Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

So a company does a shit move and you want to take it out on kids?

Doxing is never the answer. The answer is: stop using products from shit companies.

Morally wrong, but technically not wrong. Many a dumb law was only changed after some politician ran afoul of it.

If you're going to take "direct action" you should probably try to keep it fitting to the issue at hand. Swatting someone because they are in charge of something you don't like won't make your cause any more likeable to most observers.

Yes, because beating someone for doing or thinking something is a proven way of making them stop doing or thinking that thing.

In reality, what will happen is swatters will get caught, tried and put into prison. As they should be. What you're proposing is anathema to civilization.

In theory. In practice you can only act like a bully like that when you are already on the side with much more power. Repeatedly swatting (or whatever, doesn't have to be swatting) people richer and more powerful than you will just get them to use their power to make the problem go away (maybe by leaning on politicians to lean on police to not respond so over the top to unsubstantiated calls or to create harsh punishments for the callers).

In a situation like this (i.e. small minority who care vs small group with power who don't) you need to either convince the people with the power (the CEOs and execs you initially referred to) to see your point of view or convince the apathetic masses to take your side. In either case you need to be persuasive or at the very least not acting in a manner that makes you hard to sympathize with (e.g. swatting people).

Now, if you were already in power (say for example, you were the government) then you could act like a bully and kick down people's door, shoot their dogs, etc. But do that will make the targets and people like them resent you and if you do it too much or to too powerful people/groups you will either find yourself voted out or lined up and shot (depending on the power transition mechanism of the government in question).

TL;DR affecting change is much more nuanced and complicated than just being a thorn in the side of the people you don't like.

Historically very few swatters have been caught and convicted. Not unsurprising given how easy it is to conceal the source of a phone call on the internet.

E: throttled and can’t reply below

I don’t think you understand how swatting works, the only way you’re too high profile is if you live in the white house.

That may change if the victim is high-profile. I'm also doubting the probability of a successful swatting of a high-profile target.

>Yes, because beating someone for doing or thinking something is a proven way of making them stop doing or thinking that thing.

It is, coercion works. There are situations where it doesn't, but this certainly isn't one of them.

>In theory. In practice you can only act like a bully like that when you are already on the side with much more power. Repeatedly swatting (or whatever, doesn't have to be swatting) people richer and more powerful than you will just get them to use their power to make the problem go away (maybe by leaning on politicians to lean on police to not respond so over the top to unsubstantiated calls or to create harsh punishments for the callers).

They'll only be able to keep the police from responding at their home and office, anything beyond that will be difficult and require significant constant effort to arrange. And besides, it's not enough to just coordinate this with the local police, you'll also need to talk to various state agencies, sheriffs and so on.

A bomb threat will take down a plane, a single individual targeting you can permanently prevent you from flying commercial. A single individual submitting online visa applications with threats can make any kind of border crossings extraordinarily difficult too.

There's no end to the awful things a person can remotely do to you if they know who you are, being a powerful executive just leaves you much more exposed.

You're missing the bigger picture. You're debating on basically becoming a terrorist. Which in small isolated incidents might be shown to work, but then the institutional response happens. For example, look at the middle East, they can do a few attacks but when it gets too big the UN or US or whatever comes in with huge armies and destroys the country the terrorists were trying to fight for. Not good.

In this case if you try to commit domestic terrorism here, it may initially be successful, but then the institutional powers will respond by passing laws and turning the suspicion on their own citizens making life shittier for everyone here.

So for the love of God, please don't try to seat powerful people (or anyone at all).

> You're debating on basically becoming a terrorist

While on some technical level you may be correct, I think it is intellectual dishonesty to compare the targeted activism I'm suggesting to the indiscriminate violent attacks typically associated with terrorism.

I'm certainly not advocating that anyone fly a plane into a building, that doesn't help anyone.

Please don't feed egregious comments by replying. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Do this instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag.