Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

The article manages to contradict itself at every turn. For example:

"Only yesterday, Google announced its plans to make advertising ID an opt-in feature."

A few paragraphs later:

"Google’s opt-out ad-tracking popup isn’t on the forefront like in iOS. Instead, it’s buried deep in the Google Play Service settings — which could be difficult for the non-tech savvy user to find out."

And this opener:

"Facebook has a market evaluation of over 930 billion dollars today."

Versus the conclusion:

"Clearly, this chain of events is about to trigger an irreversible slump in Facebook’s advertisement business — making their ambitions of becoming the fastest trillion-dollar tech firm a far-fetched dream."

Is it really a far-fetched dream when the stock price only needs a 7.5% bump from its current level?

View on HN

This is common for Substack articles recently: It delivers a conclusion readers want to hear (Facebook bad! Zuckerberg going to lose a lot of money! Business model destroyed!) but the reality doesn’t quite match the pitch once you decipher the underlying facts.

It feels like Substack authors got started in an ultra-competitive world where they knew clickbait journalism was the norm, so they’ve gone all-in on saying whatever they think it takes to grow their subscriber base. I’ve tried subscribing to many smaller Substacks in the past year but the majority of them feel similar to this: A lot of exaggerated sensationalism and recycled material, but little actual analysis. The exceptions have been professional journalists who were already good at writing before joining Substack.

The sensational articles with exaggerated headlines do play well on places like HN where headlines get upvotes before many read the article, so the trend will continue.

It's not just substack. It's a plague that has infected regular journalism; they're just more cunning in disguising it.

Think about all the "Sources say" articles you've read at 'respected publications' over the past few years. How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?

> they're just more cunning in disguising it.

Are they? For instance, Ars Technica used to be a source of high quality tech journalism for nerds, where the journalists seemed to really “get it”. There’s still some of that left, but in the recent years, I observed more and more bland nothingburger articles coated in clickbait titles popping up in my feed; to add insult to injury, the comment section was sinking deeper and deeper into tribal outrage, consistent with the rest of the (Anglo, at least) Internet. I finally unsubscribed last year. Now I know zero source of consistent high quality tech journalism.

I would wager that advertisement income and quality of journalism go hand in hand?

I don’t buy this since journalism has been ad supported for a long time.

Ars Technical in particular has been around for a long time and always as funded.

There’s something different now that is maybe compounded by only being ads.

I think the friction is between cost structures from a different revenue time and just constantly using short term tactics to hold onto declining revenue.

So the issue isn’t as revenue per se, but the bad business models associated with ads.

hopefully covid sensationalism will open the eyes of more folks to this kind of emotionally-wearing manipulation. simple phrases like "could have" and "may" are simultaneously designed to be outwardly innocuous, seemingly informative, and highly effective in leading people to jump to overblown conclusions that keep readers heightened (i.e., stressed) so that they desire more information. it's the same primal anxiety you see in rabbits in open fields. news media will mash that button over and over again to get their little ad revenue stream while laying waste to your nervous and cardiovascular systems.

relatedly, my neighbor was just telling me yesterday how anxious and frazzled she's been for the past number of months. she's constantly following current events on npr, nytimes, facebook, instagram, and youtube. she's having a hard time concentrating and getting things done. she's yet to make the connection between these things herself, even with gentle (and even overt) nudging.

Hasn't this been going on for a very long time (possibly forever)? I'm thinking of the stress about North Korea launching nukes that would end the world, the stories about the EU banning curved bananas and thereby introducing totalitarianism, the idea that Brexit would eventually lead to WW3, the fear by some that Trump would cause the collapse of the US, the fear by others that Obama was a Muslim who would dismantle the US from the inside, the idea that George W. Bush would cause the collapse of the American democracy, the idea that 9/11 was an inside job, the idea that the Patriot Act was the end of freedom, etc. (I choose extremes from both sides on purpose.)

sure, it's been going on a long time, but younger humans tend to have to relearn this for themselves. hopefully the relentless fearmongering around covid reveals the mechanisms of sensationalism for more people.

practically all projections of power, as a critical feature of organizations, reach for heightened exaggeration to drive complicity. in that way, i'd reject 'both sides' as a false dichotomy. rather, any side--any significant organization, as a consolidation of power--will inevitably project misleading hyperbole, news media being no exception, and political parties being explicitly designed for it.

the bit that we need to keep relearning is the intertwining relationship between media and other organizations in shaping narratives for their own benefit, in opposition to the ideal of media keeping other organizations honest by disseminating information they'd otherwise wish to keep private. we the people have to continually keep organizations honest.

You are agreeing to a chain of comments about an article that reaches an exaggerated conclusion based mostly on opinion and not on facts and careful analysis, and your response is to claim that the entire news industry is guilty of it too based on a vague notion that there was a lot of "sources say" reporting that was (made up? inaccurate?) over a specific period.

So, in conclusion, human beings excel at pattern matching, even when the patterns aren't there, and sometimes use their pattern matching ability to validate the point of view which aligns most closely to their identity and psychological needs.

"How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?"

The overwhelming majority have turned out to be true.

So, what now?

The faux equivalency "they're all the same" (usually pointing to a tiny, minuscule fraction of stories where something was errant) is exactly how we ended up with the rise of overtly fake news. In the same way we have normalized politicians who lie overtly and repeatedly by casting them all the same: some politician took exaggerated credit or said something that in some contexts might be misleading, ergo he's the same as the one who lies maliciously at every turn. "They're all the same"

> "Some random guy posting thoughts on Substack has remarkably turned into anti-"MSM" advocacy. Amazing."

I wonder if there's a snappy name for this fallacy that professionals are somehow responsible for the failings of amateurs. It's pretty common.

- Blogger writes poorly researched post -> "mainstream journalists are much worse"

- Crypto project is fraud -> "banks are the real scams"

Applying this logic to the tech industry, we get:

- Random Wordpress plugin is poorly designed -> "the real incompetents are software engineers at FAANGs"

I mean, it might be true, but there's really no relationship between the two and it doesn't absolve the amateur.

>this fallacy

It's a garden variety false equivalence.

A bit more specific than that, it has elements of both conspiratorial thinking and “look what you made me do” gaslighting.

> "How many of them turned out to be true or collaborated?" The overwhelming majority have turned out to be true.

That's not a very convincing statement. Do you have anything to back that up?

Not all the news publications have the same ideals or strategies or tendency to bend the truth the same way, but all news (so far as I can tell) is impacted by the same negative incentive: advertising.

If your business model generates revenue through advertising, you are incentivized to attract attention, as we all know very well. News is no different; news publications are incentivized to write outrage-generating content to get you to look for ad revenue, whether it's CNN or Breitbart or ONN or Fox or NYT, it doesn't matter.

CNN isn't the same as Fox on this level, for sure, so it's not completely equivalent, but that's mostly because the ideology is different. But outrage on the left sells, outrage on the right sells. Those publications are different because the outrage they sell is targeted at different audiences.

Why would a "right-wing" ideology's outrage be one a bigger level than a left-wing outrage?

You are making a false equivalence. Fox publishes outright nonsense like "Texas has 0 deaths from Covid now, showing mask mandates are unnecessary" (asterisk: for one fluke day in the metrics, so we're not technically lying, even though we know members of Congress will cite while paraphrasing into huge lies).

Ok I'm responding a few days late here, sorry about that.

I'm not making a false equivalence. My comment is pointing out the perverse incentive present in all news, regardless of political slant.

There is an audience for right-wing ideology outrage; there is another one for left-wing ideology outrage. The news sources are capitalizing on that.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/aaugh-a-brief-list-of-official...

I'm sure most hacker news folks can find the right-leaning fake news easily so here's some left-leaning fake news to balance things out. Most of these include citations as well.

I had a friend who had a friend in journalism. For some reason, my friend’s mom was used over and over for “person on the street” or “sources say” when the source was just some general perception on a current event like Michael Jackson dying or whatever.

I used to follow this friend of friend journalist just to see the unnamed sources. It was funny because the articles frequently presented them as authoritative like “knowledgeable sources familiar with Mr Jackson say…” Funny because I knew the mom and she just read the same material anyone else could read.

That's not substack. It's the entire news based media.

Journalism is probably at its lowest ever point.

This is a bold statement. I think its an untrue statement too. Sure, the main stream media may be a giant dumpster fire. However, there are more journalists then ever doing extremely fantastic work. Just because most people don't see them or read about them doesn't mean Journalism is at its lowest ever point.

Allow me to provide just 3 of the countless example of fantastic journalism that still exists today:

- Many of the journalists covering the Portland protests literally risked life and limb to uncover policing abuses.

- Data journalists at the Covid Tracking Project were compiling and producing such high quality data that governments were using them to forecast local covid health trends.

- The OSINT journalism that Bellingcat does: https://www.bellingcat.com/

For sure I was overly hyperbolic there.

There are certainly some good journalists out there, but any big media institutions are way too far gone.

this chain of events is about to trigger an irreversible slump in Facebook’s advertisement business

Surely the majority of ads Facebook sells are displayed on Facebook's properties (Facebook, apps, IG, etc), where they'll have the logged in user's details already and don't need the user's device mobile advertising ID. That's not to say this won't impact them at all, because it will, but it's not exactly the sky falling.

Exactly. This only affects cross site/app tracking. Which hurts attribution and data collection, but in some cases actually strengthens their walled-garden.

It hurts Facebook, but it hurts their competitors more.

> It hurts Facebook, but it hurts their competitors more.

So it hurts Google and Amazon more? [1]

1 - https://www.businessinsider.com/google-facebook-amazon-were-...

Those are far from the only competitors.

What competitors? Smaller adtech companies? Sure, there will be some shifts and consolidation but they'll still be around.

There are a massive amount of mid—tier players, not to mention Oracle and Adobe who are also whales.

They're all small compared to the duopoly/FAANG.

Honestly I didn't make it very far before the smell made me turn around and walk out.

> Through shrewd acquisitions, blatantly copying the exclusivity of rivals (read: Snapchat, TikTok), Facebook managed to become an integral part of our lives in less than a decade.

Maybe some of that is true? Facebook has been "an integral part of our lives" for longer than a decade. I remember returning home from college in 2008 and seeing my small town papered in facebook usernames for just about every business that had a sign. That was well before Snapchat or TikTok existed, and I don't think they'd done any acquisitions of note up to then. This guy's not completely wrong here, but the framing is myopic enough for me to look for another source of information about the advertising change.

> The article manages to contradict itself at every turn.

That it might doesn't absolve the fact that Facebook has been essentially kicked about by the Big 2 that dominate the smartphone market. Remember that Apple and Google aren't exactly covered in glory as far as privacy is concerned. They want consumer data for themselves, and that's "private enough" in their eyes.

There's a reason Facebook (and Amazon) has a devices division and is betting on AR/VR.

Things will get interesting from here on.

I don't want to be an Apple apologist, but I don't think you can lop them into the same dysfunctional privacy strategy that google operates under.

Apple is using user behaviors for advertising within Apple's ecosystem, but that's not something I really mind. Once my data/behavior exists the company I've entrusted it too, I get very uncomfortable.

On 1, I don't think it's a contradiction. It's opt-in by default, and to actually find the setting to opt-in, it's buried deep in the Play Services settings. That's how I read it.

But one says "opt-out".

It's opt-out:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

Which undermines the whole premise of the article.

Wow, then yes -- this is a non-story.

I just checked my Android device and the opt-out looks like this https://imgur.com/a/1aaN4Ko

I find interesting the UI, the user have to "enable" the opt-out, not enable the opt-in.

It shows how crucial can be this simple switch for the ad industry immoral surveillance status quo.

I guess the opt-out is disabled by default, I think I enabled it some time ago checking the phone settings.

Is your screenshot showing the default setting, when you first checked it?

I'm not sure, maybe I enabled the opt-out at some point.

Can't tell what was the default option when I buy the phone (have to flash it to know)

Also, I guess the manufacturer is responsible of what is the default option of this setting? (or even the setting appear at all).

Is a Xiaomi Mi A2 lite, it comes with Android 8.1 and was updated till Android 10.

Maybe from Android 12 this is improved in some way.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com