I’m Dropping Diaspora, This Site Is Now Closed

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."

(Repost from the last link, don't know what happened to it)

(PS Why do these entries keep getting deleted?)

I read this article as "Wah wah wah, I have to do string compares to see if automated titles (Mr Mrs, etc) code works because they're respecting the trans-gendered community".

Pretty ridiculous to get so outraged about something like this. True that it adds a layer of fuzziness, but that doesn't mean you can't do something like

if(user.Gender.ToLower() == 'male'){ print('Hello sir'); }

How is this on the front page? Am I missing something?

was submitted and killed recently: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1951138

Wow, talk about disdain for non-binary genders. It sounds logical, I'm sure, to a majority of people who have never considered the possibility that gender could be n-ary, but this is ludicrous. There are a ton of reasons to drop Diaspora, but this is borderline genderist. Then there's the whole sex vs. gender thing, but I won't even touch that argument. The comments on this one could span a whole other realm of philosophical and psychological land mines.

This just smacks of not getting it, and may imply why a free and open facebook alternative may not be possible by the open source community. Facebook is a product, targeted using hooks generated from real relationships to a specific audience.

A blank text field for gender goes against any conceivable UX/UI improvement and makes no sense. The author of this blog is saying that the text field for a gender is just one symptom of a large problem with a team that doesn't have the experience of building a serious product.

If we assume that 1% of the US population is Transgendered, that leaves 99% of people who are now receiving a substandard experience because of the feelings of a minority that don't wish to choose other or blank for one ui element.

That's just stupid product design.

It's not that hard to parse most answers into the common categories of male and female. For those whose answers can't be easily sorted, they were the ones who didn't want to be classified in that dichotomy anyway.

And if you choose to answer "yes, please," then you get what you get.

I don't even see why the field would exist.

For a social network aimed at privacy-minded individuals, I'd think you would err on the side of not including any data beyond what is absolutely necessary.

So what about 'gender' is necessary?

This is perhaps the dumbest article to make HN's frontpage that I've seen, and I'm not in the 'HN is becoming Reddit!' crowd. If any article deserved to be downvoted, it's this one.

You're closing the site because the text field isn't to your liking?