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Comment by CGamesPlay | Hacker News Reader

A totally plausible explanation for this (as plausible as any Amazon Echo passive speech recognition ad targeting theory) is that she's been seeing these ads for weeks, but they were completely irrelevant and her mind filtered them out until she happened to have house hunting / martial arts movies on her mind after these events.

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I agree this is a very probable cause, but since a lot of people seem to be reporting this affect I wonder if it can be quantified... are there any tools that can do ad-tracker-tracking to collect information on the ads you're being shown over time and categorize them in order to show that you really are getting more ads of a particular type after a particular action is taken (which isn't obviously trackable)?

This seems to be the most plausible, if least satisfying explanation.

I think you may be right. Many of these stories talk about users mentioning they would like X product. Then they are surprised when they get an ad for that product. They forget A. all the other times they talked about products and never saw an ad and B. all the other ads they saw without ever mentioning the product.

This has a name! Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

Nice try Mark.

Jokes aside, these issues are happening way too often for it to just be a coincidence. I've seen multiple friends and strangers, as well as myself, reporting that they were talking about something and then an ad shows up about that.

EDIT: typo

Nice try? Read this first: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

No. You read this first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke

So what you wrote after "Jokes aside," was also a joke?

This is a well-known psychological phenomenon, not a joke or coincidence.

I understand that. I just don't think it applies to this case. It happened to me and close friends, that's why I am skeptical.

It is very easy to have opinions and explanations on something you didn't experience yourself.

This phenomenon happens to me and close friends too.

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