And that is quite a feat given how little information I hace willingly given Facebook compared to how I - until a few years ago - more or less volunteeres my data to Google.

Google knew everything about it and yet couldn't manage to serve anything but the sleaziest ads.

Instagram got the table scraps and yet convinced me to buy at least one thing that I'm actually happy with.

Is it perhaps you since instagram is showing you a lot of ads, your just skipping the ones you don't care for and finding ones you like. Thus you are under the impression instagram ads are interesting. Or perhaps they're using the facebook data to feed you ads. You don't have to give facebook much, it can make a lot of assumptions based on your network.

In the early days of facebook, they sent me an email to join with 20 people I might know. I knew 19 of them. I have no illusions , facebook knows a ton about me. Even without a profile.

I found the ads on instagram quite intrusive and not relivant (they're the same size as a post), but that's just me ( I don't have a facebook so they can't correlate). I also find quite a few news sites almost unreadable with all the ads.

Yep, seconded. Stopped using FB years ago and I use Instagram for two of my passions - tiny houses and boobs. And, somehow, Instagram figured out that I wanted to buy a Remarkable 2 ;)

But yeah, joking aside, Instagram was the one of few places I actually saw ads of things I wanted to buy. Sure, the ads tried to rip my eyes out for those products ($50 for a product I found for $5) but still...

As an aside, people complain that Twitter is a toxic place, but if you exclusively subscribe to art accounts, it's one of the most beautiful places on the internet.

Asian artists are an even safer bet: they only post art. How refreshing!

You know, I do see a lot shit on Twitter but somehow my brain has given the low value, spam etc tweets the "advertisement treatment" - I tune it out, don't "see" it.

Any artists in particular you'd recommend?

> And, somehow, Instagram figured out that I wanted to buy a Remarkable 2

The Remarkable website uses the Facebook tracking javascript. If you had visited the Remarkable website then it would know to advertise to you.

That's probably it, yeah. Still, surprising that only Instagram figured the RM2 angle out.