8 ms·

Blizzard employees strongly support punishing HK advocate, censorship – survey

87 points by Kroeler 7y ago

president 7y ago
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.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  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.
  - ma2rten 7y ago
    Blind is anonymous.
    - jadeddrag 7y ago
      Not in China.
      - outworlder 7y ago
        Is it even available there? Why would anyone dare to use it?
    - uwuhn 7y ago
      Don't they have your company email address?
      - outworlder 7y ago
        > 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.
nacho2sweet 7y ago
"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...
jchw 7y ago
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.
kirbs 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - kirbs 7y ago
    An important point - at least Gallup publishes some details on its methodologies.
  - morpheuskafka 7y ago
    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.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  How do they know these weren't 499 shills claiming to be employees?
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    Blind requires verification with a work email.
inlined 7y ago
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?
fooker 7y ago
1% isn't that small a sample here, this is rather significant statistically.
- uoaei 7y ago
  Surveys always have a self-selection bias. It's entirely possible people were worried about retaliation if they said anything different.
- seattle_spring 7y ago
  Except Blind self-selects only the most disgruntled of employees.
  - fooker 7y ago
    Wouldn't employees against this be equally disgruntled?
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  Not even close. 1% of the company, selected not randomly, not only by who chooses to use Blind, but by employees on Blind who choose to respond to the survey about this issue.
- msbarnett 7y ago
  The 1% is a self-selecting sample (people who signed up for Blind, and voluntarily chose to respond to the survey after seeing it), not a random sample. That leads to all kinds of bias issues that make it a pretty poor sample to extrapolate from.
mreome 7y ago
> "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.
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  > 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.
cjbprime 7y ago
> 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.
- tinco 7y ago
  Exactly, and because the Blizzard (and Riot) employees are far more exposed to this nuance because it is actually their colleagues making this argument of course their poll is going to reflect that.
- phire 7y ago
  The two questions seem designed to try and get a certain answer. A better question would be: "Did Blizzard make a mistake with how they handled this sitatuion?"
- tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
  > 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 7y ago
    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.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      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?
gttalbot 7y ago
AstroTurf much?
imron 7y ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- sexy_seedbox 7y ago
  Qing James.
- hestipod 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    >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.
rossdavidh 7y ago
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.
- ladberg 7y ago
  Why wouldn't the employees on Blind not be representative? Considering how every other company voted the other way, I don't don't see why Blizzard would be the only biased one.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    I'm on my company's Blind, and it is vastly different than the company as a whole. It's full of alt-righters, misogynists, xenophobes, transphobes, and other minority viewpoints (within the tech world) that are simply not said out loud at work (or with your name attached online). It drives most reasonable people away to the point that if you tried to use Blind to get an idea of the average viewpoint of employees of the company, you'd be very very off.
    - ninth_ant 7y ago
      But even you are implicitly making the case that your cohort of Blind users is likely the same as in others. To whatever degree that Blind attracts a biased sample within a company, that is true everywhere and even so Blizzards results are a strong outlier. Your excuse would only be plausible if the Blind participation bias only affected Blizzard in some way.
outworlder 7y ago
> And because of how Blind works, the survey likely reflects true staff sentiment. What? This is a bunch of nonsense.
codezero 7y ago
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.
mike_d 7y ago
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.
ping_pong 7y ago
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.
cryptica 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
- BubRoss 7y ago
  That's not what it is about. China would have the ability to accuse and extradite anyone they wanted.
natch 7y ago
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.

87 points by Kroeler 7y ago

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.

Gibbon1 7y ago
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.
- ma2rten 7y ago
  Blind is anonymous.
  - jadeddrag 7y ago
    Not in China.
    - outworlder 7y ago
      Is it even available there? Why would anyone dare to use it?
  - uwuhn 7y ago
    Don't they have your company email address?
    - outworlder 7y ago
      > 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.

nacho2sweet 7y ago

"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...

jchw 7y ago

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.

kirbs 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- kirbs 7y ago
  An important point - at least Gallup publishes some details on its methodologies.
- morpheuskafka 7y ago
  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.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
How do they know these weren't 499 shills claiming to be employees?
- wutbrodo 7y ago
  Blind requires verification with a work email.

inlined 7y ago

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?

fooker 7y ago

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

uoaei 7y ago
Surveys always have a self-selection bias. It's entirely possible people were worried about retaliation if they said anything different.
seattle_spring 7y ago
Except Blind self-selects only the most disgruntled of employees.
- fooker 7y ago
  Wouldn't employees against this be equally disgruntled?
wutbrodo 7y ago
Not even close. 1% of the company, selected not randomly, not only by who chooses to use Blind, but by employees on Blind who choose to respond to the survey about this issue.
msbarnett 7y ago
The 1% is a self-selecting sample (people who signed up for Blind, and voluntarily chose to respond to the survey after seeing it), not a random sample. That leads to all kinds of bias issues that make it a pretty poor sample to extrapolate from.

mreome 7y ago

> "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.

wutbrodo 7y ago
> 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.

cjbprime 7y ago

> 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.

tinco 7y ago
Exactly, and because the Blizzard (and Riot) employees are far more exposed to this nuance because it is actually their colleagues making this argument of course their poll is going to reflect that.
phire 7y ago
The two questions seem designed to try and get a certain answer. A better question would be: "Did Blizzard make a mistake with how they handled this sitatuion?"
tgsovlerkhgsel 7y ago
> 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 7y ago
  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.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    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?

gttalbot 7y ago

AstroTurf much?

imron 7y ago

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

sexy_seedbox 7y ago
Qing James.
hestipod 7y ago
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 7y ago
  >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.

rossdavidh 7y ago

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.

ladberg 7y ago
Why wouldn't the employees on Blind not be representative? Considering how every other company voted the other way, I don't don't see why Blizzard would be the only biased one.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  I'm on my company's Blind, and it is vastly different than the company as a whole. It's full of alt-righters, misogynists, xenophobes, transphobes, and other minority viewpoints (within the tech world) that are simply not said out loud at work (or with your name attached online). It drives most reasonable people away to the point that if you tried to use Blind to get an idea of the average viewpoint of employees of the company, you'd be very very off.
  - ninth_ant 7y ago
    But even you are implicitly making the case that your cohort of Blind users is likely the same as in others. To whatever degree that Blind attracts a biased sample within a company, that is true everywhere and even so Blizzards results are a strong outlier. Your excuse would only be plausible if the Blind participation bias only affected Blizzard in some way.

outworlder 7y ago

> And because of how Blind works, the survey likely reflects true staff sentiment. What? This is a bunch of nonsense.

codezero 7y ago

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.

mike_d 7y ago

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.

ping_pong 7y ago

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.

cryptica 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
BubRoss 7y ago
That's not what it is about. China would have the ability to accuse and extradite anyone they wanted.

natch 7y ago

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.