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.
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.