I was looking to buy a leather belt about 6 months ago. I found the belt and bought it (am very happy, thank you). Now it appears for the rest of my life I will be getting leather belt advertisements. On Facebook, Youtube, Google, everywhere. The whole reason why I wanted a quality belt was so that it would last me the rest of my life if cared for properly. I intend to never buy another.

And what's worse is that it's the same set of ads. Like before I cancelled Hulu, they would show the exact same ad over and over again, just to make it as irritating as possible.

For what its worth, this is more because none of those advertisers (except maybe the one whose belt you actually bought) know you actually finished and bought a belt!

Everyone who wants people to buy their leather belts advertises to people who have searched or previously looked for "leather belts" and that is you...

In a perverse way, it's actually good for you to keep getting belt ads. If you just stopped getting them all of a sudden I'd get worried because it means the purchase data of belts was sold and combined with your past search data to server you new ads in an even more devious way.

Alternatively, the Faustian bargin we made with the FAANGs was that we would provide our data and they would give us useful ads.

If I bought a nice leather belt, perhaps I should get ads for nicer leather shoes or some other item, maybe a leather polish/waterproofing kit to keep my belt nice and new. The failure of the Advertising-Industrial complex in that regard has been disappointing to say the least.

To do that you have to give up more information about what you actually bought which IMO is an even bigger privacy issue than what we're currently giving away.

I think it's reasonable for the ad industry to assume that you bought the belt once you abruptly stopped showing interest in comparing belts for a couple of days. No access to purchase history needed.

I'm not sure if they get that kind of historical data of your interests when they're bidding on ads though either.

the incognito mode in chrome and inprivate in edge have become my "normal" browsing mode. i keep a regular window for a handful of web sites & apps like gmail, youtube, github, etc.

i instinctively open everything else in incognito now. i have noticed less tracking, less ads, and a more pleasant browsing experience.

The cookie banners are nagging though

Yes, I know the cause, but I'm pointing out a flaw in their plan.

It would be smarter to look for pools of products and be less targetted. E.g. to know that people who buy long lived leather belts may also be interested in long-lived leather wallets, or long-lived shirts, or glass containers instead of plastic, etc, and then rotate all these products in, rather than this targetted barrage of non-stop belt ads for the next year. This just can't be the optimal advertising strategy, there must be diminishing returns to this level of specificity.

For what its worth, companies probably DO look into this, but people who are bidding on the "leather belt" keyword are outpaying those companies in adjacent products.

At the end of the day, advertising space is auction based and if the belt companies want to bid the highest for that space, they win.

That would be a really interesting example of market failure, as it suggests if the leather-belt companies pay less, they would get more business.

Sort of off topic, but which belt did you buy? The idea that the belt will last the rest of my life appeals to me.

I have a heavy leather belt with a brass navy buckle that I bought in the Harvard Square leather shop 60 years ago. I’ve pretty much worn it every day of my life.

Every decade or so it needs a new strap. For a while, I was able to have one made by a young man at a leather shop in Camden ME - the old shop having disappeared from Harvard Square with the 70s.

Finally, the now old man in Camden retired and passed the business on to his son. The son doesn’t know how to work leather - he just brings in finished goods from offshore.

The current method is to find a belt in Camden that is sufficiently heavy and has a removable buckle. Throw away the trashy buckle and snap in my old one.

I’ve probably got one more strap in me.

You might find a suitable buckle at an Army-Navy store. If there still is such a place.

Just wanted to say, thanks for the tips. A cursory search seems to show that there are a few Army-Navy type stores nearby, so I might be searching for a buckle there.

You have at least two straps in you! I believe in you :)

Take care.

If you like the idea of buying things for life, check out https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/

That subreddit has mostly turned into people showing off their grandma's frying pan or grandpa's old Thermos. At least, it was the last time I read it and decided it was no longer worth reading because actual product recommendations were few and far between.

Another problem is that quality items generally spread by word of mouth, and don't need to advertise as much. So, as an example, I am interested in camping and hiking gear, but the best brands aren't as desperate to advertise, so I get endless ads instead for cheap gadgets or unproven inventions that might work once and then fall apart. Recently spent $600 on two camera bags that I hadn't seen advertised but knew the brand, but had seen ads for many cheap $50 bags instead.

I didn't buy any belts recently and half the ads I see on YouTube are still for belts. I think "internet belt company" is just a thing right now.

EDIT: Not leather belts though, nylon with magnetic buckles or something

There should be more of a market for durable clothes. Or a cultural movement. It needs a hip name or something to latch on to like "durabalism" to go along with a hipster's sense of minimalism or nostalgia.

Good denim can last years and degrades stylishly.

It's really too bad that there's a $825 Billion apparel industry that thrives on fads and replaceable goods.

the reddit group for this about items in general and it is called, buy it for life. not exactly a market but just a subreddit for stuff that lasts longer.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/

It's a great community and idea. I wish by some miracle it became mainstream.

On the topic of YouTube tunnels ... tool/appliance restoration videos are pretty cool. There's a ton of them too.

You have to work on them a little bit but once you do, the recommendations are incredibly high quality.

Just make sure to hide the stuff you don’t want to see on your homepage. I go as far as removing dumb videos from my watch history (or watching them in incognito in the first place).

I find that most people who complain about the YouTube algorithm expect it to just work out of the box with zero tuning. It’s not that good and to be honest I personally don’t want it to be that good. But if you put in a LITTLE effort I promise you it’s an absolute recommendation beast. I have hundreds of hours of content in my watch later list just because of it. It’s all super high quality and I’m rarely disappointed hitting random videos in my homepage.

Yes. In particular, the single most important thing to do is to click the three dots next to a video and then click "Not interested": https://i.imgur.com/1CQzOy6.png

Literally any time you see a video you don't like, do this. It only takes one or two "Not interested"'s to dramatically improve your feed.

This.

My youtube recommendations are incredible. I've spent a lot of time liking and subscribing to things that interest me, and now my feed is full of videos about history and trains and machining and woodworking and science and all kinds of stuff that I could watch for days.

I tried something similar and the results are a mixed bag at best. When the algorithm decides to recommend a video from a creator that I don't follow, it is usually something worth my time. However I cannot seem to stop getting recommendations for videos I have already watched despite diligently clicking the "not interested because already watched" boxes.

A lesser issue is that if I don't watch the videos from a certain channel or genre for a while, the algorithm decides that I must have lost interest and stops recommending those content altogether when that's not really the case. And the "related videos" on the side bar never goes beyond a list of videos from the same channel.

I get that issue as well, i think YouTube has a high emphasis on rewatching stuff which is not usually something i do there.. but it's easy to ignore and the rest of the recs are stellar so I'm not sure it's a problem. Plus the videos it recommends rewatching are still excellent and sometimes i even do rewatch them.

This is super helpful but also very interesting. When technology fails to adapt to people and meet their needs, people must adapt to technology and meet its needs.

I think the level of expectation is just far too high. It's an ML algorithm, feed it some high quality training data and it'll give you some good results. Out of the box it'll give you some very default generic crap.

That’s exactly I was thinking. Why do people on HN keep hating YouTube recommendations. I want to learn electronics and now YouTube is recommending some amazing stuff. I’m absolutely amazed by the quality of content it recommends. Then again my echo chamber is mostly gaining new skills. I avoid watching trash on YouTube.

The odd time if there is a "weird" video I see somewhere like reddit I'll just watch it in private browsing to avoid this. It's annoying that I have to do this though.

I find I have the same issue on Spotify as well. I don't listen to Spotify a whole lot, but when I go to the gym I'll use it and listen workout style music. For me the stuff that gives me that energy and focus is often hip-hop/rap style music. But ironically it's probably my least favourite genre to listen to outside of the gym. But since at least half my time listening on Spotify is listening to that kind of music all my recommendations are terrible.

I really wish these services gave better options to manage your interests. I would love to just tell Spotify to just ignore certain genres from recommendations. Part of the problem is that I also suck at discovering music. So it would actually be beneficial to me to have better suggestions on what to listen to.

> I honestly just wish the recommendations were better.

Which is sad considering how great youtube recommendations used to be around the time Stripe was launched. Remember when people used to go down the youtube rabbit hole to see where they'd end up? Now there is no breadth nor depth to the recommendations. Youtube used to be a vast ocean, now it's a puddle ankle deep and no more than a step wide.

Like the rest of the Web, there's still a lot there—Google just won't help you find it.

It surprises me how many people aren't being proactive about their recommendations.

Hover your mouse over a recommendation you don't like, click the three dots that appear to the right of the title, click "Not interested". Results change very quickly.

When you aren't on youtube much it can be exasperating to manage this in this way. For example, I was watching a biology lecture on youtube. Recommendation tends to be insane conspiracy theories that include some words from the biology lecture title, and zero other high quality biology lectures. I'm not going to sit there and hover my mouse over literally every recommendation when they are all insane. I will just continue to not use youtube much, so far I haven't felt like I've been missing out.

Hover over the recommended video and you can click the three dot tab to select "not interested in Curtis Yarvin" or "not interested in Tucker Carlson." I do this all the time and it makes the feed so much better.

You have to be logged in to do that no?

Not like Google doesn't know exactly who I am anyway but I prefer not staying logged in.

You pretty much have to coach it with a generous amount of "Not Interested", "Don't Recommend Channel", etc. clicks on video recommendations of the sort you don't want.

I really like the new containers feature in firefox for this- I have a trash container so my main youtube container doesn't get polluted.

Just do what I do: open the video, downvote it, then go back to the recommendations, hit the three dot menu, and click "do not show me this channel anymore", and if your sections have a three dot menu, "do not show me this section" for all the rightwing whackjob nutter categories.

Youtube eventually learned to stop showing it to me, and due to my downvotes, may be now restricting showing them to anyone.