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Comment by Jakobeha | Hacker News Reader

"Ah, yes. I'm looking for a peer-to-peer, secure messaging system. What's this, Facebook Messenger? Maybe I'll try that instead."

In all seriousness though, this kind of advertising should not be beneficial to Facebook. You're telling a group of people biased not to buy your product, to buy your product. There's obviously some other reason.

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When I’m annoyed with an ad, I love clicking on it, especially since a click can cost from $.5 to $12. Also, upon clicking, they build a profile of me based on products I don’t like, so all the better.

Tough for the advertiser, but maximizing advertiser dissatisfaction is also in my interest (at least since I don’t advertise anymore - after an important realization that I had poured money into it for very few actual new customers).

https://adnauseam.io/

Could use of this be detected by the ad networks and get filtered out?

It _could_...

But the ad networks get paid for those clicks, so while businesses keep buying ads from a known[1] mostly fraudulent industry, they will not.

1: "Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend" -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25623858

It's usually detected by anti-click-fraud stuff (since it's the same UA, cookies, and IP that's mass whacking ads, it's the easy case). However, the users of the tool occasionally intend to punish the publishers (people who put these ads on their sites) which does happen for some low volume publishers - like your buddy's blog with AdSense and stuff.

Set it further towards the “rarely” setting, and this is less likely.

I usually block all known trackers and advertisers, so even if they could track me (which is less likely to happen) they don't get any benefit from that.

This sounds like cutting off the nose to spite the face. Sure, you may be harming the advertisers, but you are directly reinforcing the ecosystem that creates those annoying ads in the first place by telling them you like those ads.

I hate ads too, but let's not pretend like this childish rebellion is actually self-serving. It's like me saying I'm upset with politics so I'll show the world by not voting.

How does clicking an add in bad faith reinforce the ecosystem? How does thinking you like the product benefit the advertiser or market?

Platform: wow people click ads more often than organic results. We should put more ads in there.

they are not going to notice anyway. just look how difficult it was for Uber

That $.5 to $12 goes to big tech. That's only a win in the case of very vile advertisers.

Given the current mass (for some values of "mass") migration, there will be some people who have very low tech knowledge but read enough about migrating to signal and WhatsApp being bad, that they'll search for "Signal" and will try the first communicator that comes up. Not sure if they will be fooled for long, but still... People are fooled by basic spam and they will be fooled by this.

People who can figure this out are not the target.

> I'm looking for a peer-to-peer, secure messaging system

Then they shouldn't be using Signal either. Signal is not peer to peer at all and doesn't even federate.

Probably because their Chinese overlords told them to. Memes and conspiracies aside I do think it’s a little suspicious that Zuck asked Xi to name his friggin first born child. And the amount of information including beliefs and location that this guy has on our families is mildly terrifying.

Seems like a waste of effort by both Facebook and Signal advocates when the Dems will just lobby to have big-tech ban anything that can be used by the far right to communicate.

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