I personally am of the opinion that "targeted advertising" _is_ the problem.

Random generic advertising is fine. It isn't as profitable but it doesn't exploit a person's mental weaknesses. Targeted advertising is straight up exploitation.

Kids being bombarded with ads for plastic surgery nonestop on TikTok, radicalized individuals being targeted with fear-based ads. This is super toxic. And while advertising is a tale as old as human commerce, such insane targeted advertising is not.

Targeted advertising is great, so long as it targets "the viewer of pages like this" not "this person recently went to all these other web sites".

I think that's what ads should be - exactly like TV.

TV based advertising is also bad tbh. There used to be ads related to fairness cream which is effectively virtue signaling you should use this cream to look white and beautiful. And there are ads related to soft drinks claiming you will be strong etc.

Ads sucks and it is alive due to economic incentive from ads. And we know where there is economic incentive its hard to stop (eg. bitcoin mining economic incentive)

While it might be true that ads just suck. It's heavily ingrained in culture. There are a few cultures that do not use ads, even today (Amish?). However, I don't see a transition from where we are today to that. So instead of just saying, ads suck, what is the alternative?

I know this isn't your point, but how is fairness cream virtue signaling?

(If you said it was signaling race or wealth or something I would understand, but virtue?)

Those parade of horribles raise an awkward question - couldn't the lack of targetting of advertising make it even worse in several senses? We had the "punch the monkey/click here for viruses" in the past instead to monetize general targets when it was more niche. People forget /why/ Google won web advertising like they did.

The "badness" of the ads results from the selecting function and what becomes sustainable and favored. Infamously with spam and phone calls it can include outright crime.

Oh totally. Google did win because of personalization. However I don't think that is necessarily a good thing.

I agree those are bad, but those don't seem to be unique to user targeting? You would have the same thing with contextual ads (since what page someone is on is still pretty correlated with generic demographics like "is a kid" or "is a radicalized individual")

Since you work at Google, and on ads:

The insanely annoying thing that I have seen for a long time is that despite the fact that you have more information on me than anyone else the ads have been either useless or even insulting for years.

I remember bothering to click through the microscopic x in tve corner and select not relevant or something on Thai mail order brides. What did I get next? Filipino mail orders brides. Out of curiosity I marked a number of them as not relevant and I think I also saw:

- Polish

- Ukrainian

- Chinese

- and possibly a couple of more nationalities

- later I got ads for older women near me

- and then gay cruises

This went on for years.

Last year I finally started seing ads for electronics etc but now I feel no remorse for blocking ads anymore.

I'm just fed up.

Meanwhile Facebook, for all their faults and despite me blocking them for far longer than Google actually has had interesting ads.

Edit: I've nothing against Filipino or Thais or gay people or anyone, but I have something against scantily clad women etc showing up on my monitor both at work and at home and I think it says something about Google that they think this was the most relevant ads they could show me for years.

That sounds a lot like a trojan installed in your browser, or perhaps someone who shares your computer has peculiar habits.

Across a number of machines, tablets and phones.

Work and personal.

Much more likely explanation IMO (someone please correct me if I am wrong):

Google get paid by the view these days and optimize for the most expensive views.

That gets tricky. But at the least it would help me not see radicalized ads when I am generally searching. And that doesn't mean ads based on my search either.

Yes it doesn't drive as much engagement, but that's the point. Over-optimizing for engagement is a bad thing. We have seen repeated evidence of this.

There should be general overarching categories: News site, food site, movie site, game site. But not "news site for radical right-wingers who believe in tucker carlson and think gun control is communism" which doesn't really require user tracking, but I think still falls on the bad side of things.

"Is a kid" is interesting. There's literally laws to prevent children from receiving too much advertising on TV _for good reasons_ their brains aren't developed enough to counter it. But on the internet? ANYTHING GOES!

> news site for radical right-wingers who believe in tucker carlson and think gun control is communism"

This is "mainstream Republican" and it's about 1.5bits of information after "is UA resident".

Tucker is one of the most popular people in the USA.