461–470 of 882 posts
I don't hate ads, I don't mind it at all to be honest. I use Instagram just for ads :) Restaurants, hotels, we need
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Agreed on all of this, + Facebook and Google both ban images of alcohol on their ad networks. Even someone holding a glass of wine.
I'm pretty sure that's not correct. As a counter example I've seen ads for alcohol and bars in my Facebook feed.
I suspect there may different rules for different jurisdictions/markets which might explain differences in your experiences.
I don't hate ads, they are useful. I use Instagram for ads, I follow restaurants and hotels. They are just some information. But I don't want to be targeted.
The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I will offer a contrarian opinion as a user whose salary does not depend on advertising: the advertising model for using Google search and watching Youtube videos works better for me as a consumer . The alternati…
That might be true in the beginning but long term ad's add a lot of friction and frustration e.g. having to wait X amount of seconds before getting access to the content.
I have been a YouTube Premium user since day one and I can't imagine not using it.
What I would love to see more is having a choice of having a free ad supported version and the option to upgrade and pay to remove those ads.
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FB may do so now but that's only because of lawsuits as recently as 2019. It wasn't something they volunteered to do. But you asked how targeted ads hurt people, and I showed a fairly recent example. Something that wouldn't exist without targeted advertising. How does that not prove my point?
Its not like FB has ever let advertisers "exclude black people" before. The critics said it may be possible that protected categories get less ads for housing, employment, etc due to algorithmic bias. That is a subtle danger, and honestly hard to technically implement at scale, but I think FB has always given a good faith effort in this area.
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It's a Peter Singer rationalization and is essentially another version of the shallow pond parable. Instead of destroying a nice pair of shoes, Jeff is, arguably, making the world worse by working on ads. But he's making it more better by using his salary to help people.
I would argue it's the reverse that's true. He's making it significantly worse than his relatively speaking small contributions make better. If I design advanced weapons, but donate my salary to charity. The good I do is temporary, but the advanced weapon technology can kill, and repress indefinitely.
Since Jeff is a thoughtful guy and this is important to him, I'm inclined to think that he is producing net good. If you can convince him otherwise, he'd probably change what he's doing.
The online ad business generally mystifies me. While an awful lot of the internet, especially the surveillance advertising part, looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering (and other) talent in the history of the world, ya gotta ask about the efficacy. The only reasonably accurate targeting I've ever run into is the occasional ad for something I just browsed on Amazon. I've never clicked on an internet ad.…
There's also the alternative-which-must-not-be-named, which is non-regressive and frictionless: socialism. You pay with money, through taxes.
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The stalking is the problem, but the ads are too. Ads have been a problem well before tracking was a thing. Since at least the 1920s (I’m thinking of Edward Bernays but there are probably earlier examples) the goal of advertising is to manipulate consumers into making irrational decisions. The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something, like the only the thing that will make us whole is a new…
> The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something I know it's hard to disprove but I don't think adverts have that effect on me, partially it's because I don't see many adverts and partly because that kind of blatant manipulation is so hilariously blatant. I acknowledge that someone might be running a really effective advertising campaign on me but since I basically don't buy anything I don't a…