321–330 of 341 posts
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> Am I likely to be missing anything interesting by largely ignoring Instagram? I'm going to say, no. But then, if you consider mid-40s elderly, I'm positively geriatric.
I’m an elderly mid-30s dinosaur. Are you pre-big bang?
I bought something from one of these ads last summer. It was supposed to be a battery powered pump (like to blow up a pool float). The thing that came in the mail was just a cheap hand pump. Moral of the story here is be careful of these products. I assume lots are bait-and-switches like what I experienced.
I bought something from one of these ads last summer. It was supposed to be a battery powered pump (like to blow up a pool float). The thing that came in the mail was just a cheap hand pump. Moral of the story here is be careful of these products. I assume lots are bait-and-switches like what I experienced.
Why was it "supposed to be" battery-powered; just because the ad copy read "batteries not included"? :-)
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…
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It's definitely just you. Women go on Instagram to see fashion with links to shopping "the look".
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.
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Yes, but the key difference is that the mafia is, by definition, a criminal organization and the upside is not linked in any way with being a mafia. Ads, on the other hand, do inherently have the positive quality of showing you products and could exist without their current downsides.
Regardless of their current downsides (which are indeed considerable!), ads by definition are there to make me want to buy things I wouldn’t otherwise want to buy. That’s not exactly noble, even if we pretend that they’re just showing me stuff I wasn’t aware of.
That's where we disagree. Imagine you always cooked your noodles in a pan. This is clearly a suboptimal situation. Then you see an ad for a pot, you go buy it and it turns out that making noodles (and other dishes) could be so much easier!
Sure, you would not have bought a pot otherwise, but this ad would have been a net positive for you and the ad company, no downsides.
Or maybe you see an ad for a Chinese restaurant, so you try it and it turns out you really like them. There's nothing inherently wrong with their food just because you got to know it via an ad.
As stated above, the current system is stupid. But it's not all bad.
I don't use Instagram much, but I am on Facebook too often. The limitations of the advertising algorithms are very interesting to me. For example: I participate in ex-evangelical groups because of my childhood experiences. Also follow pages which discuss American Christianity from a secular or journalistic perspective, and in Christian groups which interpret their beliefs from a left-ish ideology. "Liking" any post f…
I get great ads on Instagram. Generally, they’re niche products related to my interests from small companies I’ve never heard of before. Yes, there’s a few misses, but it’s way better than the absolute scum-sucking garbage I see elsewhere on the internet from other ad networks. “Doctor shares one weird trick for emptying your bowels every morning”, “Alan Greenspan tells you what to buy instead of Litecoin”, and simil…