Male or female option when first joining.
Making the male or female option optional. I understand it makes the avatar and you can eventually change it but being one of the first questions I was asked made me a little uncomfortable. I think it was already being put in a certain category before I joined the community.
9 years ago by Lavaflow
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22 comments
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I agree. While it works well for statistical purposes (which is what I presume they are doing it for), I feel like the comfort of the users should come first.
Actually thats not why we have the choice upon registration at all. Story time...
When we first soft launched Snapzu as Alpha back in the very early days, we had only one style of avatar that had 50 different designs for 50 different levels and it were created at a substantial cost. This naturally received an outcry of complaints that the site's avatars resembled male features and that if we were to get serious about this concept we would need to create another set of 50 avatars that had feminine features. So as you can see, we were forced to create a 2nd set of avatars that would closely resemble features that many members felt were not being represented. The male or female question has nothing to do with anything but that simple choice of the avatar style, just like if you were to create a character in an online game, ie. WoW, for example.
Oh, huh. Were the avatars expected to play a bigger part in the site?
Why go with gendered avatars at all?
Being forced to either lie (pretend to be a dude) or be honest (tagged to be a chick) annoys me. I don't want to lie, but I also don't like necessarily being visually identified as female online before people even read what I've said. It's like wearing a 'kick me' sign.
What about giving the 'mascots' names (if they don't already have them), and having something like 'Choose your mascot: Bob or Sally' (or whatever). Unless it's because you are using the info for analytics, in which case it could be an additional question alongside 'Male / Female / Prefer not to say'. This way you can continue with the binary level avatar approach, but also collect optional gender data for analysis. Just a thought.
If you added an androgynous option today would you have to create another set of 50 avatars? If not that might be an easy way to be more inclusive. Alternatively, could that flow be reworked to let users upload their avatar as an alternative to picking one of the generic avatars? Being honest, it took me a day or so to realize I even could upload an avatar.
This is in reference to the level avatars, that appear on your profile, not the avatars that appear next to your comments.
Ahha, I hadn't even noticed that was there. When I went through the signup flow it only had the comment avatars shown.
I could write a quick script to take the 50 male and 50 female characters, cut them down the middle and put them together and re save the new set.
Damned if you do, Damned if you don't.
Their statistics could easily include an "other" or "prefer not to say" option, and would make it more accurate.
But it seems like the intended purpose is for avatars, though – if I recall, the original question is "pick the sex of your avatar," not "how do you identify." I don't know how you could keep the avatars in place while also offering "prefer not to say" (my personal preference) and "other" categories. The system itself might be inherently flawed.
I actually liked the option. Without that, online communities tend to assume everyone is male until proven otherwise.
That's true. I was thinking of having a third option of I prefer not to answer or say.
I think it should be optional and less binary, in order to be more accepting of the intersex/transgender community.
Unless I missed a tab I wasn't able to find your specified gender under your profile. So it appears to be hidden from the general membership.
But even if your gender was predominately featured with your posts I'm failing to see why it would matter.
My train of thought when I joined was having to live in a world where I am always being judged whether its the type of job I have, the car I drive, my age, my ethnicity, or whatever else I come into this site thinking I can be somewhere without having any judgement on me. Also knowing before that one of the rules was no racism or hate speech led me a little more to this idea. Having that question as the first thing I see without knowing how else it is going to be used besides the avatar is what caused me some discomfort.
Drunkenninja made an analogy comparing this situation to an online game character that you choose which isn't bad considering the leveling xp points that is here which I like but I see that situation as you are judged on more or less how good you are at the game. I think it is different when you are just communicating with others. I would have felt better if I had the option to stay anonymous right when I sign up then after I get familiar with the site then I would change it.
Also the female avatar is a little different than ours if you were wondering where you could see the difference.
Actually it is possible to see it, look at the avatar on this page: http://snapzu.com/ThermalShock/overview
Yours has male features (the five-o'clock-shadow), therefore I know you selected "male" when creating your account.
For people who selected "female", they have a different type of avatar.
I also dislike this option, and very nearly stopped the account creation process when I hit the 'male' OR 'female' dichotomy. Forcing your users to select a binary sex identifier to gender their avatars is simply not an inclusive policy. I also think it runs counter-intuitive to the mission statement.
From the Snapzu Mission Statement (emphasis added):
By forcing me to select 'male' OR 'female' I have already lost some control over creating that online identity.
The reasoning behind this apparently necessary classification is to quote DrunkenNinja and my own interpretation:
Graphics are expensive and we really want avatars that level, so we have to limit the types of avatars available
This is how the dev team views gender and is an appeal to tradition and generally not a good reason to just keep doing it the way it has been done
I get it, you want leveled avatars and you don't have the budget to make an avatar for every possible gender expression, I respect that because there are a lot of gender expressions in the world and it wouldn't be feasible to cover them all.
At the very least, remove the 'male' / 'female' language and replace it with 'masculine' OR 'feminine' which is a better match for the choice of gender anyway.
I would hope you could look into making a gender neutral avatar.
I would be ecstatic if we had customized avatars so I can have actual control of the creation of my online identity.
For people who have too much history with harassment on the internet due to their identified gender, the ability to opt-out would be a huge relief. A friend I invited to snapzu began with a largely negative impression of the site because of this. If it's too costly to the servers to have too many options then perhaps gender-based avatars should be eliminated.
Highly agree with this!
Is there anything stopping you from picking the opposite gender? Personally I've never looked at the avatar of another user and thought, oh he's male, or she's female. I take the users as users and their comments are genderless. Once I find out their gender it makes no difference to me as I've made up my opinion about the user based off the content that they have posted.
I understand the concern, but as I stated before, there's nothing stopping someone who doesn't want their gender known from picking the other gender. I'm pretty sure the Admins are not going to banhammer everyone that provided false gender information. It's used for the avatars only from what I can gather.
If anything, the Admins could add an option to hide the avatar from public by default for everyone and those that want their gender disclosed can opt-in to displaying it. That way the only people that could know your gender are the Admins.