
Blizzard employees strongly support punishing HK advocate, censorship – survey - Kroeler
https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2019/10/blizzard-hong-kong-protest-hearthstone-blind-app.html
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rossdavidh
This has to be one of the less plausible ways of getting a representative
sample that I can think of. Even among the Blizzard employees who happen to be
on Blind, most did not answer. So, even if we assume that Blind has a
representative sample of Blizzard employees (which seems implausible), the
real approval rate could be anywhere from (430+45)/500=95%, or as low as
(45/500)=9%. We don't know if those Blizzard employees in favor of the
punishment would be more or less likely to respond than others, but it seems
unlikely that it would be unrelated.

Better claim would be, "Blizzard employees' support for punishment of HK
advocate between 9% and 95%". Except, given that Blind's 500 Blizzard
employees are probably NOT representative, it might be broader than that.

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diziet
I think your math is off - with a 99% confidence interval, on a population of
4,700 employees of Blizzard a sampling of 60 people with a 64.27% approval
rate gives us a confidence interval of +-16%~. At 95% confidence, the interval
shrinks to 12%~

~~~
chongli
You can’t construct that confidence interval unless you know the sample was
selected randomly among all Blizzard employees. If the sample is self selected
then you don’t have anything at all, really the data is useless.

In general, there is a lot of pressure for employees to conform to company
decisions, regardless of their actual opinion, because their job is on the
line. It does not matter that this “Blind” service purports to be anonymous.
People will still demonstrate a bias because they have no guarantee that their
communications are not being monitored and ultimately they have nothing to
gain by giving their honest opinion.

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kirbs
Only 70 employees took this survey! From the article:

> About 500 Blizzard employees are members of Blind's community for the
> company, Blind co-founder Kyum Kim tells me. Of that 500, fifty to seventy
> Blizzard employees took the two question survey, along with hundreds of
> staffers from many other tech companies -- raw data on the right.

This is less than 1% of Blizzard's workforce. Also from the article:

> To be sure, this survey attracted only 50-70 Blizzard employee respondents,
> a small sample from a total staff count of about 4,700 people.

Even if all 500 Blizzard employees on Blind responded in the same proportions
it would _still_ be less than a quarter of the company.

~~~
icebraining
1% is not that low, a typical poll has much less than that. E.g. a Gallup poll
generally interviews about 1000 individuals to represent the whole of the US.

Selection bias is a much larger problem here.

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morpheuskafka
Because it wouldn't be economical to hire hundreds of thousands of call takers
to reach everyone in the US in a single week.

There's no reason a company could not send out a one-question survey link to
all of it's employees with one click if they wanted to get reliable data.

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cjbprime
> Asked, "Should Blizzard reverse its banning of the Hearthstone player?",
> only 36% of Blizzard employees surveyed responded Yes. However, a solid
> majority of 64% opposed the reversal.

I think this question misses the point a bit. Few people think there should be
literally no punishment for disrupting a tournament stream with a political
message. There is a rule against that, it's in the rulebook, you should
probably get a warning and then a disqualification/ban.

People object because the punishments were extremely severe (clawing back
already-won prize money, firing commentators who ostensibly had no idea this
was about to happen to them), to the point of seeming like they were dictated
to Blizzard by China.

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
> There is a rule against that

There is a vague and generic rule designed to let Blizzard slap people who
make them look bad with penalties. Nothing like "no politics".

~~~
cjbprime
Fair enough, we could restate it, then: it would be generally unobjectionable
to create and enforce a rule against disrupting tournament coverage with
political speech.

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Fnoord
All speech is related to politics though. There is no such thing as
"apolitical speech".

As for the survey, it shows also something else: company loyalty.

Also, they called it Activision Blizzard; not Blizzard. So they included
Activision employees in the survey?

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mreome
> "Blind allows employees at companies to share their opinion anonymously,
> which means they can share their honest opinions without fear of judgment,"
> as Kyum Kim puts it. Furthermore, Blind users can only join its Blizzard
> community if they create an account through their company e-mail.

Those two statements are at odds. Any large company (especially in a technical
industry) is going to monitor internet usage and retain e-mail/internet logs,
or at least have the capability to do so. Anyone with a technical background
is going to understand that using their employer's infrastructure to verify is
going to directly link their real/work identity with their Blind account. Even
if you were to trust that Blind would not provide their information to 3rd
parties you would still have to assume that the company could still easily
find out _who_ had answered questions (but maybe not how they answered).
Depending on how the publicly reported results were skewed, and how many
people responded, that could still very easily lead to someone being directly
identified or at least flagged by their employer.

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wutbrodo
> Even if you were to trust that Blind would not provide their information to
> 3rd parties

This is literally 100% of Blind's value prop. It's a fairly reasonable
assumption, especially when balanced against behavior your employer may not
like but wouldn't be super upset about (eg sharing constructive criticism vs
hinting at confidential information).

I've used Blind, mostly read-only, since Google spoiled me by getting me used
to an incredibly robust internal culture of open discussion (this was several
years ago; I can't speak to the Google of today), and I don't really have any
concerns at all about being tied to my real identity.

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mike_d
In my experience Blind has always been a perfect example of the "Greater
Internet Fuckwad Theory" ([https://www.penny-
arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19](https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19)).

Given total anonymity I see a lot more toxic culture and behavior on Blind
than I do in the workplace. I also know people tend to troll a lot there too.

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inlined
Blind has a reputation for being skewed towards counter-culture (e.g. angry,
anti-pc, anti company creeds). Is this actually supported by data? E.g. the
same anonymous survey on Blind and elsewhere?

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imron
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends
on his not understanding it.”

~~~
hestipod
What I don't understand is how those who choose profits over people, or do
other such provably horrible things, can then stand up and say they are not
doing said thing everyone can see and record them doing. I don't understand
what they expect the lies to accomplish over just saying nothing. Your actions
prove your character, not words. Do they think people don't notice? Do they
really think denial makes the lie a truth or makes it ok? I'd be eaten up
inside with anxiety and stress if I did something like that as my conscience
chewed at me. Do they not have these feelings?

* I wish people who downvoted would have to put their name with the downvote and explain why. The hit and run "wrong" unaccountable nature of them in any forum bothers me. It's made it too easy for people to just jab at you without consequence and treats people like they aren't other people but rather enemies to bury in grey.

~~~
shrimp_emoji
>I'd be eaten up inside with anxiety and stress if I did something like that
as my conscience chewed at me. Do they not have these feelings?

Those feelings are easy to get over; just be a hard determinist who hates
authoritarian regimes and is a "good person" but lives interdependently with
others in a system designed to serve Moloch AND WHICH ON _AVERAGE_ is pretty
ok or getting better and beyond your control in the meantime anyway. :)

>I wish people who downvoted would have to put their name with the downvote
and explain why. The hit and run "wrong" unaccountable nature of them in any
forum bothers me. It's made it too easy for people to just jab at you without
consequence and treats people like they aren't other people but rather enemies
to bury in grey.

Comment voting and its consequences have been a disaster for online discourse.
uwu

It treats people's _ideas_ like they're a thing you can counter with a click
and don't have to engage with. Without it, the mob must at least spam half-
thought-out, rash rebuttals, and these can hilariously backfire.

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nacho2sweet
"To be sure, this survey attracted only 50-70 Blizzard employee respondents, a
small sample from a total staff count of about 4,700 people." oh ok...

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outworlder
> And because of how Blind works, the survey likely reflects true staff
> sentiment.

What? This is a bunch of nonsense.

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ping_pong
To think that someone would quote a Blind survey is actually hilarious. I've
never run across a more toxic online environment than Blind, it's just troll
vs troll on there and anyone that is there for honest discussion is turned off
by the toxicity pretty quickly.

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jchw
Important to note that its a relatively low sample size, and there’s definite
selection bias to what kinds of people go on Blind. I wouldn’t be _that_
surprised though, if this ended up being true. Everyone’s the hero of their
own story I guess.

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codezero
This seems plausible, it’s my understanding that a huge number of original and
long term employees left the company in the past year or two. The prospects of
a censored gravy train in China make ones personal financial prospects look
good.

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president
Would have been better if they had included a qualitative response to
understand why they chose 'yes' or 'no'. I want to believe most people are
just not well-informed on the whole issue.

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Gibbon1
I when I put myself in a Blizzard employees shoes I think people answering yes
are going to end up in the spreadsheet of people to let go during the next
round of layoffs.

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ma2rten
Blind is anonymous.

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uwuhn
Don't they have your company email address?

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outworlder
> Don't they have your company email address?

They do. And we have to trust them that they have only used this information
during initial verification and everything is anonymized. And that they
haven't and won't ever be compelled by any entity to reveal any identifying
information that they may have.

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natch
It would help (but only a little) to know whether these users of Blind were
signed up in the past couple weeks following recent events, or somewhat before
that.

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fooker
1% isn't that small a sample here, this is rather significant statistically.

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seattle_spring
Except Blind self-selects only the most disgruntled of employees.

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fooker
Wouldn't employees against this be equally disgruntled?

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gttalbot
AstroTurf much?

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cryptica
I don't understand what the Hong Kong fuss is about. The first time I read
about it, my initial understanding was that HK didn't want to give China the
power to extradite suspected criminals from HK back to the mainland.

I kind of understand China's position on this because Hong Kong has probably
become somewhat of a haven for white-collar criminals who fled from China to
escape Chinese prosecution.

I don't understand why so many people are protesting against this bill
specifically. The protests seem to mostly serve a small number of elite white-
collar fugitives. Maybe the bill needs to be refined further so that the
intent is more clear?

~~~
kelnos
People in HK are afraid that the extradition powers will be used by China to
remove political dissidents from HK and "disappear" them. I think it's a
reasonable fear.

