Another casually offensive and dumb decision from Livejournal

[womzilla]

Currently, when you create a Livejournal account, you are given the option of choosing a gender (of which the choices are "male" and "female"). If you would prefer not to declare one of those choices, you can leave it unspecified.

Not any more, if this is correct:

ETA: Livejournal is running at full speed away from this change. Yay!

* 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.)

If this pisses you off as much as it pisses me off, go to Edit Profile and select Unspecified for your gender option. Then, go to http://www.livejournal.com/contact/?dept=feedback and politely register your displeasure. (The people who read and process Feedback are not the people who make the decisions. They are often the people who are yelling internally about the decisions.)

(This will likely take place at the next code push, which given LJ's history will be either this Thursday or next, so spread the word fast, especially to the genderqueer community. After that point, you will no longer be able to pick "Unspecified" as your gender.)

I am now remaining Unspecified.

I find it very annoying that you are eliminating the "unspecified" option for gender for users. There is an obvious objection: Many people would rather *not* "specify", often reasons of privacy. There is also a less obvious reason, which is that by making this one of *the* required fields, you are declaring that gender is one of the absolutely most important things that someone needs to declare before they can write in a public place, which is one of the weirdest decisions I can think to make.

Please reconsider this decision.

Comments

[elf]

"Privacy," they will claim, is not an issue here--gender isn't displayed on the profile.

It's used to target ads.

The logic of "let's target ads by a gender the person doesn't identify with" kinda escapes me, but LJ's logic has escaped me for several years now.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Done. If it is an ad thing, well, those who specify are already targeted (assuming they don't have paid accounts), while those who don't would really rather not be a target.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

Considering I have a paid account, the idea of harvesting my information for ads is infuriating.

[redbird]

At least not that stupidly.

If someone wants to target marketing at me based on, oh, the facts that I spend a lot of time online, regularly travel to Boston, read science fiction, and like interesting food but can't eat hot peppers, okay: it might even be stuff I'd be interested in buying.

Looking at my nominal gender and assuming I want diet ads is obnoxious and annoying (and could be triggering for some of my friends).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I might be interested in the products, yes, but I'd be creeped out by the fact that they had harvested so much information about me. I only like targeted ads when they come from vendors I have a real personal relationship with, like bookstores where I've shopped for years and socialized with the owners.

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Amazon targets recommendations to me, which I don't find creepy. It's based on what I've bought and what people who've bought what I've bought have liked, not on a personal relationship. It's not 100% on target, but that's fine by me.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The difference is, that's a book recommendation based on other books bought by the same vendor. It's narrow and specific. What's creepy is harvesting info from other sources, and then leaping to conclusions about unrelated things.