Blizzard employees strongly support punishing HK advocate, censorship – survey | Hacker News Reader

Blizzard employees strongly support punishing HK advocate, censorship – survey

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87 pointsKroeler60 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

The point I'm making is that Blind is likely not representative of the company at large at all, which is highly relevant here.

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%~

> with a 99% confidence interval

Confidence intervals assume a random sample. This wasn’t a random sample.

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.

I think you may need to revisit your assumption that Blizzard employees are pro-Hong Kong. Why do you think that Blizzard as a company, and Blizzard as a cohort of people, wouldn’t be pro-China?

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.

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.

An important point - at least Gallup publishes some details on its methodologies.

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.

How do they know these weren't 499 shills claiming to be employees?

Blind requires verification with a work email.

> Blind requires verification with a work email.

Thankfully corporations are unable to control their own email addresses, right?

Huh? Is your suggestion that these are not employees, but "people paid by a company to perform work for them"?

I suppose the FTE/contractor distinction is relevant here, but otherwise I don't get your point

I think the suggestion is that they may not be individual employees stating their personal opinion, but accounts created by even just one employee (who can create multiple accounts) under company direction.

Which then introduces some doubt that this is truly anonymous. In other words, if the respondents feel that there's a chance that their answers could be linked back to themselves as employees, they're probably more likely to toe the company line.

70 people polled out of a population of 4700 would have a 12% margin of error at a 95% confidence level, if it was a random sample. 500 people polled lowers that to about 4%.

If Blizzard were a lot bigger--say 100k people, a random poll of 70 would still be 12% and a random poll of 500 would still be 4%. You can play around with the numbers here [1].

The margin of error on a poll, if the population is large compared to the sample size, depends mostly only on the absolute sample size, not on how big a fraction of the population is sampled.

The flaws in this poll are how the sample was selected, not the size of the sample. It's not a random sample.

[1] https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/margin-of-error-calculator/

> if it was a random sample

And here lies the problem. How do we know that those people were not ahem, "selected"?

Well they almost certainly weren't selected. But there might be latent correlational factors that cause HK views to correlate with blind-membership.

They would still need to be willing to answer the survey. I have ignored plenty of Blind polls/surveys in my time there.

> 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.

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.

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?"

> 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".

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.

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?

> "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.

> 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.

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).

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.

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?

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

Qing James.

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.

>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.

"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...

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

What? This is a bunch of nonsense.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Blind is anonymous.

Not in China.

Is it even available there? Why would anyone dare to use it?

Don't they have your company email address?

> 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.

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.

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

Surveys always have a self-selection bias. It's entirely possible people were worried about retaliation if they said anything different.

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

Wouldn't employees against this be equally disgruntled?

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.

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.

AstroTurf much?

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?

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.

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

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