LJ about to make "gender" field mandatory

[gerimaple]

(via annathepiper)

Just saw this on celandineb’s journal: apparently LJ is about to make the Gender field a mandatory setting on new account creation, and word has it that you’ll have to set it to Male or Female. “Unspecified” will no longer be allowed. Details on this can be found over hereSince I have several transgendered and genderqueer friends, I find this

Comments

[jgurney]

I bailed on LJ when they added ads to my pages. I know it's changed hands a number of times, but the original owners swore i would never happen, and while I appreciate that a business has to make money one way or another, I dislike the idea of "monetizing" other people's content without their permission.

Not that I blog per-se, but still - now I run it on my own domain and have full control. I still have an account so I can read my friends page and comment, but that's it. It's sad, but LJ isn't the place it used to be, and this latest step does not bode well for the future.

[gerimaple]

they're claiming it was all a big misunderstanding - that they realized this was a problem and that the involved code was not going live for that reason.

you can believe as much of that as you want to.

[jgurney]

Translation: Holy shit! We got a massive bad publicity backlash against this stupid idea! Abort! Abort!

[gerimaple]

that's my take on it. and as a friend of mine put it (which i quote in my followup post - "whether we tipped the scales or not, we got what we wanted"