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Comment by tracerbulletx | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone write articles that aren't just to serve a pre-existing bias anymore? You can't make the claim in the title without knowing the impact on Ad revenue at YouTube, some shuffling of installs of adblockers doesn't mean it's backfired. It's entirely likely YouTube considers it a huge success but people just write whatever they want. The same thing happened with Netflixes ad tier and password sharing mitigations, if you just read the articles you'd think the whole world cancelled their accounts! Score one for the little guy. But it's obvious from their earnings reports it's been a success.

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Screw looking at ad revenue... Even the numbers in the article don't support the claim. Theres a 30% increase in installs in one place, a concrete before and after number of uninstalls in a 2nd place, and a concrete after value for installs with no before in a 3rd place.

The quality of reporting is enough for me to blacklist the entire domain this was posted on from my search engine and browser.

+1 for this. It is difficult for me to imagine how this would not be a huge success for Google, given how ubiquitous ad-blockers are and how uncommon it is for people to configure them at all.

How ubiquitous are ad-blockers in the wild with normal/average people?

Anybody know roughly what percentage of users have any ad-blocker installed?

Among certain types of people that frequent HN they're probably pretty common for desktop browsers but among regular folks who don't have tech savvy kids or grandkids I'm guessing they're somewhat less common.

"As of 2021, 27% of US Internet users used ad blocking software" - Wikipedia

It'd be interesting to look at why and how that 27% started using ad blocking software.

I'm suspicious that that 27% of users is mostly made up of a specific subset of tech workers and their family and friends.

I think we'd all be surprised. My elderly parents are not tech geniuses, but between my brother (who is in IT) and I, we keep them robustly geared up with web safety software like adblockers and antivirus. And you go visit their friends in the over-55 community, and these people aren't savvy enough even so much as open an E-mail client, but somehow every one of them has at least some kind of blocker installed. This isn't the days of grandma isolated in her house on AOL. Everyone knows at least one tech wizard, and the wizards spread the gospel and help to install.

I've told a number of people to get Brave since the ads have gotten so obnoxious. Watching youtube on my smarttv makes me uncomfortable enough to switch to the laptop or phone or just go to the computer. Watching someone suffer through them on any device is just sad.

This feels like napster all over again. Slowly, but surely, everyone will skip the junk. I don't imagine tech-savvy kids of today will forget that there's workarounds in 10 years time.

> I don't imagine tech-savvy kids of today will forget that there's workarounds in 10 years time.

If the iPhone is any indication of progress, I don't think tech-savvy kids will have a choice in 10 years.

It seems unlikely all operating systems will move to the model EU regulators are working to force Apple away from. But Google will try WEI again.

Unfortunately, "all operating systems" are not actually within the scope of the bill; only designated gatekeepers. Apple recently pulled out this clause to argue that only iOS needed to adhere to the Digital Market Act. Platforms like tvOS, FireTV and Android TV aren't actually covered by it.

> But Google will try WEI again.

Why single out Google? Apple already rolled out remote attestation, and unlike Google they didn't block theirs from shipping. Regulators have no interest in WEI, as far as I'm aware.

I did not say no operating systems would have the distribution model iPhones have now. I said it was unlikely all operating systems would move to it. The commission found the Digital Markets Act covered Android, iOS, and Windows. Nearly all phones and a large majority of desktops and laptops in other words. tvOS was not covered because it was too little used and too little profitable.

Mentioning Google after you singled out iPhones did not single out Google. WEI would have been useless if Android and Windows didn't have attestation. And they can't require attestation for YouTube until Chrome supports attestation. They could if Safari didn't probably. They could say everyone must use a browser with attestation or the official YouTube app.

Do you believe Google will not try attestation in Chrome again?

Regulators not having interest in WEI will enable it. Your point is unclear.

My point is "nothing ever happens", and from a regulatory/administrative standpoint I see no reason to think things will change.

I don't like WEI, remote attestation, or Google/Apple as companies. I don't like advertising or the way YouTube and Google propagate it. Your belief that users will continue to 'hack the planet' in 10 years is pretty funny though. There is zero interest, commercial, regulatory or otherwise, to ensure users continue to have control over their web browser or software. It's that simple; the battle against WEI for free YouTube is already lost.

It's interesting how the bias once favored large companies that paid for advertisements. However, now that most news outlets are subscription-based and don't want to lose subscribers, they strongly bias their content to what their readers want to read.

Probably also has to do with the fact that the large companies in question are effectively too big to fail and no longer rely on fleeting public opinion in order to retain power

Imagine how this biases political reporting and blurs the line of truth. Not only that but the division as both sides share stories about the same thing with completely different conclusions.

In fact you don't have to imagine it, it's been happening for a few years.

> Does anyone write articles that aren't just to serve a pre-existing bias anymore?

There never were articles that were free from bias. It's just that the bias is now overt to you.

Those are slightly different questions.

One of the stories about Theranos is that a journalist was detailed once to go talk to some happy customers and write a story about how great Theranos was. So she arrived, and she saw people waiting in line, and she said what she was there to do, and everyone waited around for a while, and then someone pulled the fire alarm and everybody left. No story.

I saw a conversation about this on HN back when Theranos was a current scandal, in which one person asked "well, isn't it suspicious that you arrive to do your puff piece, and everyone eyes each other nervously, and then there's an unscheduled fire alarm? Couldn't that have supported more investigation?" and the answer was "no, 'suspicious doings at shady company' is a different type of story from 'heroic company brings medicine to happy patients', and if you're assigned to write one of those stories you can't write the other one instead."

I don't know to what degree that last claim is true, and it seems like it'd be different at different outlets. But it's a good illustration of the difference between "article was written with a bias" and "purpose of writing the article was to serve a bias".

Everyone is biased. We are all products of our culture, with deeply held assumptions about how the world works.

Sometimes there is overt manipulation of the presentation too, like you mention. Eg writing a puff piece. This goes through the gears through to outright lying (eg "weapons of mass destruction").

Pretty much all journalism is manipulation. It doesn't even matter if they state they are impartial, eg the bbc. What they want us peoples trust, the reality (ie true impartiality, awareness of one's biases) is secondary.

It's definitely pretty tricky to try and even come up with statistics.

ublock was having issues early on, that required a laundry list of things to do to make sure youtube couldn't detect that something was up. I don't know if this has changed or not.

So rather than troubleshoot, what I did was turn it off on yotube, and install https://github.com/0x48piraj/fadblock, which isn't 100% perfect like the original ublock experience, but has been very durable against google's efforts. That said, fadblock seems to be considering a transition to some sort of paid model eventually, not sure what's going on with that.

Google may or may not believe they were successful in my case, depending on what they are looking for.

An update: updated and purged the ublock cache, and turned it back on. Seems to be working fine again.

Exactly, the only purpose this serves to enforce the already installed bias and feel good.

Attention brokers don't have biases, they have markets. They produce the stories the market wants to read.

In my experience, this is a company trading decades of goodwill for a quarterly boost. Usually doesn't end well in the long run.

> Does anyone write articles that aren't just to serve a pre-existing bias anymore?

Yes, National Geographic Magazine.

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