Instead of showing who people are upfront, show their tweets without their identities attached, and let people follow based off of that. Anything else is just a diversity virtue signal.
There's a couple reasons as to why I believe that it makes sense in the platform. To begin with, the concept that started off this project 6 months ago was simply to make women more present in people's following lists. This was an entirely identity based project from that point, attempting to increase & amplify the voices of a particular group. Needless to say, with a concept set up & validated, I kept going in the same direction.
Secondly, while some of the filters of the platform are identity-based (ethnicity, gender, LGBTQ...) I also implemented multiple based on their background (low-income, migrants, language...) as well as based on their interests. I plan on expanding this group further, as I find it extremely valuable to better diversify our feeds. There is much more other than whether someone is a man or a woman, a person of colour, or a person with disabilities.
There is a third reason, one which I might not be too fond of, but thing is, in order to achieve diversity, people tend to prefer going about it through people, faces, and real identities. As a rather "private" and ambiguous person online, I've noticed how hard it has been for me to have recognition or validity, since all in all people can just judge me by my work and ideas. Had I gone this path with the platform, it would have likely failed, and I could have not contributed to solving this issue.
All in all, your idea is good in an ethical perspective, but when it comes to its implementation, it's absolutely useless, unless you change people's mindsets (very hard, specially because you also have to change some people's mindsets in terms of diversity already...). Then again I will see if I can implement something like this in the future, I think I might be able to figure something out. Thanks for your insight!
If a racist reads some amazing tweets they find interesting and later discovers they were written by members of races they don't like, that could change a mind.
If a diversity fanatic reads some great tweets and later discovers they were all from straight white males while the boring ones were from a very diverse group of individuals, that could change a mind.
But if all you do is provide a way for diversity sensitive people to pad their following lists with socially approved diverse individuals, you're not changing anything. You're giving people a way to pat themselves on the back and feel like they are doing their part. You're building new cliques and organizing new armies for future social media wars.
Straight white american males are so boring, so standard, so unremarkable in their appearances and their backgrounds that people can't help but focus on what they are saying instead of who is saying it.
These diversity play's that highlight people's status as minorities inevitably fail because they can't divorce who a person is from what they want to say. By making us pay attention to who a person is and making us self-conscious about who we follow and don't follow we ultimately distract ourselves from what matters: content.
It would be incredibly grating if I had to be reminded someone was part of an underrepresented group every time I interacted with them, to the point that I would just stop interacting with them because of it.
Real diversity is not a conscious effort. I've seen it. A bunch of people of different backgrounds come together, work on something, and go home, and no one even realizes or comments how diverse the group is. Nor do they even care. That would be weird. As weird as being in a conference room of white men and blurting out "Hey guys! We're all straight white males!"
I'm curious what the impact on your site would be if you removed all language of diversity and simply presented the people there as interesting people to follow, not even giving the user a chance to realize you are over representing minorities and playing into their guilt of following mostly straight white males. Would your site still receive such acclaim, or would it fold like a house of cards? We'll never know. You'll never know.