Not defending the gp's harsh tone, but there's nothing particularly interesting about this post. We all know how ad algorithms are stupidly repetitive and how ads only show attractive people. This is just flamebait.

But we don't all realize the effect this shit is having. And if we did, we wouldn't be reacting so non-chalant about it. I think it's an interesting post, and it's a more nuanced criticism than just "too many repetitive ads with attractive people."

So what is the strongest plausible interpretation here? Because the article is full of body image issues and being jealous that somebody else in the ads looks better.

So let’s take away the sexualized imagery aspect.

If huge percentage of the ads you saw on Instagram were pictures of legs with varicose veins advertising some sort of treatment… would you want to see that all the time? Wouldn’t you start to get annoyed and grossed out that they keep shoving that in your face when you’re trying to look at pictures of cats/cars/landscapes/buildings/whatever?

The author doesn’t seem to be complaining the ads exist, they seem to be complaining about the quantity/frequency of that kind of imagery.

It's food for thought if you work in ad tech. Targeting based on tags/interests can be effective, but understanding the visual content of an ad and how it will be received by the user is a different problem that could result in better targeting if solved.

Suppose all ads were tagged for their visual content and their ad-hiding functionality looked for categories of content that you frequently hide. That data could be used for better targeting and passed all the way back to creative agencies to influence design decisions.

How is that not relevant to HN?

It is my belief that adtech companies' top priority is to make money. They do this by increasing clickthrough rate and cost per click. As long as they don't fall below some "trust" threshold (subjective emotional judgement from ill-informed customers pulling threads from obfuscated-at-best PR releases), they are golden.

From that perspective, why would they want to "better" target using proxy metrics for the ones you really care about? Focusing on the CTR[0], why use tags or interests when you can use clickthrough rate itself?

There are so many factors in what causes someone to click; it's a more effective strategy to treat all those factors as a black box, and optimize for the direct behavior you want to encourage.

Added bonus, those black box / supercomplex problems can be efficiently optimized by ML.

[0] CPC is driven by the advertiser side

That's an exercise for the reader, and not a difficult one.

I'm not here to argue the point so much as let you know that if you don't study the site rules and follow them properly, we will ban you.

I feel this is just the pound of posts that HN allows to feed the hive.

I'm afraid I don't understand.