This is a fantastic idea. Ignore the negativity, particularly from the "what about the men" comments.
Super cool!
Super cool!
When you post to HN or elsewhere on the internet, you're broadcasting to a large crowd. Somebody somewhere is probably going to get triggered—that's just statistics. But when it's a public forum, those are the ones who show up to vent their spleen. So comment sections are weighted towards these sorts of reactions, not because they represent the community, but because it's a self-selecting, biased sample.
This leads to the community seeming a lot more negative than it is, which sucks. The only solution I know of is to give more attention to the other data you have: e.g. the upvotes, and any traffic to your site. That's a challenge, because we're hard-wired to take personal communication more seriously, and comments feel like personal communication (though really aren't).
Personally I think the conversation on this thread needs to stop thinking this product criminalizes content choice. If my interest is engineering blogs and most engineering blogs are written by men its ok for me to predominantly follow engineering blogs. What this product (to me) is there for is when I want to branch out I have an option for doing that in a powerful new way.
Finally (offtopic) I think we do need to have more civil conversations about virtue signaling. I don't think this product or announcement is virtue signaling. But virtue signaling IS a big problem in Silicon Valley, people shouting from the rooftops how they want to do good before quietly slinking back into a board room to do bad.
Good job OP, I'm not a hardcore twitter user but will definitely follow this projects development and wish it the best.
I think that people are taking issue with this though:
> Taking aside what people might think about diversity, we've seen that ideologies radicalize when we are only surrounded by like-minded people, usually from similar backgrounds
You've classified people based on gender and sexual orientation but that doesn't actually mean they have different backgrounds. 99% of my upper middle class friends have nearly identical opinions (very liberal for the record). It doesn't matter if they're men, women, lgbqt+... I suspect you'd get more actual diversity by looking for people (regardless of gender or sexual preference) who don't live on the coasts or in major cities.