> I buy (electronic) gadgets all the time. Parts for PCs, Raspberry Pis, Arduino, "smart" devices to replace "dumb" devices like light bulbs, power sockets, equipment for race/flight simulation, etc. and adverts were usually just for the latest nVidia card or some games or something. Then there was that ONE TIME I bought a unicorn dress for my (then 2yo) daughter and that's it: Nothing but unicorn shit advertised at me for the rest of my life.

and the reply was something like:

> The fact that FAANG has spent what must be billions on specialised/targetted advertising and still can never show us adverts for anything other than stuff _we've already bought_ reassures me that we'll not see intelligent targetted advertising in my lifetime.

and I have to say I agree.

Some time later I was in my closet and still pondering how Facebook could possibly be so wrong as to think I was interested in pants of all things. On a whim, I decided to count my pants. And you know what? I had a lot of pants. Triple digits. Way more pants than I realized I had and way more pants than any one person could possibly need. It turns out, I _was_ pretty interested in pants.

Facebook, without ever having seen my closet, had a better understanding of my wardrobe than I did.

I've even bought a few things I found through Facebook or Instagram ads, things that I wasn't aware of and that I enjoy, timeular and old school safety razors for example, proving that advertising can be a win-win game.

No, what they do is buy point-of-sale data from stores, often through companies like Nielsen and larger. NOW they know what you're buying, and Banana Republic ain't gonna stop telling them, because the market research aggregators pay them back by telling them who is buying their stuff, like people whose credit card usage is 45% directed at clothing stores.

It's far more likely that the Gap is uploading your itemized receipt data to advertising networks (complete w/ that email address they always ask you for and your CC info) under the guise of improving their own retargeting.

People can really freak the fuck out when you can predict what they need accurately. For example the real case of a store advertising specific baby items to someone who didn't know she was pregnant.

This is why "suggested items" often have one wildcard thrown in: They don't want you to realize just how much they really know you.

Of course this doesn't explain failures, but I wouldn't rule out smart ads just yet.

Meanwhile, the thing I might want, if only I knew about it? It's not on the front page; it's not on the hot or new pages; and it's not anywhere near the first page of results for any search I do. These are SEO death-zones, where I just see 1000 optimized contenders for the one boring highest-profit-margin product.

Instead, to find genuinely-interesting new products, I have to go into particular micro-categories, and then browse through ~20 pages of irrelevant same-y things to get past the micro-category's own SEO death-zone. (Even within e.g. the "Scientific Instruments" category, the first ten pages are all either N95 masks or brewing equipment, rather than, y'know, beakers and test strips and CO2 monitoring equipment and such. I know why—they don't re-rank per the browsing habits of the other people who've viewed a given category, but instead reuse the item's global rank in all categories it appears in—but it's still ridiculous.)

I mean, maybe I'm an outlier; I watch YouTube reviews of life-hack tools, kitchen gadgets, etc., so most "novelties" aren't all that novel to me. When I'm looking for "something I don't know about", I more mean "something that would excite me, but which nobody within my filter-bubble is excited about yet."

But surely an AI could deduce a ranking algorithm that would show people like me what they want to see, right? I feed it plenty of training data in terms of what I do and don't bookmark/save on the site. It just needs to think one level up from "tags" / "similar users."

And the weird thing is, I feed plenty of data on exact products I've been interested in in the past to every service I use. Like I said, I watch YouTube videos about e.g. knock-off portable game consoles; I search Google for those products, say things about them in Facebook Messenger, etc. I know I'm getting my privacy invaded by these services—the least they can do is to actually use that information to get me a "recommended" product listing for the thing I'm considering buying!

Advertisement systems are way less advanced and much more stereotype driven, than privacy freaks care to acknowledge. Think of this - advertisers have less than 100ms to decide the best ad to show you... often multiple times per website. Do you really think that any ads are actually personalised?

I remember having to differentiate between Bike Helmet for Barbie(a toy) and Barbie Bike Helmet(safety device for children)... Or the fact that if you let a learning algo run through the categories, they can place dildos(adult toys) right next to water guns(kids toys).

There are services that target you with offers that are highly tailored*, but online ads are not one of those services.

(Amazon's "You May also like", food delivery services suggestions, and similar things that can calculate for a long time)

Yes. Privacy freaks are overreacting on how deep ad tech cares to know about you. It's way less than what NSA or spying agencies(hello Facebook) are able to collect and use.

Even light speed is not infinite.

FAANG companies earn billions on targeted advertising, but it's up to the customer running the ads to do it effectively.

Google and Facebook don't particularly care what ads people are buying or if those ads are working.

The only thing which prevents this are incentives. Content provider are paid per click. Intelligent targeting would reduce clicks. Advertisers would have to pay more for intelligent targeting. So why not just keep the status quo?

On mobile YouTube, where I see most of my ads, it's also almost impossible to click the extra-tiny shishkabob menu next to the ad without first clicking the ad a bunch of times. Until ~6 months ago, this made the ad disappear, and made it impossible (or at least, I didn't see how) to request they not show you the ad. And now it looks like you engaged with it. I don't think this accidental clicks was necessarily their intention, but they certainly decided to make that shishkabob smaller than all the others, which was absolutely a deliberate dark pattern. Presumably to increase the effort required to/decrease the frequency of users taking this action.

Now they've taken to pitching me pretty extreme propaganda from the likes of The Epoch Times.

Best and brightest, indeed.

There's one thing, though: no matter how good your recommendation algorithms are, if you only have shit to advertise, you'll only recommend shit.

My problem is less that the recommendation engine isn't good enough than that this industry is too large and too powerful, and I believe that it's existence is dangerous to society.

For instance, given the Snowden documents, I would give the odds that NSA isn't piggybacking on this private intelligence a very, very low value. How you feel about that is a function of your politics, but even if you think NSA is a good actor, it's not hard to imagine an intelligence agency you wouldn't appreciate gaining access to that information.

But a more mundane and realistic concern is just Google being a monopolizer. The other day they "helpfully" opted me in to their new meeting service and "helpfully" inserted a meeting link into my calendar. This caused me to be 10 minutes late to a job interview over Zoom - because I'd spent 25 minutes waiting in an empty Google Meeting! I'd just assumed the client used this service. (Luckily, they were understanding.) My personal frustrations aside, IANAL but that seems like the very definition of a monopolizing tactic, and I'm pretty sure that's illegal. If I'm wrong, then I submit that it should be.

It's not hard to imagine Google gaming the stock market, or to imagine malicious Googlers conducting insider trading. I'm sure the best and brightest could come up with more ingenious and more lucrative ways to abuse their position as well.

Seriously, why can't we say No Thanks to a company's ads and let them stop wasting our time and their money?

If I click the button to explain the ad, it tells me it's because of my age (I'm a young man) and time of day (I watch videos in the late evening.)

Which is certainly a profile that makes sense, in broad strokes. But no, these are not my interests.

(No judgement to people who like playing pornographic games and dating online! It's just rather inconvenient when I'm trying to watch YouTube videos with my family!)

That's the absolute wrong way to look at it.

There is no "you". There's a cookie/advertising ID. If you're going and constantly changing out; it's back to square one.

It actually seems to be their base arrangement. Every time I 've blown away every cookie/tracker/reset my advertising ID, the ground state seems to be teenage to twenty something with a smattering of mortgage offers/weight loss/health tips/sexual dysfunction stuff that I assume is Google's equivalent of a fortune teller's cold reading in terms of trying to make a decision on which avenues to go down in order to further specialize.

I actually messed around with it once to figure out what it would do with minimal prodding and more or less random clicks. Interestingly, the mortgage click didn't really change their estimate of my age (or they just think that every male on the internet is into 20 somethings). They've never done a good job in terms of picking up on themes except when I've looked up a bunch of enterprise software documentation while logged in on Chrome, or made travel reservations.

Frankly; I find the entire process insulting in the sense that Google would likely respond "You're using our service wrong" rather than admit they've engaged in a decade long romp down digital stalker lane. If I wanted unsolicited buying advice, I'd ask for it.

They're the new Clippy in my book. Every Ad reverberates with a mental Tink Tink as the great data hoarding monolith known as Google does it's damnedest to sell me something, coming off as an Alzheimer's patient in the process.

And again, I resent the status quo being that "if I gave them more info, I'd see more relevant ads". I don't want your damn ads. I don't want my information in any form stored in your databases. Leave me alone! That includes in the statistical voyeurism sense too!

This would be the single most impactful way to return the Net to a repository of valuable information.

Kill the advertising incentive in the absence of opt-in.

But how will websites stay up without advertising, you might ask?

I don't care. I host things I want out there. I find a way to account for it. If you want to present me first party ad like the DailyWTF did for years, I'm okay with that. The third-party monetization model needs to stop though. All it encourages is bad behavior and ad revenue maximization techniques.

Enough to just log in to Gmail or YouTube and you're back.

My mother is definitely not a tech savvy computer user, but she's learning. I've finally showed her how to do a few things 'online', including email and basic searching. She wanted to order flowers for a relative due to a family death recently. As I imagine that vast majority of the population is also trained to do, she went to Google, typed in "order flowers" and went to the very first site that Google showed her. And that flower site, of course, was an ad - though it has gotten harder and harder to notice these over the years.

She ended up spending $30 with free shipping (down from $50 after I showed her how to find 'online coupon'). Google probably made a nice percentage of this sale.

Think of how many times that situation is repeated every day, all over the world.

There's a reason Google can afford so many pointless 'diversity' managers, expensive research, projects that are canned after a few years, and tens of thousands of highly paid and pampered employees. They've practically got a printing press...

I've been assuming I'm somewhere close to normal (definitely debatable) and that most people when they want to buy something just go and do it. How many people actually see an ad, get excited about it, click through, buy the product, and then come out of a kind of trance or something and wonder what caused them to do that? I'm probably more susceptible to candy displays at grocery check out counters than I am to online advertising. I'll occasionally buy one of those and tell the clerk it's an "impulse buy".

I assume there's a reason this is a billion dollar industry, but if I'm the poor schlub they are targeting then I wonder how they even stay afloat.

You're right, though - ad money is definitely providing bad incentives, but it also provides support for cooky projects. Marketing people also get to show their managers these nice graphs on ad spend "returns", that are complete lies.

Twitter and Facebook are much more tied into ad money, though.

My towel is also damp if you can’t tell

I seem to remember an article a long time ago that pulled back the curtain on a lot of these niche dating sites. Apparently it's all basically just a single backend with a whole bunch of different front ends and they just use attributes to decide which niches you could potentially fall it. It has the effect of having lots of niches for people to sign up for, but a bigger user base in each one since they're basically pulling names out of a common dating pool.

The example in the article was that there was one site specifically for dating farmers and one sight specifically for dating within some specific religious denomination. But if you identified your religion in the farmer ones people in the religious one would see your profile too and vice versa. And, of course, the whole thing was just lousy with bots and scammers.

I read this article ages ago though. At least 6 or 7 years. I'd be surprised if that dynamic was still working.