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An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

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Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#211

Post by mrspeaker »

paulie_a wrote: post #75
cronix wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am coming to the conclusion that the only way to beat the system is to not play in the system. Or play as little as possible. I no longer go on FB, Instagram or Amazon. I do my best to just be anonymous. I don't "need" to hang out on social media. I lived quite happily before these services even existed, and will continue without them. We have control. We can resist their shiny toys. If we are waiting for THEM (or…

While I don't engage much on social media, I've found it better to randomly click an ad. I'm ruining their profile one click at a time. The ads I see across platforms and websites are so hilariously dumb and irrelevant now. You are going to be tracked, might as well ruin the analytics.

I'm sure that by now the ad networks must have figured out that I compulsively lie to them and take that into consideration. Youtube just can't believe that I've mysteriously never heard of a single product they ask about in their surveys... "Wow, this guy has never heard of Starbucks either?!"

Lying to CAPTCHA is getting tougher these days - it takes me a few minutes now before they let me through even though I've identified a plain piece of road as a sign. It's a pain to sit through until they let me go, but I'M NOT YOUR FREE TRAINING DATA!

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#212

Post by FrancoisBosun »

wiz21c wrote: post #161
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of the letter author, I suspect the problem isn't just that stillbirths are rare, but that you can't really monetize a stillbirth. Better to assume the baby was born successfully than miss out on the opportunity to advertise to a new mom. I'm sure no one in the room of marketing execs has considered personal consequences like this one. This type of thing is why I do my best to enable privacy settings and…

>>> I'm sure no one in the room of marketing execs has considered personal consequences like this one. Your first sentence was more correct (I suspect) : they thought about it and purposely forgot about it 'cos there was no money to be made there.

The execs in question are most probably all male and have never thought about stillbirths.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#214

Post by NorthOf33rd »

danaris wrote: post #205
NorthOf33rd wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media companies are incredibly clear about what information they gather and how they will use it: everything and however they want. Is anyone actually unaware of this? The individuals may not consider the consequences, but twitter has no responsibility to tell you that they'll use your pregnancy post to advertise to you, and what the ramifications of that might be. Advertising algorithms are amoral tools put i…

> Social media companies are incredibly clear about what information they gather and how they will use it: everything and however they want. OK, but...the thing is, that's not actually true, however much their less ethical executives might prefer it to be. They don't, for instance, collect data on what games I play on my iPhone, because that information is not available to them. But while I have enough technical know…

Should have said, "Everything they can that's potentially profitable," but overall I'm aiming for pith over nuance.

I'm not throwing up my hands, I'm here saying: consider the things you're letting into your life and their motivations. There are plenty of things we can do about it. Not share every single detail about ourselves on social media being a good start.

This isn't private data we're talking about with the authors post. It's data she made very public, by choice.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#215

Post by lenocinor »

VikingCoder wrote: post #145
nyxxie wrote: post #118

I felt immense pity for the mother in this scenario, and after reading the article I agreed that FB aught to have some sort of way to indicate that such advertisements are offensive and should not be shown to the user. Ideally, I'd like to see a paid tier that gets rid of advertising altogether. Then I read some of the comments here and on other sites. To put it bluntly, I don't understand the tone of entitlement peo…

I don't think the OP is asking for regulation. I think the OP is begging for consideration. As a user, we have every right to state our opinions. It's not "immoral" or "unfair" to say, "You're making money off of me, I'd really like you to change your behavior." I don't know why or how you jumped all the way to "regulatory hoops." Have you seen people advocating laws in this discussion? I haven't.

Yeah, and I found asking for that consideration to be personally enlightening. I'd never thought about a case like hers before, and it seems excruciating.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#216

Post by BeetleB »

allemagne wrote: post #170
NorthOf33rd wrote: post #100

Instagram is not a person. Don't ask it to be decent. Those ads are not your friends. Don't expect them to treat you like they care. You're not sharing your information with a human. You're sharing it with a business who is tuned to maximize profit. The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. They don't care about you. You've made the decision to let a business deep into your personal l…

This is mostly very true, but I think the author understands this better than you're implying. The point of this tweet is to influence public opinion. This: >The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. would hopefully not be true anymore due to negative PR, companies would take action out of pure self-interest, and it would stop this situation from happening to future people. There's of…

>This is mostly very true, but I think the author understands this better than you're implying. The point of this tweet is to influence public opinion.

I suspect your parent understands this, and you're not understanding his/her perspective, which is that the general public needs to have a better understanding of how the Internet and monetization works. And that it is problematic to expect almost anything of value from a company you are not paying money to.

They key takeaway in the comment is something everyone needs to understand:

>You've made the decision to let a business deep into your personal life, a space once reserved only for loved ones. These are the consequences.

Yes, the tweeter may be able to influence the company's decision in some minor way, restricted to still births. And it will solve only one small problem. You'll still get plenty of these problematic ads in bad circumstances.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#217

Post by BeetleB »

ordu wrote: post #203
NorthOf33rd wrote: post #100

Instagram is not a person. Don't ask it to be decent. Those ads are not your friends. Don't expect them to treat you like they care. You're not sharing your information with a human. You're sharing it with a business who is tuned to maximize profit. The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. They don't care about you. You've made the decision to let a business deep into your personal l…

> Those ads are not your friends. Don't expect them to treat you like they care. Why? Why they don't care? Is it technically impossible or what? You know, they can try to care and try to become a friend, maybe ads would work better in that case? How do you think? What you are doing in your comment is just stating facts that are known for everyone already. For what reason you are doing it? What are you trying to achie…

>What you are doing in your comment is just stating facts that are known for everyone already.

For the HN crowd, yes. For the general public: Still no. In my experience, most people do not understand this. A lot of people, particularly young people, think that they are entitled to free services like email, instant messaging, and pretty much any service an ad-driven company provides (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, etc).

>I can understand her, but I cannot understand you.

Read the last line of his comment. (S)he is trying to say that there are negative consequences to revealing so much about yourself to strangers.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#218

Post by NorthOf33rd »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #144
srvo wrote: post #21

This seems to happen a lot when one's experience is statistically unlikely, or when it doesn't neatly mesh with a commercial opportunity. For instance, I am a transgender woman and I get THE WEIRDEST ads. Makes sense, since an algorithm meshing together my engagement histories from ten years of social platforms must see something quite strange. The only appropriately targeted advertisements I get are from academics i…

In the case of the letter author, I suspect the problem isn't just that stillbirths are rare, but that you can't really monetize a stillbirth. Better to assume the baby was born successfully than miss out on the opportunity to advertise to a new mom. I'm sure no one in the room of marketing execs has considered personal consequences like this one. This type of thing is why I do my best to enable privacy settings and…

>I suspect the problem isn't just that stillbirths are rare, but that you can't really monetize a stillbirth.

And you can monetize transgenderism, so unless the cost of this letter starts to get very expensive, OP's advertising will get better well before mothers of stillborn children.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#219

Post by soundwave106 »

jakobegger wrote: post #198

Does anybody ever see relevant ads? I guess retargeting kinda works, if I look for info about mortages I see lots of ads from banks, but for anything else? We're all human, we're amazingly complex, everyone of us is unique, and nobody likes to be put in a drawer. But then you have the smartest programmers in the world, working for the richest companies in the world, and all they come up with is "if someone googles fo…

Based on a comment wesd linked to above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18535748), and applying that comment to all the large corporations behind ad-tech (because IMHO large corporate political problems are fairly similar no matter where you go)...

It seems like for these systems, there are often multiple teams developing the algorithms, with multiple algorithms in play behind the recommendation. Each algorithm has their own style of metrics system. Some of them are probably relatively simple with not very sophisticated AI/ML (or even no AI/ML at all) behind it. And, there is a lot of internal political conflict preventing better analysis of said algorithms to refine them.

In other words, you're absolutely right.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#220

Post by samirm »

NorthOf33rd wrote: post #100

Instagram is not a person. Don't ask it to be decent. Those ads are not your friends. Don't expect them to treat you like they care. You're not sharing your information with a human. You're sharing it with a business who is tuned to maximize profit. The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. They don't care about you. You've made the decision to let a business deep into your personal l…

This is flawed on so many levels.

1. Just because a thing isn't a person, doesn't mean it can't/shouldn't be decent.

2. That thing was designed by humans which, inferring from your post, you can ask to be decent, ergo you can ask their thing to also be decent.

3. It would make a lot more sense for the business to care in the long term, rather than the short term, that's where maximum profit is.

4. I highly doubt she actively made "the decision to let a business deep into her personal life" since most of these services are opt-in by default.

There's really no need to be so narrow-minded and out of touch with reality...

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