darklajid

Another one from Singapore. I agree that the official reaction seems well handled!

(Not that there wasn't a slight panic and crazy hoarding stories and there certainly are flaws in company/building management policies, but .. that's not to blame on the government)

Similar/same experience here: Friends are in Europe, I'm in SEA / Singapore. We randomly have the robot voice or people cutting out and then start the 'switch region' dance. Which might fix the problem for a while, but messes with the latency quite a bit then.

I was tinkering with it recently. My problem was .. support.

After a lot of double-checking on my part, I was finally convinced that Cloud Run messed things up (in my case: A Content-Type header was changed from ThingsISend to text/html and broke every client). The issue tracker is hard to find and more or less abandoned, SO wasn't helpful (but had people that .. love Google Cloud Run and didn't believe me) and only after tweeting a bit someone looked into it.

The issue is fixed now, which is nice. The way to get there was ... questionable?

Sometimes Names and occupations are a weird (and amusing) mismatch.

Lester Freundlich - the name literally meaning 'Friendly' in German - having to be the ~bad guy~ in this context, going after a private person selling some map online..

Obviously this is all opinionated and YMMV etc.

> Facebook in comparison never had strangers piling on me telling me I am worthless and invalid based on my race and gender.

Uhm.. That seems to be just as prevalent on FB (or anywhere online) as far as I can tell.

As for Twitter vs. Facebook: I feel that Twitter is far less cluttered for me and "follow" (and unfollow) is a much better way to select my content then be"friend" (and then unfriend). On Twitter I just pick interesting accounts to read and now my feed is full of stuff that is largely interesting. On Facebook it's .. complicated (and I reduced my friend list to 2, because it wasn't worth the effort).

Instagram? That's just shallow/vain in every way and doesn't even compete IMHO - it's an entirely different beast (that I don't understand).

This is a signed die and has to have -1 on it somewhere..

> Perhaps you should, so you can be more informed on a position before posting opinions such as this. As evidenced by the above, you don't actually know what this protest is about, yet are trying to create comparisons that will mislead others that are uninformed.

Nonsense. I live in Singapore, have friends and coworkers in HK. This subject comes up on a near daily basis. On my Twitter feed I especially follow @Pinboard for a perspective on this, every day.

Basically you failed to read my sentence, THEN became condescending. I am aware of what lead to the protests, how the protests look like, I'm exposed to pro and contra opinions every day. Am I an expert? Certainly not. But I care and do think I'm largely aware of the events. I just effing don't want - you even quoted it, although you missed the point - ANY political agenda in game streams. Note the word "game" in there?

At no point have I shown any sort of disinterest in the situation in HK (or political situations anywhere), I merely expressed my strong preference to not cram them forcefully and unsupported into any game stream.

(I don't believe that there's any way to make a comparison about Saudi/Rape victims, but my "No" was certainly low effort. So was your reply above, honestly)

(Addendum while rereading before hitting reply: It seems you also believe that I think HK wants to leave China. While there is a minority that argues for that, I am aware that this isn't part of their demands. My comparisons were made based on the GPs "Free HK" - which my English parser equals with "Liberate HK" not "For a (more) free HK". Even if we only talk about giving regions substantially more authority/liberties, my argument still stands: It was that "Free HK" is actually quite a complex thing as far as I'm concerned)

> Well I am sorry for the people who live in that country.

And this, Hacker News, is why it's hard to argue on English platforms / on mostly American sites.

This poster, in a single reply, just showed extreme arrogance, perceived superiority and complete unawareness of cultural differences - because obviously anything other than what the US constitution says is inferior and needs to be pitied.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think you gave me the most pause in this argument so far.

I do think punishing the player itself, even in the original 12 months / 10k way before they relented, was .. acceptable? Linking to my earlier comparison with professional athletes: You can lose your title, be fined and be banned for behaving improperly. Which I think was the case here, completely ignoring what he was advocating.

You're bringing up good points about the rest of the disaster though. Unless they were secretly in on this (and all coverage I saw makes that highly unlikely), the casters are complete bystanders and not responsible in the slightest¹.

I won't weasel around and say "It wasn't _Blizzard_ directly who apologized" or stuff like that. The apology is - in my opinion - the worst part in all of this and the single part I find a little disgusting.

Ban/Fine the guy? Yup. Fire casters: That's stupid. Apologize to China: Ewww..

I guess what made me burn my karma in this thread is that so far I've seen a lot of discussions focus on "Freedom of Speech" (not applicable on a private platform, not a global/unified concept anyway) and actually .. supporting the gamer.

Player vs Blizzard: Both fucked this up. The former intentionally², the latter incompetently. I don't see why Blizzard alone gets the hate and is painted as the bad guy.

① One might mayyyybe wonder if the production team could've cut to a commercial, but again.. no use blaming other people.

② I've never watched that player myself, but I extend him the courtesy to believe that he knew he was doing something stupid/risky way in advance

> We can't know for sure from the outside, but context suggests 2 is more likely.

Can't it be .. both? And if we at least somewhat agree that this had to have consequences, why .. does it matter?

> For years American entertainment has been some of the most effective propaganda globally, now American citizens are indirectly starting to be exposed to Chinese propaganda (by avoiding content or topics) in American entertainment.

I'm not trying to be infuriating, but that seems something very American to worry about. As you write, American propaganda is huge worldwide (personally I cringe at - random examples - Independence Day speeches or Captain America). In addition, I don't quite understand how that is "propaganda" in the first place. Video games already tried to "censor" themselves before, to get around various gore acceptance level before for example. That's .. hardly propaganda. And if you build some erotic novel game that purposely avoids showing pubes and genitals to reach the Japanese market .. then I don't see censorship here either.

Now, I obviously don't deny that there IS censorship in general and around HK/TW specifically - I just feel the examples/comparisons aren't applicable?

> This is why I find this mess so fascinating

It certainly is interesting to observe, I agree.

> Context #1: there has been a years-long trend for Western entertainment media (movies, games) to cater to the Chinese market. This ranges from voluntary censorship that seems odd in the West (no skeletons?) to more sensitive topics like sexuality.

I .. take your word for it. I'm not sure what the "no skeletons?" references and I'd argue that sexuality is already a pretty weird thing if you - say - take the US and Europe (during the 2006 soccer championship US visitors got an "informational leaflet" that - among other things - said something along the lines of "On tv back home? Gore is fine, sex is bad. Here? Expect less gore, more nudity"). But again, without said context and without catching your references I .. can't really disagree.

> Context #2: the trade war and Hong Kong protests have brought a lot of attention to China in general. The Hong Kong protests seem to be particularly popular with younger people online.

Not sure how that's related to HK per se, but I agree that this was on the news a lot (I'm.. using a Huawei phone myself).

> Context #3: Blizzard's reaction seemed particularly swift and heavy-handed

Fair enough, that's true.

> Further, Blizzard's support for LGBTQ suggests that it's not just about political statements on the stream

I .. don't get this. What does LGBTQ have to do with .. anything? How does the fact that BLIZZARD can make public statements one way or another on BLIZZARD streams or elsewhere have anything to do with private unrelated individuals making their own loaded statements on BLIZZARD streams?

> Combine all that and Blizzard put themselves in an impossible situation with no good way forward.

I guess there's no debating this: They're in a bad spot and I don't know what they could/should do.

> My personal opinion: it probably was about China

I don't even disagree with this, I'm not thaaat naive. I assume it was mostly about China. My problem is that I still think that the guy was out of line and should be banned/punished for hijacking the event.

Pro-gamers often lament the fact that they aren't considered "athletes" in the general public, that people like to say things like "eSports aren't real sports" etc.

But in this case I feel this professional Hearthstone gamer got treated like an athlete - just not in the way he probably would've liked: If you're representing your sport, if you're on camera/in public, then you're not a private person and keep your private agenda to yourself. Otherwise there will be consequences for your career and your club/league/whatever association is relevant might remind you of that in fines/bans.

> But in the West it is expected that token political statements are to be allowed and protected.

Is that so? I could imagine a huuuge amount of political statements that are illegal in my home country, Germany. Since I was raised there these rules are ingrained in me: "Free Speech" is not a thing (if we compare it to the US) and - that's the important part - I don't DISAGREE with that.

> "Free HK" isn't a particularly complex political statement

Is it not? I truly, honestly, don't know how complex that is in the end, compared to - say - supporting Texas leving the US, Bavaria leaving Germany, Basque leaving Spain (note I'm not comparing these countries with China at all, I'm just wondering if a separation argument can be simple)

> and it is over a topic which Westerners think is unfairly suppressed.

I wasn't aware of that

> A similar comparison would be if Saudi Arabia had Blizzard ban someone for saying "Don't execute rape victims."

No.