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by EvanAnderson 904 days ago
Publishers, already pushing back against ad blockers and now suing because their sites were scraped and incorporated into LLM weights, would love to have clients "attest" to the "humanity" of the user and "integrity" (read: no ad blockers) of the browser. It's not hard to imagine that, if given access to the feature, they'd jump on it as soon as it ways feasible and make the user experience for non-attesting browsers progressively worse to force the change.
1 comments

Your point is that struggling publishers will stay relevant, gain subscribers and afloat/make more money by implementing ad blockers, worst user experience and safety checks to make their sites less accessible. I'm sure it'll happen any day now.
Absolutely, yes. They will be empowered by tools they don't yet have to make it feasible to slowly "boil the frog". Remote attestation is just such a tool.
The frogs already moved onto 4chan, twitter, TikTok, reddit, or YouTube for news. Even here at HN everyone uses archive. Publishers are dead. Nobody checks fox/cnn for the latest breaking news or needs to hear some anchor/journalist tell them what their handlers told them to say.
This is not true outside of a small bubble.

In Europe traditional media still enjoys relatively high public trust and high circulation. Weekly reach of traditional news media is at 80% to 90% of adult population in the Nordic countries compared to 50-70% of all social media combined, depending on the country.