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Comment by CaptainOfCoit | Hacker News Reader

> I think they we're just defining what Easter egg meant in this context.

I disagree, they're explicitly claiming it's a "Swiftie-verse" thing, not something that has existed for decades already.

> The fact that it has an "Easter egg," in this context, is more of a more meta nod, rather than it being a hidden thing you have to find

I guess what I'm trying to say is calling something an "easter egg" and then describe exactly how to find it, makes it very not an easter egg anymore, you don't receive instructions for how to find the egg before you go searching for it, that would ruin the whole idea.

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When you google „Taylor Swift easter eggs”, you’ll see that it’s a more specific thing than just „easter egg”, similarly how it has a more specific meaning in software.

I googled that, and it seems to mean something like "Something hidden you can find" which is the same across all other contexts. What exactly is so special about Swift's easter eggs compared to others? It's how everyone else uses them too, like referencing past/future events and so on.

Easter eggs can contain basically anything. In a video game I'd expect an easter egg to be anything from a secret weird level or item, a nod to another game/movie, or a picture of one of the developers' pets. As that bit you quoted from the story was trying to make clear, in the context of Taylor Swift, "easter eggs" are a much more specific and are often hints about what will happen next. This seems like a very reasonable clarification to make, and to my eyes doesn't imply that Swifties invented the term.

> in the context of Taylor Swift, "easter eggs" are a much more specific and are often hints about what will happen next

Right. Do you think they would still be called easter eggs if Taylor Swift didn't just place hints, but also told people about the hints, exactly how to find them and what they meant?

No, of course not. Why would they? It’s not trying to explain what Easter eggs are in general, nor is it acting like Swifties coined the term. The article is trying to explain that in the context of Taylor Swift, easter eggs are usually about upcoming projects or such things.

The article could have said “‘Easter egg’ is a term which means a bit of information or a feature which is left hidden as a surprise for people to find. In the context of Taylor Swift, easter eggs are hidden bits of information which often point at upcoming projects.” That would be overly wordy and unnecessary though because most people already know what Easter eggs are and thus won’t assume it’s claiming that Swifties invented the term.

> In the Swiftie-verse, an “Easter egg” refers to a hidden clue or detail that Taylor plants in her work …

I don’t see this as meaningfully different than, for example:

> In the computing world, “Java” refers to a programming language …

Which seems totally fine to me.

No, it's more like saying "In the context of Java, addition refers to the concept of adding two numbers" which yeah, I guess is technically true but the concept of adding was not invented in Java nor works differently in Java, it's a general math thing. Writing it that way implies that somehow addition works different in Java, which it doesn't.

I agree that that is what the word and phrase means, however in THIS context, it means something different.

It doesn't ruin the idea if the idea is to share that it has easter eggs. If they didn't create, share and "ruin" it, they would have omitted an important feature (to put it in software terms)

They don't want the reader to go and find it, they are overlaying ideas from the "Swiftie-verse" onto a tech platform and THAT is the fun part. It's just a little fun blog.

You're talking about a cultural reference, or similar, which isn't the same as an easter egg, although an easter egg can be a cultural reference, vice-versa isn't necessarily true.

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