There is more to be said about "we built this in two hours" not cutting it as a full excuse. In two hours, three men figured out a new way to reinforce existing privileges for males as heterosexuals. I am calling shenanigans on their obliviousness. Let's take that happy word "app" away from the equation: they wrote a program. They wrote code that did not simply say "create list x from list belonging to user data; if user A marks user B as state Bang, and user B marks user A as same state, notify each User and send ad for condoms." Instead they added the gender check. They can claim all they want that it wasn't on purpose, but it bleedin' well was. You can almost guess that half an hour of the coding session was dedicated to three men saying back and forth: "I swear, two other fellow dudes, no homo." It could be a toggle, but instead it was a wall put into the code. They can't claim they don't know about homosexuality, didn't think about it. They'll swear right now, they aren't thinkin' about peens, bro. They live in a state that just finished re-legalizing gay marriage: pro-gay is pro-capitalism, and writing an app is capitalist. They may not like being called on their shenanigans. This is too bad: when you enter the public sphere with your creation, you have to accept the response. They may have only spent two coding hours in the closet, but we can all see their closet.
3 dudes made this in 2 hours. If the lgbt community gave a flying piss about this it would have its own up in no time. If it is in any way successful you will have 8 clones by then end of the quarter. Their decision whether it was incidental or a premeditated stab at homosexuality is completely ineffectual in the face of online trends.
I don't think it was a premeditated stab at homosexuality. I just think it's wrong to say they didn't plan hetero-only into their code. They aren't attacking the gay community -- they're just selfish jagovs. Besides, they are basically making Grindr for Breeders.
So the LGBT community already has an existing app similar to the one in question, but this app is still a horrible affront to the whole community because they didn't include you? A business can choose to not target all markets; it seems they chose to lead the design in an area that doesn't need to compete with GRINDR.
Except I don't buy that there's any shenanigans here at all on this point. Such is an entirely natural thing to do if this was built in a matter of hours. If you want to prove something works, leave the finer points for later. You make it sound like it was some sort of conspiracy to design the app that way. That theory goes to garbage once you consider the fact that they apparently don't have any opposition to same-sex pairings on their app: If this statement isn't directly implying that they intend to make BWF gay-friendly then consider me bamboozled. Any attempt to portray them as some tyrannical cis-hetero dudes falls apart there. So they made heterosexuality the default in v0.9. Big deal, it kinda is the default if we're being frank. Can you blame them for initially conceptualizing the app around their own demographic? And I want to reiterate, there's no reason to believe that these guys are against that despite what the editorializing in the article suggests.It could be a toggle, but instead it was a wall put into the code.
We built the most basic version we could to keep it simple and get to the result of getting people bangin buddies! We are working on expanding it to help everyone.
The program filters for gender if it only shows a user of one gender the friends with the opposite gender. To filter for any gender at all, they have to ask Facebook's API for gender data about users. It's easier not to ask at all and just offer all users. Instead it checks that gender of user does not equal gender of list presented. The computer doesn't maaaaaagically know "boys should want to see girls or it's icky": that's in the app's code. If they plan to add it later, that's only because non-bros made a stink. It doesn't matter if you don't want to see the evidence of breeder privilege. It's there. I spend enough of my life dealing with code to know it took them effort to get this non-toggle option.
More like the app would be a lot shittier if i had to scroll through most of the dudes on my friends list just to protect the sensibilities of a few. It kind of defeats the whole purpose of the app if i'm not even getting to see anyone I would bother rating on sexual attraction.