PSA: LJ code notes

[jenett]

(I suggest reading the whole sequence before deciding what you want to do about it.)

The basic issue
New updates to LJ code are posted to the changelog community. A recent addition would have forced new users to pick a gender (male or female, no 'unspecified' option as currently available.) and a subsequent commit would have forced a choice of male or female if the user profile were edited at a later date. They've pulled the code for now, but there's more worth talking about - namely how code gets pushed live in the first place, and a particular aspect of the response from LJ's US general manager.

[I am assuming that my reading list gets why forcing binary gender is Not Cool, and why I think it's a damn stupid move, even though I personally am perfectly comfortable self-IDing as female without me going into that bit, right?]

synecdochic has a lengthy post about the basics here: http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/366609.html and elf has linkspam at http://elf.dreamwidth.org/288498.html .

There's fairly good reason to believe that the motivation for this change is better advertising targetting - obviously, not easy to prove, but it's about the only logical motivation for making this particular kind of change in this particular way.



Where does new code come from?
(I welcome additional notes/correction on this in comments because so not a coder.)

- There's a decision to create a new bit of code. This might come from a suggestion post, it might be a bug fix, it might be a decision from someone in the site heirarchy to add a feature or change. Generally, this involves an entry in Bugzilla, which is used for tracking these things, and who's working on them.

- Someone writes the code.

I am told by someone with reason to know that while these two steps of the process used to be a lot more public/transparent on LJ, it is now much more private: there's no public bugzilla, code submission, or review process outside of paid staff.

- Code is pushed to the repository (basically a working clone of the existing code with the new changes), which automatically makes an entry in the changelog community.

- People can comment on the changelog post with queries/concerns/etc.

- Assuming nothing breaks or the code is not rolled back, code is made live on LJ in a subsequent code push. In other words, anything that appears on changelog is very likely (and intended) to go live, it's not just "Hey, we might maybe like this code some day." or "Hey, let's play with this thing."

Code does not write itself
As is obvious from the above, someone has to a) decide the code needs to be written and b) actually write it. (These are, generally, two different people.)

Likewise, as noted in zvi's comment on synecdochic's post over here, "
Still, you do not write error messages that say "You need to specify a gender" by accident."

Yeah. That.

So, someone decided to write this code, someone decided to force a binary gender requirement (removing, in fact, functionality currently present in the code), and this code was pushed to testing. All of those involve some deliberate decisions in there, by people.

It's also worth noting that there are previous promises out there that LJ would continue to maintain the Unspecified option. (see this post from 2006)

An actual TOS issue
In addition to the idea that people should be able to determine their own identification, etc., there's also another slight glitch with forcing a binary answer: as noted by elf over here

"During registration, all users are required to provide accurate, complete and current information about themselves in all required fields....Should LiveJournal suspect that your personal information is not complete, current, or accurate, your account may be subject to suspension or termination"

Responses from LJ's US General manager
This is the one that actually irritates me about as much as the actual code change, which is saying something. synecdochic notes the answer she got back in her post, but the subsequent answers other people have gotten back include an interesting additional line.

Now, pause a moment, and look at the date stamp on that changelog entry. One would presume that someone on the LJ side was reviewing these posts to make sure the code was, in fact, worth adding to the server. Note that the post was made on 12/10. Note that the first comments are on 12/14, *after* synecdochic and various others started boosting signal on this. In other words, no one from LJ actually looked at this and rolled it back during that time.

There's also the fact that Anjelika's response to people other than synecdochic has been including the statements:

"We were going to add a gender field to the sign up user flow, which is fine, but by mistake it became a mandatory "female/male" field for everyone. This is why this is not going live. And this is what beta releases are for, to see problems and solve them before any user faces a problem.

I would appreciate if you share this information with your friends that are also concerned. I am sorry that you were misinformed."

(from various posts, but you can see a range of comments on page 5 of the much referenced post.)

Now, let's look at this for a moment. These statements presume:
- that people can't read what code is supposed to do for themselves. I am not a coder, but I can read enough to recognise a) binary code choice being forced and b) an error message that indicates you have to choose (as opposed to just not answering that question.)

- are being lead astray by someone without reviewing it for themselves

- and that code designed to add a (mandatory) gender field to the sign up user flow can't actually manage to provide the options already in the code (and readily available for anyone who's designing the code to review as currently in use.)

Personally, that reads a lot to me like backpedaling on an unpopular action by throwing blame, and I am not fond of that particular move to cover a bad decision in the first place (and I think it's lousy customer service). I'm particularly unfond of the implication that the person passing on accurate information about the process is misinformed.

Either that, or *really* poor code-review practices are in place, and are not being addressed well. Which is a whole other problem in the first place, and suggests Dire Things in the long-term, especially given that the LJ codebase is large, clunky, and sometimes held together by chewing gum and string in places, so that badly planned changes could have particularly complex ripple effects.

Me, myself, and I
I've been an early and active supporter of Dreamwidth as a project in large part because I strongly prefer to invest most of my time and money in a site that's got as open and transparent a management process as possible. In contrast to LJ, proposed code changes are accessible to the public on DW, and there are regular and frequent requests for feedback on any significant new feature or change (and explanations of their eventual decision, whatever it is.)

I've got a permanent account on LJ through volunteer work (in other words, I'm spending money on my DW account rather than just using LJ), and I'm unlikely to ever totally abandon LJ. (And I don't see ads, so targetting data to me doesn't make a difference to me personally.) But things like this make sticking around a harder and harder decision. I want to hang out in places that respect their users, y'know? Or that have a clue about code design and review. In this case, one of those two is a major failure, and they're both pretty serious ones.

I have DW invite codes for anyone else who'd like to check it out.

Comments

[ilyena_sylph]

Excellent post.

If it wasn't for that "sorry you were misinformed" bit of bullshit, I might have been willing to let LJ get off with "we fucked up, we realized it, it's not actually going to happen."

But that backhanded slap at Denise... no, I am not okay with that.

Nor am I okay with the insult implicit in "misinformed" that says they don't think I can read a changelog.

[jenett]

Thanks for the compliment!

And yes, very much with you on that. I'd also have been happy if there were *any* indication that anyone on LJ noticed the problem before various people signal-boosted it. Because that's also part of the theoretical review process.

[aedifica]

I too have a permanent account on LJ, and that makes my eyes cross with confusion any time something like this happens and I start wondering whether I'd ever someday want to leave LJ. Because if I leave, they no longer have the cost of my activity (server use) and so they actually benefit, but if I stay, they get the benefit of publicity through my actions. *shakes head*

[brooksmoses]

In theory, your usage is not that much different from that of a basic account, and they benefit from those enough that they've kept them around.

My guess, though, is that fundamentally it really makes very little difference -- after all, they didn't benefit enough from basic accounts to feel very strongly about keeping them around, or so it appeared last time that came up.

[brock_tn]

There are times that I suspect that the business model at the heart of LJ is very seriously flawed, and much of the drama has at its core the intent on someone's part to once again shore up a tottering structure before it collapses completely.

The rest of the time I suspect that LJ is cursed to always be owned by idiots.

And yes, I know that these two ideas are not mutually exclusive.

[faithinseeds]

Between this issue, and the ads popping up on my account (a plus account but still..) that make the screen go totally black, and do not allow me to stop them for 5 seconds or so, really make me think of leaving LJ. I feel much better about supporting DW.

[syzygis]

Ouch. I've been off my blog reads for a week or two, so this is the first I'd heard of this (extremely belatedly); definitely glad I do all my actual posting over here now!

[firefly-124.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this. I really don't know much at all about how the coding works and such, and I hadn't noticed the timestamps. I've appended a link to this in my post on the topic.

I really do fairly strongly prefer DW for a number of reasons, the transparency being high on the list. I just wish more of the people and comms I follow were there.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

This is why I'm migrating to Dreamwidth come the new year. I'd been contemplating the change simply because I've been debating about turning my blog into a more professional forum for issues in Information Science and stuff like that. This sort of thing, though, it solidifies my decision.

I am sort of sympathetic to LJ, though. They can't enforce fee for service on a mass market audience that expects internet services to be free(or at least to appear that way). That forces LJ to rely on advertising and they have to prove they offer real value to advertisers and that leads them towards targeting and making blogs available for data mining. The real problem is just who comprises the constituency of Live Journal. It's not the participants and hasn't been for a while a now. That constituency consists of the people who pay the bills and those people are advertisers.

[jenett]

Have you read Denise's rant on why monetising social media is doomed to failure?

http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/234496.html
http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/234845.html
http://synecdochic.dreamwidth.org/235204.html

I have sympathy for LJ in that they're in a really hard place. But I also have a lot of frustration in that they're not doing a good job of handling it with good grace, or with recognition of the existing user culture. And that's not cool, no matter how hard they're feeling pinched.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Wow! I glanced through the part one and that was a very, very good read. I've been working with technologies that might be called Web 2.0 for a very long time myself. Unlike Denise, though, I've been developing them under the aegis of public organizations. In other words, my sponsor has always been US or state taxpayers. I knew diddly about funding through advertising until I glanced at her post. That's a very rough way to fund a service. I wouldn't get started down that path myself.

LJ has to remember that the thing that draws the advertisers is the community. The community creates the commodity that advertisers want to trade in. Screw the community and it breaks apart depriving you of the resource you want to sell. Interesting... Conservative economists always use Tragedy of the Commons to illustrate why public enterprises are doomed to failure. Here we're seeing an entirely different dynamic. Here, the commons has been made private and the owner has no interest in nurturing the commons; only in exploiting the resources it generates. Once the owner has gotten all he wants out of the commons, he'll abandon it and move on. Dreamwidth makes every participant a stake holder by joining their interest in having a platform for expression. Gee. I think I could a paper here on Information Economics.

[elf]

It is worth noting that, when LJ was sold to 6Apart, it was profitable. It was surviving just fine on "free accounts w/minimal features; paid accounts that subsidized them so they could have access to all that social."

It's possible that wouldn't have worked indefinitely after the removal of invite codes--but LJ's reaction to that could've been reinstalling invite codes.

It's when it became a "venture capital" case that they needed more money than paid users were willing to provide in order to hang out with their free user friends. And then they brought in adverts, and those have been growing ever since.

And the ads have had a drastic affect on TOS enforcement policies. Pre-ads, LJ's abuse policy was "if it's not illegal, and not a violation of privacy of the kind that's problematic online and the laws haven't caught up to, it's not a problem." Post-ads, suddenly they're concerned with what's publicly viewable on the site. And concerned with data-mining, which many users don't want.

The number of spambot accounts makes it impossible to track real activity on LJ--but every group I know of grumbles about fewer posts, less content, than we had in 2006. LJ management's decisions coincide with this concept--they're bringing in more ads because the ones they've got aren't working well enough, because not enough people are using the site they way they need it used to make money.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

The response I got was evasive but does make some important statements:

Thank you for taking the time to contact us with your concerns. We
understand that gender is not binary, and intend to respect that
understanding for our users.

At this time, the code you reference is not live on the site, and will not
become so in the future. We know that you, and many other users, have
serious concerns about any requirement to specify gender, so we'd like to
take a moment to explain events and our position further.

The intention of this code was to change the sign-up process to include a
field for the selection of gender; that the code would completely disable
the "Unspecified" option at the same time was deemed unacceptable. While the
code in question had gone to our beta (testing) server, it had not gone to
our production server, and will not do so due to this problem. Furthermore,
we'd like to clarify that code posted to the changelog community is not
always final, as such code must then go through the beta testing process and
can often be changed before actual implementation.

Additionally, some erroneous information has been spread regarding the
potential public display of the gender field. We would like to clarify that
gender is not currently publicly displayed on the profile, nor anywhere else
on the site, and there are no plans to change this behavior.

Regards,
LiveJournal Community Care Team

Basically the same story, not phrased so poorly. They're being slippery, but they're also making respectful statements. I am relatively pleased.

[brooksmoses]

FWIW, I also came across this comment, which is saying similar things -- though somewhat confusingly, as I noted in reply to it.

Personally, the bad-code-review explanation seems a bit more likely to me; I can easily see the programmer reviewing the existing options and thinking that "unspecified" means "haven't gotten around to specifying it yet" and is only there because people don't currently specify at signup, rather than being a meaningful choice.

It also seems very likely to me that any code review that Paid LJ Staff did would be internal rather than visible on those entries -- but it should, in any sane development environment I know of, happen before things get pushed to the repository.

Finally, and here's what I would consider conclusive: The changelog entry title, describing the intent: "LJSUP-5276: add gender field to sing-up and profile page. Added option to set accessability to this info." That says nothing about changing the available gender options, which if it were an intentional change, would be one of the most significant parts of the intended effect of the patch. Either that title is misleading (which would be really counterproductive, since it's for internal use) or the change was not intended by the programmer as a change.

Oh, and finally -- note the change at the very bottom: "+.share.gender=Shaw your Gender to:". I think there's another strong corroborating bit of evidence for the "this was not accurately reviewed" claim. That's a pretty glaring typo.

[brock-tn.livejournal.com]

It's germane, I think, to point out here that the code monkeys at LJ are now all or nearly all Russian. Back when I actually worked with current military intel, we used to think of the USSR/Russia as being the only nuclear-armed superpower in the Third World. And even years later Russins still tend to have Third World sensibilities on many social issues. It is possible that the programmer simply never considered that it might be necessary to provide anything other than a binsry choice for the "Gender" field.

I'm not advancing this as an explanation, mind you. But it does seem to me that it is at least possible that this whole situation may not actually have been an intentional act on the part of LJ's management team.

I understand that much of the LJ user base here in the West has been conditioned by previous debacles such as Strikethrough to be suspicious of LJ management. At the same time, I have to agree with the philosopher who pointed out that "It is unwise to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Still and all, I am glad that there is DreamWidth, where I have a seed account.

[jenett]

The culture issue's been raised elsewhere, and yes, I think that's not unreasonable.

However, it's not like this particular issue doesn't have a *long* issue (back to before when I started on LJ in mid-2001) of being an issue of concern.

Honestly, I expect people running a site of this kind to be aware of those particular touchpoints, and even if the *coders* don't know the issues or the background (and you're right, they shouldn't necessarily need to), someone ought to be flagging and cross-checking anything that touches gender identity flags - or frankly, anything on the profile page at all (given how relatively high-profile it is on the site), for oversight and making sure nothing got missed.

I don't want to be on a malicious site, but I'm not exactly wanting to be on a site run by stupid management either, y'know? Forseeing this particular kind of issue is what good management should be spending some time on, not scurrying to catch up.

[brock-tn.livejournal.com]

The problem is, people are stupid. And QC/QA is not a strong point in most industries in Russia. The recent "unusual lights" photographed over northern Norway was actually the latest spectacular failure of the Bulava, Russia's latest design for a submarine-launched ballistic missile. You'd think that if ANYTHING would be built to stringent and exacting standards it would be a missile intended to carry multiple nuclear warheads. But so far, out of thirteen Bulavas that have been test-fired, there have been seven failures, of varying degrees of spectacularity.

Expecting better QC on something as trivial as a social-networking site's software seems to me to be a little unrealistic.

I agree with you that it's a lousy way to run the social-networking site, especially when there washn't a lot of goodwill to be transferred from 6A to LJ's new owners. But by the same token I think that those people suggesting that this was a deliberate ploy to increase advertising revenue are jumping to conclisions that aren't supported by what we know to be the facts in this case.

[jenett]

But by the same token I think that those people suggesting that this was a deliberate ploy to increase advertising revenue are jumping to conclisions that aren't supported by what we know to be the facts in this case.

The only thing is - given that you have code that is apparently working, why change it? (Ok, I get the argument that you might want to include the gender thing as part of new account creation, rather than leaving it for later, but still.)

Making a change of this kind argues that there's a *reason* to make that change. And the most simple reason (hello, o razor of Occam) is that there's some reason to encourage a particular kind of identification - gender is seen as an easy way to better target ads (even though various commentary makes it clear that it's also very problematic.)

So, yeah. Not necessarily malicious, but not particularly virtuous or prone to encouraging confidence, either.

[jenett]

It also seems very likely to me that any code review that Paid LJ Staff did would be internal rather than visible on those entries -- but it should, in any sane development environment I know of, happen before things get pushed to the repository.

You'd think, wouldn't you? But note, as I noted in my post that there are no comments on the relevant changelog post until right around the time that Denise's post showed up. (She notes she wasn't the first to point this out, but I don't know who was.)

So, whatever internal process had 4 days to catch this, and didn't. Which is a problem in and of itself.

Also, there's this changelog entry: http://community.livejournal.com/changelog/7937189.html which seems to produce an error (assuming I'm reading it right) unless the answer to the gender is either M or F.

### gender check
- $from_post{errors}->{confirmpass} = $class->ml('widget.createaccount.error.nogender')
+ $from_post{errors}->{gender} = $class->ml('widget.createaccount.error.nogender')
unless $post->{gender} =~ /^M|F$/;


And note the title on that one: "LJSUP-5264: removed extra option 'gender accessability'."

So, yeah. Mistakes happen, but this seems to be a particularly troublesome combination of them for long-term health.

[brooksmoses]

I started off strongly agreeing with most of that, but after writing my reply I'm not sure I entirely do.

I'd question your issue with there being no comments on the relevant changelog post. It would seem strange to me if internal review -- even after the commit -- showed up as comments there, so I don't think the absense of comments is at all meaningful. (Do such things show up there on other changes?) An important thing to remember is that the changelog posts are effectively an RSS feed duplicated off of internal process; they're not the internal process itself. The only evidence of internal review that I'd expect to see there is later changelog entry posts revising things -- and I note that, if you factor the weekend in, they only had two days for that, not four.

Also, this second changelog entry that you refer to is not adding something new; it is revising the "You haven't specified a gender" error code that was added with the first one. In particular, the part that you quote is changing the error from a "confirmpass" error to a "gender" error -- which is a very minor technical-correctness change, not adding anything significant and new.

Finally -- it's entirely possible that LJ has a "commit and then review" policy for their programmers. That would mean that what we see on changelogs is effectively work-in-progress that hasn't been internally reviewed yet, and errors in it are normal. That sort of policy would be badly broken in a volunteer-driven project, but it's not as broken as it seems in commercial projects. (And I'm specifically noting this, because my personal reaction is to be very concerned about it, but that's more of an emotional "it's horrid and broken and ugly!" reaction than it actually being unworkable, and I want to compensate for that.)

So this may not be as troublesome as it looks. Maybe.

[jenett]

I'd thought about some of the same things, but I keep coming back to 'either this was deliberate (and at the very least, *stupid*)' or that they've got a really broken process.

- The rollback came in this morning, after the commentary hit last night. And, incidentally, at a time of day that, assuming Russian coders, would have meant 3 working days, not 2 for review.

- There are 3 posts with comments (not including the massive discussion on the initial changelog post about the gender settings) in the last 100 posts (this takes us back to late November). One is a userpic comment, one is a question (which was not answered on that post) and there's one "I wish I could like this" thread.

So, wherever the discussion's taking place, it's not there.

- My understanding from people with past experience with LJ Dev is that stuff that goes to changelog *should* be fairly final: it goes to changelog, and then assuming there are no problems, rolls over in the next code push (so this code would presumably have gone live this Thursday or maybe next Thursday.)

That means that any review needs to be pretty timely: if they haven't gotten to it after 3 days, there's a good chance it wouldn't have been reviewed until it went live (unless it broke something obvious in testing.)

- Said people with LJ Dev experience have also mentioned that stuff that turns up in changelog, has, traditionally *been* pretty final - yes, you post it because other people might catch something you missed, or have a question about how something works, but it's supposed to be relatively finished product, not 'work in progress', and especially not 'policy shift in progress' (which this particular issue basically is.)

It's possible this has changed (as noted, a lot of this process has become a lot less transparent in the last couple of years), but if so, that's not obvious - there's no obvious post on changelog itself about the process, lj_releases shows code updates roughly every 2 weeks (the last one was December 3rd), so one this week or next week would be expected.

So, y'know, hard to tell from the outside, which is also not great process.

[brooksmoses]

Thanks for the extra data there. (Any idea how the beta site works in that, incidentally? Does stuff that hits changelog immediately go on the beta site?)

If stuff that goes into changelog is indeed supposed to be finished product, then, yeah, this looks rather like a broken process to me. The "Shaw your gender" error never got fixed until the rollback, although the second commit took out the code that would have made it visible. (Which is, itself, an error in the second commit, in not removing it.)

Similarly, now that I think about it -- just from their own explanation, the fact that they don't have code reviews for this sort of screwup before the code hits the beta site is pretty broken, IMO, unless their beta site is really remarkably "beta".

Whether it was also deliberate as well as broken process is not something I'd entirely rule out, though.

[jenett]

My understanding is that it's the other way around: stuff put on the beta site automatically creates a changelog post. (I got this from several people who have LJ dev experience as volunteers, but who aren't currently active on that side.)

[brooksmoses]

*nods*

Pedantically, and having worked with similar source-code repositories, it can't quite go that way, because the changelog posts have all the hallmarks of being automatically created when someone puts something into the source-code repository -- but it's entirely possible (and plausible) that putting code into the repository also automatically pushes it to the beta site, and that's a distinction without a difference as far as their development/reviewing process is concerned.

I'm not sure this pedanticism is at all useful -- it's not relevant to anything -- but I will feel unhappy if I don't say it.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The way I see this is actually LJ improving hugely on their past behaviour with screwups.

Somebody screwed up, probably someone who went with societal defaults that gender is binary -- and how cool is it that LJ has never forced that before? Facebook does. Somebody pointed out that this was a problem. LJ then reacted brilliantly and fast, first by recognising that it was a problem, then by deciding not to implement the code and acknowledging that gender isn't binary. I think this is terrific. I think this is how I want LJ to react to screwups, which, lets face it, happen.

Oh, and if they were going to do it to increase revenue? They decided to forego that increase in response to user concerns. Think about that.

I'm also a little disgusted with Dreamwidth over this for constantly trying to make this seem worse than it is and promote their own service.

[jenett]

Thing is - it's a bit more complicated than that.

The issue of gender identification has been a hot button issue on LJ since sometime in early 2001, if I remember correctly: *any* change to the settings has always involved a huge heated discussion and a lot of hurt people along the way. The current settings have been in place for a while, but they're *only* that way because of persistent poking from various people who cared about the issue strongly. LJ still refuses to add an 'other' option, too, even though that's been requested (in some format) for about as many years.

In terms of LJ recognising it was a problem: look at the time stamps, as noted in my post. *Four* days went by between that changelog post and any comments, and five days went by before the code was revoked. And that commentary was, in large part, fueled by people who have a long and passionate history with LiveJournal.

Yes, Denise is one of the co-founders of Dreamwidth. But she's also been a longtime volunteer (until very very recently - like, this calendar month) on LiveJournal as well as an employee - in other words, she knows this particular issue's heated history, and she also deeply cares about making sure that this option remains.

(It's worth noting that she's the one who made the post from the feedback community in 2006 talking about LJ's commitment to maintaining non-binary gender options. so it's also, in some respects, her word on the line even though she no longer has any ability to enforce that promise directly.)

(She is also someone I consider about as good a friend as I consider you - so while I'll admit my personal biases might be getting in the way, I also have good reason to be pretty sure that her motivations for this are not financial, but instead to protect something she cares a lot about on a system she's got a lot of history with.)

Likewise, if money was the motivation, she'd be saying "You can buy a invite code for $3", not "And, I don't mean to be tacky here by tooting our own horn, but Dreamwidth doesn't require anyone to specify a gender; our options are "male," "female," "other," and "decline to specify". I will happily provide an invite code to anyone who feels that this new policy of LJ's affects them. Our Diversity Statement explicitly mentions "gender identity or expression". [direct quote])

Yes, she has a lot of influence as one of the DW co-founders, and needs to be attentive to how she uses that influence. On the other hand, I also feel really strongly that she gets to speak passionately about an issue she's got a lot of history with *as* a person (note that she's posting from her personal account, not her 'official DW business' account).

Are there places in her post where my language would have been more moderate? Yeah, but I'm widely recognised as being way off one side of that particular spectrum most of the time, so that doesn't really surprise or dismay me.

This also still leaves the issue of LJ's process. Is their review system so broken that this wasn't caught much earlier (especially given that this is a repeatedly heated issue throughout the site's history?) Likewise, saying that they're foregoing revenue by making this change is not a clear cut thing: they really had no choice but to either back off on this change, or to risk a substantial argument that would leave a bunch of the passionate userbase with even more distaste for current management.

It's also worth remembering that the idea to make this code change came from somewhere - as outlined above. Code doesn't write itself, so someone thought this was a good move, but then didn't correctly spec it, code it, or review it, and that, to me, is as problematic as any actual *content* of the code, because if this relatively straightforward thing is not reviewed, what happens when you're dealing with stuff that's got larger impact (privacy settings, for example.)

So, yeah, I'm glad that LJ backed down. But I also recognise that they probably wouldn't have if there hadn't been the hue and cry, and that the hue and cry have highlighted other concerns that go beyond this particular issue or the individuals involved.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they wouldn't have done it if there hadn't been the hue and cry, especially if their employee who cared about the issue had recently left. I think it's one of those things where it's hard for people like us to see how different mainstream views are -- most random people would assume as a matter of course that gender is binary. But I think it's great that LJ responded to users this way.

I'll take your word for it about Denise. I don't know her. But my response, not knowing her, was to think it was tacky and reflecting badly on DW to tout for business in that post. I don't know if I am typical in this -- probably not. I've seen far more responses like "LJ screwed up and fixed it so I am abandoning them for DW".

[elf]

This is an improvement. However, that doesn't mean LJ's reached anything like "good" in their user relations/customer service. (It's possible that the users aren't considered the customers anymore.)

Somebody screwed up
Yes. Who? Will LJ admit whose decision the code was--did the coder come up with it on his own, or was it a mgmt decision to use the gender-binary? Will LJ even admit the mistake (and its correction) publicly--that it came close to breaking a promise it'd made to its users years ago? Will LJ *thank* the angry people who called the mistake to their attention, or just quietly grumble at them for raising a fuss?

Broken promises is one of the big reasons people left LJ. Lack of transparency is another.

This is not how I want LJ to react to screwups. I *want* them to *admit* the screwup, not tell the people who noticed it that it wasn't really a problem because this was only a beta version. I want them to apologize, not say "sorry you were misinformed." Fixing the result of the screw-up is good, but that doesn't mean they're "doing things right;" it means they're not doing things as wrong as they could--and have in the past.

how cool is it that LJ has never forced that before?
LJ's current management doesn't get credit for LJ's previous coolness. They're trying to ride on the coattails of history while disclaiming any responsibility for previous mistakes. If they want to claim "oh cool, we haven't forced gender decisions!" they can take their lumps for "we haven't outlined the policy for NC-17 fanart that was promised in the wake of strikethrough, either." And for not defining what will convince them to flag a journal adult/restricted against the owner's wishes.

They decided to forego that increase in response to user concerns.
Yes, several hundred to several thousand angry comments in the space of a few hours may have convinced them that gender-targeted ads on the, what, 5% of active userbase who won't get them without a binary, was not worth worth fighting for.

To give them points for that, we'd need to know *how few* user responses they'd need to reconsider such a decision. Right now, we're stuck believing that the *only* way to get LJ to reconsider hurtful and discriminatory business decisions is hue-and-cry across the journalsphere.

disgusted with Dreamwidth over this
A big part of DW's reason for existing is to give people who are disenchanted with LJ a place to go; it was partially founded on "let's do what LJ should've done to make fandom happy." The concept, "Pissed at LJ? Come to DW!" is going to be around for a long time.

All LJ has to do to prevent that, is stop with the fail. Stop focusing their business efforts on "inflict new ads" instead of "make users happy enough to pay us more." Stop deciding that new users are more important than long-term ones. Stop treating early adopters & perm accounts like dead weight. Stop ignoring basic netiquette in their own news posts.

A bit of effort towards convincing their users that THEY, not the advertisers, are the customers here, would go a long way.