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Comment by jp555 | Hacker News Reader

I think it's a little ironic people are so concerned about this kind of thing because so much of what annoys us about advertising is ads that are not relevant to us - due to the limits of targeting.

Ads that are extremely relevant are not even considered adverting to us in the moment. Wont better targeting provide more of this sense and a perception of fewer ads overall?

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I don't want to be sold products. I don't care how "relevant" it is to the particular subset of people I most resemble. I want precisely the information I asked for, and no more. Every bit of information extraneous to that, is another piece of garbage I have to wade through to figure out whatever I actually wanted to know or do. The most frustrating ads are ones that don't make themselves clear that they're trying to sell me something until the end and waste my time, when I have zero intention or desire of ever buying something to solve a particular problem. Or the websites that write content that is almost useful, just to get as many eyeballs on its ads as possible. Ads are the slurry of microplastic on the sea of information, of benefit only to whoever dumped them in the first place.

And if I'm enjoying a fictional work, I certainly don't want to be interrupted with another person hocking another piece of junk, or worse, integrating the ads into the story and having Gandalf trying to sell me on Pepsi.

> I want precisely the information I asked for, and no more.

Are you willing to pay for access to that information?

Because ultimately whoever is providing content wants to be compensated for their time.

I agree with your sentiment, but there is also a pragmatism here. (FWIW I am willing to pay for, ad free content and don't believe tracking/ profiling should be part of advertising or even legal without consent.

I'm essentially in the same boat as you -- I'm willing to pay for content as I do for my books, or support free sources of information as I might for Wikipedia. The siren song of the advertiser is hard to fight though, even if many people are willing to pay the price for a quality product. The Faustian bargain that I presume leads to this mess: Any ad-free informational product could probably reach a wider audience and thus pump up revenue, if they traded some of their up front cost in exchange for a few modest ad slots or selling a little customer information here or there (To some degree paid users would put up with these things even without any subsidy to their subscription whatsoever, so it could also be directly pocketed).

If I complain about poorly targeted ads, it's because I am shocked that the targeting can be so useless even with the disgusting level of surveillance.

It is not an invitation for even more intrusive spying. It is an invitation to give up and leave me alone.

> so much of what annoys us about advertising is ads that are not relevant to us

What makes you think this? That's not what annoys me about advertising.

And I've literally never seen that as an argument, outside of chuckles from friends who have their advertising personalization turned off.

Complaints about ads, as I can tell it, are: they're everywhere all the time on everything and in the way of content a lot of the time.

No. I want no ads, at all.

Ads and advertisers insinuate themselves into every goddamn situation, they destroy trust in human communications by introducing a profit motive f*cking everywhere, and they degrade every experience they're part of.

No tracking, no ads, go away.

Was searching for accuracy in modern sleep trackers and smartwatches. Couldn’t find anything except a youtuber from Vienna which had an amazing confusion matrix to show in a video. All the articles I found where basically:”buy buy buy! Look at the features! Oh heres the affiliate link...”

I remember having a Polar heart monitor that said that my table had 67 beats per minute... best of class, so many features!

So I concur, ads are ruining everything.

Until a company starts using this same data to screen prospective employees for unionization risk, or uses purchasing history to identify and filter vegans from slaughterhouse jobs, so there's less risk of those animal cruelty videos getting out. Or show you higher prices online if they determine you're willing to spend more [1]. Or...

Or are they doing that already? How would you know?

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323777204578189...

User data must be kept secret to be valuable. Facebook only makes money if it keeps user data mostly secret from advertisers.

That's because Facebook sells ad space. There are companies that don't do this, and are happy to sell your information. Like, say, the California DMV...

Is the California DMV a private company?

Obviously not, but the point was snide humor.

Do you really not believe there are private companies which sell personal data?

Sure, CC companies have been doing it since the 1950s. But only aggregate data has any value. Advertisers care a lot more about finding a large group of potential buyers than individuals.

Something like the more data you have the less detail you know, because noise expands faster than signal.

If you're implying that advertisers only want aggregate data to build a marketing strategy that requires leveraging the individualized data from ad platform holders like facebook, that feels like some serious cognizant dissonance about the meaning of privacy.

Facebook also makes money by letting politicians micro-target potential constituents with propaganda.

Is that a new thing? Seem to me that's been happening for like hundreds of years. I've worked at a PR firm and in a Newsroom. I've seen the sausage being made.

The key phrase was "micro-targeting" not "propaganda". Previously, if you put out an ad full of religious zealotry to appeal to fundamentalist Christians, you would risk turning off more moderate parts of your base. Now you can make sure only the "right" people see that message.

Love to hear it

> to be valuable

And selling lists of vegans to slaughterhouses is one way to extract that value. Similar for all the other abuses I listed. I assumed it was obvious.

> Wont better targeting provide more of this sense and a perception of fewer ads overall?

No. If you're say, a video game lover, you're still a potential customer for a number of things you don't really care about. Ads don't target things you like, they target things you might be convinced to buy. If you want to find interesting, relevant ads, you'd be better off having no targeting, and finding domain relevant ads. E.g. video game ads on video game sites, rather than ads for the toaster you bought on amazon 3 months ago or women's underwear because your spouse made a quick search on your phone.

You're describing examples of the problems of poor targeting.

I like plants. But I don't get ads for plants, instead I get ads for stupid plant-related gizmos. Why? Because the plant "market" is not online, and is much less lucrative than the gizmo market. There's no amount of tracking that can fix mismatches between commercial and human interests. Or to put it another way: the best things in life are free, ad space is not.

What I'm describing is the best targeting that a massive dedication of the top engineering talent in the planet is capable of. Perhaps if we gave them even more personal information, like a list of all my purchases, they would know not to sell me the toaster I already bought. That doesn't mean there's a market for "good" ads that could reach me instead.

Previously I used video games as an example. Let's choose something more mundane. If I have a pet cat, I still don't want to read ads about cat food. I don't want ads about litter. I don't want ads about stupid cat toys. Or pet cameras. Or pet photos. Or pet grooming services. Or more cats. I don't want your fucking ads at all. Your targeting isn't wrong, but that doesn't make it pleasant. Everyone needs toilet paper. I don't want toilet paper ads.

And then on top of all that, cat product companies get outbid by some sketchy financial company trying to get me to refinance a mortgage because the margin on that is way higher.

I bought a software product for work several times. But it was not purchased in any way related to my personal Google account. Using Youtube to learn about the software has cause me to see thousands of ads for the software I had purchased several times already.

This is poor targeting (especially since it's direct response), and a lot of people I talk to get very annoyed telling me their experiences like this.

That's great for you, but is a tiny fraction of the problem being outlined. If you could say "Don't show me ads for this again", and total ads were held constant, you would not suddenly be inundated with ads you enjoy seeing. Ads are unpleasant, period. Targeted ads are no better.

I find targeted ads extremely creepy. It's like I'm being stalked. I now turn off personalized ads wherever I can.

Any politician that talks about regulating what data can be collected and how it can be used will probably get my vote. I want to see my browsing data protected as well as my video rental data.

> so much of what annoys us about advertising is ads that are not relevant to us

What ? How do you even decide what is relevant for you and what is not yourself ?

I never think about ads being relevant or not, they are always annoying. My attention is not unlimited and I certainly don't like others profiting from it.

edit: Well I guess we could agree that if I get ads and I'm in category "I want 0 ads" it is indeed a case of poor targeting.

I've never heard anyone complain about how irrelevent their ads were. Only complaints about the rampant amount of ads.

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