Comments | queer_rage: Oh LJ...

angelikitten in queer_rage

Oh LJ...

Dec 15, 2009 04:46

LiveJournal's making a change to the gender setting on the profile page.

* Gender will be a mandatory field at account creation.

* LiveJournal is removing the Unspecified option for the gender field. That's right: you get to be male or female. Period. That's it. ( Source.)
I... I don't even have words to explain how much this hurts me. And it does ( Read more... )

Comments 15

terry_terrible December 15 2009, 05:11:12 UTC

fuck this shit.

angelikitten December 15 2009, 06:48:54 UTC

Pretty much :(

espreite December 15 2009, 05:30:38 UTC

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. I give up on this whole goddamn internet, right now. Facebook, I knew was crap. Livejournal I had a hunch about, but it's still my natural habitat and this is like a knife in the heart. Thanks for the links.

angelikitten December 15 2009, 06:50:33 UTC

Sorry for having to be the one to let you know about this :(

sleepless_x December 15 2009, 06:24:28 UTC

Why are they pulling this crap? >:(

suburbanamnesia December 15 2009, 06:43:05 UTC

Advertisers, likely. D:< *deepsighofrage*

angelikitten December 15 2009, 06:45:53 UTC

*nods* It's the only explanation anyone's come up with so far. Except, possibly, huge amounts of ignorance.

angelikitten December 15 2009, 06:52:18 UTC

Because they are most definitely not awesome.

Thread 6

suburbanamnesia December 15 2009, 06:46:23 UTC

Ugh, fuck that. Livejournal, get it together. Discriminating against a large portion of your userbase in order to get teh ad revenues is NOT good business practice. I'm cisfemale, and I still don't want to do business with a company that would pull this shit.

*internet hugs for OP, if you want them*

I sent a modified form letter in as feedback and passed it on in my personal journal.

angelikitten December 15 2009, 06:54:00 UTC

I will take the hugs, but I like the fact that you're passing the news on even more :)

raenbow December 15 2009, 08:57:50 UTC

This is crazy, and I don't see how it can ever work smoothly. I don't think gender should ever be a "drop down box" list of choices (although from the technical point of view I can appreciate that letting someone select "male" or "female" from a list is a lot safer than giving people a textbox to fill with mlae / femael typos.)

I also don't see why gender has to be a mandatory field.

1) If you're a young girl, advertising~ yourself as a young girl is only going to attract trouble.
2) For this reason (and several others), many female users will set the drop down box to male, thus messing with the advertisers as well as skewing the LJ userbase statistics.
3) Not everyone is male or female

LJ don't need to know which gender I am. :[