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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

#951

Post by erikpukinskis »

avar wrote: post #927
erikpukinskis wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He’s not exiled from professional gaming.

Hence the analogy to cabinet making v.s. all of carpentry, he's been banned from something he's heavily specialized in. But I think that misses the point, 20 years ago nobody would have been able to ban anyone from Quake III, because running the servers was distributed, today you have major game companies like Sony, Microsoft etc. that can ban you from entire game ecosystems. In another 20 the whimsy of one company m…

How narrow would the exile have to be for you to be comfortable with it?

Or, put another way, how big can my business get before I have to forgo my right to make my own decisions about who I collaborate with?

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#952

Post by nashashmi »

ummonk wrote: post #936
luckydata wrote: post #677

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you agree with the measure. Is that the case?

I do. I don’t want sporting events, conventions, etc. to become platforms for advocacy about controversial politics. I support non-disruptive actions like kneeling at an anthem, but advocacy about a political issue during a post-match interview streamed by the event organizer certainly crosses the line.

Were rules already established in the terms of service that would prevent him from protesting against a country or supporting oppressed people? If it was during the broadcast, then cutting the broadcast is sufficient punishment.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#953

Post by dang »

rjzzleep wrote: post #950
dang wrote: post #803

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely not another flamewar about that. Would you please review the site guidelines, paying special attention to this one? " Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190597 and marked it ve…

If you look carefully the controversial discussion wasn't started by me but by the comment Steltek wrote below my post. I think you do owe me the courtesy of recognizing this and in that case detaching that comment might have been the right course of action instead of throwing threats towards me. It is relevant in the sense that in the sciences department (FOR NOW) we don't judge scientific discovery or papers by the…

I don't mean to pick on you personally, but it was clearly your comment that brought in the "unrelated controversy and generic tangent" that the site guidelines ask users to avoid. Steltek ought not to have stoked the flames, but the fate of the thread was already determined at that point, which is why phrase that guideline that way.

I'm sorry you felt like I was throwing threats at you—definitely not how I want a comment like that to come across.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#954

Post by mr_toad »

greycol wrote: post #899
closetohome wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except in many cases they are legally required to maximize profits, regardless of ethics, so long as their actions are strictly legal.

It is part of our moral duty to punish a company for ignoring public good rather than excuse it as what a company must do. That's because if a company is punished financially (say by boycott) for making immoral decisions then they must follow a more moral course to maximize their profit. Personally I don't think this is enough especially as companies become more pervasive and the confusion of subsidiaries which make…

> I'd even expect the 'correct' long term 'required' choice for blizzard is to ignore any blow back and focus on the Chinese market.

So, the shareholders would be for practical purposes passive investors in what would become a defacto Chinese run company?

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#955

Post by dang »

PavlovsCat wrote: post #945
dang wrote: post #915

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Because of this scarcity, everyone who feels strongly about a story feels that their story is being unfairly suppressed on HN Writing something to graph the course of stories over time was just something I did for fun, then I noticed that stuff. And again, I'm talking about stories that are ranked lower (and that can mean much lower, several pages lower) than stories that have a lower score, are older, and have mor…

Sure, all those things intersect with intellectual curiosity, as well as writing advice and the life of Lord Byron and the Nobel prize in physics and lots of other topics that appeared on HN today. What isn't so good for intellectual curiosity is hammering on the same hot stories over and over again. One of our jobs as moderators is literally to moderate that, i.e. make it not so excessive.

It's human nature, or at least internet nature, that hot controversies and sensational stories get lots of upvotes relative to everything else. If you want to have a site for intellectual curiosity, you need a countervailing mechanism against that, or such stories will dominate the front page entirely. On HN, there are a number of such countervailing mechanisms—user flags, moderation downweights, and software penalties. When you see a story that seems like it has a low rank relative to its points, one or more of those is the reason why.

The Blizzard story was the top item on HN for its day (https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08), so I don't think it was underrepresented. Moderators gave it the standard downweight for indignation that all such stories get, which didn't reduce its rank much. Once it had been on the front page for 15 hours, software added an additional standard downweight. That helps flush yesterday's major stories off the front page so that the next crop of stories can come up.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#956

Post by MrStonedOne »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #924
Dove wrote: post #904

This is a very specific instance of a much more general problem. A lot of private companies control exclusive access to something with a value that dwarfs what you pay for it. I pay nothing for access to Twitter; if I build a business or a social life on the platform, it becomes something I would pay thousands of dollars to prevent losing. I pay nothing for access to Facebook; the memories they store at this point in…

Mostly playing devil's advocate here: When the Constitution was written, free speech meant literally that, your ability to go to a public space and physically talk. No third party was involved as it is with any telecommunication technology. So the resources consumed in that speech were totally your own. The only way to strictly have that equivalent in the telecommunications realm is for me to own every communication…

>When the Constitution was written,

They never mentioned the constitution so I don't know why you are.

The idea, behind free speech and censorship, predate the constitution and the constitution is not the arbitrator of the ethical principles of free speech.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#957

Post by GooglyMoogly »

jimclegg wrote: post #740
GooglyMoogly wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is blocked in China for refusing to censor what China wants. Bing works in China.

China will consider it a favor if you block your own "offensive" company from the Chinese market.

Google used to obey China's censorship requests, and was allowed in China. Then Google decided to stop obeying the requests, and China blocked Google.

You're saying that China was happy about that because China wanted Google out anyway and needed an excuse? If China didn't need an excuse, China could have blocked Google from the start. China has blocked things it considers offensive without an explicit action from that party (such as Winnie the Pooh).

If Google was obeying China's censorship, what would China find offensive about Google?

Does China find a similar level of offensiveness in the NBA and Blizzard, such that China is disappointed that they censored themselves and thus China doesn't have an excuse to block them?

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#959

Post by unityByFreedom »

Dove wrote: post #904

This is a very specific instance of a much more general problem. A lot of private companies control exclusive access to something with a value that dwarfs what you pay for it. I pay nothing for access to Twitter; if I build a business or a social life on the platform, it becomes something I would pay thousands of dollars to prevent losing. I pay nothing for access to Facebook; the memories they store at this point in…

> We should not expect Blizzard to stand up to the Chinese government; that is the job of the Chinese people, of other goverments, of perhaps the whole world.

Blizzard is an American company. They don't need to answer to China. They may choose to do so, just as consumers may choose not to play their games.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#960

Post by anm89 »

MrStonedOne wrote: post #956
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #924

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly playing devil's advocate here: When the Constitution was written, free speech meant literally that, your ability to go to a public space and physically talk. No third party was involved as it is with any telecommunication technology. So the resources consumed in that speech were totally your own. The only way to strictly have that equivalent in the telecommunications realm is for me to own every communication…

>When the Constitution was written, They never mentioned the constitution so I don't know why you are. The idea, behind free speech and censorship, predate the constitution and the constitution is not the arbitrator of the ethical principles of free speech.

Yes, however could one connect free speech in the US to the Constitution? What a ridiculous statement!

People may have presented the concept before the US Constitution but it certainly didn't apply to many people legally (if any?) before then

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