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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what the discovery is. Haven't social sites been doing this since the beginning? Reddit was. Not too dissimilar from those IP ads from like two decades ago, "Jane Doe is ready to meet you in Centralville, Wyoming".

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Some of Reddit's early users were sock puppet accounts run by the founders, which are different than bots. The sock puppet accounts were, in fact, interesting to engage with since they were run by interesting & literate people. Since presumably a conversation is what you came for, you got what you wanted. Quite different from talking to a bot on a dating site where you came to initiate an IRL interaction which could never happen.

That is true, I had lumped them together at a higher classification level.

I still find it surprising that this is new news as it has been the direction of different industries for a couple decades now.

There's a big difference between a bot and a tool-assisted human.

Obligatory xkcd :) https://xkcd.com/713/

My DSL tunnels through an ATM network, I think, and comes out in Norwich, NY which is about an hour's drive away. I am always getting ads about "Drivers with a perfect record in Norwich can...", "Grannies want to jump your bone in Norwich", "They hate it when seniors in Norwich do this but they can't stop you", etc. The only services which geolocate correctly for my house are Apple's.

When I got to NYC on the other hand and attach to public WiFi often those localized ads are spot on to within a block.

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