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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

My hypothesis is that on major platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, tech-savvy users with a solid ad-blocker (like UBlock Origin) contribute valuable content and provide valuable interaction with the bulk of the users without. We are a vocal group who on the whole have a decent understanding of the mechanisms used to influence people, and if we didn't have ad-blockers, we would complain loudly, entertain alternatives, or try to subvert the comfortable business model that is targetted advertising. We'd raise awkward questions, constantly.

As the author points out, to our eyes the internet is unusable without an ad-blocker. With an ad-blocker, it is somewhat OK, and with it we grudgingly accept the status quo. This is fine as far as those platforms are concerned. The working ad-blocker is our pacifier.

We are being tolerated.

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Reddit is a prime example of what you're explaining. Reddit has been aggressively expanding their advertising, yet they've done little to nothing to stop ad blockers, or third party Reddit clients, such as Apollo, that automatically strip the website of ads.

I'd posit that Reddit understands that the demographic actually generating content (comments, posts, etc...) are very tech savvy, heavily utilize ad blockers and ad-stripping third party clients. Reddit understands that these users would leave the site en masse if their third party clients or ad blockers were interfered with. This would result in a drop in quality content for "average", non-ad blocking users to interact with, ultimately killing their web traffic and ad revenues.

I'd also bet this is why Reddit has yet to force everyone to the new advertising-optimized redesign, which their power users hate.

I think I’d bet that Reddit just hasn’t seen a reason to prioritize it. They seem perpetually understaffed on the eng team.

It wouldn't take too much effort to do. Just lock down the existing API and require all requests to be signed with a safetynet/recaptcha/devicecheck token. On the other hand they've been making various changes on the new mobile app, adding various a/b tests that try to encourage account creation.

It's not just the mobile app, but a lot of the stuff on the regular reddit site is full of dark patterns. They want you to create an account to see comments below the top levels.

old.reddit.com still gives the experience that you're used to if you want to remove the redesign.

> Reddit understands that these users would leave the site en masse if their third party clients or ad blockers were interfered with.

I want to agree but I don’t. Twitch recently went to war with adblockers and they don’t seem to have lost any meaningful amount of streamers/viewers (at least the streamers/games I follow have the same amount of viewers/chat spam as before). Why would reddit be any different?

Twitch is a job for the big-time streamers, right?

I don't know what Gallowboob gets paid to be on Reddit, but I expect nothing and get nothing. On Twitch I assume even the small-time streamers are trying to make money and get big. So Twitch has that leverage over their power users.

excellent comment

agree completely with you

The only LOGICAL reason to go from a format that works to such a terrible format, is that it can make ads work better

How do tech-savvy users contribute more valuable content than non-tech savvy users? Maybe when it comes to content about tech but that's not the majority of content on Facebook and Twitter

Yeah, this doesn't seem right to me. I don't think my family consumes content by the tech-savvy - they come for the content by friends and family members, and get sucked in via the rest of the stuff Facebook throws at them via the feed.

Nowhere in that pipeline do "tech-savvy users with a solid ad-blocker", "who on the whole have a decent understanding of the mechanisms used to influence people" come into play - unless you're counting Russian agencies and others who are explicitly using it for propaganda (not to be confused with people who like-and-reshare David Icke nonsense.)

Hypothesis: we're in the net rather than just being on the net. That gives us access to a wider range of material.

For example, I found Nightline [0] on itch.io earlier today. I'd never even heard of itch.io but I follow a cool nerd on Twitter and she retweeted [1] another cool nerd.

We know about RSS. I have dozens of feeds and they're really varied. I've been following many of them for at least a decade.

You're just not finding this stuff on /r/yourregionalcity unless someone like us posts it there.

[0]: https://colorfiction.itch.io/nightline

[1]: https://twitter.com/colorfiction/status/1330575276561063937

Not more valuable, just valuable. I don't mean to imply that what one group contributes is more valuable than the other, just that what the ad-blocking group contributes is valuable to help retain users in general.

I.e., from a monetization perspective, losing (part of) the ad-blocking group is much more expensive than retaining them with their ad-blockers working.

I have never encountered a single online forum where the users did not believe that 'we' were the biggest contributors to whatever.

For any given forum, the "we" making the claim is almost certainly correct. Most people on any given forum only lurk, so the people commenting are inherently "contributing" more. Many lurkers will recognize your username, and you certainly contribute more to HN than them, so if you were to have made that claim in your comment you'd be correct.

See: Participation inequality [0] and the 1% rule/90-9-1 rule[1] and the friendship paradox[2].

Re-reading your comment, I think you might actually mean that people commenting on random forums think they are the biggest contributors to <something off of the the forum>, which isn't nearly as certain.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_inequality

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox

On the other hand advertising isn't something that just automatically pays bills. If I buy ads on a page, I want it to be worthwhile. If I buy views on the screen of users that hate my brand because I show up on their favourite page and disturb them, I haven't really gotten value for my money so I'm perfectly happy that you use an adblocker.

> We are being tolerated.

Facebook does some pretty ridiculous stuff to try and prevent AdBlockers and outside tools from being able to remove things from your timeline.

I suspect they feel like ad-blocked users are better than non-users, but they are still going to try their damndest to prevent adblocking.

Maybe this is just my biases showing, but I would expect that your average adblocking person is more likely to stay away from Twitter and (especially) Facebook than a non-adblocking person. I don't have any evidence to back this up; it's just a feeling.

It isn't always a choice, unfortunately. Just to make an example, an HR person 'nicely' asked me to create a linkedin profile. The signal-to-noise ratio is already zero, I bet without an adblocker my head would explode.

You are now making me wonder: what's the % split of left-leaning and right-leaning users that use ad blockers? What about men and women?

Oh man, this would be interesting! How to survey users to find this out, I wonder. Adblock users are likely to be harder to reach and survey

Based on nothing other than my assumptions, I would say users who block ads skew younger, and younger people skew left.

I know that (right-leaning) die-hard culture warriors take some pleasure in depriving tech giants and (left leaning) media companies of revenue by using ad blockers. Some go as far as to only share archived versions of the sites so that not even a site visit can be recorded.

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