A very odd stance. Personally if I'm going to be tracked and advertised to I want it to be things I have absolutely no interest in, even better if it's in a language I don't speak.
Amazon's recommendation system did this. It would sometimes show random products to make people think the system wasn't as good as it was and to generate funny social media posts featuring Amazon. That's the origin of "people who bought this also bought [unrelated product]" screenshots.
Targeted advertising will usually never feel good, and it's not due to lack of information. Consider the following:
- 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? No 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's true for the advertising companies, but Google or whatever advertiser have a big stake in showing you the ad from the millions they serve that you're most likely to click/buy/complete. So there's no fault on McDonald's part, but if you're a vegetarian, arguably 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).
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.
>That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".
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.
I don't really see how you could solve this problem with a sufficiently complex algorithm. Which ads are shown still depends on how much the vendor is willing to spend on marketing. I may have zero interest in Ford cars, but if Ford is the one spending the big bucks in the "car" category I'll see a lot of Ford ads.
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.
Exactly. The ad-revenue companies will show you the ads the advertisers pay for that make the most money for them. Your actual wants, needs, preferences, and specifics are only important in the way that they make you a sellable target to the advertisers.
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.
No, the price that is charged in a specific impression is adjusted by the relevance to the user. If the user relevance is 0.001% a Ford ad would need to spend 100000x more dollars per impression than the same ad for Toyota with a user relevance of 100%. So in practice you might get some amounts of "high cost lower relevance" ads but not to the extent that people think. The advertising broker (as in Google for Google Search) has an active interest in showing good ads relevant ads for the user in order to not negatively impact Google Search metrics, and also maximize clickthroughs or other goal metrics for the advertiser. Poorly matched ads are antithetical to that purpose.
There is a big misconception that ads are just targeted as picking the max(advertiser spend) and it really fuels low quality discussion online.
But isn't relevance just measured as purchasing the product? That is, someone who can be convinced by advertising to by a ford or a Toyota by which shows the next ad would have equal relevance, even if the Toyota is the vehicle they would most prefer?
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I'm still not sure this overcomes the marketing budged differences between entities like "AI Slop Co" vs. "Independent Artist" or "Ford" vs. "Independent Mechanic". There's also the fact that the heaviest advertisers are often the brands I'm going to be least interested in regardless of any other factors[1]. Yes, you can get ad relevance to some local maximum where I do see some stuff I'd actually buy, but optimality is forever out of reach because the products I really want to know about probably spend almost nothing on advertising or have direct competition from an entity like Microsoft that will pour $millions into their ad spend.
[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.
At the scale of a McDonalds ad campaign that seems easy to measure: go to the nearest Target parking lot and ask as many people as you can two questions: "are you vegetarian" and "did you see {description of ad here}". Then compare how which percentage of vegetarians saw the ad compared to the percentage of non-vegetarians saw the ad. There are even companies specialized in market research that will do this in a more representative and statistically rigorous way
For pay-per-click ads, if the vegetarians won't click, that's a lost opportunity to show a veggieburger ad Google would have made money from.
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.
Doesn’t Google earn more from McDonalds if Google provides McDonalds with a higher click through rate? If you’re providing a high click through rate, you’ve probably done the due diligence to screen vegetarians already
> 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.
Let me ask you this directly, I'd love to hear your takes as somebody working in ad targeting: Don't you think what you're building is kinda... creepy?
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!
Advertisement and propaganda are two different arms of the same mechanism/technology stack.
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.
As someone who has worked in ads, this is scifi. Nobody is building mind control into BLACK HOLIDAY SALE ads. If that were true I could get you to buy long haul truck gearboxes or donate to save the slime mold foundation.
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.
Whatever Meta is doing on Instagram is next level advertising.
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.
The few times I ever used Instagram, it knew me where I went to university (a different country) and then recommended I take a cybersecurity course. That was rather scary because it shouldn't have that information.
Despite hardly posting or commenting, Instagram is the only place I've seen relevant and interesting ads. Like scary good advertising. My wife has had the same experience, she was blown away that the ads are actually relevant where everywhere else, including Facebook which has the same or more info, acts as dumb as you can possibly be. I've heard others say the same. I don't know why they are so much better at ads or literally everyone else sucks so hard that just doing as would be expected appears exceptional. The addendum to this is that in the last few months this fell apart for her account and now it's turned irrelevant.
My parents were frugal; we acquired most possessions second hand, and we learned to view all advertisements with suspicion. Seeing an ad on television practically guaranteed that we wouldn't be wasting our money on whatever it depicted.
Coming from a relatively hardened mindset, it is startling to understand how impressionable people must be for modern advertising to be worth the cost.
The secret that most people in business don’t want to admit is that the vast majority of advertising is not worth the cost.
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.
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?
But it's the dirty little secret of most advertising: there's no voluntary feedback to prove (consistently, objectively) how effective your $$ are being spent.
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.
Only a very small part of advertising is actually product promotion. Coca-cola spends $4 billion a year on ads, do you think it's because otherwise no one would know that coke exists?
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.
If you drink it now, would you stop? Would you forget that it exists even though it's on store shelves, in vending machines, and pushed at several restaurants?
Almost no-one can honestly answer this for themselves. I think the truth is likely: 'no, I'd still order a coke at McDonald's, I'd still pick a coke up from a vending machine if I'm thirsty. But if I'm buying a takeaway sandwich, I might not also get the drink. Or if I'm in the supermarket, I might just skip that aisle.'
Yes, but not because advertising lets people know about Coke. The people who still know about Coke would be the same after a year, I imagine.
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.
Absolutely untrue by any metrics or semblance of study. People overestimate how unsusceptible they are to marketing. Marketing doesn't only work if you see an ad and click on it. It's after seeing hundreds of ads, that you start internally building a perception of a brand as whatever they market as (expensive, value oriented, fun, serious, luxurious, splurge material, etc.) Then the next time, maybe months after you've seen any such ad, you need to buy an expensive, splurge type gift for someone. If you remember the brand then, the marketing has worked.
That kind of stuff is absolutely worth the cost of ad spend online
It's not impossible to prove at all. Brand perception is very easily ascertained and corroborated through focus groups. And it does change as different marketing campaigns are undertaken
It's partly true, but only if no-one advertises. If I don't advertise but a competitor does, then I start to lose market share. So although the cost may not justify itself independently, in the face of my competitors' marketing budget, it does.
> Coming from a relatively hardened mindset, it is startling to understand how impressionable people must be for modern advertising to be worth the cost.
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.
The Mere Recognition effect exists in pretty much all humans, yes--but it's completely possible to train a reflex of "if I recognize the brand name, it's the same product as the store brand next to it for $150% of the price." My family also did this when I was a kid.
Marketing ≠ Advertising ≠ Sales
As a tech guy, it took me a lot longer than I like to admit to fully understand this. There is tons of money in advertising, but most of it is wasted: As the old saying goes, "I know half my advertising budget is wasted - the problem is I don't know which half!"
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.
I think this is right on the nose. Advertising as it exists today is not so much about inducing customers to buy your product, as it is propaganda to convince people that your product holds a natural place in society.
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.
I’m sure we can trust the folks whose whole business model is “we’re real good at convincing people to spend their money” when they say their product is a super effective tool that every business owner should spend money on. Right?
It's like that on YouTube today. Every single company that buys in-video advertisements ("sponsors") on YouTube has turned out to be a scam in one way or another. Every single one. The VPNs are probably the least bad, since they deliver the service as promised, they're just overselling how much you need the service, but at least it's not very expensive. Well that and the meal ingredient delivery, which is just overpriced.
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.
If I get advertised something on youtube, I instantly assume it's not very good. I only use onshape because I was personally recommended it by a friend. It does the job, mostly
> Seeing an ad on television practically guaranteed that we wouldn't be wasting our money on whatever it depicted.
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 just don't buy things that have adverts I find annoying.
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.
We're talking about entertainment products. What do you think it would be like to be the only Star Trek fan in 80s Mongolia? I think it would be pretty sad. Yes, the show would still be the same, still be as good, but you have no one to share it with. They simply don't get it.
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.
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.
I agree with part of this. I don't know what Instagram is doing, but their ads are remarkably well targeted. The rest of the internet needs to do whatever they are doing.
> 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.
Why would Meta not raise their costs of advertising until it was the most efficient by the smallest margin?
Targeting was super easy back in the days, when it was done based on where the ad appeared. Putting video game ads into a video game magazine and not diaper ads was kind of a no-brainer, but on the net I had to suffer through diaper ads on a video game site.
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.
We are doing this all wrong. I don't need to be "targeted". There's things I want to buy. Get to know me. Learn what I need. Then, do a JOIN in your database and show me the best options for me.
That's what this is all about. Where is my tech-powered shopping helper and advocate?
A vegetarian can still buy French fries from McDonalds. An ads are not necessarily about you but about the people in your life too. Think parents getting served gaming ads. They might not want the consoles but their kids will surely appreciate a PS6 for Christmas. Point is, a sale was made. Who ends up using the product isn't that important for the ad imo.
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).
> 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.
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.
> My user account, system locale, browser locale, and keyboard settings are all set to English. I am logged into Chrome and all Google services. I travel to Germany every few months, and lots of services that I've been using for years suddenly decide I speak German.
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.
It does not. My point was that even with excessive tracking these companies are incapable of showing me stuff I can read or advertising me things I can, even in theory, buy.
Not even tracking, but when I land on a page from a Google search, some sites try to be helpful by steering me to a local site, but the local link does not exist so I end up on the homepage, not the specific help I was looking for.
I've been making this point for at least 10y, and I think it's gotten 0% better. It's already infuriating how much data is collected about me against my will and any sense of ethics, but it makes me LIVID that all this invasion of privacy has completely shit results. Pretty sure I'd be more sensitive to advertising if it was fully random, at least I'd see stuff I was curious about or didn't expect I'd be interested in, instead of myriads of variations of things I already bought or that are adjacent to something I bought (and therefore I already have too).
Targeted advertising just has not worked on me or many people -
If I'm interested enough to buy something, my digital trail is of that moment and in the process of buying and already sifted through the noise.
Ads a week later for some random thing are pointless.
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?
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.
GDPR is limited to companies that have a presence in the EU, or are directed at EU citizens. When you browse the world wide web, you rarely stay only in Europe. Some sites will respect the GDPR, some will block you, and some just don't care.
I worked for Google for 10 years. All of my personal email and all of my work email (back then, Google, now CMU) goes through Gmail. They know basically everything that's ever been sent as a receipt in an email. They know what I watch on YouTube, what I search for Google, and Android's little Google rootkit knows everywhere I go, and by extension, everyone I hang out with. They know I install an adblocker everywhere I can. I rail against advertising and tracking on the internet (this site) all the time.
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!
I think you're missing the point of ads. They're not (only) there so you click on them and buy something, they're there because it implants the brand into your mind.
"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?
"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 may be a case of a "speed bump" where they are giving an opportunity for the user to recognize/acknowledge the account that is signed into the device.
This! I don't mind tech companies knowing things about me. If I don't want them to know, I browse in Safari's anonymous mode.
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.
You want them to advertise things you won’t buy; that’s far less bad than them advertising things you shouldn’t buy but might if pushed, which is the ultimate goal of the corporate mind control machine.
The issue of you already buying something is interesting to me. It’s so obvious that they’d fix it if it cause revenue loss. My guess is that conversion for any ad is so low that you’re indeed more likely to buy a lot of products twice rather than buying something totally different.
No, it's really difficult for 'them' to find out whether you actually purchased something. All the tracking stuff is on social media and the product browsing pages. But not on checkout. Shopping sites can't allow all that stuff there because of security and privacy issues. So big tech doesn't even know whether you bought something. They only know what you have seen. That's why they keep showing it.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't want my computer suggesting anything to me unless I ask it for suggestions. A computer should be essentially a REPL. It waits for a command. The user inputs its command. The computer processes it. Then the computer loops back to wait. Now we have all sorts of nice GUIs and modes of interaction, but essentially the computer should behave that way: The user should tell it what to do, and it should only do what the user wants.
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.
On YouTube, I get the same rotation of 3 ads almost constantly. A shampoo that I have no interest in, a detergent that I used to have (but no longer, because I associate with spam), and a dusting brush (I had no idea these things still existed!)
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.
You don't get the obvious scam ads with an AI voice-over telling the story of how a lone genius created this amazing thing, but you need to buy now because the government is going to shut them down because their product is too good? Outside of election ads, that's 90% of what I see on youtube.
Just so I don't get accused of shilling out of self-interest, I don't work (and never have) in advertisements in any way shape or form, nor does my employer make a dime from advertising. This advertising discussion always ends up with two sides: "so what?" and "advertising in any form is evil and everyone involved in it deserves the death penalty" (hyperbole but not by as much as you'd think).
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.
> 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.
I'm not even talking about the adtech surveillance aspect of it. The discussion is often about how advertising itself is, at its core or "fRoM fIRsT prInCiPLeS" or whatever, a Bad Thing. If I'm going to see ads I'd rather see ads for a specific product I might actually want to buy than for products I have no interest in or generic "hey did you know Coca-Cola exists?" brand ad nonsense. I'd love it if that happened without invasive surveillance or Samsung-level malware but I think that's besides the point.
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?
You seem to lack a fundamental understanding of adtech and the mechanisms surrounding it. I'm not trying to be rude or dismissive, but it goes much deeper than "I bought a product and am being tracked." Everything digital collects information from you, with the primary purpose of selling the data to advertisers that target based on that data. It's not, "I bought a smartfridge, so I get what I deserve." It's "I went to mcdonald's, my friend used the mcdonald's app, now mcdonald's knows a ton of shit about me and I will be served ads based on it." I do not want Mcdonald's to know anything about me. That is the agency I am losing, because I cannot do much about it. You may think that's harmless, but there's been articles written about how McDonald's in particular has so much ability to surveil they basically can see like a state. Or stories like this: https://www.wired.com/story/mcdonalds-built-a-515-page-dossi...
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.
Yeah, the fact that too many websites just ignore language settings/preferences (both system, and browser it seems) is really annoying. Location-based language picking doesn't even make sense in some locations. Like ebay not even giving an option to switch from German to anything else, if you are in Switzerland. They seem to be unaware that Switzerland is a multilingual country?
Don't expect too much from ebay, even effin' google search in 2026 (and certainly 2027 too) cannot figure out I am deeply in french speaking part of Switzerland, and thus it may be better to serve me in french. They do have Swiss offices in Zurich mind you.
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.
The answer to this is not better information for better ads. It's a Pi-hole or other DNS level ad blocking + uBlock origin.
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.
It is a hard truth to swallow for many on HN (myself included) but the reality is a lot of normies don't mind ads at all. I recently told my wife how to install an ad blocker and her response was "but sometimes I see cool stuff in ads". I'm sure the percentage of "cool stuff" she sees is higher because of what they know about her.
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).
It's shocking to me that, sometime in the last 10 years, everyone forgot that adblocking's primary argument is security.
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.
Links that take you to a malicious site are not the only security reason. Ads are often used as vehicles for malicious payloads, some execute when you click on them and some are 0-click.
> People know how the sites they visit are funded and need some way to justify cutting that off.
As the admin for various SMBs I cared only in a vague, way whether their browsing experience was made unpleasant by ads.
I cared enormously whether I had to spend valuable time imaging or de-rooting their PC because some 0-click infection delivered by ad-network ransomwared us.
I have never felt even the slightest obligation to the vague collective of websites that rely on the shockingly dangerous concept of injecting unvetted, advertiser-supplied code into trusted domains.
From the moral angle, paywalls are an option and were in fact heavily used 25 years ago. The decision to rely for revenue on whether and in what manner a browser renders certain elements is certainly a choice a site-operator can make but it creates neither legal nor moral obligations on me or my users. My obligations as a paid IT / security practitioner are rather clear, and they are to my employers and clients.
I do not know the latest numbers on "what percent of web-based (or all) infections are mitigated by adblocking", but based on historicals that it is well over 50%. In that context it is lunacy to ask "but what about the site operators who create this mess".
> 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.
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?
> Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
It probably helps when your marketplace is filled with knockoffs and misrepresented trash.
People always have said this from when I was in ad tech over a decade ago and to be honest, I think it's much more mundane: a delay in the ad tech data pipeline. If you have delayed intent signal, or you have delayed suppression, or even if some conversion gets dropped in the pipeline, you're going to get this effect. People talked about this a lot but almost all the focus on recent purchaser lists was on suppression. So I'm just going to go with the boring explanation: data pipeline error.
> 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.
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
You raise a good point. I am similar. I am much more influenced by an advert that is somewhat artistic. Plus, I notice that size and scale really matters. Thinking about the same advert: One is a tiny graphic on your phone, the other is a two meter tall version on your subway platform. The second one is much higher impact.
I mean if you get useful ads that don't feel like a waste of time, I'm sure you'd have a more positive view of ads, not sure the takeaway is normal people like ads, but i'm sure there's something to be said about well timed and targeted ads.
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.
I've got a common spreadsheet with facts about me accessible to all personal agents, plus they consult each other, and it's a little disturbing how well it works. "You might want to spend a little more on a wood splitter that works vertically, to save your lower back." "That route will take you through an area with a high population of elk and deer at dusk, which is a particular hazard with your poor night vision." "You've been eating a lot of sauerkraut, shall I add more to this shopping list?"
While still disconcerting in my current state of future shock, it is so useful that I'd be willing to share selections with selected advertisers to get a better fit, e.g. from a personal MCP server. And then filter the results through agents to omit, e.g., offers for a wood chipper since I just bought one. Best if that's the only info they have about me so I can turn it off at will.
Mildly related: I always felt this way with Youtube's recommendations. For me, they're the epitome of dysfunction. It's so rare it will recommend something I want to see.
Same, so I always use the Subscriptions tab to see just what I have subscribed to. But of course, just this week they have hidden it. It's still there fortunately, but you have to dig for it.
> 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.
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)
> I get shown ads for products I just purchased. All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses".
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".
Maybe Amazon's generous return policy means people are willing to swap products if shown alternative ones. But surely they already take this into account?
Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, at least some of the people running ads must be competent, right? I have trouble believing that it's just a flawed incentive structure the whole way down...
My guess is that it's good for repeat purchases. You bought that blender, and if you really liked it, here is an ad to remind you of that model again, just in case you want to buy it as a gift for your relatives, or if you just want to buy a spare or something
Perhaps their metrics are broken. Perhaps their metric is the percentage of ads that are shown for a thing the customer eventually bought and it doesn't consider whether you bought it before or after seeing the ad.
Sounds like they optimize on the full population and not for individual. Because if they did it for OP well the metrics would improve.
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.
I don't understand the skepticism that people who bought something are more likely than a randomly selected person to buy another one of that kind of thing. Yes, even stuff like mattresses. If you think about it for more than ten seconds it should be obvious why this is true.
I don't think people assume there is literally zero signal. I think their intuition is that the repurchase rate is low. Low enough that that if the advertiser knew the purchase was made, then the advertiser would serve something else with a higher predicted chance of getting a click.
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.
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] thread- 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? No 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
If the company can afford that kind of thing, it implies customers are overpaying for the actual product.
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.
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.
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.
Adobe and Lenovo are really good at this.
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?
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.
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!
"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?
Programmers :-D
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.
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.
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.
"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 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.
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.
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.
As the admin for various SMBs I cared only in a vague, way whether their browsing experience was made unpleasant by ads.
I cared enormously whether I had to spend valuable time imaging or de-rooting their PC because some 0-click infection delivered by ad-network ransomwared us.
I have never felt even the slightest obligation to the vague collective of websites that rely on the shockingly dangerous concept of injecting unvetted, advertiser-supplied code into trusted domains.
From the moral angle, paywalls are an option and were in fact heavily used 25 years ago. The decision to rely for revenue on whether and in what manner a browser renders certain elements is certainly a choice a site-operator can make but it creates neither legal nor moral obligations on me or my users. My obligations as a paid IT / security practitioner are rather clear, and they are to my employers and clients.
I do not know the latest numbers on "what percent of web-based (or all) infections are mitigated by adblocking", but based on historicals that it is well over 50%. In that context it is lunacy to ask "but what about the site operators who create this mess".
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.
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.
While still disconcerting in my current state of future shock, it is so useful that I'd be willing to share selections with selected advertisers to get a better fit, e.g. from a personal MCP server. And then filter the results through agents to omit, e.g., offers for a wood chipper since I just bought one. Best if that's the only info they have about me so I can turn it off at will.
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)
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.
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.
I do not want ads matching my weaknesses and likely to convince me to buy anything.