Hacker News Reader

Comment by varelaz | Hacker News Reader

I'm against easter eggs, at least right now. First of all not of them are harmless, can you make sure that it wouldn't break anything important, would it tolerate race, religion, gender and after all of these would it remain fun? It's hard to be responsible and fun in the same time.

View on HN

Well… I find your conclusion a bit sad, and turned upside down. Instead of banning all things fun for fear of misstepping, maybe it’s time to take things less personally, be more tolerant towards others, and push for positive change instead of trying to punish others for not being ”aware“ enough?

I'm not trying to punish others, I just don't find it fun anymore with all respect to everyone who keeps up. Before it was naïve and simple, right now it just more complicated, often looks commercialized or not appropriate.

I didn’t mean to imply you personally aim to punish others, but that we should collectively strive to foster a culture of positivity rather than instilling fear of offending others, until people say nothing at all anymore (or say a lot that doesn’t mean anything).

Why on Earth would jokes have to "tolerate" race, religion and gender or anything else? The point of (some) jokes is to challenge anything and everything you deem to be a norm.

I'm starting to think that many tolerance-preaching people are the most intolerant bunch by far.

Well, my 2-cent is that you can laugth of everything but not with everybody... So defying the norms with Easter Eggs sent to the wild can be an issue. You have to know your audience to properly chose your level of impertinence.

I completely agree with the first sentence - however I would argue that normal, level-headed and sane person either laughs or just shrugs and moves on if that particular joke is not to their taste.

Is the Google "Minecraft" easter egg intolerant of gender?

Easter eggs can certainly be problematic when used in APIs (or similar) where access is intended to be automated (and therefore vulnerable to surprises).

But in user facing code, easter eggs are perfectly fine.

Is it just a marketing tool of a mega-corp which tries to look nicer and engage you more?

I don't know what your point is.

Yes, Google is a corporation and yes, Google tries to build a product people want to use.

(Building things that people like is a good thing.)

I don't say it's bad. It's commercialized experiense and it's cool if you love it. I just wouldn't treat it the same as devs fun of hiding things for valuable user who loves their product and I'm talking from dev prospective, not user.

I'm sure some companies use easter eggs as marketing/recruiting tools.

That said, I've put a small number of user-facing easter eggs in publicly-traded MegaCorp code before. In every case, it was an inside joke among devs that the higher-ups never knew about it. The C-Suite is uptight and we definitely would have been reprimanded if they were aware.

It's an Easter egg, so clearly it's intolerant of other religions!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com