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Comment by Svoka | Hacker News Reader

How is seeing more Ukrainian flags a discrimination?

Discrimination implies something harmful. Like invading neighbor country and perpetrating genocide. This complaint says more about Ivanov than anything else.

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The imputed discriminatory part is that the software only shows the additional flags to users with Russian locale, not that it shows the flags at all.

Not sure you know what discrimination is.

This point in the comments made me think twice:

> People in Western countries don't realize how bad the situation on the ground actually is; random Ukrainian flags showing up on your work monitor can result in severe problems for you (like losing you job, or worse), especially if you work in the government sector. If they show up on your laptop in a random cafe or an airport, you might very well get a beating from one of many "war heroes" that walk around the cities these days.

[EDIT: I see @krunck reposted this at the top level — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48736518]

Oh no! Imagine the horror of losing your job. It compares nothing to literal genocide their army perpetrating.

And yes, it is their, not their government, not some mysterious leaders. Russians reelected same government for 35 years with it invading neighbours pretty much every 5 years.

Imagine living in the occupied part and being sent to the basement for this. Probably not that black and white now... although seeing both activist and slacktivist types being very loud about the land but not the people over and over again, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if you don't care.

As a reminder, the most dangerous job in Russia is "opposition leader".

you mean nationalists/imperialists like Navalny whose main beef with current russian administration is that is corrupt, meaning it is not being effective enough?

Honestly, not sure why westerners yearn to find good fascists.

Yah that's where I stand on it. The message isn't harmful or hateful, it dares only make a political statement.

It's still selective degradation of functionality, as presumably people who download a snowglobe animation program don't do it to see any sort of statement apart from normative depictions of wintery things. The problem would be the same if it showed Russian flags only to users with Ukrainian locale, or ads for Mountain Dew only when the user's locale is set to French, or even just something as impossible to interpret as offensive on its own as adding lots of little cactus men whenever the locale is Dutch.

right, which means the software is less useful and as such you might not want to use it. Plenty of software like that listed on repositories, which I think is fine.

> presumably

So it's "selective degradation of functionality" based entirely on your assumptions regarding the motivations of the users? How is this a useful description?

Given the number of colonized people that speak Russian, including residents of Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan, etc. etc. etc. I think this sort of Easter Egg based on language rather than geographical location is quite appropriate.

My family speaks both Ukrainian and Russian, and in Russian speaking spaces here in California we find many many many eager supporters of Ukraine's sovereignty, because when they hear Ukrainian spoken they tell us! And also tell us they wish they had been able to keep their non-Russian family language alive too. Most of these supporters are not from the Moscow or St. Petersburg areas though...

It's not even an anti-Russian statement!

I wouldn't get bent out of shape if Xsnow showed me a Canadian/Greenlandic flag in response to me using en-us.

How can anyone complain about Ukrainian flags, unless these people have a problem that the Ukraine exists.

Very much agreed. It‘s a statement by the authors of that software, and that is well within their rights.

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