I like the idea of a “quick info” field into which you can put basic stuff, e.g. “my preferred pronoun is xe”, or “Male, Mandarin, Japanese, poor English”, or “crazy cat lady”. But given that about 90% of people can’t be bothered to set a flag, I suspect that a lot of people won’t use this either.
The main counter-argument seems to be concern about visual clutter. I can think of three possible solutions.
First, provide a button in the title card, which reads “quick info” on mouseover and which people can click on to get the info in a popup.
Second, add this information to the popup you get when you click on someone’s name. I often click on this already to get their flag, out of curiosity.
Third, add a “quick info” button to the popup. At the moment the popup only has 5 buttons on it (challenge, message, friend etc). This isn’t visually balanced and has always annoyed me slightly. Having 6 buttons there would be a bit more visually pleasing. This proposal would require two clicks to get the information, but you wouldn’t have to leave the page by going to their profile to get it.
I have that userscript installed, and anecdotally speaking, maybe less than 5% of the users I come across on a daily basis on that site have some kind of pronoun in their bio profile for the userscript to grab. I still like having it around, though. I don’t think it’s particularly intrusive or anything. Most of the time, I hardly notice it.
I have to agree with all the points here. There is no reason for preferred pronouns to be an elevated piece of information above and beyond anything else.
I’m strongly against putting this information in the player card. The preferred pronoun issue is intrinsically a political one, as it boils down to “political correctness.” It is already tiring to deal with political correctness everywhere else on the internet. I don’t want to see it when I want to play go.
If your opponent chooses to fill in this field, and you see their preferred pronouns in the player/title card, you are free to ignore it. […] I’m sure steps can be taken to make this minimally intrusive to the UI, and you are free to still play in zen mode and never know about this at all. If you are strongly opposed to knowing which pronoun you opponent prefers, I’m sure a complimentary feature could be added in you settings page to always hide it.
I‘d rather we don’t go this route. As go players we should strive to respect our opponents, if they want to be addressed with a specific pronoun we should respect that. This feature would simply give them a way to discretely declare that.
I don’t care about “political correctness”, “gender politics” or any of these. Being nice is not a political issue. This has been pointed out as a political decision above and I fail to see the logic behind that. Deeming this feature as a political one is by it self not enough to discredit it. We should debate this feature on it’s merit. That’s all I ask.
I have to vehemently disagree with you there. Pronouns are simply a matter of identity - how someone should be referred to. This is not a matter of “political correctness” any more than if someone named Michael were to tell you that they actually go by Mike. At that point, you’re kinda just being a jerk if you keep referring to them as Michael for no reason.
It’s fine that you don’t care about political issues. I personally care about political issues insofar that I do not want them thrust upon me during online-go games. Deeming the feature as a political one IS enough to discredit it as the argument is that OGS should be politics free.
Your Michael/Mike example seems to imply that people will misgender others purposefully. If that’s what you’re worried about then displaying pronouns only enables that behavior, though it is very unlikely to occur whether they are displayed or not.
This pronoun issue IS a matter of political correctness. If it solely a matter of identity, why are we not having this same conversation about age? Seniority is a much more important piece of identity in other cultures as it can completely change the entire language you use when referring to that person.
This might be the case in language where a third person referral changes if the person you are talking about is older or younger then you. But even these languages usually have a way of speaking generally in case you don’t know the age of the person. Or they might assume seniority of their opponent, whichever is more polite.
I guess that is why we are having this discussion about pronouns but not age. In the English streams I watch the players never assume an age of their opponents, however they do assume male pronouns in most streams I see. Assuming male gender feels un-inclusive for players of other genders. Unlike your age example, assuming male identity is generally considered rude if your opponent identifies with a different gender.
I feel you’ve outlined exactly why displaying preferred pronouns is unnecessary. We already have gender agnostic pronouns (at least in English), just as you can use age agnostic language. If streamers are assuming the gender of their opponents, then that is their issue, not an OGS issue.
I do think that making a field for pronouns and labeling it as such isn’t “just giving an option”. It’s prodding people to declare their pronouns. And generally these kind of Western lefties I guess want to promote pronouns as this big deal. That’s the politics of it, right.
Now let’s look at player profiles. In profiles people can and do write whatever they want, and it seems like the best place currently to declare your pronouns. But hardly anyone does it. It’s like one in a thousand, maybe. So it doesn’t seem like an important issue to overwhelming majority of people. Almost everyone seems content solving this on person-to-person basis.
That’s why I think that if we at all want to introduce a special text field, we shouldn’t label it “pronouns”, we should choose something neutral. So different people from different cultures feel ok writing something else they want their opponents to know. Instead of being this very specific thing designed to tackle this specific issue.
Although in this form probably it won’t work for you because most people would be writing something else. And as I understand your issue is not about giving people option to declare pronouns at all, it’s about promoting more inclusive language, which is pretty political.
I’d be down for the free little snippet on the player card where you can write whatever like we have on the forums, I think it should be short and sweet, and easy to access for those people (like me) who don’t really look at the profiles of their opponents.
So something like @Vsotvep proposed earlier in the thread:
I like that. The field could be labeled something general. People would be free to use it for whatever, like “Ask me for a review (he/him)”, “No chat”, “Am drunk”, “Parolas Esperanto (li/lin)” etc. (like @Jhyn proposed above).
The biggest issue with this is that majority of the people won’t write anything, given that a small percentage of the players actually chat on the forums, website and add things to their profile. Most of them are here to play games :P. As a streamer, a lot of the players I face don’t even say anything in the game chat, like a simple hello.
Adding a field will also mean mods will have to look into games to make sure what other people type in is appropriate and we can’t really force people to only type in their genders or pronouns. This all just seems like a nuisance to me, if its really that important for other people to know to their gender/pronouns they can say in the game chat. I feel like there are more drawbacks to this idea than advantages.
Asking streamers to say “black” and “white” and not worrying about the pronouns seems much easier than giving anoek another headache to deal with.
I do like this styling better than the orange vermillion. Is there an easy way to line up the left of the username and text? I assume the answer to this is, you’d think, but no, but if not, I think that would make it look much better.
