I wish tech companies knew more about me
rakhim.exotext.com
rakhim.exotext.com
Same here.
I think the songs get pushed by who pays to push, and most of those songs have vocals.
Goth industrial stuff from like the female singer from L’Âme Immortelle was a nice exception with “Bitterkeit”.
I liked their playlists/radios, though and I miss them.
However, that "non-skip" thing was always a showstopper. Undiscovered music is often obscure for a reason, and I would end up exhausting my skips fairly quickly.
The one exception was an experiment where I gave every single song a thumbs up. It converged on comedy rock (Weird Al, Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords, etc).
I have quite a few channels:
1. Comedy rock, seeded by "Code Monkey". (Mainly Jonathan Coulton and Weird Al Yankovic, but other people sneak in there. The biggest hit, in personal terms, was a song by Matthew Ebel.)
2. Secondary comedy rock, seeded by "Weird Al Yankovic"; this channel is mostly dead. It tried to converge with the main comedy rock channel for obvious reasons.
3. Country (sad), seeded by "She Used To Say That To Me". The main thing on this channel that I personally see as a genre outlier is Mark McGuinn's "Busy Signal", but going to youtube I see that that song is tagged "#countrymusic".
4. Country (happy), seeded by "Emily Harper".
Those two channels also constantly attempt to converge with each other. But they mostly don't try to converge with the comedy rock channel.
5. "Clancy Brothers".
This has blossomed into a more general Irish folk and sea shanty channel.
6. "Steeleye Span".
This one plays Steeleye Span and some other English folk and folk rock music. It constantly tries to play Irish music, though the Clancy Brothers channel does not try to play English folk.
7. "Alan Menken". This one is good at staying separate. It plays showtunes. (And sometimes branches out a little; Annette Funicello's "Pineapple Princess" is on there.)
8. A channel seeded by "Kiss Me", by Sixpence None The Richer. I like the way this song sounds. I was never happy with anything that played on this channel and it's been abandoned.
Within the past several years I have gotten the feeling that Pandora would rather I just have one channel that plays "everything"; there have been attempts at crossing the deeper channel boundaries.
I have never ended up with Ellie Goulding or Dubstep.
I've seen the same kind of thing in other services that weight recent choices as a part of their graph based recommendations like Spotify and YouTube. They can get stuck in a feedback loop where the pool of recommendations shrinks to the point where it recommends the same stuff over and over.
I have a bunch of different Pandora channels with different themes.
Pandora's skip limit is per-channel. If you run out of skips on one channel, and give up on it and start playing another channel, you get the full complement of skips back. You can go for quite a while if you have several channels.
In a development that is probably not related, but nevertheless feels like it is, Pandora tries hard to get you to collapse your channels, playing songs on one of them that don't fit at all but that you've thumbed up on another channel.
(Another obvious pattern is that if you haven't signed in to Pandora in a while, all of your channels will heavily feature songs that you've already thumbed up. They start playing new potential "discoveries" only after working through a "welcome back" backlog.)
You are Spotify's product. They get money making record labels happy. User preference is secondary to this goal.
The new Korean monster movie, Hope, keeps getting jammed into my watchlist, and I can’t remove it.
I don’t want to watch it, and I’ll bet that watching it, won’t make it go away.
Maybe Bono invested into it…
(None of this excuses the annoyance but I loathe leaving something untriaged when it’s a matter of seconds for the dice roll of helping.)
Those of us that were Apple users, back when, may remember a certain forced "gift" of a U2 album...
There was a case a few months ago where the App Store was forcing an app reinstall into people’s phones even after they’d deleted it years prior, which I assume ended up being a server-side bug (perhaps a database shard had a defect?) since so few, relatively speaking, were affected.
I had to escalate to a cloud data repair through their support to unbreak my own database entries re: a different service. It took several weeks but it eventually got resolved.
In fact, the algorithm is there to make money by changing the choice a person would make otherwise - the subtlety I assume is figuring when someone will accept a "good enough" choice handed to them. But just limiting choice to what you want someone to make might be a simpler approach.
The music industry associations around the world generally can’t force you to use their royalty system for your own music. So if you make an ai generated track they’re out of the loop completely. As much as people hate ai music it’s a nice upside.
It may well do, but if so, that's because they have more passive subscribers, or more generally that their users listen to less music. Possibly because their recommendation services are worse (most were much worse than Spotify's last time I checked), or possibly just because they have less users streaming all day in their hair salon etc.
(This payment scheme also why Jay Z's Tidal, when it inflated the listens of Beyonce's "Lemonade" and Kanye's "Life of Pablo", stole from every other artist on that platform. I'm still amazed they got away with that, but I guess Norwegian courts weren't prepared for the "shit-flinging monkey" legal strategy.)
I’m so happy that massive corporations can save on royalties by pushing AI slop in my playlist.
I really wish I could use an LLM to select the recommendations
Enabling their "AutoPlay Station" keeps going to certain tracks that I ALWAYS skip and yet they come back again and again.
They get pushed also by what's the most profitable to play out, which is why you get so many bootleggy "Live Version" and shitty remixes.
It's often hard to get Spotify that actually all you want is the unremixed unedited unremastered album version of a track.
Even YouTube music works better for me most of the time, but SoundCloud clearly takes the lead
There's many auto generating dynamic ones. Like the Monday and Criday ones. Plus the DJ new AI thing and then the better stuff is often in all the human curated Spotify lists.
There's also a way on desktop to take an existing g playlist and "create similar" where it tries to make something similar too one of your already made playlists. You have a lot more control using this
Holy shit, I’m the exact opposite. I’m so sorry. I am the reason you have to listen to all that vocal trance.
The New York Times doesn't have to bullshit because people want to use it, thus it's a more trustworthy advertising point.
https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...
- People who know you very well (friends, family, spouse) often buy you bad gifts you need to pretend to be happy to receive.
- Ultimately, advertisers aren't _merely_ trying to find things you want. They're trying to get you to buy _their_ things. So someone selling (let's say) hamburgers might be savvy enough to avoid vegetarians, but after that how would they possibly narrow it down? Not everyone wants to try out a new burger place, or even cares about advertising when it comes to restaurant suggestions.
ie, they're trying to coerce you into wanting their products, and no amount of targeting can really fix that problem. Also, targeting is difficult.
That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough". Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, there isn't really a lot of meaningful competition in the ad space driving superior targeting. It's more about having the killer network, the list of effective channels (search, youtube, instagram whatever) that is the big players advantage rather than their targeting skills.
Agreed wholeheartedly, and this is an important point: advertisers don't really lose much by showing you ads you don't want, so it's unlikely the system would ever become ultra-precise.
What people seem to be looking for is not targeted advertising but targeted recommendations - where vendor "spend" can't skew the results to show you crap you don't want. But that's a product the consumer and not the vendor would have to pay for, by definition. Unfortunately consumers don't have deep enough pockets to make this kind of thing lucrative over just selling ads.
It's an entirely soulless process, which makes my extensive ad-blocking regime entirely justified the same way that walking off of a beaten path in the woods is justified.
There is a big misconception that ads are just targeted as picking the max(advertiser spend) and it really fuels low quality discussion online.
[1] VPNs are a perfect example here. I would never use NordVPN because they advertise on every square inch of YouTube. This suggests to me that they're either charging too much for what they offer or they're getting money from their actual customers and the users are simply the inventory they sell to those customers.
Google has a lot of incentive to optimize this, and it's a lot of why they (and Meta) spent so much money on AI research that eventually brought us modern AI.
> Google is doing McDonalds a disservice as their advertiser by showing you the ad (and won't be doing the user any useful service either).
yes this is right and why the parent is totally off base
> That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".
This is totally wrong. Ads targeting "algorithms" are some of the most complicated systems on earth. First of all, it is completely done by machine learning models now not simple algorithms, and within companies who are doing ads targeting well (ie, Google, Meta, Tiktok, and if you want to go down the list to the less competent companies then you can include X and Reddit and others) there is massive internal pressure and competition to get any edge by either improving models or other parts of the ads targeting stack. The top dogs as in Tiktok, Google Search, and Meta have been posting 10+% yoy ads revenue numbers for many years now with a much smaller increase or even flatlining user counts. It's all due to improvements in the ads stack making them more effective and more useful for advertisers (and they and the article in the post would say users as well but HN mostly doesn't subscribe to this viewpoint) driving more total ads spend and a growing economy.
My perception is that your job is to build a model to psychologically profile people at scale to manipulate them into buying stuff they wouldn't buy otherwise. Now, first of all, that seems incredibly unsettling to me in its own right already.
But where it gets really unsettling is if you think even a little bit past the immediate usecase: Once you have this sort of model, who knows what sort of other stuff you can manipulate people into? Should people like Zuckerberg really have the power to do this? And if you trust Zuckerberg, what about other players? Say an authoritarian state somehow managed to get control over these models. Doesn't it seem like you're building an incredibly dangerous thing here?
Wonder how you feel about these things and if you've ever had similar concerns. Like, I get that there's probably all sorts of interesting engineering problems involved. But one could say the same thing about von Braun building the V2 - these things aren't just puzzles in isolation!
And they have been for a very long time, dating back to at least when von Braun was building those V2s.
If we lived in a more humane world, intrusive advertisement and propaganda would all be banned--but that is like talking about some kind of utopia-level civilization right now. Might as well be discussing modern democracy back in the 10th century.
People buy to solve the problems they already had. All ads do is give them a timely reminder of something they were already thinking about.
Im not sure if you mean “coerce” literally but if so this is overkill. Maybe “persuade” or to be more critical, “manipulate”?
It's almost like rather than identify who I am, they identified the social niche stereotype I identify with, and then pull ads from that reservoir.
So while Google is trying to get me to buy discrete transistors and push cart tires (work related stuff), Meta is trying to get me to buy bespoke Icelandic wool socks, artisan gummy edibles, and hand made ceramic table ware.
Doesn't it make more sense that these things just advertise better on Instagram? These are all things people like to show off on that platform.
> It's almost like rather than identify who I am, they identified the social niche stereotype I identify with, and then pull ads from that reservoir.
So... you're a typical user of Instagram? I'm not following how this alone isn't the largest signal of all.
Coming from a relatively hardened mindset, it is startling to understand how impressionable people must be for modern advertising to be worth the cost.
Everyone is influenced by advertising even if it’s third hand: “oh I like that (thing) where did you get it, oh (person) saw an ad and bought one and I tried it too”
But I agree that if you inculcate a default position of rejecting things that are advertised you can avoid being pulled into wasting your energy on unnecessary things
I always try to avoid ads as much as possible and not having any social media really helps. But going to use this remark from now on.
Expanding on this.
"Wanna go eat somewhere? Like McDonald's or something?" -> McDonald's is suggested offhandedly[1], but that's only because it's already somewhere in the back of the person's mind, and it's already associated with "eating". It's only "already" there because the person is aware of it. And they're aware of it for whatever reason (one of which could be advertising, but who knows!).
The endgame for advertising is when people become blind to ads, either because they become used to them, or because they hate them so much they "ignore" them (or so they tell themselves). So in both those situations they completely block out the "ad" part of it, and "I saw an ad about a thing that..." becomes "Wasn't there a thing that...?").
[1]: Maybe even defensively, like "if we don't find anything better (or we're not in the mood for anything in particular) there's always this option as a last resort".
They are throwing many different strategies out there through many different avenues and banking one the one that just happens to pull in a new chunk of buyers. It’s like lower-stakes gambling.
This doesn't in the slightest replace ads though. Before modern internet advertising we had advertising in whatever else had your attention. Ads were meant as we way to simplify and ease distribution.
It's a horrible business in terms of user experience but it's purpose isn't user experience it's meant for businesses to be able to streamline their outreach for much cheaper than the alternatives, imagine cold calls, emails, door knocks, door to door sales has died for this very reason.
I am not trying to explain away the issues and societal problems but they have value of companies otherwise they wouldn't exist. However much people would like to pretend CEOs and founders aren't completely retared.
For initial distribution spikes Ads are the best possible solution, very expensive yes, but if your goal is growth Ads are the most efficient solution since they almost linearly convert spending into visibility in turn producing growth.
Horrible way to do stuff but it's what it is.
Despite lichess being better in every way except marketing, it's still #2.
It's very impressive word of mouth got it to #2, but marketing experts are marketing experts.
It's like why they use sharp points in the hazmat symbol, it just looks bad even if you don't know what it means.
The only companies that have made any real money have had to use Ads from the very start.
You can catch lightining in a bottle but exceptions here prove the rule.
It's absurd to think anyone will care about your product if you don't.
If I make let's say a children's toy, how am I supposed to let people know that this new type of toy even exists? That WHOLE process is advertising, no? Whether I give these toys away for free at a Santa Clause parade, pay department stores to put my toy in prominent shelves, or buy space on Cartoon Network.
How do you get even a single buyer without advertising?
The last thing a marketing company or media provider wants to admit is that any of their services are underperforming, or worse, turning off buyers.
It's true that advertising is a great way to promote a product, but its far from the only way. For many years now I've done what I can to cut all advertising out of my life and yet I still buy lots of things, including things I've never seen a single ad for.
I'm sure it's almost completely subconscious.
The mechanism of how advertising works seems to be not that. I think repeatedly brand exposure does something to the brain and decision making that we don’t fully understand.
Exposure breeds familiarity, which breeds desire, I think.
Even if all you hear is an occasional ad about the company, you might get curious and research them yourself.
That kind of stuff is absolutely worth the cost of ad spend online
But, even if there's a better equilibrium, isn't loading a website crammed with obtrusive ads still a coasean bargain between two parties? Simon P. Anderson and Stephen Coate studied this question in "Market Provision of Broadcasting: A Welfare Analysis" (2005). They identified unpriced externalities like the common-pool attention tragedy, as has been raised in other comments here, and asymmetric information & hold-up, which increase transaction costs.
Divide advertising spend into two components: Informative specs, and persuasive/obtrusive spend. The margial external cost is the sum of profits foregone by rival businesses, and aggregate viewer nuisance. A pigouvian tax with an exemption threshold for factual spreadsheets and apunitive rate on expenditure above that (or visual intrusion metrics) both prices the cognitive nuisance imposed on readers, and collapses the positional arms race between rival firms; transforming the industry from a high-waste prisoner's dilemma to a low-cost, high-information pareto optimum.
Obviously, you still have to watch out for firms goodharting the spreadsheet metric, but that's both a partially solvable problem, and a much better situation than the current nash equilibrium.
There's a lot of question as to how much advertising is actually worth the cost, at least in terms of actual sales. I suspect that many companies could scale back their spending on marketing substantially and never notice any difference in sales.
Advertising does more than push sales though, it also manipulates consumer perspectives and our culture. It sets expectations. It tries to make you feel inadequate, insecure, and unfulfilled. It modifies how we act and the ways we express ourselves. It changes how we see ourselves and the world. Maybe that is what's really worth the money.
As part of his training he had to run an advertising campaign for a minor P&G shampoo brand. Training for a finance position, not a product management position! Why would you make somebody in finance handle marketing for a shampoo? Because they need to understand the fundamental mechanics that drive the business. There's no such thing as a good or a bad ad. The only thing that matters is that you flash the name of your product into peoples' primitive lizard brain over and over and over. Pantene, Pantene, Pantene, Pantene. People buy commodity products, and are willing to pay more, solely based on whether they recognize the name or not. Humans have no defense against this.
And for the record, the last one (sales) is what really matters. As another old saying goes, "Nothing happens until you get a purchase order."
Really aligning sales incentives with the company's goals is surprisingly rare, and seems much rarer now than it was 20 years ago becasue of digital media.
When you view ads through this lens, the number of ads for things that consumers do not even directly purchase — like prescription drugs, or oil - makes a lot more sense.
And nowadays they're mainly trying to convince us that these companies are green and part of the zero emissions/carbon negative solution
If the company can afford to throw money at Frivolous Thing X, the money has to come from somewhere, which implies it comes from consumers who aren't actually getting a good deal on the product or service.
Established Titles doesn't make you a lord. Honey doesn't save you money. Brilliant doesn't help you learn things. Betterhelp doesn't connect you with real therapists. I forgot the others.
The VPN side - it feels more like a honeypot than anything else to me.
I'll sometimes use the VPN mode from Proton, but I wouldn't sign up for just a vpn - I simply assume they are selling my data the same as everyone else. The only way to convince me otherwise is an open-source non-profit vpn properly overnighted by the community.
One doesn't need to be frugal or come from such environment, its more about basic human decency and mental hygiene. You try to manipulate me to buy your product, normalize its existence etc? Ok will make sure to avoid that, there is a lot of competition. Too pushy and seeing it everywhere? it means you over-invested on marketing manipulation and product has probably seen some dramatic cost-cutting to make it all together still financially viable. In any case, customer lost.
uBlock origin with Firefox on internet, including (especially!!!) on phone. Ads simply don't exist in my world under normal circumstances, not on general web, nor on youtube. When something bad happens and I see internet or youtube without those protections, its properly nauseating and outright insulting to me.
But - I've seen people en masse already conditioned to accept this, they watch it all, some of them even take hints for their shopping habits. When questioned, they don't see anything wrong, don't care about manipulation. Sometimes I feel like an alien. Luckily my wife sees it the same, I'll go to great lengths to protect my young kids from this cancerous soul garbage. 'Better' parents from our circles see it similarly, for now at least.
I did some web development work for an advertising guy about 20-odd years ago and he found my position on it baffling.
"But advertising works on everyone!" he cried, "everyone remembers their favourite adverts! Why do you buy oh for example the washing powder you buy?"
Well, I buy Persil, because it's what my mum buys, and I like how it smells. I tried other washing powders, but I didn't like how they smelled so much, and there are two brands I won't buy because they have annoying shouty adverts.
He just didn't get it at all.
So even the most hardcore nerds adapt their tastes to what other people like. It's not so hard, because hey, there are other good TV shows, there's other reasonable entertainment. It's hard to say objectively that a Star Trek convention is better than a Mongolian Chess tournament anyway.
But when advertising comes into the picture... It's not that you necessarily think the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the best thing ever. It's that you know everyone will be talking about it, everyone will be referencing it, so if you can find at least decently entertaining you should maybe prioritize getting into that over getting into Danish underground comics from the 90s.
On the flip side I only give cash and they all complain its not very thoughtful, no matter how nice the Hallmark money card.
I have bought a number of $50-$100 things that are advertised to me on Instagram. I think I bought a $1,000 piece of furniture once.
Instagram ads are perfectly targeted to me. I am sometimes amazed at how often they show me good products that I legitimately want to buy - often niche, unique products from companies I didn't know existed. Obviously they are combining information from other sites I visit, because the accounts I follow on Instagram have nothing to do with any products.
Targeted ads in this setting are quite useful and pleasant for me! I wish Meta all the best in making them even better. I'm sure they are also super useful for the small businesses making the products I buy, because they can build awareness much more cost-effectively than other mechanisms.
Yes, I agree that when I visit my local news sites and see "targeted" ads for sports gambling, "800 singles in your area", or other nonsense I'm not interested in, it's pretty unpleasant. But those are just shitty ads.
Why would Meta not raise their costs of advertising until it was the most efficient by the smallest margin?
Not sure why we got to this point. If there had only been video game ads on my video game site I wouldn't have had to resort to adblocking back in - checks calendar - 2007.
That's what this is all about. Where is my tech-powered shopping helper and advocate?
Convincing someone who does want a burger to buy one at Shake Shack does work.
People who bought BBQs or anything else related to hamburger-adjacent foods or equipment.
People who live or travel through a 30 minute radius of somewhere that they're sold.
People who are able to view the ad between the hours of 11am and 7pm.
People who have engaged with burger-related activity on social media (TikTok, Reddit, YouTube)
People with a higher-than-average association with other burger fans.
All of this information is available for a price.
If I've bought a BBQ and hamburger-adjacent equipment, I probably prefer my hamburgers home-made.
I might view the ad after 7 PM, as that's when I get home from work, and still decide to go there the next day during my commute.
Engaging with burger-related activity might also mean that I run a competing joint, so advertising to me is pointless (unless you want me to buy that one time just to check my competition).
One of the examples in the posts describes ads for products that aren't even sold in his country. I feel like limiting your ads to people that are or live in a country you sell your burgers in would be a good start.
I just disabled my adblocker on the BBC website out of curiosity and oh am I happy I don't live like this.
What's freaky is there are people who actually like the ads.
Granted, many of us enjoy the kooky ads that occur during the Super Bowl. That's not really what I'm talking about. I've met people who say they enjoy midroll ads in videos and podcasts. There are even folks who like banner ads. To me, those all represent precious seconds that add up to countless hours of my life wasted, which I will never get back. The more ads I avoid, the more opportunity to experience life I have.
Another horrible thing about ads in general is they distract one from being alone with their own thoughts. A lot of people are too afraid to spend time alone with their own thoughts, so in a sense they might enjoy the fact that any sensory input can take them away from that. To me, modern ads are thought vampires. It might be one thing if ads focused on the merits of products, and if most products today were of quality and a fair price, except that is not the norm.
But I enjoy creative ads thanks to growing up watching the french tv show Culture Pub: https://www.culturepub.fr/annee-chapitre/2007/
For example, insight into the french advertisement culture makes you appreciate the full depth of the movie "99 francs": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0875113/
The HN crowd tends to filter out lower IQ people from their social circles so that it's easy to forget this simple fact about humanity.
One thing I've realized - I simply can't grok many of theirs' decisions, viewpoints, values. Its often quite selfish view but rarely just that. And just pure facts rarely pierce the thick veil or version of reality they create for themselves to feel comfortable in this crazy world. Or maybe thats the thing - I don't mind feeling uncomfortable in this world, seeing uncomfortable truths, picking up lesser of evils instead if simple black & white polarity, or the pinnacle - actually changing my opinion on things as I learn more about it.
Or in other words - can't talk to them about anything deeper, nor do I grok them beyond surface layer. But as you say its fine, and also its quite easy to create a life where you just don't meet them, apart from odd situations like car repairs or home reconstruction.
I’ve watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail countless times and I laugh at it every time.
I'll never forget the last time I visited the Dell website, it had some popup dialogue constantly jump into view on the side and then disappear again after two seconds or so. It was so infuriatingly distracting to me, meanwhile someone else sitting next to me didn't even notice it before I pointed it out. Which I guess explains why that same person often has trouble finding a seemingly obvious button on screen - it could jump across the screen and some might still not see it.
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/120541/why-do-people-...
I find it especially funny that when I point my eyes directly at the banner (because it's the subject of the question) my brain still filters it out by ignoring it.
This is especially true when you know how to avoid ads otherwise and are confronted with what must be the default ads for the majority of regular users.
It's like a smell. Some are pleasant, some are fascinating, and some are totally nasty, but I don't willingly plug my nose everywhere I go like a psycho.
What would the world be like without smells? This is a serious question I'm asking. How recalcitrant do you really have to be to get offended by all ads and on the principle of the matter?
One of my best friends had banner ads and YouTube ads on his laptop, and there was a day where I finally had to say something about this. I asked him if he ever considered installing an ad blocker and explained how easy it is. He surprised me by saying "Meh, they don't really bother me. I kinda like some of them." As mind-bending as this is from my own perspective, this mindset does seem to exist.
I can also count with more than one finger how many girls I've gone on a movie date with who said "I dunno, I like it" after I made fun of the stupid Coca-Cola commercial or whatever before the trailers. Looking back at this, I probably was being a bit pompous. I'm pretty sure they liked the commercials for the vibes they picked up from their perceived positivity.
I remember visiting family during the height of the iPod and being offended by how many iPod ads were on TV. I worked for Apple at the time. I couldn't imagine not hating the company if I didn't work for them because of how intrusive the ads were. My family didn't seem to notice / tuned them out.
(Annoyingly it’s also stored in a cookie; if you travel frequently, you can get stuck in a redirect loop.)
I'm so glad that political season is finally over because I've been being spammed by politicians over and over and over. The worst part was they weren't even from my state.
Advertisers forgot that you shouldn't spam the exact same ad over and over. I am never going to buy insurance from gigco, state form, or liderty for that reason.
Sometimes there is a glitch and I get more generic ads, and I live on the edge of a "rich" zip code so I get ads for jet rideshares and lately ULA, I mean I enjoy Scott Manley's Deep Space Updates but I am not launching sats, so I am not sure why I get those ads.
Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.
As an aside, there is exactly one place on earth where I will actively look around for ads, and that is London Underground stations. Because for whatever reason they advertise a lot of cultural events (concerts, festivals, plays, etc).
Back in the bad old days of adobe and flash plugins in Internet explorer, malicious ads targetting those were the malware infection vector in something like 80% of cases. Browsers have gotten better, but it remains the case that ad networks are the single easiest way to inject your mal-content into another website.
In those days, any time I handled a client call about malware, I replaced everything with Chrome (built in pdf viewer, sandboxed/autoupdated flash) and adblock plus. And then, my calls from those users stopped being about malware or slow internet.
We see headlines about this-- about the Israeli firm that was abusing this, for instance, to hit targets-- and I am left scratching my head. Of course...?
IMHO it's the duty of any techie (with the social capital to influence digital hygiene) to ensure they and theirs are set up with at least ublock lite.
I’m not sure about that. I suspect people don’t like how intrusive ads are. Especially in videos.
The security issue strikes me as a post Adblock rationalisation. People know how the sites they visit are funded and need some way to justify cutting that off.
The number who understand the security implications is going to be very small.
I suspect that Amazon somehow get paid for "impressions" by the ad originator.
(it looks very much like a standard enshitification pattern : 1) gain market dominance, 2) screw the users 3) screw the business customers )
Isn't the point of those, that in the end, the likelihood of you buying something again just recently bought might be tiny, but is probably still bigger than showing the same add to a random other person?
The effect is quite strong.
Humans are stupid and fail to make logical decisions, instead they reinforce and justify their previous ones.
Showing you the product you purchased is the best way to get you to transfer your purchase decision to purchase additional other products.
1) and a lot of them prefer them to be gone
2) why it would be a hard truth? I am not expecting that everyone will match my preferences
They probably have data on return rates and the brand/model people buy after returning? Or are you saying they show you the exact same brand/model you just bought? That would be weird, unless it’s a consumable.
I've asked people at Amazon on the recommendation algorithm side about this, since it comes up so often in discussions.
Their answer is that, surprisingly, it is a good heuristic. If you just bought something, you've shown intent, and there's a small probability that you're going to be unhappy with your initial purchase and back on the market soon, for whatever reason.
Is the posterior probability that you'll buy a mattress again shortly after buying one, a small chance? Yes, undoubtedly. But is it smaller than the prior probability of a random person who hasn't bought any mattress at all recently, suddenly being on the market for a mattress? Apparently not.
Weird things can happen with joint probabilities when both sides of the condition are very unlikely. Sort of like how your chance of having some rare cancer after testing positive on a ~99% accurate cancer screening test is still quite tiny.
It probably helps when your marketplace is filled with knockoffs and misrepresented trash.
This makes no sense. If I just bought a mattress, the prior probability of a random person buying it is irrelevant. What's relevant is the posterior distribution of what people buy after buying a mattress. Yes, you might buy another one, but what about other bedroom accessories for example?
A mattress might not be the best example though, because what really matters here is the expected value from the posterior probability, which includes the price. So a more expensive product with a slightly lower probability of purchase might yield a higher expected value than cheaper products with higher probability.
Anyway, that's orthogonal to the discussion: my point is that it's the posterior distribution conditioned on the mattress purchase that should be modeled, not the comparison with random people that may or may not just have bought a mattress.
> one place on earth where I will actively look around for ads, and that is London Underground stations
Like the ads I get on instagram, I actually don't mind because they are show me clothing consistent with my taste in clothes or appliance/utilties I'd find useful. Can't say I've ever seen a useful ad on twitter/X or Tiktok.
Guys, if I buy a photo camera, I might want lenses, or a cleaning kit, or maybe a camera bag. But I'm almost certainly not interested in starting a camera collection, nor am I interested in incompatible brands to what I just bought.
It shouldn't be so hard to run some stats and figure out that there's things one doesn't buy again often, like washing machines, cameras, laptops and other big purchases.
Also, search still sucks. Searching for things like sizes where fuzzy ranges are involved is pain. Like I need to find a recessed light that fits into a 100mm hole, it's a pain to search for still. At this point I think somebody at Amazon could have come up with a way to categorize products and extract parameters automatically. And the pain only increases exponentially if you need 3-4 things in a product to match.
ChatGPT can do it, no reason why Amazon couldn't just have that on their page.
You might not be, but as a guy with easily a dozen cameras from half a dozen brands, we're absolutely out there, and I know plenty of other folks in my network who do too.
(Reason: I travel a lot, I live stream for a living, and my partner does social media.)
I'm old. I don't understand how the economics of this work, and I think of it was explained to me, it would annoy me.
People in livestreaming are paid because their platform is paid, because it sells advertising during the livestreaming. Advertisers pay because the platform can demonstrate that a lot of eyeballs are watching, and they support livestreamers that many eyeballs enjoy watching. There can also be direct sponsors, merchandising, franchises, etc.
If your question is not the economics but the social aspect (why would someone watch livestreaming?), the answer is that either the livestreamer is doing something cool that people like watching -- and you can be as judgemental about that as you can be for TV shows ("they're watching Real Housewives / a guy speedrunning Super Mario Bros / HYROX championships ??!?!?"), and there is now also the live-service aspect, which you've experienced for decades in the form of talk radio with callers, and DJs taking live requests. Also, in the early days of the internet, there used to be forums that would host watch parties, so everyone watched the TV at the same time and commented in a thread to get the metacommentary and it built up a watching community. That is now integrated into the livestreaming, and the chat sidebar is visible to everyone watching, approximating a live audience, who can let their thoughts be known in a slightly more nuanced way than just cheering/booing/clapping.
If you buy one camera, you are likely a billion times more likely to buy another. And, you have the disposable income to be in the market.
>> there's things one doesn't buy again often, like washing machines
You are not a whale, but you might be. Most people only buy one washing machine but a few people buy dozens (apartment managers and such). Such people, whales, sometimes buy one as test case. So ya, if you buy one then you are a strong maybe for one day buying many more.
The washing machine advertiser doesn't want to to spend money to show me an ad for something I'm not going to buy, and even Amazon doesn't benefit because they get something out of each purchase, so they should want to show me stuff I want to buy too.
There's just nobody that benefits from bad ad selection.
* I purchase something and all the recommended products become the thing I just purchased for the next month.
* I do an operation in 3D modeling software that can be applied in 2 directions, it always chooses to apply it in the direction that makes no sense.
* I get recommendations in my social media feeds for what to do in a certain city for 2 months after I already visited and returned home.
* I click on a link to a song, listen for 10 seconds and turn it off because its a genre I don't like, too bad, that is what the algorithm thinks I'm exclusively into now (related, right now I'm struggling with Tidal recommending Swedish language songs because a band I recently discovered is Swedish despite singing in English).
Maybe I don't notice when the computer gets it right most of the time, but it really feels like it gets it wrong more than it gets it right. It also feels like this continually gets worse, when software should be getting smarter at predicting what a user wants. Is it unreasonable to expect that my computer can see that I did the same operation on something twice in a row and that maybe it should prompt me to do it on the rest of the data in the same location?
A small storefront business I liked closed up over the summer. Literally nothing to do with tech other than they had a website, flat HTML that hadn't been touched in years, to solicit business. They communicated with me and their other customers by SMS, almost exclusively.
I talked to one of the core employees and asked why they were closing. Business was drying up, the usual story of business headwinds but among the reasons business was drying up was they couldn't make money by running ads, the cost of running the ads these days meant they would barely break even on the average customer they acquired at the historical customer acquisition rates.
I don't buy ads myself but the sense they shared was the like the locksmith and plumber experience, except as seen from the other side. Maybe it's different in other parts of the world but the experience is 1000s of ads for indistinguishable fly-by-night-looking operations all of which seemingly lead to the same call centers. Dispatching nearly-faceless vans from who knows where and a different junior-ish guy or gal shows up each time, looks dazed, does an average job and hustles off to the next one.
I don't know the business well but to me as a buyer it's a bit like a hairstylist. Once you find a good one, or for me at least, I am reluctant to switch.
advertisers are.
you use adblocker. you're persona non grata to begin with. your purchases are not mapped back, that's why you keep seeing the stuff you just bought. for them, you are top of the funnel still. AdBlockers work! (20yrs in adtech)
for music, you're also irrelevant. you're old. music industry doesn't care about 25+ finding new music. they spend all their effort on keeping teenagers in a comfortable bubble to mine them for music purchases and shows. people under 25 spend pretty much all the money record labels make.
anyway, the system works and they do know everything about you. but your goals and desires are completely irrelevant to everyone involved money changing hands.
Howver, i do not see why i should not act the exact same to the industry. From my perspective i absolutely hate online advertisements in each and every form. This is a feeling and not something i enforce or endorse to others. You do you concerning advertisements.
If it was legally possible for me to destroy all advertisements, i would. But it is not. I do however control my own infrastructure. I am as sure going to design it so that i am as little as possible bothered by advertisements. The goal of the advertisement industry is completely irrelevant to me.
Their ad being shown to someone who already bought the thing or is obviously not gonna do so can't be in their interest, can it?
I keep my Firefox on mobile (with ublock origin) not logged into my google account. Every second search result since forever I need to add work "english" to it, clearly just english search words are not enough to convince it to give me english-speaking results, all is in german. Sometimes, even that word doesn't switch it.
Its pretty pathetic for otherwise stellar tech company of such scale, and since we are in 2026 clearly not a priority for anybody.
You can be certain that they are using that data. The truth is that the data being collected about you is not intended to benefit you, it's being gathered and stored and sold to be used against you in any way that the person with that data feels might be an advantage for them.
It's not really about showing you relevant ads, or helpful recommendations, or useful product offerings. It hasn't been about any of those things for a very long time now. Your data will still be used that way, but while companies will tell you that is mainly why they collect your data that is a lie. Those are secondary uses for your data and making those things work well for your benefit is a cost to the companies and they are only willing to invest so much time/money/effort into that.
Your data is being used mostly for their benefit at your expense, and where it isn't being used today, it's being stored for a time in the future when it can be used more effectively against you. AI promises to make it easier than ever to trawl through all that data and find ways to leverage it to better manipulate you, or take more of your money from you, or further limit any possible risk you might expose a company to.
Companies don't want you to be aware of when and how that data is being used, so it's natural for you to feel like it's all being ignored, but you can sure that a lot of work is going into finding new and creative ways to put all that data to use.
Do you think it's unlikely that companies collecting and buying large amounts of data on the intimate details of your life would try to use that data to their advantage? Do you think that data isn't being used to manipulate people? To take more of their money? To lower a company's risks?
Do you think that there aren't a growing number of products and services designed to allow them to do exactly those things?
Do you think that companies aren't aware of how consumer perception and awareness of these practices impacts them or that they don't see it as an obstacle?
Yep, its not really inflation making things expensive. It's that every company now knows scientifically exactly how much money they can get out of you. Not just how much but literally what minute of the day they can get more money out of you. Probably even charge more by what mood you are in at this point, that is not sarcasm.
The primary purposes of the data going forward will be: psychological manipulation by political factions and special interest groups, calculating the absolute maximum cost you will bear on any given item or service, and de-risking you to the insurance industry (by increasing your premiums or denying you coverage). In authoritarian societies, it will also be used to build the various lists of undesirables to be expunged, as defined by the current authority (wrong subculture, wrong origin, wrongthink).
But I hate it when they suggest things that I don't want.. show me stuff I have already bought.... show me things I already decided against... show me stuff that is not in my price range. That's annoying. I don't mind a good, paid recommendation. I just don't like all the bad recommendations.
I'm not sure if that's true, but that's the theory.
That's just stupid.
But I have never heard of them passing it on to whatever 3rd party trackers they have on their sites. THAT would be a privacy violation.
Any kind of "proactive" behavior on the part of the computer is unwelcome. If I don't command it, I don't expect my computer to do it. This includes ads but it also includes recommendations, and notifications, and "you should do this!" and "try that app!" and everything else modern computers are now throwing at us.
We need to get back to the user being in the driver's seat.
This does not require more tracking. This requires LESS tracking - just show the language explicitly requested by the user.
> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.
This does not require more tracking. Just dont show the screen if there is only one user.
You know, I had a really long argument about a decade ago with an Amazon senior engineer on the ads side of things about this. I was complaining about repeatedly being shown ads for the same blender I had just purchased (not accessories, not competing products, the exact same blender). And I hit a brick wall of "everybody complains about this, and we've been trying to change this, but every change to this makes the metrics worse".
It is just the curse of naive AB testing. Same stuff happens with apps like Duolingo where it is optimized e2e, not personalized, and then they behave as if their approach is sane.
The UX stuff is pretty obvious. Probably comes down to the time and money involved in implementing and maintaining something better. An engineering problem. The airline stuff is likely an architecture problem. Airlines are notorious for running ancient systems (Windows XP, floppy disks). I’d bet the information is there somewhere, just scattered across a bunch of poorly integrated systems.
Like it or not, AI will probably improve a lot of this. As behavioral analysis and AI-generated customer profiles become more common, these systems will get better at figuring out what you actually want. I wouldn’t be surprised to see advertisers running small models built around individual customers and their behavior. You’ll basically just be a vector in some advertising model. The ads will probably be more relevant, but I’m not sure we’ll be thrilled about how much they know about us.
Adobe and Lenovo are really good at this.
If you have bought them recently, they are the most unlikely things to buy in the near future.
I was actually surprised a few days ago when I have seen for the first time in many years a personalized ad that was useful. When I visited an on-line shop, I was greeted with a message that a product at which I have looked during a previous visit, but which I have not bought, has a 20% price reduction, and at the new price I was indeed interested to buy it.
This kind of notification, about a price reduction, makes sense, but ads for products to which I have looked previously and nothing has changed about them do not achieve any useful purpose. If I bought them I have no need to buy them again, if I did not buy them, this means that I decided that I do not need or want them, so I will not buy them regardless if I see ads for them.
I used to work at a big ad company and went and read about this once. Turns out the opposite is true (in general, maybe not for you specifically).
People are really likely to rebuy things. I’m not really sure why, but the numbers don’t lie. Gifts maybe?
Time consuming research (starting with filtering out advertising budget powered fake reviews) and short-lived products & brands make personal experience & recommendations a lot more useful. If someone around me has an even remotely similar set of requirements and budget for a product, they are much more likely better off trusting my recommendation and (having me) order another one right away. It used to be less clustered around one person or calendar date, when brands stayed around and kept true to their previous performance for longer. Nowadays I even order duplicates for myself, not because I really need 3 of them in the near-term future, but because I am worried that I will want a replacement in a year and another one the year after.. and I won't find exactly the same then.
Basically: capture everything I'm putting out and use it to help me.
But that's the "buy this now" type of ads, another big category that I don't see on the internet much (...because I have an ad blocker but that aside) is the "brand recognition" type - Nike and Coca Cola for example, a lot of their ads are passive in that they just want you to see the logo and become familiar and comfortable with it. Product placement in media.
Can the advertiser (as in "the company paying for the ad") get any of those signals ("we're paying for ads, but they're being shown to randos who are never going to by our products") ?
Or are the online ads so cheap that they don't care ?
It might also be a hard problem that is unsolvable until now. The most obvious reason is that company has a partial knowledge of the customer making distorted decisions about what to show.
I think it'd be a great opportunity for someone to make an ad network where the user can type in things about themselves in an ad space. Randomly targeted questions and then we get ads perhaps around that. Ads that start off about current events in a fun way and give users an opportunity to feel like they have control in what they see. I know users would abuse it but I think that'd add value to the interaction. If I didn't want toilet seats but I write that I do it'd be valuable to an ad network to see how users interact with their preferences. I'm sure we'll say google already sort of does this but I disagree. I think google infers based on our traffic. Some sites I visit I don't necessary want to but am forced to. I'd love to see ads or have the option to even pay for things I want to see like pictures of my kids instead of an ad.
Subject: 6MONTHS OF'COVERA.GE'START.ING.AT $2
From: RR_BANKAI.NET.bankai.NET.MCK.NET.MCK.NET.MCK.NET.RR_BANKAIdb@ad288.com
In contrast go try out a Chinese social media such as Rednote, and the recommendation algorithm is creepily good at displaying that it knows what content you like. Yes it does feel creepy. But in this case I wanted it to know my interests.
Spotify, Instagram, all those others, it's like the button ENCOURAGES them.
I also stopped getting ads years ago, but it was the same story. Car Ads. I hate cars, I have made it as clear as possible on multiple occasions. Sidebar ads never learn. Amazon never learns. And I bet they keep trying to show me cars to this day.
I could probably get something pretty decent going if Youtube would give me access to some buttons that actually give their algorithm signals directly. Subscribing and watching every video should be a pretty strong signal. Subscribing and only watching videos with a certain subtitle should be a signal of what videos on that channel I like. There should be a 'channels I don't really care for' bucket, that it might still show me videos from if it's doing exceptionally well. But giving users these tools isn't in the interest of Youtube, so they never will.
I do much better after switching to FreeTube as a front-end for Youtube, since now I'll only be shown videos from people I subscribe to, and I can be on my own to find videos I actually want to watch. If only Youtube search wasn't hot garbage, I might actually see success more often than I do now.
However:
a) I don't want better-targeted ads or more convenient infinite recommendation algorithms because they create friction that preserves some intentionality in my media consumption.
b) there's some survivorship bias here. We notice the bad things because they stand out, but not all of the machine-recommended things that we unquestioningly accept.
Amazon used to be better at targeted advertising than it is now. I used to browse for a few things on Amazon, then go do something else, content with the knowledge that they'll do the hard work of figuring out what is actually a good recommendation for it. For a few years, this strategy helped me buy tools, light fixtures, and other things I used around the farm.
I'm not sure when it stopped, but it definitely did.
Ultimately, it's probably just a lot more compute than it's worth. They can probably spend $1 in compute to drive $10 in sales with dumb ads or they can spend $2 to drive $15 with smart ads. It's a diminishing returns thing and they drew the line such that I get dumb ads. Maybe folks that buy more, higher priced items get better ads.
I lived in Germany for years but don't speak German. I raised a support ticket with Spotify to ask that they stop sending me emails in German, as they full-well know I speak English (the Spotify UI, thankfully, is in English). They declined. I sent their emails to spam.
Amazon is the same. I ended up just not using them, because it was so painful getting their site to talk to me in a language I understand.
And, as TFA points out, we have a mechanism for this: the browser passes a preferred locale to the server. It's simply a matter of the server respecting this and not assuming that everyone who happens to have a German IP address speaks German, which is blatantly not true.
That works pretty well but me just constantly telling it to grep manually is a bit underwhelming as far as UX goes.
If I buy toilet paper and a toilet seat I’m not going to be buying another seat next month. I don’t use them up like that.
Always surprises me that Amazon hasn’t managed to incorporate that into their algo
But for a while not too long ago, like for one year until last summer I regularly used Instagram, and almost all ads were directly targeted at my interests and they directed me to local events and concerts and products and what not.
When I'm looking to purchase an item, it would be nice to get relevant ads for the kind of specs I'm looking for but like the blogger said, why do I care about getting ads for something I just purchased?
There are some remotes that can be programmed to automatically send a "select this" code I think, to automate having to do this every time (was researching something like this recently so just mentioning I think it exists, don't know a lot about it)
Now I am totally opposite, more unrelated the ads easier they are to ignore. If I start seeing related ads in feed (e.g. twitter), I try options provided by platforms to change those ads ('don't like this ad' etc)
You are not their client. And never been. And will never be.
Banks, credit unions, advertisers, insurance companies and the local and federal police. That's some of their clients.
In the sense that you aren’t able to build an immune system against it.
Other daily metrics like from Instagram, etc are not very monetizable as, like great, you know I sometimes doom scroll through Korean pole dancer accounts, etc. What exactly does that help with?
Programmers :-D
But most of us want it legally mandated as an opt-in with explicit consent.
"I wish the farmer knew more about me, it gives me corn but what I want is sunlight !"
What the former side ignores very often is that there are scam ads to scam websites that are basically malware. The ads with fake sign up buttons, the flashing ads saying you've won money, basically any video ad I've ever seen. They're garbage.
What the latter side ignores is... basic human agency? Nobody has ever had a gun to their head and been forced to buy a salad spinner off of Amazon because they saw a banner ad or read a sponsored article on a recipe blog. I have regretted purchases I've made, and some of those were probably only made because of an advertisement. That's my fault, not the advertiser's. If you don't want to buy something in an ad, don't buy it. A company having more fine-grained detail about your socioeconomic status or third-party purchases does not remove any of your agency.
My agency is removed when the mechanisms used to serve those ads aggressively invade my privacy and surveil pretty much any and every activity I do in daily life. This happens regardless of whether I click the ad or not. How does one miss this side of the argument? And no, "use an adblocker" or "use ublock origin" does not fix the problem.
But to your point, what agency of yours is removed when you buy a product known to actively spy on you, you take no measures to stop it, and that ends up with you being shown ads based on whatever you were browsing?
There is no opting out without entirely opting out of every day life. Whatever viewpoint you're coming from always seems completely oblivious to this.
> I'm so jealous of my son because he's 5 years old and they've been collecting all this data on him since he was in the womb and by the time he's my age he's going to have a much better customer experience than I'll ever get
Sounds impossible to figure out.
Like - I just purchased some plants from Dibleys, a plant nursery in UK. I've gotten confirmation email to my gmail account. Now I'm served plant ads for that very same company. I'd expect that The Algorithm would be smart to decide "hey, here is a guy that is interested in plants, let's take a look at other people in his age group and occupation, what are they also interested in, and let's serve him ads for that. Or having failed that ads for other plant nurseries in UK". But no! It's astounding, that it's so utterly mindlessly stupid.
But you know what, actually I prefer that there's no computational effort here. Maybe this means that me being served a shitty ad for a company I like and already know will not attribute to global warming. Maybe this means that Dibleys isn't being charged for a clickthrough, but for impressions that cost a lot less. Maybe this cyclical stupidity is something that we're stuck with as a human race, because why the fuck should an ad serve some kind of purpose.
That time where all the ads I got for months were ads for ridiculously expensive servers, after I had (out of curiosity) googled for "what is the most expensive server you can buy on ebay?"
Or the time when all I got was ads for military-grade cables and connectors for months, after having googled (out of curiosity) for something or another about submarines -- most likely something about the dud submarines that the UK had sold to the Canadian government.
Actually they have and they use it to charge advertisers who want to target you.
Hope this helps and reassures you! Now get back to the trough, piggy! And don't complain about the taste again!
You are the product!
Why would you think that companies want to use this information for your good?
I don't think that they care. Orders of magnitude more resources are poured into A/B retention testing than to user's actual quality of life improvement
coz targeted ads as in op - only one party has benefited so far - people running the ad exchanges.
It's easy to assign a straw-man a belief there is zero signal and talk down to it. The more nuanced idea that is less obvious goes like this: advertising is such a boondoggle that the aforementioned weak signal actually does represent a higher click-through than everything else in their ad inventory.
Advertisers working in predictive targeting like to tell tall tails about their analytical genius. That story about the Target ad campaign predicting someone was pregnant is their ur myth. The basis for their big swinging statistical analysis prowess. Imagine how embarrassing it would be to their carefully crafted image if they had to admit the peak of their profession is hoping people need a 2nd of something that's usually a less-than-once-a-year purchase.
The ad-example with the ovens/AEG appliances could also be designed for someone who recently moved in to a new home. But nevertheless, point of the OP is still valid.
I think that in theory, advertising based monetization is fine, but practically speaking, the incentives are so terrible that it invariably leads to bad outcomes. The reality of our ad-supported web is unsustainable and unacceptable and it needs to die. This does mean that lots of things will go away, and that we will be paying for a lot more things, but that's far preferable to the current state of the internet.
i went to bed and opened youtube. guess what, there it was again.
So, you are protected by the GDPR. There are some types of tracking that are just forbidden or very difficult to implement inside the law.
If you want to stop thinking and let companies decide what is the best for you, your problem is not lack of tracking. Trusting that big corporations will have your best interested in mind seems an odd believe to have in this day and age.
The thing about the language in websites is different. Most websites are created to be used locally. So, they conflagrate language, residence, currencies, etc. It has nothing to do with tracking.
Mastodon was my main source of doom-scrolling, but I got sick of the endless stream of posts about US politics and posts about Mastodon not having an algorithm, so I decided to give BlueSky a go, and climb back into my filter bubble, but it's even worse. Just an endless stream of people reporting US pol happenings at each other - unsourced - using screenshots of multicoloured block-letters.
Amazon keeps recommending me sequel to books I never finished (which they know as on kindle it tracks how many page you read), or books I gave 1 star reviews to.
I often scream at my Kindle/Audible app: "My brother, you know I hate that series and gave it a 1 star why do you keep recommeding it?"
And I have to go thru crappy Goodreads lists to find an interesting book
Advertisers aren't incentivised to show you ads for what you actually want. They're incentivised to get money for showing you ads for what you plausibly might want, for the lowest cost possible.
And if you buy one thing and the algorithms go "finally! Some signal" you should be happy - it means you're hiding from them quite well.
Any "discovery" algorithm that shows you a wildly varying set of things is still mostly in explore mode. And if they're easy to tune out and swat away you can be grateful.
I do not want ads matching my weaknesses and likely to convince me to buy anything.
I saw an ad for $30 water proof shoes at Costco.
I have no illusion that these are the most comfortable/durable shoe in the world, but I do believe that they are $30 and water proof.
I didn't know they existed because they are online only. But I'm very glad I saw this ad, especially with the el nino season coming up in california
Doing it online, even with free returns, would be far more annoying.
I'm saying I didn't know those shoes existed, especially at that price point.
Are you claiming that you are fully aware of all the products in the world that would be a benefit to you?
Its a discovery problem, not a fulfillment problem.
No, but ads are not effective way of learning about them. Too much of lying and deliberately misleading info and manipulation.
They're incentivised to get money for showing you ads for what you plausibly might want, for the lowest cost possible.
Also if you buy one thing and the algorithms go "finally! Some signal" you're doing pretty good on the hiding.
Yet they don't freaking get it. Google has not discovered that I do not like ads. Advertising (mostly) doesn't work on me. I don't buy the shit that is advertised to me. Sometimes, it's the absolute opposite.
...and yet, on the one device I haven't got an ad blocker on, they insist on showing me ads for stuff I WILL NOT BUY. (one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years--no, no no).
I just don't get it. They expect me to pay for YouTube premium or something, I don't know. I won't pay them.
Google bought my 30s and now they just can't help but nickle-and-dime my mind from here to eternity. It's kind of infuriating. They don't need to know more about me. What they do know about me should be enough!
If you still work for Google I recommend reading privacy design docs for random large scale services if you're able. It's very telling what the priorities are.
And I agree that they mostly don't want to be Palantir-like. They mostly don't care about people. They care about advertisers. Any new targeting mechanism they can offer advertisers they absolutely will. The problem is they sit on a gold mine of very, very sensitive personal data (most of it "anonymized"). Most of it can be de-anonymized with little work. Worse, they will absolutely cough it up to the government when required. They also have a lot of motivated engineers thinking of ways to try to use said data to "improve products". Like the whole saga of doing activity inference for Android users. You don't even want to know about how stupid and creepy that is/was.
"one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years"
And the one time you need some random specific insurance, what are you going to think about?
The advertising ecosystem is bad and broken in both directions within the dimensions of what they know, how much they know and in how they leverage it.
I feel sorry for the company - obviously, Google hasn't been able to place those ads because its such a niche product and need. So once they "got a live one", they started serving me this company's ads *everywhere* (and I research and browse a *lot*).
I'm pretty sure I was perhaps the only target of their entire ad budget for the month - I was literally served ads for this tiny company *thousands* of times.
Note that only Google gained here - the ads didn't make me any more likely to buy a product I already knew about (and won't need for months in any case), and they did nothing to actually help the company reach more potential buyers. But the ad inventory was placed, and no doubt, each superfluous impression dutifully billed for...
"if you take a look at most systems, they are almost all broken and no one has much control over them. I can't send a sales inquiry, let alone a tech support request through a 'contact us' form most of the time, why would I believe that what I typed into a form would somehow reach an all-seeing panopticon?
Even if it's collected, I'd assume no one is looking at it, and many court dockets demonstrate stuff like this, while you routinely see cases where criminals or school shooters are caught, you also see cases of crimes that occur, but there's like 3 months of chat history where the dude was speaking in crazyish about purging the world and offing themselves."
I'll add that there's a lot of laws where the disclosure of information is mandated, but in that case the workload becomes so high that it's very unlikely someone will sift through it. Like financial information sharing between countries or between business and Tax Collection Entities. Sure every transaction above X amount gets sent to the other country or to the IRS, but considering that you have to pay high hourly fees to your accountant to go through your transactions, why would someone else go through them for free?
Amazon surely have some ofthe best engineers in the world, and it's surprisng they can't figure out this problem. No, now that I have purchased a fridge, I don't want to buy a second fridge.