Not necessarily. If you approach this strictly from a business perspective as a commercial software developer, statistical guesses (not just about gender) that, for example, delight 70% of your users at the price of upsetting 3% can be worth it.
Not necessarily. If you approach this strictly from a business perspective as a commercial software developer, statistical guesses (not just about gender) that, for example, delight 70% of your users at the price of upsetting 3% can be worth it.
Relatedly, deliberately choosing to piss off a subset of users at no major benefit to yourself because you've decided there's not enough of them to affect your bottom line is kind of a dick move, even if it doesn't actually impact your financials directly. That's not a good habit to get into.
Upsetting users by misgendering them won't just upset those users, it also has the potential to upset their friends and family. You're not just upsetting them, you're upsetting their network. That 3% starts to look a lot bigger.
And if we consider market trends, facebook actually expanded their gender identifying process, rather than simplifying it. Facebook has probably more data than any other entity for the purposes of guessing, and yet they chose to allow users to self-identify anyway. That would suggest it's not a business-correct decision.
Do you actually mean the argument in the post or the post itself for presenting it?
>You're not just upsetting them, you're upsetting their network.
Right, this would be a valid concern to an amoral profit maximizer. It would have to be balanced against the potential profits from bad publicity and, more deviously, the benefits of a good "redemption story" of changing the functionality at the upset users' request.
As for Facebook, it is an activist business with the power to shape social trends, so it is hard draw conclusions from its particular case.
Edit: I get passed around between call center people because they think I'm fraudulent because of software guessing this bullshit