecified" option.

if you still care about LJ, synecdochic has good advice on how to give feedback.

if they start enforcing the binary choice for existing account holders, i'll stop reading the friends-locked LJs for which i now still visit the site.

Comments

[synecdochic]

We're now getting "oh, it was a bug! we were never going to push it live!" which is pretty much a flat-out, bald-faced lie, but I'm okay with being called a liar in public if it means that the changes are reverted.

[piranha]

i'm surprised they caved this quickly.

[(Anonymous)]

It looks as if this was either a genuine mistake -- and never live -- or as if they're responding rapidly to concerns. As they've never done the latter before, I'm inclined to believe it's the former.

Link to Their comments conveniently all in the post a of one of my friends (http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1358959.html).

Jo Walton

[piranha]

they're rapidly backpedaling after realizing that once again they couldn't slip one past the people who're paying attention to the changelog. so now they're getting faster at damage control, woohoo!

their explanation is misleading. it can't have been a bug; i saw the code, and that code didn't write itself in the place where it was written. somebody made the policy to require binary gender upon signup and told a developer to code it. somebody doesn't just make this stuff up and code it for fun.

you have a perm account, so you don't see ads. ask around. women get different shite pushed on them than men, for example weight-loss ads. this sort of thing is done to help them claim higher targetting rates to their advertisers.

i wonder what _will_ go live instead. it'd be uncharacteristic for them to just cave.