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Comment by fedxc | Hacker News Reader

I love the following comment because it begs the question: Where do we draw the line? When do we, as a society, stop contemplating every single person special needs? When do we stop the "everyone is a snowflake" mentality?

"Very disappointing. The most stupid change ever made. I found the new color offensive to me and many i know so change it to another color".

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Also the question: on who does the responsibility to be tolerant and understanding lie in such a situation? Is it our responsibility to change green hats to blue, or their responsibility to understand that not everyone sees any negative connotations with green hats? I think in this case, where there is absolutely no protected class being victimised (cuckolds are surely not a protected class), it should not be changed.

Both. And with fix being so easy and self-contained, it shouldn't even trigger any discussion. You just fix it and are done with it.

If fixing it meant more work, like redesigning all of the artwork, then you can ask the other side to be tolerant and understanding. In this case, there was no need to.

I agree the pragmatic thing to do is just to change it, but how much work the fix requires is not really the point here. We're talking about something more than what is simply the optimal business decision. I think it's wrong to indulge people's prejudices.

We simply don't, because why would we. Of course the effort to benefit ratio has to be considered, but in many cases, like this one, fixes are actually trivial. The only thing that really needs to be ignored is awful trolling, like the one you quoted.

Changing the hat's color is such a non-issue that it's really pathetic that there's actually a discussion about it.

This does make people ask that question, but looked at from another way, if they have have the possibility of offending a totality of the largest market in the world, does that really fit into this question. It's more like an extreme example to show that sometimes a trivial change would have a large effect.

By the same logic it's ok to:

- remove any imagery of LGBT people for Chinese market

- remove any imagery of black people for Eastern European market

- black out any imagery of women for Saudi market

And yes, this actually happens all the time. Maybe it's ok not to market to people who are offended by some things?

And, which happens all the time, remove images including tits from advertising for the US market. It works both ways.

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