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Comment by rowyourboat | Hacker News Reader

> And in fact, for a very long time we resisted allowing people to filter by race—we felt it just wasn’t appropriate. > But then we learned about some use-cases from the other side—someone who is Filipino who wants to find other Filipinos easily. We found that that’s a pretty legit reason to search by race, so we added that feature.

I don't understand. What other side? And why are Filipinos special? How is that fundamentally different from any other race-based selection?

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I can't tell if you're playing devil's advocate here. I'll translate what the CTO was saying;

"And in fact, for a very long time we resisted allowing people to filter by race—we felt it just wasn’t appropriate." --> A significant portion of our users wanted to be able to filter by race, but we were afraid it'd create an internet shitstorm.

"But then we learned about some use-cases from the other side—" --> So here's the semi-PC thing we invented to cover our ass, just to give our users the feature they wanted anyways without being the target of a social activism campaign.

Regardless, they have since removed the feature.

Thank you. I wasn't playing devil's advocate. I am not from the US, and the specific hangups and dos and donts Americans have around the issue of race are a bit alien to me.

(That's not to say I am free of hangups, but mine are different)

Yeah, I don't get it. Is Pilipino a race? Isn't it a search by country of origin, or ethnicity or whatever, not race per se?

Yeah, they could have allowed filtering by language like Tagalog (something learned) rather than race or "nationality", which would have been just as easy. The other place I can see them doing this is Brazil, and there I'd admit that European vs South American Portuguese would be different. People like to segregate though...

By other side he meant they didn't want to give people the tool to remove certain races from the results. I know that logically this is the same exact thing but from a PR angle it's not.

In Las Vegas I knew several Filipinos. Most were immigrants but also native born as well. They have a local subculture akin to any of the others that employ specific dating sites.

Filipino is not a race, but nationality.

I'm guessing that Filipinos aren't obviously "white" or "black", and thus get to dodge all of the baggage that Americans have about the topic of race.

Just another guess: "Filipino" is also associated with a single geographic place, unlike most of the other races that Americans typically think about.

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