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Instagram Has Become SkyMall

clivethompson.medium.com

261–270 of 341 posts

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#261
post #250

What's tragic here is that the author is complaining about one ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash of a product, on another ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash that is Medium. Why the the fuck people still write on Medium even though it prevents people from reading content after a few times without either paying or logging in is beyond me.

There’s ads on Medium? I’ve never seen any. BTW you can easily open an article in incognito mode, to bypass the login-wall. They do however use analytics, like any other platform that wishes to quantify engagement and provide value to their content creators.

With or without ads, Medium is the absolute essence of trash software.

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people go to instagram for fashion, but that is definitely not all women nor just women. I personally just wear a black shirt and black pants almost every day, am not all that interested in fashion, and am a woman.

> Some people go to instagram for fashion, but that is definitely not all women nor just women. No, but it is the third option you ommited: mostly women (doing that).

Great, does it matter? I think GGP's comment's point was that some do want that. They said 'women' but I don't think it really matters (or affects the point) who it is.

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#263

I go to great lengths to anonymize myself on Instagram (futile, but I do what I can), and as a result I get what I guess are 'standard' ads: - gun modification products - survival stuff: knives, para cord etc. - conservative 'mens group' retreats It's dark.

get out while you still can...

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#264
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don’t follow these people. Once I view all the new content from the people I follow, Instagram starts showing me posts from people I’ve never seen before.

Are you using the app or browser? I just use Safari on iOS and I only follow my two kids and I just go back years of posts and there’s nothing from strangers on there.

How long has it been since you updated the app? It used to work that way, but they changed it. It was a really disappointing shift. If you have a pending update from ~last year, don't update until you have to. I only get a few new posts from friends each day, so it's three scrolls and bam, random accounts and content ads. To see old posts from your friends, you have to click a button that says "See archived posts" after the last new post by a friend, but before the inserted ads and strangers.

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IG is a gateway drug

You want a real hot take based off a throwaway comment? It kinda is for steroids. (Hold on, don’t downvote me yet, I’m going somewhere.) I am a 30-something gay male. Here’s my Recommendations view: https://imgur.com/a/1Paravn Hot dudes, dogs, and one computer setup that’s either based off my search for standing desks or mechanical keyboards. Instagram is a body dysmorphia engine. If you are in a certain demographic,…

> Instagram is a body dysmorphia engine.

100%

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you can infer human nature here as much as psychology of advertisers. I think it was GrubHub that started advertising on porn sites at one point and published some interesting findings from that. The reason the started to advertise there was because it was cheap and because other food related businesses were not advertising there. What they noticed is that most ads on porn sites are for porn, so ads for…

Thinking about it, one of the marketing received wisdom things is that you often want to associate your product with sex. What is probably the easiest way in the world to associate your product with sex?

Ye it is quite strange that there is such a price difference between sites for the same ad CPM when the advertiser can select audiance somewhat through tracking anyway.

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#267

What's tragic here is that the author is complaining about one ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash of a product, on another ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash that is Medium. Why the the fuck people still write on Medium even though it prevents people from reading content after a few times without either paying or logging in is beyond me.

What are some good alternatives? I’m not a fan of Medium either. Their user experience is very disrespectful. Edit: alternatives for a reader

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#268
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s ads on Medium? I’ve never seen any. BTW you can easily open an article in incognito mode, to bypass the login-wall. They do however use analytics, like any other platform that wishes to quantify engagement and provide value to their content creators.

With or without ads, Medium is the absolute essence of trash software.

Medium had a brief period when it was enjoyable and not overflowing with clickbait, listicles, and ads. Now it is, indeed, trash software.

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#269

Maybe it's just me, but I dislike the whole concept of advertising in places that aren't related to shopping. I go to Instagram to look at my friends' pictures, not to be sold something I don't actually need. If I were to shop, I'd go to a mall, thank you very much. Anyway, at some point Instagram ads (especially the autoplaying video kind, with sound) drove me crazy enough that out came jadx and apktool and I found…

I’d love to read a write up on how you did that. I wonder if it’s possible that one endpoint returns a chronological feed whereas another endpoint returns an algorithmic field?

Re: Instagram Has Become SkyMall

#270
I think what's essentially happening here is that Instagram has lots of tracking and targeting so it's very good at telling advertising "Hey, here's the list of people you want to advertise to, and here's how much it will cost". The result of this hyper-targeted approach though is that if you're not in any of the targets no one wants to advertise to you at all. This is the weird part though, rather than accept this, Instagram juts lowers the cost of advertising to you to practically zero. This is what opens the door to these trash ads - it's a kind of noise floor where ads are so cheap you may as well just spend some money on advertising something that costs you zero capital and has crazy margins - cheap chinese drop shipping rubbish. Because there's practically no barrier to entry, it immediately becomes a race to the bottom and the price of the adverts will perfectly match the margin times conversion rate.

What's interesting here is that Instagram have basically decided not to put a floor in. They could very easily say "Hey, we don't yet know how or what to target at these people, but they're still users, let's just not show them many ads, keep them happy on the platform, and give up on that ad revenue until we get it figured out, once we've firgured it out they'll probably be valuable". Instead what they've decided is "Hey, we have no idea how to target at these people so let's just drop the price of ads to the point where anyone will advertise any crap, it'll give the users a terrible experience and forever associate our app with cheap tat, but atleast we get to pick up that tiny revenue stream from drop shippers"

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