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Six Months at Riot Games

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Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#161
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do YouTube, Facebook, and others ban illegal, unsavory content? Teams of moderators with good tools. Unfortunately, also a thankless job with the potential to give PTSD.

YouTube, Facebook and others have several orders of magnitude more money to throw at the problem than an indie game company. That’s why Riot’s level of progress over the problem is so remarkable.

Throwing an 'indie' tag on a company that makes over 1 billion in revenue annually is ridiculous.

And even indie companies have to pay the piper when the bad culture and tough decisions that are put off result in blowback.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#162
post #158

The amount of white knights in this thread is absurd. She provided zero evidence and everyone is jumping to her rescue. Maybe wait for evidence first? Typical SF culture. Imagine if this was a guy accusing a woman. But that's different right? Yeah yeah, downvotes incoming... I'll take it..

Excuse me, but she's writing about her personal experience - what evidence would you expect her to provide? If you hear someone shout the n word in an office and later tell me about it, should I disbelieve you? How about if you tell me, and a number of other people also tell me? Do I say no- you need to provide evidence. Even when no one has actually denied it happened? What about if a reporter who fact checks their…

> what evidence would you expect her to provide?

1. Witnesses that confirms her accusations

2. Chats / emails / memos / pictures etc

3. If possible, maybe audio recording would be in order here?

Why is it bad to ask about evidence? If someone told me aliens landed on earth I would not believe that person but suddently because she is a woman in tech, everything she say has to be the truth and nothing else is plausible?

> There is literally nothing anyone can say to persuade you.

What? This is exactly the opposite of what the author of the first comment is writing. He or she is asking for evidence in order to be able to believe it.

P.S. Because no one denies that aliens have landed on earth doesn't mean it has happened.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#163

>At Riot, employees are encouraged to play League before/after work, or during lunch. My very first week at the Dublin office, I heard shouting from individuals playing together, calling each other “f ggots” repeatedly. I was unnerved, but it was my first week and I didn’t know if this was a common occurrence. I didn’t say anything at that time. Eventually, the language would escalate to “n gger”. No one flinched, an…

That's gaming culture to have racist and homophobic speech? There is no valid reason for this. I don't get why people think this is justified and acceptable.

> There is no valid reason for this.

Provoking an opponent into irrational behavior seems like a valid game strategy. In other words the language is not necessarily used for its face content but for its psychological effects.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#164

Interesting that this one is doing well compared to the longer in-depth kotaku article a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17710188 - fwiw that piece has since been corroborated by a ton of former riot employees on twitter. At the risk of sounding overly cynical, this is all true and everyone knows about it, people feign disgust at these articles but we're all complicit and understanding that this is…

this one is doing well compared to the longer in-depth kotaku article This article rocketed to 180+ points in two hours, yet it's already on the second page and falling fast. Moderator activity? Flagging? Some algorithmic quirk? Possibly the first article had the same problem. There's enough hidden behavior on HN that I don't think you can trust individual story ranking to express anything about the HN community. Unf…

[deleted]

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#165

Not sure why people are flagging this topic. (was on top of the first page 2min ago, it's on second page now)

Stuff like this often gets flagged off the front page, but usually it then just sits on page 2 for a while. This one is now down to page 5 (at only two hours old, with 200+ points).

It's kind of hard not to suspect brigading...

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#166
post #123
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because there are false positives or one company has a bad implementation doesn't make it an unsolveable problem. As parent mentioned, ml sentiment analysis + logging + peer reporting + final human analysis = problem effectively combated It's the final human analysis that companies are loathe to fund (e.g. Facebook), as costs scale with user count. But it's not efficiently unsolveable with current tech. Therefor…

Kay. What are the odds that some HN commenters are going to solve the same problem that has been an active priority for years of the people in the field? I can’t speak for Valve or Riot, but at S2 it was a concerning issue. There’s just no good way to do it when the people involved are actively malicious. If you think there is, get ready to have your community collapse around you as everyone complains about unfair ba…

I absolutely appreciate the scale of the problem, and the adversarial nature of peer reporting. My day job has those same characteristics.

Millions of games per week * 30 minutes per game * avg lines of chat per minute = manageable w/ a proper streaming architecture

Especially when you have access to a massive, perfectly-scaled, distributed edge compute system. (i.e. running minimal, performance-optimized models on users' opponents' clients to do the initial detection / filter / compression pass)

But my point is this is fundamentally an economic problem, given current state of the art, not a technical one.

Companies are looking for pure-technical solutions because they're cheaper, and then complaining that it's a hard problem because they're unwilling to properly fund hybrid systems until state of the art can deliver.

ML is a first order approximation of human ability, not a magic unicorn that gives you exactly what you want. Thats the definitions of engineering: how do I build a system that fulfills my requirements from the pieces I have, not the pieces I wish I had?

So I don't feel much pity when companies allow toxic user bases to flourish because it's cheaper than funding solutions.

* Above intended in no way to belittle the awesome work folks are doing in the space with ML detection. But sometimes as engineers we need to admit when management is making unethical choices for financial gain

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#167
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you won competitive darts championships while blindfolded, that would suggest the blindfold wasn't an impediment. Given how long the movie industry has been around and how many studios have gone bankrupt through competition, I would think that any cultures that significantly impeded productivity would have been stamped out by now.

"If you won competitive darts championships while blindfolded, that would suggest the blindfold wasn't an impediment." How many of the other competitors were blindfolded? How many of the other movie studios have this culture? "I would think that any cultures that significantly impeded productivity would have been stamped out by now." Evolution doesn't always lead to better final outcomes. In a culture of dickheads, b…

> Evolution doesn't always lead to better final outcomes. In a culture of dickheads, being a slightly bigger dickhead can give a personal advantage. Soon, everyone is a raging dickhead. The same applies to companies. The same applies to species (although with them it's not so much "raging dickhead" as "some small individually advantageous feature").

You're moving the goalposts. Are Riot "dickheads" here? Maybe. That's a very different argument from saying that their culture makes their games worse.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#168
post #155
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but bucketing a company as racist just because someone said the n word once in 2009 isn’t productive. It’s like calling pewdiepie racist.

"Bucketing a company as racist" is not the point. The point is that the CEO is the head of, represents, and consequentially speaks for the company. Their personal opinions are reflected in the company's internal and external image. Don't we all have better things to do than argue moot points in nested comment threads? ;)

Why do you think I end up spending so much time on HN?

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not the way things are though. I’m a manager, and I wouldn’t tolerate any of the painted stories for a second. In fact, none of the people in my network, which includes numerous large Scandinavian tech companies would tolerate anything of the sort. You do see that stuff, of course, but you see it mainly in children aged 10-15, and otherwise only in private, because anyone who keeps it up after that will be un…

There's obviously a scale of how things are at various workplaces, and how acceptable various things are in different cultures. I've worked at a gaming company in Europe before where among other things female team members told me they've been asked by someone "how it feels to have the biggest boobs in the team" when another female in the team left. The company later introduced an inclusivity effort and a code of cond…

There are a number of studies that show that implementing new guidelines / yearly rote training is about the least effective thing you can do to change corporate culture.

The most effective tends to be non-adversarial, regular peer meetings where actual discussions can be had.

And yet every enterprise I've ever worked at has the same canned training systems. Or implements them in response to an incident.

Re: Six Months at Riot Games

#170
I know my interview with Riot was more like a freshman college hazing. At the end they setup a 2nd call and I was like wtf. They said they were just testing me to see if I could handle the culture and that I passed so I can move on to the next interview. I told him to diaf and never contact me again.

I'm male, I can't even imagine what its like for Women.

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