melomal

> I would fear the Chinese government

If you are outside of China then surely there is nothing to really be scared of? What could the Chinese government do with your data that could cause harm?

I get it's the principle but ultimately we are all scared of sharing our data with China and I am not sure why?

Thank you for your response and clarification! Your point on the multiple attempts to connect etc seems to make sense. I would imagine a lot of people checking these requests may jump to conclusions that every piece of data is being pulled across.

> just asking the question is enough to get flak

You are definitely right about that!

This is what I am trying to figure out. I have a UK focused website therefore I use UK based servers, US focused website I use US based servers.

Aren't most processing chips/hardware made in China for all major western tech companies anyway? I get the RU/China server suspiciousness but as far as I can tell, US unicorns are up to the same tricks and openly/brazenly pillaging data without any threat or fear.

The unicorn playbook. There's going to be VCs on LinkedIn trying to explain why this is such a good long term play...

> was talking to a bunch of Chinese servers constantly

Out of curiosity do you want Chinese companies to use US servers? Or where would servers be ideally placed for a Chinese brand to be accepted? I genuinely am curious to know.

> I think I was doing myself a disservice

Were you able to run a data comparison in terms of users/time on site/number of pages etc. I would assume that this in itself would clearly tell you if the ads were harmful or not.

> I don't see how font styles and colors affect the cost of the website

What I mean by this is that when you visit a site with these native ads, the ads themselves would have to adhere to strict design requirements laid out by the publisher. The idea being that it is less intrusive for the overall UX which in reality should limit the problems you mentioned in terms of 'quality'.

The neon, 90's style banner ads are very off putting when you browsing a site, which is what the above is trying to combat.

Thank you for the feedback. Native ads in my opinion are key and ultimately need to try and match up even more so with the content. As in style, colours, fonts etc.

Thank you for the feedback! Targeted ads seem to get a love/hate relationship for many people.

Completely agree but the reality of it is, most people want to monetize but they cannot outside of ads or ebooks etc. Your drivel may only reach X number of people but when you are getting Y amount of readers, I guarantee you will look to find a way to monetize, because your time is money.

What about ads that have to adhere to a style guide of the website/blog? As it, the font styles, colours etc do not have to be exact match, but close enough that it would fit into the website. The other side of this is that Google has done this and so has Quora and sometimes it feels a little crappy that they do this.

First hand experience retargeting gets <1% CR. But it's so cheap, like honestly so so cheap to run and forget about it that people just don't bother with the fine tuning.

Thank you for the input, this is something that I would say is at the top of my list.

You could also say the same about Russia making the UK basically their poison playing ground. You would think much more would be done when a whole city needs to be shut down due to the spread of the poison between people.

Money is money, people are fickle minded and will look beyond incredibly awful things if need be. It's a helluva drug.

I can imagine all of the growth hacking tactics everyone is going to implement. There's a startup out there already using GPT-3 to automate sales email creation.

For sure I agree, I just tried to check my Reddit account and it has now been suspended due to some activity so that I could find the comment.

Unfortunately I cannot find it but ultimately it was not a debate, it was a classic teen response 'yeah but what have you done about it?!!?'. No value add and definitely nothing worth replying with.

Sometimes text lacks the context that we need to feel and see as humans. IMO debates and discussions via chat will always be terrible. People misread texts all the time assuming it was said in a way that was meant to be insulting.

Once we can manage our emotions and misinterpretation of text then we can start debating in a healthy fashion.

> had people to exchange ideas with that were non-existent in other kids my age.

This I completely agree with. I've have many hobbies in my early years that were considered weird of just not in line with what my friends liked. Having a chat to learn more and dig deeper was amazing to do.

But there's debating and then there's just flat out teenager responses. I honestly don't mind having a debate or conversation but the lack of insight and knowledge only provides you with lacklustre meme attacks.

> reddit meme-spam and nitpickers

8 years of basically no engagement from me (maybe 30 karma points) I call someone out and bam I'm getting downvoted to kingdom come but at the same time being gilded with silver. It just didn't make sense.

HN has so far been nothing but amazing conversations and it will hopefully stay like this. Big Tech played the PR game and won, PR is what makes a unicorn startup not so much the startup's product these days.

I tapped out after I realized that I was having an argument with someone that was probably no older than 15/16. When you do that you quickly ask yourself WTF am I doing here?

It's the public that needs convincing more so than the government. Billy Gates is probably the best person, apart from Elon, to try and convince people that it's not that bad. It's a good way to build positive PR for something that is considered a hideous, disastrous, dangerous monster of an idea.

You are also right on the niche ad-tech. I want to discover new products and brands again, not get shown the same product over and over again because I used a specific keyword or bought that product 3 months ago.

This is something I will ponder on as it can potentially lead me down the path of improving digital marketing without banging my head against a wall! Less talking more doing as they say.

Exactly, I've worked for a couple of start-ups that focused completely on growth hacking. Product was 2nd simply because of tech debt build up. A lot of people assume reading GA data you can unearth these hidden gems, it's nothing more than gambling.

The issue with me being the reality checker is that I am considered 'negative', 2 years down the line after I'm long gone and reality bites, I look like some sort of messiah. Damned if I do, damned if I don't.

Doing my SEO volunteer work with small shop owners in the UK during lockdown opened my eyes. As you said the average business is hammered with SEO, PPC, growth tips (snake oil) to the point you have to try it. But they don't have the time so it's half baked mostly and they feel disheartened. Honestly, ad-tech is nothing more than going to the casino and thinking you can win against the house.

One sentence has decimated my digital marketing career and I honestly couldn't agree more. I think this has something to do with more than just Google itself though and good old capitalism.

There are heaps of SaaS platforms out there (from my last point of reference there were 2000+ MarTech companies, I would guess double that now) that focuses on; A/B testing, email marketing automation, customer success tools, heat mapping and much more. They have funders who want their returns, one way or another. Which then leads the marketing team of the SaaS to develop growth hacking articles which startups tend to absorb.

As a marketer you are backed into a corner of having to test everything because there are so many articles out there showing us how A/B testing a button from 17px to 18px increased sales by 50%. Or this genius new AI content tool that can swap things around for each and every user to match up with their purchase intent. It's gambling. There is data and some poor calculations that lead you astray hoping for that quick win. You will also find that one 'unicorn' SaaS will also dictate the UI/UX for the vast majority of others out there, look at Intercom which basically has been cloned in design across the board.

I still make references to friends and family to the whole wood pulp issue (I should find some new references). I believe it's Hershey's chocolate that is basically 1% off the minimum amount of chocolate content to legally call it chocolate.

Bigger brands have bigger pockets to line with profits so we all know that the ingredients are probably the first to take a hit. Discounters do not have to deal with brand taxes.

> I don't understand how every parent isn't filled with sheer, abject terror at their child's death from starvation, thirst, disease, or violence.

Sometimes the tech community just lives in another world. In reality: work, bills, screaming kids and life get in the way of thinking about anything but yourself. When I was 21 I was the same (vegan, vegetarian, telling people about BPA, not touching receipts with my hands yadda yadda yadda).

Now I'm 30 and as far as I can tell, nothing changed, I didn't die from too much exposure to plastics, the world still is spinning but I have a lot more on my plate to think about than watching documentaries and fear mongering myself into depression.

I'm desperately trying to find the source but discounters like Lidl/Aldi just use well known brands, signed with NDAs on both sides.

Imagine knowing that a discount chain is about to make a regular purchase of 300,000 tins of beans. You will happily rebrand, keep it hushed up and take the repeat large orders. It makes me wonder what the margins are on a single tin of Heinz beans.

The insane growth the stock has had needs to be kept propped up for the shareholders to be happy. More profit = more shareholder value and that's that. Once you IPO, forget about any and all startup grandiose values that was created on inception to help the 'little' guy. Shopify will be the new Yelp with their mafia style tactics.

It pains me to go shopping where there are "well-known" brands on display. All that I see is their brand tax slapped onto each product whereas I go to Lidl/Aldi and I have no qualms in buying the knock off products. Same product, different labelling.

Growth hacker of 8 years here.

This smells like the brilliant plan of endless A/B testing that a unicorn did once, wrote about it on their company blog once it was used up, then everyone else followed.

These are all growth 'levers' which on paper can drastically improve metrics which is what is needed to get those crazy valuations and huge funding rounds. In reality they make the experience poor for the user, however, outside of the tech world most people are not bothered by these tricks.

then they'll spin off the division, add it to a SPAC and go public as another $1bn unicorn.

Is this not a perfect example of our endless thirst for dopamine? During ads what's the first thing we do - grab our phones to fill that ad time with dopamine.

A 5 minute ad could actually provide some respite from that dopamine hit by allowing you to get up and move around, make a tea and grab a bit of fresh air.

I probably would have stuck with the 720p historic LCD sony flat screen but I can't use a chromecast or plug my Xbox in either. So new screen was needed.