Microblog Memes

I work in this space and I'm appalled at how much targeted ads make my company.

Every smart person I know is using adblocking too. So is there's like a percentage of people who eats ads all day and open their wallets up?

I think it's different if you consider ads as a way to maintain the status quo.

Like, there's an ad I keep seeing on TV where 25 or 6 to 4 by Chicago plays as parents struggle to keep up with the parenting responsibilities of their toddlers. It's an ad for Amazon. And thank god for Amazon for being available to help these parents.

And like...everybody knows about Amazon. Nobody is going to suddenly sign up for a Prime account after seeing this ad. However, parents or expecting parents who already have Prime accounts are going to relate to the people in the ad and not even consider other options for their parenting needs.

Maybe a very specific example, and their are certainly ads just telling you to buy chicken nuggets, but I'm seeing it more and more.

Edit: Or hell, look at detergents. Do you really think Tide has innovated anything in the past 30 years?

The "algorithms" are also dumb as fuck. For example on a large retailer site you spend a couple of hours browsing for a particular kind of item. You are comparing different kinds, looking up reviews and issues, watching YouTube videos about them. And finally you pull the trigger and but the thing. Then for the next 3 months that site (and others that picked up on the research) will go: Hey here are some more of that thing you like, you really liked it right? Would you like to compare some more items? Uhm no, I actually bought said thing, you made the sale. All of that "targeted" advertisement is just wasted, I have zero interest anymore since the need has been filled.

It's either that or stuff I can't afford (like memory or graphic cards) or really weird stuff I have no idea why it's being shown to me. Sometimes very alarmingly so. Just recently I got an ad that said "Popular in your region" and it was for illegal Nazi dogwhistle flags, "self defense knifes", baseball bats and tracksuits. That's a bit scary. On the other hand the same site gave me an ad for an "easy to conceal" blowjob machine sex toy. Like holy shit what kind of people are living in my region?

Targeted ads have been terrible for as long as I can remember. I don't think I ever bought anything through an ad or hardly ever even clicked on them. Only time I click on them is because the site and my adblocker are fighting and when I try to click somewhere on the page, it inserts an ad the last millisecond, shifts the entire page so I accidentally click on it.

I think it was proctor gamble that zeroed out their $200 million yearly adtech spend and saw zero impact to their sales from it. There's a good possibility we're making everything terrible just so that Zuckerberg and friends can keep getting richer to nobody else's actual benefit.

Everyone likes to think the ads don't work.

The ads absolutely work.

They work on you as well.

ICE is using Palantir data to target neighborhoods, which is purchased directly from "advertising" data brokers. So "advertising" is only part of the story. It's always been about creating a surveillance state, it's just not evenly distributed.

I lived in a country where people don't speak English. There's a sizable expat community of English speaking workers there. The ad targeting was so useless that I was constantly shown ads in a language I couldn't understand. This was on an Android phone where everything was set to English. With every single interaction I with any app or web page I was broadcasting the language I know, and yet they couldn't figure even that absolutely critical detail out.

This targeting was so bad that an old fashioned newspaper ad printed in ink next to a story would have been more effective. At least a publisher is going to put English ads in an English newspaper, German ads in a German newspaper, etc.

If the ad companies can't even figure out the language(s) that their targets understand, their knowledge of their target must be essentially zero.

It’s because advertising is the pretext for government surveillance

i think advertising purposes are just a front. They use it for something, but ads is just an afterthought/excuse for public.

I find it so funny how I use Spotify daily*, and the account is linked** to my google account that I use a lot, and in the past I made sure to downvote any ads that don’t fit my interests at all, so basically giving as much aminition to give some good targeted ads to me.

Turns out, after all that, I get rubbish collection ads, face mask ads and wastewater management ads, even though I have truly never thought about any of those nor have shown interest in them, AND I’ve shown tons of interest in only technology.

I have friends who don't use adblockers (!) but I have never heard anyone say that they bought something they saw in an ad.

A targeted ad consists of showing you what you just bought from the same exact website you just got it from.

Like, it's just a scam towards the businesses at this point and a waste of my time and bandwidth.

I mean I think that it does work on most people. I have a few people in my life who just don't block ads. Some of them do not even change their radio frequency when ads play through it. They think that they can choose for it to not affect them, but that's not really how propaganda works.

There was a small window around 2010 when Google's targeted Ads is actually kinda good (which is to say, not annoying and somewhat relevant).

Then everything enshittified.

You have to remember we're the minority.

There's already enough effort put into sabotaging AD blockers. If everyone used AD blockers, there wouldn't be enough effort on Earth to keep corporations from destroying them left and right.

Our safe-haven of an AD-free internet only exists precisely because most people just put up with it.

Having said that, I don't like things like Sponsor-block. I'm perfectly fine with the mega-corporation not getting my money, but I absolutely do want to make sure the creators who are putting cool things out there are getting paid.