Comment by maxbond | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxbond | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I share similar experiences. I routinely tell Google not to show me obnoxious dating ads, or ads for pornographic video games, etc. They tell me they won't show me a particular ad again, and then immediately show me an almost identical ad from the same company.

On mobile YouTube, where I see most of my ads, it's also almost impossible to click the extra-tiny shishkabob menu next to the ad without first clicking the ad a bunch of times. Until ~6 months ago, this made the ad disappear, and made it impossible (or at least, I didn't see how) to request they not show you the ad. And now it looks like you engaged with it. I don't think this accidental clicks was necessarily their intention, but they certainly decided to make that shishkabob smaller than all the others, which was absolutely a deliberate dark pattern. Presumably to increase the effort required to/decrease the frequency of users taking this action.

Now they've taken to pitching me pretty extreme propaganda from the likes of The Epoch Times.

Best and brightest, indeed.

I worked for 5 years for an ad network. We had a team of ML engineers working solely on improving the recommendations accuracy.

There's one thing, though: no matter how good your recommendation algorithms are, if you only have shit to advertise, you'll only recommend shit.

"Best and brightest" was pretty glib, I'll admit.

My problem is less that the recommendation engine isn't good enough than that this industry is too large and too powerful, and I believe that it's existence is dangerous to society.

For instance, given the Snowden documents, I would give the odds that NSA isn't piggybacking on this private intelligence a very, very low value. How you feel about that is a function of your politics, but even if you think NSA is a good actor, it's not hard to imagine an intelligence agency you wouldn't appreciate gaining access to that information.

But a more mundane and realistic concern is just Google being a monopolizer. The other day they "helpfully" opted me in to their new meeting service and "helpfully" inserted a meeting link into my calendar. This caused me to be 10 minutes late to a job interview over Zoom - because I'd spent 25 minutes waiting in an empty Google Meeting! I'd just assumed the client used this service. (Luckily, they were understanding.) My personal frustrations aside, IANAL but that seems like the very definition of a monopolizing tactic, and I'm pretty sure that's illegal. If I'm wrong, then I submit that it should be.

It's not hard to imagine Google gaming the stock market, or to imagine malicious Googlers conducting insider trading. I'm sure the best and brightest could come up with more ingenious and more lucrative ways to abuse their position as well.

Now they've taken to pitching me pretty extreme propaganda from the likes of The Epoch Times.

Seriously, why can't we say No Thanks to a company's ads and let them stop wasting our time and their money?

It's in Google's best interest to let the company pay them for showing you irrelevant ads.

If all players would act rationlly then Google would have no incentive either way. If Google would show more (irrelevant) ads then the cost per click would be reduced and Google would get the same payout. But most advertisers are still people and because of this Google still has an incentive to show more ads.

They actually do that. It's not difficult at all to get banned from Tier 1 online ad networks.

How does one achieve this ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com