I’m Dropping Diaspora, This Site Is Now Closed

The guy who wrote this rant seems to just not like the idea of transgenderedness, and wants to promote his viewpoint that "gender is a linguistic term with a hard meaning". That's fine I suppose, but of the many reasons to think Diaspora isn't going to be a success, gender being an editable field ranks really low down on the list.

Is there any content to this rant besides a political desire to maintain greater use of gender pronouns? It doesn't really seem to have much to do with the success of something like this. If Facebook replaced all its pronouns with gender-neutral pronouns tomorrow, the site would not change much (hell, about 10% of my friends purposely have the wrong gender set just for amusement). It just doesn't make sense to me that this guy was willing to forgive serious architectural flaws as fixable, but isn't willing to forgive an editable gender field?

Diaspora's ability to provide gender options beyond the binary is a terrible reason to drop Diaspora.

For all it's problems, this is something I'd definitely defend the spirit of what they were trying to achieve, if not the exact implementation (should have provided some common options instead of just a blank text field), but when I clicked this link, I expected to see a critique of Diaspora's efficiency, security, platform decisions, protocol specification, etc.

Not a rant against "identity politics."

"This is a sign that the programming team — not some unrelated pinheads, but the five or six people who are supposed to be writing the code — have put strong, usable code last on their priorities. It comes behind marketing, behind ideology, and behind absurd identity politics."

Ignore for a minute that Disapora may be a pathological case of this idea, in that their first release was apparently riddled with easily avoided security holes.

In general, is this prioritizing of other concepts before code necessarily a bad thing?

Code is important, but users generally do not care if your code is amazing or just acceptable. What matters to them are the concepts that are visible: things like how they feel while using it, what philosophy the application embodies, and aesthetics.

I don't think it's wrong in general to prioritize your application's philosophy before its code, and I don't think the example the author gave is a pathological case of this idea either. It's a minor change to the code, but the idea of gender is massively important to users of the application. What do you think people will actually care and talk about: how rock solid the code on Facebook is, or the fact that they just made gender a text field?

I think the author overreacted pretty badly in this case. Diaspora in general may have too low of a priority of on strong, usable code, but this was not the case that proved it. Nor is placing strong code low on your priorities list a bad thing.

I'm no particular Diaspora fan, but is this blog even important in the Diaspora community?

Because otherwise, I don't see the value of some random asshole's tantrum about gol-durn political correctness, whether it's about a non-binary gender field, people of the same sex being able to indicate they're in a relationship, or whatever.

I've been caught in this argument before. A situation arose with a client who wanted a male/female binary and I argued in favor of a third choice for those who didn't wish to self identify, as I have a few friends who are activists in this area. The client's argument was for marketing targeting and metrics they needed it that way. I didn't get very far.

On my own project, I put 4 options Male / Female / Transgender / Decline to state. It worked pretty well. I have it always default to Female. Men will instantly change it, women are happy and anyone who's serious about gender identification issues or really need to hide it both have options. I've been given compliments by LGBT activists for the selection choices so I guess I'm doing something right.

Either way anyone who won't identify as M/F is a corner case. If you offend anyone its a tiny subset, and even of that group its likely they'd pick the gender they identify with. It does screw up email targeting and metrics a little bit, but I imagine not by a big enough sampling to make much of a difference..

Uhh, there's also no problem with using regular expressions to provide a normalized set of genders in the database for pronoun agreement.

"Gender is a linguistic term with a hard meaning." Credibility: 0. This doesn't make sense from a linguistic, gender theory, or even psych standpoint.

Haha, the beginning of this post really had me worried :-) It's not until the end (just before the edit) that he actually makes his point.

If you leave the value as an editable text string then the software will not know what gender to use. It is now completely useless. If someone wants to know whether to call the user “he” or “she”, “Mr.” or “Ms.”, they will now have to ask separately.

He should have put this first, the rest of the rant doesn't really make sense without it.

I believe we should strive to make machines/software adapt to people, not the other way around. This change seems like a good idea to me, if it's well implemented.

The silliest part of this? The complaint that after entering gender, the software doesn't know what title to give you.

Presumably, he thinks software can't parse words like "male", "man", "m", "guy", "trans-male", or whatever and offer "Mr." as a default choice.

Presumably, he also thinks nobody is going to say, "I'm a Mrs., not a Ms." or "I'm a Dr. and don't you forget it!" when looking at the default term of address for their gender.

Politics aside, this seems like a lazy technical implementation on Diaspora's side. They could have a "Male/Female/Other (please specify)" dropdown--allowing total customization, while still offering the ability for 99% of their user base to see male/female pronouns.