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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

#261

Post by harryh »

mc32 wrote: post #241
harryh wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actuall…

Statistically speaking, a person who just bought an 8oz hammer is much more likely to buy another 8oz hammer than some other random person from the population of people who has never shown any interest in hammers at all.

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

#262

Post by mc32 »

harryh wrote: post #261
mc32 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 actuall…

Statistically speaking, a person who just bought an 8oz hammer is much more likely to buy another 8oz hammer than some other random person from the population of people who has never shown any interest in hammers at all.

Sure but I'm going to guess statistically they are more likely to buy something not a hammer than a hammer. Maybe "people who bought a hammer also bought...", or, you bought a hammer and nails, here is a cordless drill. I mean, why would I buy a hammer twice in a row, and after that unlikelihood, a third hammer?

If I were going to buy two hammers, I’d have put “2” in the basket in the first place. That’s the more likely scenario. I mean they are not operating blind in a vacuum. They know what I just bought. We’re not trying to guess against an unknown person with unknown purchasing history.

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

#263

Post by MarkMc »

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 a pretty insensitive comment

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

#264

Post by itronitron »

rspeer wrote: post #120
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…

Can confirm. I actually went and specifically informed a couple of ad-targeting networks that I'm a woman, in the cases where they allow that, around when I was updating many other people and institutions. That helped on some fronts. So now some of the ad targeting networks have me targeted as "woman who's a successful professional and knows what she's doing in life", which, uh, is correct up until that last part. Th…

It's really shocking how terrible the selection is for professional clothing for women, it's almost like clothing manufacturers have gotten together to ensure everything fits poorly and doesn't coordinate with anything in order to drive up sales. It seems they can only get it right when it comes to designing yoga pants.

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

#265

Post by drewmol »

lenzm wrote: post #192
Notorious_BLT wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like screwing with advertisers, I recommend the browser extension AdNauseam https://adnauseam.io/ Basically, it hides and silently clicks on every ad in the background. It even has an archive where it shows you the ads it has hidden and clicked, so you can check in to see what advertisers think you are interested in, and it tries to eyeball the cost of those clicks to advertisers. Lots of fun to load the worst…

You probably aren't. That's highly suspicious behavior that isn't hard for the ad networks like Google to detect and they'll just refund any costs as fraudulent activity.

Anecdote: I've hopped on a pot committed, 5+ device, aggressivly tuned AdNauseum bandwagon several times now, about one to two month spans spread over the past several years. I usually forget/ignore the increased background traffic for a short time then realize during a moment of inconvienient network congestion and flip back to ad-block, pie-hole, Blockada for mobile vpn etc... I have repeatedly observed a very steep increase in spam phone calls for myself (I take great effort to minimize the footprint of my personal emails across random db's) and email/social media spam for both other household members and office collegues, starting shortly after these heavy AdNauseum binges begin. Lot's of uncommon or specialized, high margin, high intent customer markets and service spam floods in. Never understood why they can stay so persistant. They often seem completely unfased, as if Google's prompt and voluntary fraud detection, disclosure and refund issuance can go entirely unnoticed. /s

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

#266

Post by Kye »

lkdjjdjjjdskjd wrote: post #255
danso wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did she say that her suboptimal experience was exclusive to her?

She said it is a "rejection of her reality", which is complete hyperbole. I can't find the original comment to check the exact words she used.

You can click "parent" until you arrive at the comment you're looking for.

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

#267

Post by sgroppino »

trophycase wrote: post #224
NorthOf33rd wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She will not succeed in making the system more human centered or friendly. She will succeed in changing the ROI of dealing with advertising to mothers of stillborn children, as another poster stated, by creating negative PR. Those are not equivalent. You are exactly the person I'm trying to influence by reminding you that these systems care about revenue, not you or your well being. These facts may be well known, but…

These systems are sociopathic. Full stop. It is in their nature.

It'd be depressing if they tried to sell you a funeral service after you let them know of your misfortune... Just avoiding this would be a big win.

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

#269

Post by dwighttk »

cronix wrote: post #89
paulie_a wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That might be a fun thing to do. Make google and the others pay out the nose by actually clicking as many ads as you can instead of avoiding them. Just have everybody be their own click farm. We could have an international "click to support business day" (hah) where for 24 hours everybody around the globe just clicks ads. That's what they want us to do, isn't it? Maybe we should give it to them.

Um. Google would make money if you did that. At least short term. I guess if enough people joined in then advertisers would move to FB and google would lose money.

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

#270

Post by [deleted] »

eridius wrote: post #234
rocqua wrote: 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.

[deleted]
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