adblock, ublock, zap every fucking ad
An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth
291–300 of 362 posts
Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth
#292This 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…
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Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth
#293Earlier 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…
Still births aren't rare. That makes this all that much worse. > Stillbirth effects about 1% of all pregnancies, and each year about 24,000 babies are stillborn in the United States. That is about the same number of babies that die during the first year of life and it is more than 10 times as many deaths as the number that occur from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/stillbirth/facts.html
1% is in the same ballpark as the percentage of transgender people in the US (~0.6%). So if we're saying one is rare, so is the other.
I consider 1% to be a pretty low percentage, myself.
Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't care, I ruined their analytics and more importantly my online profile. The cross platform tracking exists, I'm going to fuck it over regarding my identity. Plus at an incredibly small scale I make it less valuable for advertisers.
Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth
#295I 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 demand that anyone fix my individual problems when it comes to advertisements, I simply use an ad blocker and call it done. I don't need that intrusion into my life.
Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth
#296Instagram 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…
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.
Nice victim blaming there, let's hold individuals responsible for the bad experiences they have with the vast data collection and ad targeting infrastructure they're virtually forced to interact with. If only they had been studying the blade instead.
Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth
#297This 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…
> the algorithmic rejection of my reality on these platforms takes a pretty consistent toll That sucks. :/ https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ and https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/blob/10bba14590738c445c...
ublock origin is a much safer and more effective way to deal with filtering then hosts files, as well it supports the host format and has its own very large lists built in
Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth
#298This 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 wonder if it makes sense for ad platforms to enable a "clear history" option just like our browsers do? That way you can say very clearly "the current model is wrong, please restart and try building a new one for me". That might also help this particular case: rebuild the model from scratch including only content going forward rather than backward. Should eliminate the baby ads effectively, right?
I would immediately try to figure out a way to automatically clearing my advertising history as often as possible. So would other people; at least one of us would build an easy-to-use tool for other people to do the same.
Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth
#299[deleted]
Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's possible to interpret your comment as a direct response addressing the mother who put out the tweet, which seems very inappropriate. The point you're making might be true, but maybe it's better to rephrase it.
If you publish an open letter you invite open responses. Doubly so if you do it on the Internet. Triply so if you work in the media.
It'd be real nice if people stopped using the public aspect of discourse (and especially virtual discourse) as some sort of general-purpose excuse for acting like an asshole. While such behavior is often framed as telling hard truths or suchlike, more often than not it turns out to be trite cliche deployed for sadistic effect.