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Comment by ImaCake | Hacker News Reader

Link to the draft law is below [0].

Quoted from that page:

>The code also includes a set of ‘minimum standards’ for:

>providing advance notice of changes to algorithmic ranking and presentation of news; appropriately recognising original news content; and

>providing information about how and when Google and Facebook make available user data collected through users’ interactions with news content.

This sounds great to me. Australia has a history of producing consumer friendly laws (although I am sure we have our share of bad laws on this), and I consider google to be working against my personal interests, so I think this law is probably good (for consumers and news media, but not google/facebook).

0. https://www.accc.gov.au/focus-areas/digital-platforms/draft-...

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> This sounds great to me

Keep in mind, this is not motivated by your interests and has nothing in it that is there to help them. It's based on an a priori assumption that old media is good for consumers interests and all of the benefits it provides are directed to a newly invented category of "registered news businesses" which will have special rules. So no, you're not going to find out changes to algorithmic ranking in advance, nor will you get information about how and when Google collect information on you. It'll be provided to Rupert Murdoch, but not you nor anyone who doesn't qualify as a large media conglomerate.

Look, I'm not going to deny that this is obviously motivated by News Corp and Fairfax lobbyists.

However, the ACCC is legitimately one of the really brilliant government agencies here in Australia -- our consumer protection laws are actually designed around protecting consumers interests and I would argue is firmly on the list of positives when taking stock of the pros and cons of living here.

The ACCC is great. (I'm Australian, and think it's a awesome example of a regulator with real teeth)

But this makes no sense! Why should Google be forced to pay News Corp to display its headlines, when other smaller companies have to pay for ads for to get the same exposure?

It’s worth noting that, while the ACCC did recommend “requiring designated digital platforms to each provide the Australian Communications and Media Authority with codes to address the imbalance in the bargaining relationship between these platforms and news media businesses and recognise the need for value sharing and monetisation of content” [1], the “mandatory bargaining code” policy resulted from a more recent and specific direction from the government [2].

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/holistic-dynamic-refor...

[2] https://ministers.treasury.gov.au/ministers/josh-frydenberg-...

AFAIK you're missing a crucial point - they're trying to require G/FB to pay out billions to old (read: dying) media publications, which will crush small publications. On the Open Web, ABC News should get the exact same treatment at JoeBloggsYT2020.

Murdoch's News Corporation and the currently incumbent Liberal party are very cosy with one another, so it's not surprising the government is legislating to prop them up financially. It's beneficial to consumers to have a well funded fourth estate, however I doubt this is being done out of public interest.

God forbid if Sky News corners a prominent real estate in my Youtube results, they are already atrocious and have insufferable comments.

Sky News is almost more virulently ignorant and hateful than Fox News. I'm shocked Australia - a generally 'nice' country - is capable of producing something like this.

Australia is 'nice' when the powerful are winning all their arguments.

Terrorism, climate change, the challenge to single-narrative media, gay marriage, and a number of other examples of recent societal change are shifting the ground underneath the powerful, and they're not winning 'naturally' as often as they'd like, so they're resolving to win 'unnaturally', which very quickly degenerates from a position of 'nice'.

Sky News is what it is because of chasing popularity. Unfortunately it has a suitably sized audience to maintain it's virulently ignorant and hateful narratives. It's representative of a distilled version of a Australia's hopes and dreams for the future. Oh so sadly.

Australia ain't a nice country. We moved away partially because of rampant racism.

You do realise both Sky News and Fox are owned by Murdoch right?

Its all the same shit.

Our media here is a joke, even our govt funded "for the people" news org is massive biased toward the liberal party.

The ABC (our government funded "for the people" service) only changed their tune, a bit, since the libs threatened, and followed through with, budget cuts. Oh, and the unprecedented event of Prime Minister Turnbull ringing the head of the ABC to complain about an article that was eventually found to be primarily based on sound economics. (yes, Australia's leadership are that petty).

> It's beneficial to consumers to have a well funded fourth estate

Fine. Have the government pay subsidies. It's not Google's duty to fund the newspaper industry.

> On the Open Web, ABC News should get the exact same treatment at JoeBloggsYT2020.

I legitimately don't understand this point of view. Original reporting of the kind that keeps politicians and corporations in line costs money; investigative journalists aren't cheap. What YouTuber gives you this kind of depth? Will the world be a better place without the Fourth Estate?

Sure, this is a legitimate argument.

But then why wouldn't the money go to fund the AP Press Pool in Canberra which shutdown recently because of lack of funding[1], or to the ABC or SBS or other public journalism?

Instead it goes directly to the big publishers who cut journalists while increasing the salary of people like Andrew Bolt (who is so far removed from a journalist it is objectionable).

[1] https://apnews.com/c9d2809aaa0e8fa47c629723444d7b51

Your response is unrelated to what I was disagreeing with.

My underlying argument is that a strong free press must be maintained and that the reductionist argument that legitimate news sources and JoeRandomYouTuber should be treated identically is naive at best.

> Instead it goes directly to the big publishers who cut journalists while increasing the salary of people like Andrew Bolt (who is so far removed from a journalist it is objectionable).

The relationship between the rise of populist/sensationalist media and that of the Internet/social media/Google is inextricably linked. Traditional news sources found their revenue declining and so chased whatever attracted consumers, including sensationalist cretins like Bolt. Google should accept responsibility for this.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that the ACCC's proposal is the perfect solution to the underlying problem, but the status quo does need to change. At least they're doing something.

> Your response is unrelated to what I was disagreeing with.

Well the flow of money is the source of pretty key in enabling a strong, free press.

> My underlying argument is that a strong free press must be maintained and that the reductionist argument that legitimate news sources and JoeRandomYouTuber should be treated identically is naive at best.

Sure.

So there should be some kind of non-discriminatory rules that allow new players to find a voice as well as maintaining credible news sources.

> Traditional news sources found their revenue declining and so chased whatever attracted consumers, including sensationalist cretins like Bolt. Google should accept responsibility for this.

Well I agree that the news ecosystem has changed, and I agree that a strong and free press has value.

> At least they're doing something.

See I don't see this as a good thing at all. I see this as making the problem worse by funding players who are some of the worse examples.

That's my main problem with it. Extend those minimum standards for everyone regardless of revenue and other selective filters.

Can someone explain what this means?

> providing information about how and when Google and Facebook make available user data collected through users’ interactions with news content.

Is it saying google or facebook need to tell news publication about when/which users are accessing thier content?

It is explained in the ACCC concepts paper [1] under the heading “Sharing of user data.” The idea is that both news organisations and digital platforms make money from targeted advertising, but digital platforms have access to more data, and thus an advantage at the negotiating table.

[1] https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/ACCC%20-%20Mandatory%20...

This reads to me more as if though G/FB have to tell news organizations what data is being collected, rather than disclosing the actual data.

A quote from the Q&A seems to clarify:

> give news media businesses clear information about the nature and availability of user data collected through users’ interactions with news on their services;

Looking at news.google.com, 100% of the first few pages is from those old, dying media publications. The news displayed by Google is not from JoeBloggsYT2020. It's not even close.

As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience.

You don't have to take my word for it though, you can opt-out of personalization on Google here: https://myactivity.google.com/activitycontrols

Try it for a month and see if you prefer it.

Personally, I don't like personalization.

I had a friend in middle school who was into rabbits for about a year. For the next several years, she got tons and tons of random rabbit stuff from people she knew who didn't know what else to buy her.

That's what personalization feels like to me. I can never find what I'm looking for because the algorithm is trying to pin me down into a category it thinks it understands, and those categories are always the wrong model of how I search.

The experience is much better when I use services that don't personalize.

Also you can't turn off personalization on Google unless you sign in. If you don't sign in, it still personalizes and there's nothing you can do about it.

There's a bunch of anecdotal stories about personalization goes wrong, but I don't see how any of that is a strong enough point. Should you be equally given news about every local news from every city in the world? Should be equally given news about every sport and sport team? What if you don't even like any sports?

Does personalization sometimes go overboard temporarily? Sure. But there's more and more levers to try and fix it. Generally you can mention you're not interested in a specific topic, and while it's not foolproof nor instant, it's still overall much better than getting complete random news.

I currently get plenty of cool articles about fairly niche things that I'm into and don't expect any other "average" person to ever get, such as Python news, animal crossing tips, indie game releases or updates on my favorite TV shows.

Again once in a while I'll get updates for a show I was just looking for but have no interest in, but that's honestly a much smaller price to pay than having zero personalization.

Yes what you describe is what I want. When I search I don't want my search influenced by search terms that are invisible to me and that I can't influence.

If I want to know about a particular sports team or niche, I will either include that search term, or I will subscribe to a pubsub feed for information about that topic. That way I can unsubscribe or filter as needed based on the feed.

What I never want is for an algorithm to try to figure out what I like and subscribe me to topics based on that.

I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said.

I can see how for your average user "guess what I mean" might produce better and quicker results, but for power users (who are entirely comfortable with search syntax, and who sometimes may be searching incredibly obscure things), it produces a worse experience

The only type of search personalisation I want is the ability to exclude certain sites from my search results (bye bye Pinterest, bye bye Quora). Google used to offer that feature, but in more recent years it appears to have disappeared.

I particularly wish Google News Search had a way to exclude media sources I dislike. I am interested in Brexit, so I regularly search on that term, but then I get bombarded with a boatload of sensationalised crap from the Daily Express, a media outlet I'd prefer to pretend didn't exist

> I miss the old Google search, the one that didn't try to guess what I mean, but instead did exactly what I said.

You and me both. I cannot stand the whole 'I know better than you, let's use these synonyms that don't exactly mean the same thing or are literally different from the exact phrase you're searching for'. I loathe that Google removed the ability to search for symbols, basically destroying it as a means to find certain kinds of research papers and expressions.

I would legitimately pay for a research-quality search engine similar to Google Search circa 2010ish, before the Panda or Penguins and the truly awful Hummingbird algorithms were enabled. (And no, Bing's not it - it's basically about as good as Yahoo Search ever was before it was just a frontend to Bing...)

Could you give an example of when it doesn't do what you ask? In my experience it always only makes it more specific when it's vague in the first place and never overrides what specificity you gave.

For example if I write `range`, it's extremely vague but one of the first results I get is Python. If I write range JavaScript obviously that'll be first.

You can still do this per-query by typing `-site:quora.com`.

news.google.com allows you to hide publications, probably at the domain level but I can't tell. I use this extensively, but I don't know if those choices are honored in the Google search news tab.

I know about `-site:`, but it is a pain to have to keep on typing it in, they used to have a feature to permanently block certain domains in results, from your Google settings. (Plus, `-site:` only works for a few sites, since it counts against the search keywords limit.)

When I go to news.google.com, I can't work out how to hide news sources. I do have a "Hidden Sources > Manage" option in the settings, but it doesn't let me add any, just tells me I don't have any. Each individual result has a few options under it – Share, Save for later, and a "More" menu with a "Go to..." option that takes you to the page for that media source. But even on the "Daily Express" media source page, I don't see any "hide" option, just "Follow" and "Share"

Does this feature still exist? Is it disabled for my Google account (maybe because of some privacy setting I set)? Does it only work from certain countries? Google is inscrutable as always

You have to click on the vertical ... button. It's a little hard to find on desktop, but on mobile it's very clear.

Okay, I worked it out – really confusing UI. The "Hide" option only appears on the vertical ... menu on certain screens, not others. The "Headlines" page displays it, so do "Sections" and "topic" pages, but not search results. I was trying to find it on a keyword search result page, which is why I couldn't find it anywhere.

Also, blocking a source hides it from "Headlines"/"Sections"/"Topic" pages, but not from keyword search results pages. You'll still get your blocked sources displayed in those. (Confusingly, when you search for "brexit", you can get back two different "Brexit" topic pages, which have the same title but different pictures, or you can get a keyword search results page, which behaves differently.)

I get more relevant results from DuckDuckGo. Who doesn't do the personalisation to begin with.

I have found personalisation doesn't work for any search product. YouTube's ranking engine won't get me what I'm looking for. Google's personalised search doesn't get me what I'm looking for, and the de-personalised whilst better, only gets me halfway there because it still tries to geo-bubble me.

I am aware that what I search for makes me slightly outside the norm. All attempts to bubble me fail because of that, and turn your product into nothing more than an exercise in frustration as I try to escape the narrow roads you expect me to walk.

Being able to control the geo is one of the great features of DDG for me, especially back when I traveled a lot. The search engine doesn’t know the context I’m in (and I’m happy about that, I don’t think it should be guessing something this personal and then limiting the options for me).

It also helps me search for content vs for listings, sometimes I want information on a product and not the local merchant, with Google the closest I would get was switching to news search (also not optimal).

I can confidently assure you that I've had that feature off for ages and could not possibly be happier about it.

as another person who worked on personalization I can assure you that way over 90% of users prefer personalization. Decades of A/B tests have proven that.

And yes, some people, myself included turn it OFF because of privacy concerns. But we are in a really small minority.

Is A/B testing focused on increasing the time people spend on YouTube or the actual benefits people get out of YouTube?

A/B testing tends not to produce the result you want when the metrics you are going for are harmful.

I don't work at Youtube, but different teams probably optimize for different things. Time spent is really, really hard to change directly, so they probably focus on things like p(like), p(watch > X% of vid), p(watches another video).

Generally speaking there's no answer in principle to the question "is the time spent actually valuable". For the vast majority of people, time spent on Youtube cuts into time spent doing basically the same thing somewhere else. We're not all researching cures for AIDS or new sources of green energy. Most people just want to sit around being entertained.

"When we A/B tested users against different kinds of personalisation, we consistently found that they liked personalisation"

If your non-personalised experience is stunted in functionality because the core UX of the product is biased towards personalisation, it will be unsurprising if people "prefer" personalisation.

It's definitely possible to have a good experience without personalization. Depending on how much you inherently value google not storing data about you, it may be the only way for you to be happy.

But it's very unlikely the actual product experience would be worse with personalization enabled, measured by probability that a search includes something relevant near the top.

There are lots of examples of where personalization results in a worse experience for users but better metrics for the tech company.

Somehow the Instagram ads algorithm has figured out exactly what I’m self conscious about with my own body; all I see are ads for invisible braces, skin cleansers, and hair treatments.

I don’t actually want to buy any of these things, and they make me feel bad to look at. A de-personalized Instagram experience would be far superior to me.

You can click the ... menu, then "hide ad". It will show you fewer similar ads in the future.

An unpersonalized IG ad experience would be teenage women's clothing and Netflix branding (assuming you're in the US). You probably don't want that either.

Why wouldn't I want that? It's not like I want to be successfully manipulated by ads, so getting shown irrelevant ads is just a big win in my book.

Well, that explains my IG account. They do seem to know something about me; and one point, they literally recommended some old friends (even tho I wasn't using enough of my name, or my history, or the same email address as in those days, and we had no independent friends in common).

Irrelevant ads in this situation, sounds like they are less annoying than invasive ads

You mean like how every TV ad works? Yeah that sounds preferable.

Of course the single best way to make the top more relevant is to block ads.

On YouTube, I highly recommend turning off personalization and watch history, especially if you find yourself spending too much time there clicking recommended videos. Without history, it will pretty reliably recommend the same videos again and again, which can help you realize when you have seen a lot and might want to stop.

As someone who remembers the web before personalization, the product experience was better.

It may be true that Google has over-invested in personalization-driven features, and under-invested in user-neutral features.

Personalization belongs in the agent. Specifically, the agent that I own and control.

So Google sends metadata for 5B videos to your browser, then your browser ranks them and shows you the best one? How would your agent do personalization?

Why doesn't my browser compile and store my viewing habits, then construct searches for me? Searches which Google then executes?

Centralized services have built personalization systems in which they operate the personalization algorithms.

I don't have a problem with that, per se, except in that their interests (profit) and user interests (effectiveness) are only partially aligned.

The biggest reason, as near as I can tell, these system architectures were built is that control of personalization algorithms means (1) a means and reason to collect and retain data on users (that can be used for targeted advertisement) & (2) a means to execute targeted advertisement (via insertion into "recommended" content).

It's likely the only way these services are possible at the "free" price point. But it's disingenuous to suggest that they're the only model by which personalization could be realized.

> As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience.

As somebody who uses search products many times a day and who has opted in to the less personalized experience in several different ways over the past several years, I can confidently assure you that I very strongly prefer the "less personalized" experience. Additionally, I don't feel like I need a shower just because I used it.

Why on earth would I want you to track me more? I don't see any reason.

> Try it for a month and see if you prefer it.

Far longer than a month. It’s a vastly superior experience.

99% of personalization is utter shit. Having hard filters ("never these domains" on search engines, "don’t try and get me to rewatch things" or "No comedy" on Netflix) would top shitty personalization (aka. hey, I’m dumb, but please watch this) every time.

edit: For me. I realize that the majority of people seem to want tech to guess/tell them what they actually wanted.

> As somebody who works on ranking and personalization products, I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer a less personalized experience.

I absolutely prefer non-personalized web search results, the YouTube home page you get when you are not signed-in (and have cookies deleted) and suggestions based on the current view only (not on the previous history). I confidently assure you ;-)

Obviously there are people who feel different.

Not the original poster, but I've disabled all personalisation that it's possible to disable since forever, and my biggest problem with it is that it still doesn't seem to disable it entirely.

So yes, I definitely prefer it. And looking at the other replies to your message suggests that I'm not alone here.

As someone who makes widgets, and can confidently assure you that you need widgets.

We (and Google) run RCTs constantly, including experiments with no personalization. Users self-report higher satisfaction and NPS with personalization.

I'm wondering if this assertion comes from some kind of "search bubble" among developers of these tools.

If adding widgets to products caused the product revenue to double, then you probably wouldn't call it a bubble.

My previous response was probably a bit snarky. My point was that if this is something that you worked on and you realise that your revenue doubled, then it's probably very easy to justify that to oneself that this is indeed what the users want. After all, you don't hear any negative points, which is what a filter bubble is.

It's not possible to truly know what they want, but it is possible to ask them. Almost all people say they want more personalized content, especially for entertainment. Those who don't want it are free to opt out. The real bubble is around the belief that products with billions of active users somehow thrive without giving users what they want.

I have everything turned off on that page. I am doing fine.

I've actually preferred it on Google services. I seem to get the same recommended videos on YT otherwise and I like how unlikely I am to click on an ad if I ever see one.

What personalization products do you work on? Just curious if there are other services/situations where it's a better experience.

I work on a lot of different products, usually trying to answer the related question "how much better on average is the personalized experience". Often I look at the more relevant but less profitable question, "what percent of users would have had a better experience without personalization". It's always been <1%.

I guess "less than one per cent" is a lot more than you implied in your original post, and many of the people most likely to be in that less than one percent are likely to be part of this audience here.

It's true that it's probably not significantly profitable to worry to much about that group, but saying "I can confidently assure you that you would not prefer" is not a valid use of a statistic of "less than one percent have a better experience".

Yep, I have my main search engine on personal laptop switched to DuckDuckGo. Guess what, more often I just end up typing '!g' for finding something relevant.

For US, DDG still is fine I guess for basic results like local websites. If you are traveling to other countries, notice that DDG will often give very bad results for queries with local relevance.

I ran away from data collection and personalisation at the start of the last decade, but I often these days leave it on, because it just makes my life easier. Another example would be Google Photos, where letting Google run my photos through algos is very convenient because the simple feature of searching by visual context works like magic. The young privacy freak me would have been horrified if he knew this.

A few months ago, I disabled all of that stuff, so that YouTube only recommends videos based on my subscriptions and liked videos. I guess it's still personalization, but it's personalization that I have control over, which seems to have drastically improved both the privacy and the quality of recommendations.

I don't use Google for search, though, so I can't comment on that.

I have turned off personalization for several years now. I prefer it off, though admittedly I adblock, and block thumbnails etc...

And having disabled personalisation on a lot of products for as long as I can remember, I can confidently assure you that yes, I do in-fact prefer the non-personalised experience.

I don't want it to display what some service _thinks_ I want, I want it to display what I'm asking for. No more, no less.

Lol, you can ‘confidently assure’ huh?

Clicking that link, turns out I’ve had all of those personalisation features switched off for nearly a year.

Don’t be so confident that your ranking/personalisation products are universally appreciated

Fortunately I have mountains of data and do not have to trust anecdote and comments. Almost all users self-report higher satisfaction and they behave in ways consistent with strongly preferring personalization.

DuckDuckGo does exactly that. They call it "no bubbling".

What would be good and bad examples where personalization excels and fails?

Given the generic names for a lot of things in tech, it's at least mildly useful that Google knows I'm probably not searching for info on snakes or fruit.

I definitely prefer it.

I don't think they care about the end user. The goal of this law is to let legacy media companies which are becoming obsolete and can't compete anymore to become parasites that are paid just because they want to get paid. It's anti free market law.

How are they working against your personal interests?

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