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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

#241
post #236
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know things are broken when after you buy things you begin to get ads for the very thing you just bought. Now, you could forgive one ad network not knowing, but when you get served up ads by the people who know (have a record of the transaction) you bought something, you know something’s not working the way it should, optimally.

Nah, this is definitely not evidence of brokenness. People rebuy things they've bought recently all the time, certainly more often than the general population. Maybe they want a 2nd one. Maybe the 1st one broke. Maybe they liked it so much they want a 2nd one to give as a gift. All kinds of reasons. patio11 has a great tweetstream on this issue. https://twitter.com/patio11/status/982208307057246209

Most of these things are not things like candy or a latte. They're durable items I'm unlikely to buy in the near future. If I buy an 8oz hammer, don't recommend another 8oz hammer. I can see perhaps recommending nails, or maybe a ball-peen hammer, maybe a chisel or punch, but not the exact same item. If it's defective, I'll return and perh get an exchange.

Or I bought socks. "Oh, they must have forgotten they actually wanted 12 pairs, not 8". Ok, remind me in a few months, I might be ready to buy again, but not right after the purchase.

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

#242
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> 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.

Men lose babies too.

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

#243
post #185

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. > 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. Considering only the profit aspect (because the ethics, social responsibility, and public opinion aspects have already been addressed elsewhere i…

> Hence, it makes more sense for e.g. "stillborn" be a trigger word that stops/blocks pregnancy-related ads for X time than for the user to be so brokenhearted by the platform itself that they leave.

Only iff you can be confident that the occurrence of this trigger word means that a person indeed experienced stillbirth, and wasn't just researching this, reading up on it because of fear, a non-native speaker looking up the definition of the word, etc. Metrics like this are really only weakly correlated with what (you'd think) they're trying to determine. Even targeted advertising is essentially a shotgun approach, as we don't even know what actually makes a person click on an ad.

Also: as long as (probability of losing an user X their expected lifetime value) is lower than (probability of ad hitting a gullible person X money got from the ad), it's more profitable to just display the ad. People all over the thread seem to think that it's only about losing vs. not losing a user. But there's opportunity cost to not losing a user, and frequently it's judged not worth it.

(It's good the author is raising a stink over this, it shifts the ROI calculations a little bit towards being more humane.)

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

#244
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are people that callous? I work for a large corporate, and I can honestly say that I think no-one would make such a decision. Perhaps I am naive.

I doubt people hear this story and say 'Meh, fuck em'. However, what about (in thought not out loud) 'False positives are hard to prevent, special cases like these are very rare. Instrumenting our platform with exceptions like these is a massive undertaking for which I don't have the political capital. Lets not take action now.' From outside the company, those are nearly the same reaction. From inside the head of the…

This is suspiciously reminiscent of the adage, "All it takes for evil to triumph, is that good people do nothing."

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

#245

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…

> They don't, for instance, collect data on what games I play on my iPhone, because that information is not available to them.

they would like to reconstruct that information from what they've got, if they could, and they'd probably be more successful than most people would believe if you gave them a zeroth order explanation of "they can't get data outside of their app".

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

#246
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are advertisers going to notice that 1% of people in the 'Just had a baby' group actually had stillbirths? I'd guess not, especially because advertisers don't get to know who they advertised to. Is FB or Google going to change this to improve their conversion rate by ~1%? Probably not, 1% is not a lot. In the end, as long as the advertising platform gets a decent conversion rate on 'Just had a baby' for the advertise…

Serving up ads that are known to be offensive to the user isn't just a lost opportunity to make money, it's also going to encourage that user to start blocking ads, which the advertisers and Google/Facebook don't want.

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

#247
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My life is my life, not a revenue stream for these parasites to capture. Adblocking isn’t good enough. There needs to be a way to punish these people and cost them money.

Maybe I’m singing, “Don’t Ban The Bomb”[0], but algorithmic advertising literally pays the mortgage and puts food on my table. You can live your life just fine. No one is interfering with it. No more than getting a flier in the mail asking if you want to drive for Uber is a big disruption. In fact, enough people find some level advertising useful, and have for literally hundreds of years. [0] https://youtu.be/lSEtCz6…

Useful to whom, the companies employing predatory behaviour and psychological tricks to convince people to buy things they do not need?

There's no nice way to put this but the world would not be at all affected or a worse place if your company ceased to exist tomorrow. In fact you could argue many would be better off.

I struggle to believe competant software developers can argue "oh but I didn't have a choice". You chose to join this company to put food on your table. There are many ethically good industries you could also work in to do so. Maybe you'd earn slightly less, but you could have a clean conscience.

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

#248
post #85

I think it's things like this that will ultimately bring the downfall of the tech giants - the fact that even with "machine learning", the quality if the experience is still so low. They built an addictive product in the beginning, but now all of them are starting to make us feel nauseous, which is one of the fastest ways to break an addiction. It's true here for social media (in spades), but it's true with Amazon (s…

I remain skeptical that it'll make a dent, honestly. People will still use Twitter, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, etc. because they provide enough convenience and positive experiences that outweigh the perceived negatives. I mean people know about the negatives of companies that use sweat shops, child labour, or who employ people in horrific working conditions, and yet these corporations are still very much the…

> The tech giants will remain tech giants because as much as people will complain about it, they won't abstain. They won't stop using their phones, their websites, their apps, their search engines, their e-mail... because it's all too hard to give up.

That's one reason why they like network effects so much. It's one of the ways to turn an "addiction" into actual necessity, by creating a coordination problem. You can easily ditch Instagram or Facebook up to the point when it would suddenly seriously handicap your social life. You could still do it if all your friends agreed to switch to something else at the same time, but those friends have friends too, and good luck coordinating all that.

There are other ways to turn a choice into a necessity. In the western world, if you don't want or can't afford an iPhone, you generally can't ditch your Android phone, because there's nothing else available. And you can't just stop using smartphones either, as that makes functioning in the modern society much more difficult.

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

#249
post #66
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…

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…

This would be a solution if the problem was social media. The problem here is the intrusiveness of advertisement. Personally targeted advertisement exists on the non-social web, on the phone, in your mailbox, at your door. Group-targeted[#] and still intrusive advertisement exists in the public transports, on the radio, in newspapers, in the streets, on most "things" in your house (as branding), on your clothes. I think by now it's clear that we cannot realistically avoid substantial amounts of ads by simply changing our personal behavior. Just like for ecology, it is a common mistake to depoliticize the problem by advocating only individual actions. Defending oneself against ads has to be done in whatever community you are part of using the available power levers (that were put there exactly for that purpose). This can be the state level but also as a union, in a neighborhood. Advertisement should to be (more) socially controlled and regulated.

Advertisement is inherently intrusive, it's goal is to make you listen to some message you didn't ask for. It is strictly one-way communication and as such it's deeply authoritarian: tptb have the right to talk, you are coerced to listen (it goes against fair access to public speech, which goes against the ability to exercise your power on society as a citizen). It is based on ethically questionable methods: psychological manipulation and information gathering; to provide some hindsight, when performed by an individual and not a corporation, we call this behavior harassment or psychological abuse. Yeah sure, you might be stalked by a nice guy with whom you could be friend just like you might see an ad on an interesting product, but no, stalking is oppressive even if done by a nice guy and harassment is a tiny fraction of the possibilities you have to communicate. You want to get a new fridge? Ads will not help you while an independent comparison or buyers guide will. You cycle a lot and would like to keep up-to-date with related products? Subscribe to the newsletter of some cycling community. We don't need ads for anything, they only solve some problems as byproducts and we can always solve them more efficiently and less intrusively.

F ALL ADS

note: i didn't properly define "ads" here but broadening from pure "commercials" we could have mostly the same arguments against all sorts of "public relations" like corporate communication or modern vote-based politics.

[#] there is no such thing as "non-targeted advertisement"

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

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> She's demonstrating a huge amount of entitlement and technically illiteracy. No, she's not. I do have a problem with all of the various people that we interface with, including insurance organizations and pharmacies, abusing data sharing agreements intended for subrogation and similar procedures to manage pharmaceutical sales quotas and conduct outbound marketing. My wife was admitted to the hospital due to complic…

Forces.. WHO?! to care? You can't be serious. And she sounds exactly entitled. The system isn't there for her.

Who is the system for then?
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