No, I don’t follow these people. Once I view all the new content from the people I follow, Instagram starts showing me posts from people I’ve never seen before.
Are you using the app or browser? I just use Safari on iOS and I only follow my two kids and I just go back years of posts and there’s nothing from strangers on there.
How long has it been since you updated the app? It used to work that way, but they changed it. It was a really disappointing shift. If you have a pending update from ~last year, don't update until you have to. I only get a few new posts from friends each day, so it's three scrolls and bam, random accounts and content ads. To see old posts from your friends, you have to click a button that says "See archived posts" after the last new post by a friend, but before the inserted ads and strangers.
Imagine the people who you follow only post stories from now on. For me there is no new content on the start page. It's just Ads. Nothing else, from the very first post
Kind of like reddit or YouTube when you're not singed in. The amount of garbage takes your breath away. Neither is not great anyway but then you find it can be worse.
The app itself can quickly turn into a never-ending scroll of infomercials from ads and accounts if you go beyond your social circle. Even if said accounts are not directly selling a product through the store feature, it's often advertising a desirable lifestyle not your own and general consumerism. How many photos are staged versus candid? This type of content-as-ad imagery is what the app lends itself best to versus any other social media app. Of course, you can just not follow any of these accounts or limit them or have better self control over your time spent there. But, the company is also probably working against your best interests, bottom line and all that...
Some of the brightest minds and smartest people go to work for companies which spend every minute of their existence to figure out how to place an ad in front of our eyes for 1 more second.
I really dislike the suggestion "just have better self control". It's you versus an army of machine learning experts all tuning algorithm on personal data about you to learn your weaknesses and bait you into spending more time on the app.
Blaming the consumer ignores the adversarial role that the apps play in our lives.
I agree. I wasn’t trying to place blame merely stating that there are ways to make the experience personal and closed to the people you know only. The sentence following the one you’re referring to was meant to convey your sentiments.
They don't install the apps for the purpose of seeing advertising, and there's no way to opt out of the ads, so I don't think that is a good assessment.
Then I can't message my extended family. I have no way to reach the friends I made in Costa Rica. Some of my business contacts in Europe only use adtech platforms to communicate.
You can't just delete the app. You have to fully opt out of a significant portion of the global ecosystem.
I want to buy every single thing I see here. I've been really happy with the kind of ads I've been seeing lately. Instead of generic commercials I'm getting very specific products solving problems I have but didn't realize could be solved by a gadget.
I'm in the same boat. Normally I despise ads, but the ones on facebook I'm seeing I have actually clicked on to learn more. Not a robot, hate facebook to the core, but some of the ads I get are interesting.
I almost never check Facebook and when I do, I only login in a private tab, but even from this sandbox, Facebook somehow has the best ads for me by far.
I actually get very little value from the normal content, but I’d probably even sign up for a newsletter of their ads for me.
Edit: They always seem to have very cool Kickstarters for me, for example, so then later I’ll try to go right to the source, but I’ve never found something good myself on Kickstarter.
Eh. There are a lot of ads. A lot of it is nonsense.
But: there are some diamonds in the rough. Do I really need another novelty tank top? No. Would I rather have an ad for a novelty tank top versus going back to the TV days and getting an ad for vitamins for senior citizens? No—give me my targeted ads, versus ads for drugs for old people.
I found a t-shirt brand that actually has well fitting, nicely colored, comfortable shirts. They shrink in my dryer so I have to hang-dry, but I have been buying some things I find on there.
The app has become about 30-40% advertisements which I think is far too much. I don't ever want to buy any of these things because all of my ads are for coffee beans, which I would much rather buy fresh from a local shop.
and there's a reason magazines are mostly irrelevant these days - we found new, better sources of entertainment. i'm not sure emulating magazines is a good goal for the medium that supplanted magazines.
Absolutely. If I see an ad for something I make a mental note to search for competitors before buying that brand, assuming I need the product.
If a company is spending money on ads, that’s money they’re not spending on R&D or cutting prices, and it also means their product is too weak to get traction organically.
> If a company is spending money on ads, that’s money they’re not spending on R&D or cutting prices, and it also means their product is too weak to get traction organically.
Or they just want to make even more money than they could make organically, which they can then put into R&D or into cutting pricces (through economies of scale).
Yes, it is possible to do things ass- backwards. The first way is better for consumers, the second way exploits consumers at a subconscious level, and is more often leveraged to maximize profit than to benefit consumers.
E.g., Imagine all the good pharmaceutical research that could be funded if we just allowed blatant snake oil to be sold for unlimited profit? Surely the ends justify the means?
Corporations trend toward consumer exploitation and as they get bigger, there is less chance for any human concerns like ethics or morals to correct negative behavior.
My nearest pharmacy doesn't sell many homeopathics, and I live in the USA - land of the hucksters and home of the deregulators.
It's got aisles for fungii, ears and eyes, cuts and bruises, stomach stuff, cold/flu/allergies, prophylactics, etc etc. But the closest thing to unapproved cure-alls are the stronger sort of cough drops.
There are plenty of stores that sell sketchy supplements, but they usually don't have prescription pickup counters with pharmacists.
> Aisles upon aisles of homeopathic "drugs" that do nothing and cost nothing to produce.
Homeopathics only reliably do nothing (different from whatever inert carrier is provided) if they are real homeopathic dilutions, which thanks to the absence of regulation and testing in the homeopathic market, they often are not, which has led to homeopathics with dangerous levels of ingredients that would be < 1 molecule per package if the stated dilutions were accurate.
Advertising works at a subconscious level. The more you see a product, the more you subconsciously learn to like and trust the product, especially if you are being exposed to that product in a trusted context (popular celebrity posing with it, etc).
I wish I had saved the link, but I read a study that showed people consistently underestimated how likely they were to buy a product after seeing an ad. They would buy it at much higher rates than the control group yet still assert that they were aware of the ad and not allowing it to influence their decisions.
> still assert that they were aware of the ad and not allowing it to influence their decisions.
The claim you're responding to is not that they won't allow it to influence their decisions, but that they will actively refuse to even consider a product if they learned about it through an ad.
Most of the ads I encounter are through podcasts because I don't watch TV and ad blockers of various kinds apply everywhere else. I will never use or recommend Squarespace for any purpose, simply on principle.
Similar to endisneigh I take as many steps as I possibly can to avoid letting advertising influence me. I block ads wherever possible, and anything that slips through goes on a shit-list of companies that I will avoid buying from unless I have no other choice.
I don't think you can say this in general. I really, really dislike ads, but they _do_ sponsor a lot of content creators which could otherwise not focus on their content creation and they help companies to get their product known to you - which does not need to be a negative. If they sell you a product which genuinely improves your life, it's a win-win-win for you, the producer and the person advertising.
The current ecosystem is overly focused on manipulation and there are simply to many ads, yes, but I have found really good products via ads and I don't think companies should be generally demonized just for playing the game. It's not all bad.
Yes, but the key difference is that the mafia is, by definition, a criminal organization and the upside is not linked in any way with being a mafia. Ads, on the other hand, do inherently have the positive quality of showing you products and could exist without their current downsides.
Regardless of their current downsides (which are indeed considerable!), ads by definition are there to make me want to buy things I wouldn’t otherwise want to buy. That’s not exactly noble, even if we pretend that they’re just showing me stuff I wasn’t aware of.
That's where we disagree. Imagine you always cooked your noodles in a pan. This is clearly a suboptimal situation. Then you see an ad for a pot, you go buy it and it turns out that making noodles (and other dishes) could be so much easier!
Sure, you would not have bought a pot otherwise, but this ad would have been a net positive for you and the ad company, no downsides.
Or maybe you see an ad for a Chinese restaurant, so you try it and it turns out you really like them. There's nothing inherently wrong with their food just because you got to know it via an ad.
As stated above, the current system is stupid. But it's not all bad.
Opposite for me, I go out of my way to avoid brands that drown me in ads. I don’t mind the occasional ad, that’s just nature of doing business. It’s the ads that are nonstop in your face or the forced viral campaigns.
Coke stopped buying advertising once. Cause everyone already knows about them, so why pay for ads? Their sales dropped dramatically. Now they pay for lots of ads.
That's only surprising if you mistakenly imagine ads to be about competition. Instead, ads are about getting you to consume things you don't need, and since no one needs Coke,lless advertising -> less sales overall. Of course, that's only a bad thing for Coke, and should be encouraged actually.
It’s especially true of me when I’m making a purchase where I don’t already have a favorite brand. I know I gravitate towards the most familiar thing, which may be the deodorant brand I saw a friend using (true story).
>I read a study that showed people consistently underestimated how likely they were to buy a product after seeing an ad. They would buy it at much higher rates than the control group yet still assert that they were aware of the ad and not allowing it to influence their decisions.
How frequently must these people be buying things for this to even be noticeable.
If I think about regular day to day purchases, I'm not sure how influence plays a part at all. There is no branding or advertising for fruit/vegetables/meat from the local store. Even with household goods, I don't speak the local language so brand names are not easily noticeable.
Maybe bigger purchases? But those are rarer and usually involve some kind of research. I'll happily buy from brands I have never heard of if they show good results in independent tests. It just never feels accurate when people tell me I'm being subconsciously manipulated by ads when I see so few and buy so little.
Depends on the ad - if it's excessively irritating or intrusive absolutely.
To the point where I'll boycott entire stores if an ad pisses me off too much.
Tangentially, youtube's ads are getting worse by the day and Hero Wars' efforts are now so damned desperate that they've gone beyond deliberately misleading to damned near pornographic.
It's bad enough that I'm considering completely dropping Google despite the inadequacy of DuckDuckGo and the fact I've had the same Gmail address since university.
YT is certainly levering up the ad annoyance lately. It drove me to look around and I discovered not only is it better without ads, it's better without any social component at all. CloudTube uses YouTube APIs for what you actually want, just the video: https://tube.cadence.moe/
I buy things from ads if the things solve problems I have. Sometimes I don't know about the solutions and the advertising works because FB/Insta know what I like. They work well and I'm grateful I get relevant ads.
As the other poster said, it’s Carv (https://getcarv.com/) . It has helped me a lot to improve technique, I actually learned how to carv in skis, and I’m much more comfortable when going fast (my speed record is now 105 km/hr) .
It’s beautiful having objective data to tell if you have improved and what did you improve, as well as what needs more work.
For me it was a cheap buy as a private lesson one whole day would go for the price of the device, which I can use the whole season and gives me objective data.
Stomp it tutorials in YouTube is also a big help.
I do this too but I generally search on google/amazon for the product before buying. Much of the time, the same product is available cheaper from someone else. I think certain companies buy and resell stuff through paid advertising, so they have to pad their margins appropriately.
Yeah, I do this too. I don't know why or how, but on a subconscious level, my brain registers online ads as something bad / malicious, and so anything I see through an ad is automatically labelled as bad.
I even freak out if I accidentally click on an ad on mobile because I feel as if I have downloaded a piece of malware.
I don't know where this comes from...possibly due to having been there back when many ads really were malware? I am not sure.
poster didn't say anything of the sort. but given the situation you're constructing, i'd expect they'd buy only what's necessary and all things being equal from the one that advertised least.
Yeah, precisely. In that case I'd only buy what I need. If there are multiple sources / alternatives, I'd buy from the one that advertised the least. If they all advertised equally, I'd probably ask people I know which one they found the best and research on the best alternative.
Depends on the ad, tbh. Some ads just scream low-quality crap. No matter what, that impression will stick with me, even if I see the product in a retail store I trust.
However, I recently bought some Dr. Squatch soap, so ads can work.
Whenever someone tells me a video URL that I decide to invest time in looking at, Grammarly or Liberty Mutual will tend to barge in, and interrupt whatever flow that was.
Sure, I remember the brand names. And I'm going to be sure to remember that those brands spent a lot of money wasting my time.
I now understand that ads are purposefully nonsensical and annoying because they’re stickier that way. The ostrich in the insurance ads doesn’t have any damn thing to do with their product, but because it’s out of the ordinary my mind is left to absorb it, wondering, what was that ostrich doing there. It’s just straight mind manipulation and I resent it.
And 2, it hardly makes sense to advertise insurance (I’m never in the mood to cancel my current plan) but they have a gargantuan adspend because their profits are capped by a percentage (search 80/20 rule)- This is basically the same reason Coca Cola is famously ad-spendy - since they are locked into a low percentage of revenue, the only way to grow is “make it up on volume”
I don’t mind what people are marketing or that they’re marketing and I occasionally buy things I learned about from ads, but I do mind that’s it’s a keystone of the modern internet.
These things are difficult to separate these days. I don’t blame the people who want to sell their goods though. It’s scary to try competing without using online ads in many industries.
There's lots about the human experience that you can't control, and advertising works on those levels too. You are affected by the mere exposure to it. You're not just sold a product - you are told about the brand, values, how they approach the world, how it's acceptable in these times to express yourself, lots of stuff. And you see it and you learn it. It doesn't really matter what you think about afterwards, you are already affected, because that's how humans work, and advertisements are exploiting how humans work. The solution is to not be exposed to it in the first place, and because you can't really block them all, to accept that you are affected and work with that. Denial will bring you nowhere. But, it can be a good milestone to realization.
No. There might be the perfect suiting product to me. There is, however, a huge red flag for all these companies and products. This usually drives my buying decisions (against them).
Yes and no. But I do avoid buying products which price is mostly based on their advertisment budget. So in the end yes, never bought anything suggested from an Instagram or Facebook ad. However I only get shown absolute bullshit that has zero relevance to me (prolly because of blocking so much of the tracking)
I've noticed nearly everything I see on IG is a version of something that can be found elsewhere for less. Sometimes MUCH less. In some cases the IG ad is for a "prestige" brand, so you're paying for the name, but in many cases it's a brand with no recognition but advertising as "artisanal" or hand crafted. Look deeper, though, and discover these just big cheap brands rebadging their stuff.
Hot dudes, dogs, and one computer setup that’s either based off my search for standing desks or mechanical keyboards.
Instagram is a body dysmorphia engine. If you are in a certain demographic, it is so easy to drink from a constant firehose of thirst traps of men with very suspiciously large traps. You get that every time you open Instagram? It does start to warp your brain, and make you consider trying pharmaceutical interventions.
Conflict of interest: I am absolutely one of those monsters posting thirst traps: https://imgur.com/a/2JGOYwL
Very interesting. Almost like it wants to flatten society, all gays are all the same. To me I hope this doesn’t keep people from being unique or growing in the future
I only use insta in the browser on my phone, which is quite a nice watered down experience that doesn't show ads (even without an ad blocker) or annoying account suggestions.
i've never seen those ads before. aren't instagram ads tailored based on your browsing history? if anything, those ads may just be indicative of your recent interests.
Yeah, they’re tailored. I get ads for perf dev tools, compilers. I still get ads for vehicles months after buying one.
I’ve only had one ad that was “eerie.” Coworkers were talking about a kind of beverage I’d never heard of (talking over zoom, on a work-only machine), got an ad for the product later that day. Could be that I just recognized the name from our convo which caused me to scroll back up...
I finally figured out the spookiness after talking to my mom on the phone about vacuum cleaners and then getting ads for vacuum cleaners:
My mom bought a vacuum online after our phone call, and one way advertisers choose an audience is “all the friends of someone who searched for the product”
My roommate and I confirmed this by getting ads for something the other just googled.
What I’m trying to say is, targeted ads ruin Christmas, but no one will hear me out :’(
The thing I hate most is if I click on search it starts autoplaying some random thing that has no relevance to my social circles, until I start typing my search query (usually just trying to find a friend or an account I already follow).
I generally assume that installing an app to use a website is voluntarily opting in to a worse experience, so you're probably right. Still, though, maybe a PiHole would be effective?
Yeah, it's hard to imagine the pihole approach working for most ads in the long term. Fortunately, the traditional browser addon approach still works great.
Something changed about Instagram recently, maybe it’s just because I changed how I used it. I used to only follow people I know, but then I added a few accounts that post Simpsons screenshots and clips. Now my feed is overrun with meme accounts, other Simpsons accounts I don’t follow, similar accounts for Futurama, Seinfeld, etc.
Admittedly, some are amusing sometimes, but it feels likes it’s turned into 9gag or something. It’s like if you follow one instance of something Instagram immediately assumes you exclusively want to see every single thing like that.
I'm an elderly (mid-40s) non-USian techie, and I've never done Instagram. On Facebook I mostly follow people I've largely lost touch with in real life (particular these past couple of years), and on Twitter it's news sources and journalists, plus a selection of 'celebs' from various niche interests like tech, sci-fi, winter sports and comedy.
Am I likely to be missing anything interesting by largely ignoring Instagram?
Agree with this, I'm a big fan of sci-fi and high-fantasy art, and follow a great deal of amazing artists on IG, there's more than a couple of great space paintings in my living room that I saw on the site, contacted the artist and offered to buy a print from. That and of course seeing friends in their own necks of the woods is what makes the platform for me.
Some of your younger friends / relatives / colleagues think Facebook is for their parents’ generation and put the stuff they want their contemporaries to see on Instagram. But not too young, there’s a generation behind them that thinks Instagram is for old people.
In terms of pure functionality there’s absolutely nothing special about Instagram. At this point the two products are reskins of the same functionality.
I know a few people who get severe anxiety after spending too much time on there. I don’t use it but it seems really negative because of the algorithm forcing polarizing, stress-inducing content on you and your friends and family. It might possibly be okay if you strictly follow a non political artist or two that you like
I think even the apolitical stuff causes a different flavor of the same anxiety though on some deeper level based on the comparing-your-insides-to-other-peoples-outsides phenomena. What I cant figure out is why so many of my artist friends are on there so willingly with seemingly no conscious awareness of any toxic effects. I seriously feel like my partner and I are the only artists who find IG toxic but we have to be on there because its essentially required for anyone in the arts...
Maybe. I’m a little younger than you and I both post and consume Instagram Stories. It’s mostly of my kids and my friends kids. I like that the posts only last for 24 hours and there a no likes, etc etc. By contrast my actual Instagram profile and FB profile are very quiet.
Maybe you have friends that are the same (but if you don’t care to watch endless videos of other people’s kids maybe give it a miss!)
Oh, for sure there are permanent copies, you can go to your profile to find them. But I actually kind of like that too, I like to be able to privately look back through my old memories. Just don’t want a permanent public record.
Its become the defacto central hub of the art world, especially with the exacerbated decline of in-person small and large art galleries. For the overwhelming majority of emerging / non-established artists, if you aren't on instagram other artists will literally just forget you exist. I know somebodys just going to respond with something contrary here but Im open to it if anybody knows about some other healthier platform for artists to connect and share their work on...
I'm a US tech person in my 20s who does not use Twitter, Facebook or Instagram at all.
I do miss out on things because friends and family use Facebook for event planning, so I have to hear about things secondhand from mutual friends. But I never feel like I miss anything from the others.
I resisted for a long time, but the reason I use instagram now is that some of my friends have moved to that platform. So I’m sort of split between fb and instagram now. Also, I like checking “stories” on instagram as you get a quick glimpse of what people are up to and you can send them messages to react instead of writing a comment, which is more likely to lead to a real convo.
The thing I hate about Instagram is how lenient they are on nude pics. While Facebook has a strict policy, on Instagram a lot of celebrity content is borderline porn.
The would you think of the children?!? Argument is so destructive for anything privacy or freedom related, it is politicians silver bullet for any issues. When anyone makes that point now I completely ignore it, as you can use it for anything to do whatever you want, specially curtail freedoms.
Educate your children if you are so worried about them, that’s the best thing you can do.
Before I completely dropped social media, I had a f—k the algorithm attitude towards the ads. I made a point of clicking through everything that was completely uninteresting to me. That road led to a non-stop flood of class-action lawyer ads.
Personal injury (caused by negligent 3rd party) but not necessarily class action (and especially not workers comp cases) are consistently the highest cost clicks I bid on regularly.
Those ads mock me. Have a severe negligence case that nearly killed entire family. By time we recovered enough to deal with legal side the statue of limitations had passed.
That's not cynical at all; that's exactly what i-the-human-looking-at-trends would do, and it's almost certainly what an automated system would go for as well.
You're not wrong but it depends on the platform and campaign. If the ads are bought click-optimized then yes... if conversion optimized then the algorithms will learn to avoid zealous clickers.
It’s funny, once I started watching luxury houses (I became rich last year, bought a house and wanted inspiration to decorate), I got flooded with ads about “How to become rich”. (Obviously none of those include programming…).
It's interesting how this exposes the dynamics of ad-space.
Advertisements as points in a metric space A. Clicking ads as a contractive mapping C:A->A. Class-action lawsuit ads as a fixed point in A when iterating C.
This must imply something interesting about human psychology or ad economics, or both. Why does the fixed point end up as class action suits and not something else? It's not what I would have expected.
I don’t think you can infer human nature here as much as psychology of advertisers. I think it was GrubHub that started advertising on porn sites at one point and published some interesting findings from that. The reason the started to advertise there was because it was cheap and because other food related businesses were not advertising there. What they noticed is that most ads on porn sites are for porn, so ads for food stood out. And it didn’t hurt that often times people get hungry after they are done with porn. So in my mind the class action lawyers are just a niche that happens to advertise there and is the lowest common denominator that matches a wide range of people when nothing more targeted does. It could be mattresses or shoes or something else, but right now it’s lawyers.
Thinking about it, one of the marketing received wisdom things is that you often want to associate your product with sex. What is probably the easiest way in the world to associate your product with sex?
Ye it is quite strange that there is such a price difference between sites for the same ad CPM when the advertiser can select audiance somewhat through tracking anyway.
I should have been more specific - what I meant is that the ads that instagram chooses to show you can be thought of as points in ad-space. So when you click on ads and instagram chooses to show you different ads as a result, you have traveled around in this space. I say the space is metric because it is meaningful to say that two ads are more or less similar. I assume the "click all ads" mapping is contractive because if you take two different people with different histories of clicking ads and therefore different flavors of ads shown to them, and they both just start clicking on all ads regardless of content, the ads they both see after doing this should be more similar, or closer in ad-space. So iterating this should just get to a point where they see the same ads (or at least ads that are progressively similar)
The canonical example of SkyMall equivalence for me is wish.com ads. They're odd enough that they're frequently clipped and commented on - https://www.google.com/search?q=wish+ads
What is wish.com? Comes up in a lot of search’s, shows me an absurdly cheap price for a product and then I can’t buy it, it’s out of stock or something went wrong
It's an ecommerce platform with very low quality and anti-counterfeiting standards. It's become a meme with how prevalently products are misrepresented on there.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadNow, useless ads and inappropriate posts from random kids I have zero interest in seeing.
But now I kind of wish that I got to see ads for these kinds of ridiculous products in my feed too.
Blaming the consumer ignores the adversarial role that the apps play in our lives.
It's absolutely not adversarial. People voluntarily install these apps. This is opt-in advertising.
The opt out button is the "delete account" button. Instagram and Facebook's surveillance-based advertising systems are one and the same.
You can't just delete the app. You have to fully opt out of a significant portion of the global ecosystem.
Lots of interesting games or hackathons or nifty tools.
I actually get very little value from the normal content, but I’d probably even sign up for a newsletter of their ads for me.
Edit: They always seem to have very cool Kickstarters for me, for example, so then later I’ll try to go right to the source, but I’ve never found something good myself on Kickstarter.
But: there are some diamonds in the rough. Do I really need another novelty tank top? No. Would I rather have an ad for a novelty tank top versus going back to the TV days and getting an ad for vitamins for senior citizens? No—give me my targeted ads, versus ads for drugs for old people.
night-glow toilet seat actually turned out to be quite a popular product on Shark Tank. Kevin O'Leary put $100K for a 25 percent stake in it.
https://mashable.com/deals/oct-11-shark-tank-bathroom-produc...
There's been many copy cats all of which have tons of sales:
https://www.amazon.com/illumibowl/s?k=illumibowl
If a company is spending money on ads, that’s money they’re not spending on R&D or cutting prices, and it also means their product is too weak to get traction organically.
Or they just want to make even more money than they could make organically, which they can then put into R&D or into cutting pricces (through economies of scale).
E.g., Imagine all the good pharmaceutical research that could be funded if we just allowed blatant snake oil to be sold for unlimited profit? Surely the ends justify the means?
Corporations trend toward consumer exploitation and as they get bigger, there is less chance for any human concerns like ethics or morals to correct negative behavior.
Head into your nearest pharmacy and check out what they sell. Aisles upon aisles of homeopathic "drugs" that do nothing and cost nothing to produce.
It's got aisles for fungii, ears and eyes, cuts and bruises, stomach stuff, cold/flu/allergies, prophylactics, etc etc. But the closest thing to unapproved cure-alls are the stronger sort of cough drops.
There are plenty of stores that sell sketchy supplements, but they usually don't have prescription pickup counters with pharmacists.
Homeopathics only reliably do nothing (different from whatever inert carrier is provided) if they are real homeopathic dilutions, which thanks to the absence of regulation and testing in the homeopathic market, they often are not, which has led to homeopathics with dangerous levels of ingredients that would be < 1 molecule per package if the stated dilutions were accurate.
Which, I guess, doesn't contradict your point.
I wish I had saved the link, but I read a study that showed people consistently underestimated how likely they were to buy a product after seeing an ad. They would buy it at much higher rates than the control group yet still assert that they were aware of the ad and not allowing it to influence their decisions.
The claim you're responding to is not that they won't allow it to influence their decisions, but that they will actively refuse to even consider a product if they learned about it through an ad.
Most of the ads I encounter are through podcasts because I don't watch TV and ad blockers of various kinds apply everywhere else. I will never use or recommend Squarespace for any purpose, simply on principle.
The current ecosystem is overly focused on manipulation and there are simply to many ads, yes, but I have found really good products via ads and I don't think companies should be generally demonized just for playing the game. It's not all bad.
That's where we disagree. Imagine you always cooked your noodles in a pan. This is clearly a suboptimal situation. Then you see an ad for a pot, you go buy it and it turns out that making noodles (and other dishes) could be so much easier!
Sure, you would not have bought a pot otherwise, but this ad would have been a net positive for you and the ad company, no downsides.
Or maybe you see an ad for a Chinese restaurant, so you try it and it turns out you really like them. There's nothing inherently wrong with their food just because you got to know it via an ad.
As stated above, the current system is stupid. But it's not all bad.
https://hbr.org/2013/03/did-ebay-just-prove-that-paid
https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...
How frequently must these people be buying things for this to even be noticeable.
If I think about regular day to day purchases, I'm not sure how influence plays a part at all. There is no branding or advertising for fruit/vegetables/meat from the local store. Even with household goods, I don't speak the local language so brand names are not easily noticeable.
Maybe bigger purchases? But those are rarer and usually involve some kind of research. I'll happily buy from brands I have never heard of if they show good results in independent tests. It just never feels accurate when people tell me I'm being subconsciously manipulated by ads when I see so few and buy so little.
To the point where I'll boycott entire stores if an ad pisses me off too much.
Tangentially, youtube's ads are getting worse by the day and Hero Wars' efforts are now so damned desperate that they've gone beyond deliberately misleading to damned near pornographic.
It's bad enough that I'm considering completely dropping Google despite the inadequacy of DuckDuckGo and the fact I've had the same Gmail address since university.
I even freak out if I accidentally click on an ad on mobile because I feel as if I have downloaded a piece of malware.
I don't know where this comes from...possibly due to having been there back when many ads really were malware? I am not sure.
However, I recently bought some Dr. Squatch soap, so ads can work.
Sure, I remember the brand names. And I'm going to be sure to remember that those brands spent a lot of money wasting my time.
I now understand that ads are purposefully nonsensical and annoying because they’re stickier that way. The ostrich in the insurance ads doesn’t have any damn thing to do with their product, but because it’s out of the ordinary my mind is left to absorb it, wondering, what was that ostrich doing there. It’s just straight mind manipulation and I resent it.
And 2, it hardly makes sense to advertise insurance (I’m never in the mood to cancel my current plan) but they have a gargantuan adspend because their profits are capped by a percentage (search 80/20 rule)- This is basically the same reason Coca Cola is famously ad-spendy - since they are locked into a low percentage of revenue, the only way to grow is “make it up on volume”
These things are difficult to separate these days. I don’t blame the people who want to sell their goods though. It’s scary to try competing without using online ads in many industries.
https://imgur.com/a/SLrJaUJ
I am surprised by just how many ads for drugs I get.
They know their audience.
But still. Lots of ads for testosterone, growth hormone, and now ketamine.
It kinda is for steroids. (Hold on, don’t downvote me yet, I’m going somewhere.)
I am a 30-something gay male. Here’s my Recommendations view:
https://imgur.com/a/1Paravn
Hot dudes, dogs, and one computer setup that’s either based off my search for standing desks or mechanical keyboards.
Instagram is a body dysmorphia engine. If you are in a certain demographic, it is so easy to drink from a constant firehose of thirst traps of men with very suspiciously large traps. You get that every time you open Instagram? It does start to warp your brain, and make you consider trying pharmaceutical interventions.
Conflict of interest: I am absolutely one of those monsters posting thirst traps: https://imgur.com/a/2JGOYwL
100%
Oh.
https://imgur.com/a/CXvySpa
(Like I said. They know their audience.)
I’ve only had one ad that was “eerie.” Coworkers were talking about a kind of beverage I’d never heard of (talking over zoom, on a work-only machine), got an ad for the product later that day. Could be that I just recognized the name from our convo which caused me to scroll back up...
My mom bought a vacuum online after our phone call, and one way advertisers choose an audience is “all the friends of someone who searched for the product”
My roommate and I confirmed this by getting ads for something the other just googled.
What I’m trying to say is, targeted ads ruin Christmas, but no one will hear me out :’(
The thing I hate most is if I click on search it starts autoplaying some random thing that has no relevance to my social circles, until I start typing my search query (usually just trying to find a friend or an account I already follow).
https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/88vsz1/youtube_ad_d...
Admittedly, some are amusing sometimes, but it feels likes it’s turned into 9gag or something. It’s like if you follow one instance of something Instagram immediately assumes you exclusively want to see every single thing like that.
I'm an elderly (mid-40s) non-USian techie, and I've never done Instagram. On Facebook I mostly follow people I've largely lost touch with in real life (particular these past couple of years), and on Twitter it's news sources and journalists, plus a selection of 'celebs' from various niche interests like tech, sci-fi, winter sports and comedy.
Am I likely to be missing anything interesting by largely ignoring Instagram?
I'm going to say, no. But then, if you consider mid-40s elderly, I'm positively geriatric.
In terms of pure functionality there’s absolutely nothing special about Instagram. At this point the two products are reskins of the same functionality.
That said, I have all fb properties dns blocked: fb, instagram, and whatsapp. The privacy invasion isn't worth the content at all.
You should delete your fb account, as it serves as an implicit endorsement of the platform to your friends, family, and associates.
Maybe you have friends that are the same (but if you don’t care to watch endless videos of other people’s kids maybe give it a miss!)
I do miss out on things because friends and family use Facebook for event planning, so I have to hear about things secondhand from mutual friends. But I never feel like I miss anything from the others.
Educate your children if you are so worried about them, that’s the best thing you can do.
Cynical hypothesis: once the platforms realized you’ll click on anything, they decided to show you their highest-compensated ads.
Advertisements as points in a metric space A. Clicking ads as a contractive mapping C:A->A. Class-action lawsuit ads as a fixed point in A when iterating C.
This must imply something interesting about human psychology or ad economics, or both. Why does the fixed point end up as class action suits and not something else? It's not what I would have expected.
Why is it a metric space? Why is it a contraction?
Just like the Snuggie, many of these products were invented to help people with various disabilities. See e.g. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/20/17791354/products-pe...
"Some of the most useful products for people with disabilities weren’t developed with them in mind"