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Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

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Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#911

Post by mikelyons »

adventured wrote: post #894
chimi wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wasn't the government's decision though, was it? It was Blizzard's decision. Just makes me wonder where all of this is going. Americans left and right are choosing China's cultural decisions over America's cultural ... legacy for the lack of a better word. Over money. It's like the Americans who love America, because America made them rich, are now loving China because China is richer. I don't know which is more…

> It's like the Americans who love America, because America made them rich, are now loving China because China is richer. China isn't richer. That debunks the rest of your follow-on premise. China has less than half the household wealth of the US. The US has 35%-40% of all the world's millionaires and about 32%-34% of all the world's wealth (with just 4% of the population). Fun fact of the day: Since any of the years…

China has 5x the number of eyeballs that USA has, this is a wealth of attention, human capital, which is what gives money it's value.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#912

Post by 1000units »

josteink wrote: post #650
streb-lo wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate-speech laws exist because people are programmable. Try and tell me your opinions are your own and the books and media you consume do not own some portion of them. Hate-speech laws exist to prevent the programming of people to systematically hate and exterminate other people, a lesson that has been learned many times over in history.

> Hate-speech laws exist because people are programmable. And some people would like to have us programmed with their opinion unchallenged, rather than have their view face opposing arguments in a fair and open debate. Once you compromise on free speech for some views, it’s all a slippery down-hill slope from there.

This is entirely correct. As rhetorical advice, I recommend against calling things a "slippery slope". This causes alarm bells to ring in a pedant's mind, and they frantically search Wikipedia's catalog of Fallacious Reasoning for an appropriate article to copy-paste or internally justify downvoting you instead of authentically engaging with the argument.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#913

Post by ClumsyPilot »

taytus wrote: post #866
groby_b wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You presuppose that all rules - via their nature of being rules - are automatically fair. They aren't. Especially not if they're not arrived at by consensus, but unilaterally laid out.

I never said I thought the rules were fair, I meant the banning. Their product, their rules, you break the rules, then you accept the consequences.

Except they are not. They are nebulous catch-all clauses applied on a whim.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#914

Post by bovermyer »

simias wrote: post #367
bovermyer wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds way too close to the Ministry of Love from 1984.

We need an equivalent to Godwin's law for making parallels to Orwell's 1984. It's thrown around so much in internet debates these days that it loses all meaning IMO. Besides it doesn't even really work here, the Ministry of Love is about torture and spreading fear throughout the population. If anything what the parent proposes would be closer to the Ministry of Truth but even that is a stretch. I think the soviet Gos…

I chose an analogy that I felt would be reasonably familiar to most people and convey the reaction I wanted.

Is it the most appropriate of all possible analogies? No.

Is it contextually close enough? I thought so. A few people seem to agree.

If your contribution to the discussion is to critique the efficacy of my analogy, then I feel like you've missed the point a bit.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#915

Post by dang »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #838
dang wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an incidence in gaming garner more eye balls on the topic of Hong Kong politics than whole month combined That's definitely not true. Hong Kong has been discussed a great deal here, and China even more. These are probably the most-discussed topics of the last month; if not, I can't think of what would be. Perhaps climate change. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/…

> hong kong comments > 10 Just as interesting are all the instances where stories gained dozens of upvotes but very few comments, because they disappeared from the front page within a few hours after rising to the first spot. It's very easy to see even from the outside, if you simply filter for stories that are ranked lower than other stories that have a lower score, are older, and have more comments. Try this on for…

For sure, there are submissions on that topic at every level of points, comments, and front page time. It's that way for all the hottest topics; if we replace Hong Kong with climate change in your query the result is similar: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

The hottest topics are both the most discussed and the most "consistently suppressed", as you put it. That sounds like an oxymoron, but it's just what happens when you have 10x more submissions than front page slots. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Because of this scarcity, everyone who feels strongly about a story feels that their story is being unfairly suppressed on HN, no matter how much coverage it's actually receiving relative to other topics. You seem to feel that Chinese political stories are being unfairly suppressed for who knows what reason—but there are at least as many users (probably many more) who feel that those stories are overrepresented and that HN is going downhill because of it. There's an email in the inbox right now saying so.

The actual moderation principles we use about all this are simple and have been the same for many years. Here they are: HN is a site for intellectual curiosity, so follow-up stories that don't add new information are mostly off topic, as are riler-uppers that don't gratify curiosity so much as stir up indignation and flamewar. When there have been a lot of stories about X lately, the bar for X stories gets raised; HN readers don't like it when the front page has a lot of stuff they've seen already. That's about it. The execution has a lot of subtleties, of course, but those principles fully explain what you're observing.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#916

Post by jonny_eh »

saltking112 wrote: post #870
dylanz wrote: post #868

If you have a Blizzard account and want to cancel your account, you can do that here: https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/2659

What’s hilarious is that deletion of account might require government issued photo ID. The last step for me to stop doing business with a bad actor is by giving up my privacy.

Devil's advocate here: They probably put this check in place due to the extremely high number of hacked Battle.net accounts.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#918

Post by widowlark »

chimi wrote: post #863
monster2control wrote: post #837

Wow, when a government can ruin someone's professional career of choice simply because he or she has an opinion that goes against the People’s Republic, that’s when companies should decide to no longer do business in China. Sadly, however, the dollar is more powerful than the the moral high ground.

This wasn't the government's decision though, was it? It was Blizzard's decision. Just makes me wonder where all of this is going. Americans left and right are choosing China's cultural decisions over America's cultural ... legacy for the lack of a better word. Over money. It's like the Americans who love America, because America made them rich, are now loving China because China is richer. I don't know which is more…

If you are an american who values money over american values, kindly jump off a cliff

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#919

Post by dang »

grecy wrote: post #905
dang wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comments here and below have broken the site guidelines badly. Please read and follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html . Note this one: Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data. No one who reads these threads remotely…

Thank you for taking the time to type out such detailed and thoughtful replies here and down thread. I sincerely appreciate your input and perspective. Obviously you have infinitely more experience and insight than I do, and you have given me a lot to think about. I had never before realized that it is in fact me who is the toxic element in this community by singling out individuals and putting them on trial. I feel…

Thanks for such a calm and kind reply. I've not gone easy on you and I know it sucks to get those sort of moderation comments. I hope you can trust that it's absolutely not personal and that my point was directed at the community, not you.

I do need to write something more definitive about this, if only so I can link to it in the future instead of writing variations of the same comment over and over again, which is slowly driving me crazy. But I fear it won't convince anyone. Personal interactions, like the one we're having here, sometimes seem to move the needle—which btw goes a long way toward repairing the hopelessness I often feel about this issue. But I'm unsure how to effectively deliver this message to the community as a whole, or if that's even possible.

My gut feeling about a statistical analysis is that it would probably be unsatisfying and stir up more objections than it settled. That tweet you linked seems to depend on much higher volume, 1000x if not more, compared to what we see on HN. That is, he's analyzing 5000 instances of a measurable kind of comment, of which HN probably wouldn't even get 5 over the same time period. Trying to analyze the HN corpus on these questions would be frustrating, because you'd be forced into semantic analysis right away and no one would agree whether you'd done it right. But I'm open to suggestions.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#920

Post by darkarmani »

monster2control wrote: post #837

Wow, when a government can ruin someone's professional career of choice simply because he or she has an opinion that goes against the People’s Republic, that’s when companies should decide to no longer do business in China. Sadly, however, the dollar is more powerful than the the moral high ground.

I completely agree. Same as the NBA "outrage". We are normalizing China's outrage here by acknowledging their false-equivalences. China is "angry" at the NBA, but the NBA has nothing to do with a private citizen's tweet.

What does China expect? The NBA should throw the man in a private work camp/prison and re-educate him?

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