Less-nonsense page showing the before/after image:

https://nitter.eu/alexhern/status/1366396140116131842

we're in a time of moral panic. this is what it looks like.

familiar to those who lived through the D&D satanic panic.

It really isn't. No-one was calling for Amazon to be banned, no-one was even outraged about it. A couple of people made some jokes on Twitter. That's all.

We _are_ in a time of poorly motivated clickbait content, however. That's what this is. There's a certain irony here somewhere in people being outraged about the outrage they perceive others to have... the original outrage doesn't even exist and yet another outrage cycle begins.

The real moral panic is the moral panic panic.

Thinking of it as a Rorschach test helps explain the knee-jerk reactions

Do you think that having your icon be a picture of a smiling cardboard Hitler is a good marketing move?

do you think that D&D is a front for demon worship?

I do find myself saying the word "daemon" way more than I did as a kid.

I did not see Hitler in the icon either. I feel like people are just looking reasons to be offended somehow.

People were mocking Amazon. Not offended.

Make your icon a random blot and some people will imagine Hitler in that too. It's a packing box with tape on the top, something Amazon is widely known for.

But it's got that weird "smile" on it, which any way you slice it is incongruous.

You know who else had a similar mustache? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/eb/OrwellB...

But that was in the mid-1920s. Obviously it was fashionable at one point, in some circles, and once it was associated with Hitler, people stopped wearing it.

There is a distinction between saying "something associated with something bad is aesthetically displeasing or embarrassing" and saying "something associated with something bad is a terrible crime". The former is not a moral panic.

Important to remember that Amazon’s strategy for everything is to scale to infinity. Even if something offends .01% of people, those are people amazon wants as a customer and a slight app icon change to accommodate them is well worth the money.

Also this reminds me to recommend Look Who's Back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look_Who%27s_Back_(film)

which took an idea that could have been trite and boring but made it really creepy. I think because it had that whole boiling the frog thing down - it paced the move from absurd to horrible just right.

Seconded - good film.

The new icon is still hideous anyway.

I think it's a cool idea but it's so different and abstract I can't find the app even when I'm looking right at it. Hopefully I'll get used to it.

Also, the Hitler-esque tape at least looked like tape. Now the blue part uses the symbol that's usually used for a post-it note.

I don't see it at all.

What has a blue sticker got to do with hitler?

A hitler 'tash is ultra short and square, not a long curve.

The curve is the mouth. Blue thing resembles the Hitler stache.

I was in the same boat. They changed it so quickly I didn't even notice the "problematic" one.

It's the blue tape that changed, not the "smile".

To be fair, the tape reminds me more of the orange hair patch of a Mr. Meeseeks than Hitler's mustache, mostly because of the smile. The only way I can see a blue Hitler mustache is imagining a closeup cropped from below the nose, and a really tiny mouth.

I guess it costs them less to change the icon and letting the self-offenders pick someone else.

People were mocking Amazon. Not offended.

Some people are trolling Amazon, others not so much. The fact that a silent icon change was mentioned in many news sources is a sign of the audience those initial trolls had.

I think it's silly that Hitler had a particular moustache 80 years ago therefore that moustache style is permanently verboten. I rock a moustache very similar to Stalin's, thankfully that one is allowed.

I also wonder if it was a popular moustache style in the 1930s or if it already made him look different at the time. I know Michael Jordan sported the style a few years ago and that also didn’t go well.

It's sad that dressing up as Charlie Chaplin has so many negative connotations.

Infamy really sticks around. Adolf is still pretty much dead as a name and nearly everyone with a last name of Hitler had their last name changed (in the US at least). People still don't name their kid Judas.

It was a perfectly practical Great War mustache style for gas masks when facial hair was more in vogue but it is still emotionally poisoned.

Agreed, this attitude has to end. People are forcing themselves to imagine Nazism in symbols, meanwhile there's actual racism on plain view that many pretend not to see.

I thought it was Charlie Chaplin.

I'd wondered why that ugly mess appeared on my phone. I didn't even notice the old one looking like Hitler. Oh well.

The new icon looks more like Hitler with side-combed hair

I found the new icon to be more "Hitler-esque" than the first one. The first one felt more like hair.

Anne to be frank, my first thought was I don't like either variant. The Hitlerishness of it was a second thought.

Doesn't really belong here.

That said, I thought the rule was that you never went full Hitler and I would have said this tiny soupçon of Hitler was just the right amount to add a bit of darkness to the overall flavor.

Clearly I'm out of step with the times.

Amusing, but not sure this belongs on HN.

News about Amazon doesn't belong on HN?

Not news about changing an app icon.

Do we need a corollary to Godwin's Law? "The longer an app is available in the App Store, the probability that its icon will eventually resemble Hitler's mustache approaches 1."