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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

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.

verisimi 3y ago
> 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.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  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".
  - verisimi 3y ago
    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.
Modified3019 3y ago
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 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.
- Modified3019 3y ago
  An update: updated and purged the ublock cache, and turned it back on. Seems to be working fine again.
machdiamonds 3y ago
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.
- stemlord 3y ago
  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
- mikrotikker 3y ago
  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.
zagrebian 3y ago
> Does anyone write articles that aren't just to serve a pre-existing bias anymore? Yes, National Geographic Magazine.
senkora 3y ago
+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.
- beenBoutIT 3y ago
  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.
  - AniseAbyss 3y ago
    [dead]
  - tim333 3y ago
    "As of 2021, 27% of US Internet users used ad blocking software" - Wikipedia
    - beenBoutIT 3y ago
      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.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    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.
laserbeam 3y ago
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.
karmasimida 3y ago
Exactly, the only purpose this serves to enforce the already installed bias and feel good.
lubujackson 3y ago
In my experience, this is a company trading decades of goodwill for a quarterly boost. Usually doesn't end well in the long run.
barryrandall 3y ago
Attention brokers don't have biases, they have markets. They produce the stories the market wants to read.

verisimi 3y ago

> 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.

thaumasiotes 3y ago
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".
- verisimi 3y ago
  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.

Modified3019 3y ago

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 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.

Modified3019 3y ago
An update: updated and purged the ublock cache, and turned it back on. Seems to be working fine again.

machdiamonds 3y ago

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.

stemlord 3y ago
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
mikrotikker 3y ago
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.

zagrebian 3y ago

> Does anyone write articles that aren't just to serve a pre-existing bias anymore? Yes, National Geographic Magazine.

senkora 3y ago

+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.

beenBoutIT 3y ago
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.
- AniseAbyss 3y ago
  [dead]
- tim333 3y ago
  "As of 2021, 27% of US Internet users used ad blocking software" - Wikipedia
  - beenBoutIT 3y ago
    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.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  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.

laserbeam 3y ago

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.

karmasimida 3y ago

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

lubujackson 3y ago

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

barryrandall 3y ago

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