I love that bb is publishing this information but it may result in driving up the cost of the most reliable hdds which ends up costing them more with future drive purchases assuming they gravitate to buying more reliable drives in the future.
I assumed publishing the stats would actually work to BackBlaze's advantage, because it means no HDD supplier is going to skimp on quality control on the order going to BackBlaze.
Since they're always trialing other disks on small scale, this can only really benefit both them and humanity as a whole!
Also I think they know this and still post it for the community benefit. What people store in the cloud is important and drive failure is their business because they are storing that data.