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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> Demographics are used pretty heavily in market research, etc. This could be used both in targeting ads to specific people, and also in providing aggregate data to business and marketing partners

I'm thinking about the workflow here.

First, Discord profiles you based on your behavior. They conclude you are a 20-year-old male.

Second, they show you ads appropriate for a 20-year-old male.

Third, these ads do better than average because they match your behavior.

We already have behaviorally-targeted ads. We've had them forever. How is introducing a level of indirection, where we infer age and sex from behavior and then decide on appropriate ads based on the age/sex construct, supposed to improve over deciding on the ads based on behavior?

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I think the world is being segmented into those who are exposed to targeted advertising and those who never or almost never see any advertising because we use uBlock Origin.

Oh, you. Thinking uBlock Origin actually blocks advertising. It doesn't block sponsored blog posts, sponsored comments, paid reviews, conflicts of interest, marketing copy on landing pages, etc. Advertising is everywhere.

And uBlock can't protect you from anything not in your web browser.

I don't think I use any proprietary web services outside of either my web browser (90%) or command-line CURL (10%).

I have 3 PC game platforms, Discord's desktop client, 4 cloud services, and probably some company hubs for drivers (Nvidia, Logitech, Razer, etc) that phone home. You can definitely access all these through a browser intermediary, but many don't. Steam sort of needs to stay on your device for DRM purposes anyway.

What? You mean it doesn't block billboards or radio ads either? It doesn't block my friends when they start talking about their iPhones or being Vegan?

There's just no avoiding those astroturfed marketing campaigns being pushed by Big Vegan.

Minimalism is a scam created by by big small to sell more less.

Inferences have uses. I’ll always try to target marketing based on user segments that are deterministic and I’ve read how the data is collected. If I can’t find that, I’ll look for modeled/etc audiences that include inferred data points. It’s likely discord would have targeting/data for self-reported demographics at a smaller scale and higher price point. Then the inferred demographics at a larger scale and lower price point.

That means your strategy is to make some assumptions about where your marketing will be well received, and insist on only showing it there.

This limits you to the quality of your assumptions. It's always going to be better to show your marketing where it actually works than to show it where you believe it works.

Well yeah you start with an educated guess and optimize once it’s live. So budget/etc moves fluidly and if discord audience 1 performs well it gets more budget. DSP I use doesn’t have discord inventory (if it exists?) but pretty much everything is optimized by deep learning outside of moving branding budgets around.

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