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Nov. 10th, 2008 04:43 pmWhy does LiveJournal's "edit profile" page ask for a gender when it does not display gender on the profile pages?
I'm coming at this from the perspective of wishing they did display it, or rather wishing they'd give me the option to, since I'm contentedly female and happy to have people know as much via some field I could choose to display. [I was recently told that my (public) entries are gender-ambiguous, which somehow amused me.] But at one point there was also a movement for LJ to either not ask about gender or to include more options. I can see that side as well...but from either perspective, why do they ask? It doesn't seem like they're doing anything useful with it, at least nothing that benefits the users. *grumbles about how they don't care about users anymore anyway, with the ugly redesigned profile pages brought as a case in point.* Simply keeping stats about whether male or female people are more likely to update (one of the reasons that's been given) seems like a pretty strange solitary reason.
I'm coming at this from the perspective of wishing they did display it, or rather wishing they'd give me the option to, since I'm contentedly female and happy to have people know as much via some field I could choose to display. [I was recently told that my (public) entries are gender-ambiguous, which somehow amused me.] But at one point there was also a movement for LJ to either not ask about gender or to include more options. I can see that side as well...but from either perspective, why do they ask? It doesn't seem like they're doing anything useful with it, at least nothing that benefits the users. *grumbles about how they don't care about users anymore anyway, with the ugly redesigned profile pages brought as a case in point.* Simply keeping stats about whether male or female people are more likely to update (one of the reasons that's been given) seems like a pretty strange solitary reason.
