The issue with this is, she is an HR person. She does not know much, if anything, about the work those in the production side of Blizzard actually do in a day to day basis. Ultimately it is the job managers + the HR personnel that hire in. Her only role is to ensure they hire more women & minorities. (Nothing wrong with doing this obviously, it just comes across as disingenuous with all that’s been happening at Blizzard in recent months.)
In essence, little to no impact will be made to the game with her presence. It is the leadership of production that would incur the greatest change.
If she is hiring people to assist her, then she would have hiring input. If they are hiring a server engineer, she would not be a decision maker.
This is true. It is more than “hiring a more diverse group”. The role has both a recruitment and hiring impact, but also a work culture impact for those already at work to ensure people have a decent work environment.
One way discussed earlier in this thread that someone in her position does is help with recruting more applications from additional resources. So instead of hiring streamers they know, or recruiting from X and Y university, they may do work programs or job fairs at additional universities. They may work with schools to get kids interested in the career so that there are lots of candidates. They may open in-house summer programs to a broader range of applicants, etc.
Once at work, there is a ton to address about workplace culture to just get folks to be professional and respect others. Also that with a broad workforce group, you will have lots of unique holidays, religions, cultural backgrounds. There are parents, there are people with medicial needs, there are people who do family care, there are all sorts who are fantastic and capable with a bit of flexibility. Understanding and tolerance is good for everyone.
Yep, and often make the news that follows corporate hiring.
This lady is very high up in ATVI, not at the individual game publishers or studios. She is not selecting the game devs. She is just making sure there are lots of qualified folks and they ALL get considered instead of buddies or pretty faces.
Those 10 people will go on to make the entire platform less hospitable to everyone else. So then people are less likely to join because that platform will disproportionately favor the 10 bullies who will create a negative net experience for every one person.
This might be a controversial take, but I think this should be normalized.
We are more than just dollar signs, we foster a community.
Seeing as how the default for Bully is - Anyone who may disagree with any statement I may make - this includes many people that do not qualify as a bully anywhere else.
Using the extreme example of what may constitute bullying does not grant you the right to eliminate differences in thought by branding people you don’t agree with as bullies.
If there is no limitation regarding how to quantify what is or is not considered bullying, you run the risk of using oppression as currency. Oh look, too late.
They can’t…which is why they bring in someone to oversee the process and make sure they’re not hiring only the white males they find to be “most qualified”.
There is nothing hypothetical about court filings and journalistic reporting. And some of the lazy claims here about “HoW aBoUt We HiRe ThE bEsT pErSoN” don’t even merit the descriptor of hypothetical.
No, he can’t realistically make his own social media platform in the sense of building competing one with anything other than a sliver of a chance at having any significance. Money is not the issue there.
Twitter essentially pioneered the service it provides, and became the dominant short-hand communication platform across the globe, but particularly in the west (weibo in china would be an example of a regional exception). The power of the network effect means nothing is going to realistically supplant Twitter in America absent a very unpredictable turn of events. (Those can happen, but you could be waiting 5, 10, 20 years for it, etc. - the reasonable prediction as we stand today is that Twitter remains on top for the foreseeable future.)
All major power centers (financial, cultural, political) are already on Twitter, use it to shift and mold actions and opinion, and for most topics you’re unlikely to run into censorship. Which is why people don’t leave it voluntarily almost ever - they might create an account on a second site, but Twitter is still the primary place to check for the most up-to-date discussion of most things.
For that same reason, it’s a very insidious platform, because the areas where it does engage in censorship (which it does in small increments) allow the people that run Twitter to subtly shift national discussion away from positions and opinions they disfavor. (Towards, of course, what are essentially the politics of the San Francisco bay area).
This is wrong. It’s like shutting down a public square to some disfavored people and saying, “well, they can still meet in some alleyway or something, there are free speech alternatives.” Twitter absolutely became the primary modern public square of our time. It’s kind of sad that it did, but it did. It is exercising a role and power that’s historically governmental in nature while getting away with being a company and ungoverned by the first amendment. Consumers wanting the modern public square combined with freedom of speech have no equivalent product selection, and realistically will not get one absent an intervention like Musks or some strong governmental action.
You either have Twitter, with the widest scope of reach, or you have the “free speech alternatives” with far less visibility, and therefore less relevance, to public discussion. (This is not to insult what those alternatives have built themselves, but no one thinks that Gab seriously influences national politics). A leftist, of course, is getting both benefits in full as far as they’re concerned - access to the widest network and freedom to say everything they want.
Hopefully Musk succeeds in the end, though the best outcome would be for modern legislation to classify tech companies reaching a dominant market share in certain digital services (communication, search, etc.) as something similar to public utilities and subject them to the same standards, by statute, as the first amendment does to the government. The government doesn’t have the will to do that sadly, and no one knows when or if they ever will. There isn’t (yet) an equivalent today to Teddy Roosevelt busting the trusts, but it’s far past time for legislation to be updated to deal with the tech companies, because early 20th century anti-trust laws weren’t designed to deal with it, as they were mostly focused on pricing rather than other uses of market power.
You’re confusing “free speech” with the “first amendment.” The two terms can be used interchangeably on many occasions, and sometimes people colloquially refer to free speech as “first amendment rights,” but the distinction matters if someone is trying to limit the principal of freedom of speech to the narrower use of that principal as expressed in the first amendment.
Freedom of speech is a broad principal, the first amendment is just a protection of that principal against one potentially malicious actor against it. For non-governmental actors against it, you rely on statutes to protect freedom of speech. (This is why, for instance, you have laws prohibiting employers from firing employees from discussion about work conditions or unionization - statutes protect those workers’ freedom of speech). California even has a statute to protect people from being fired for their political speech outside of work. It’s an old law, and of course today no one expects present-day California to enforce it equally, but the goal behind it was to protect freedom of speech from threats private employers might levy against certain political positions.
You’d be incorrect there, as twitter doesn’t care what political isle you lean towards it all just matters the wording you use or if you’re trying to spread harmful misinformation. There are plenty of left-leaning people that get removed because of their chosen wording, among many other things. I will also add those “Free speech alternatives” in fact, do not have “Free speech” as much as they LOVE to try to say so they pick and choose what they want on their platform just like anyone else.
the whole free speech thing is a red herring. Most people fall into their own narcissistic bias like everyone else. They don’t want free speech, they want their own echo chamber.
So much this…I observed this flaw in myself alot. I observed different opinions created a feeling of being threatened by others, which made me angry and uncomfortable.
Sure, it’s the same reason Altavista and Yahoosearch were never able to take the market from Google, why MySpace and Livejournal were never able to take the market from FaceBook, or why Ultima Online and EverQuest were never able to take the market from WoW…
Yeah, those damned censors won’t allow any fertile ground at all for productive discussions about things like violence against political rivals, or racism and hate speech. How can anyone accept a world where people try to shift the discussion away from equally valid talking points like these?
Only in very limited ways. In general, private entities establish their own rules for speech and behavior. We live in a free society, so rules that are too restrictive can drive away potential workers and/or customers in business, or drive away friends and contacts in private interactions.
As long as Twitter isn’t violating laws, like removing service on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability, genetic information, retaliation for engaging in Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) activity, marital status, political affiliation, and status as a parent, then they are free to place whatever limits they wish.
The reality is, Twitter is making sensible exclusions, based on violence, hate speech, and misinformation. It’s particularly damning to the people complaining about censorship that so much of their political beliefs are built on these reprehensible foundations. If their politics weren’t so awful they wouldn’t feel like their political affiliations were the reason their voices were being silenced.
This honestly just sounds like you’re trying to prove my point. You have to go to early years of these digital services exploding on the internet to find the dominant player supplanted. And the network effect also involves a factor of “critical mass” in network size. (A bigger network provides a small advantage until you reach a certain tipping point, when it provides a massive advantage that guarantees long term market dominance absent some catastrophic collapse). It applies much less to MMO gaming (a niche demographic) than something serious like Twitter’s societal role, but certainly the “network effect” is easy to point to even in that niche (if in a lesser way). WoW supplanted Everquest back around 2005. The network effect was a major asset to WoW staying on top even when it was not putting out a good product.
A “network effect” market is not like a normal competitive market where if you invent a better product than anyone else you’re likely to rise to the top. An inferior product can remain on top year after year after year, because it’s simply where everyone already is. Doesn’t mean it can’t ever fall, just that you shouldn’t expect it to fall.
Of course, my position is that something like Twitter should be regulated similar to a public utility based on its dominant share of public participation. That allows for the rare and unlikely (but not impossible) possibility it is supplanted by another service. In general, because the potential of such a service is defined by the size of the network, and people will flock to the dominant player and stick with it precisely because it’s already dominant, it’s essentially a service where you can always assume the top player is a very dominant top company, not a slightly dominant company at the top of a big pack (like a highly competitive market where you’ve got say 20 major market players with each of them fighting for a small portion).
We’re all used to how people who support a system of censorship describe the benefits of censorship. How those terms are defined is of course a spiraling eternal semantic debate, but what qualifies as “hate speech” to someone at Twitter HQ in San Francisco may not match much of the country.
Regardless, we have centuries of law giving well thought out guidance to “freedom of speech” in first amendment law precedent. The first amendment, and case law surrounding it, doesn’t govern these companies, but provides the right reference point for drafting any statutes to govern them.
Indeed, and the argument is that Twitter’s significance to political speech in society has long since crossed the line where it justifies joining that class of “limited ways” that freedom of speech should be statutorily protected.
And a free society should of course be vigilant that a single private company, or group of coordinated companies as a trust, does not amass so much power as to exercise power historically only wielded by governments without the same accountability that the government would have.
We all know that right now, in this year, Twitter is the modern public square. Statutes should be enacted to reflect that. But, until you have a government that will do that, society is relegated to depending on extremely unlikely, massive private interventions. What Elon Musk is doing is exactly that kind of very rare, hard to predict event, unlikely to succeed, but fun to hear about and certainly an improvement over the status quo if it does succeed.
Then you’re not understanding. I went to the early years to demonstrate that pioneering and controlling the dominant market doesn’t guarantee dominance in perpetuity. Your entire premise is flawed by the first 3 examples that came to my mind without even researching what I’m sure would be many more examples.
And your position is wrong because Twitter isn’t a public utility and doesn’t even remotely function like one. It is not critical infrastructure, even if many people find it a convenient way to communicate.
Only if you count geographical area when you’re talking about “much of the country”. The vast majority of Americans know what hate speech is and don’t condone it. When you disqualify the people who feel that hate speech is acceptable, you’ll find much more agreement about what it is from the rest of country, even if there are some small scale disagreements.
And the argument is wrong. It is indefensible to claim that providing a forum obligates the provider to broadcast someone’s words in defiance of their own standards, provided those standards are legal. Doubly indefensible if those words come from someone who isn’t even paying for the service. It’s triply indefensible if you ever preach about the free market and limited government interference, which represents an enormous percentage of the group complaining about censorship.
And a free society has the ability to refuse to give revenue to any a single company that misuses that power, which is the necessary check against it. Unless you’re trying to claim that the Twitter police will arrest people for choosing to replace Twitter with another service, or the Twitter military will impose martial law on the country if they don’t get in line. You know, the types of tools historically wielded by governments to insure that they can maintain their power in the face of a populace that no longer wants them to have it.
No, we don’t all “know” that. You want to present it this way to pretend that your arguments have merit. There are more media outlets than there have ever been, and even the most illegitimate ones carry more weight than a tweet.
And even if you think otherwise, you’re as free to ignore tweets from people you disagree with as people were to ignore loudmouths in the public square in years past.
Your proposal for statutes is all a thinly veiled effort to mandate equal time, in defiance of the community standard, for lies, violence, and hate, but with a pretty package of claims of censorship and free speech rights. The massive private interventions necessary are unlikely because most of the country recognizes that the policies Twitter and other social media companies use on their own forums are generally reasonable.
That the lunatic fringe is so opposed to these policies is a good thing because it means they’re working.
I like that “free speech” advocates always try to call out Twitter for censorship, but they always side step and never acknowledge just why people get banned from twitter.
