Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

s/is overpriced junk/costs 10% more on average and may be lower quality/g

I've been very happy with some purchases from companies I found out about on Facebook. Cognitive Surplus, for example. Love their stuff. Is 10% of their price due to their choice of advertizing platform? Shrug.

Having said that, a lot of it IS overpriced junk, or outright scams. I had some cool-looking shoes show up on my feed for "50% off" a price that was more than twice the amazon.com price. I bought an espresso machine from a facebook ad that turned out to be an elaborate scam. I'm only really objecting to the use of the word "everything" here -- that makes this title false.

To the headline-only readers, be aware this article is largely not about advertising making products more expensive, but instead mostly lamenting ad-tech, terrible modern search, and proposing privacy regulations.

IMO, the cat is mostly out of the bag at this point. I don't think there will ever be regulation meaningful enough to "untarget" advertising to the degree that privacy advocates might hope. At best you'll be able to regulate some of the more egregious abuses, like phone apps surreptitiously listening to conversations to pick up keywords for advertising, or installed apps sending your phone's location data while in the background. It's simply too easy to track usage data these days to expect advertisers to not fingerprint visitors, especially when almost all visitors to major websites are logged into Google and Facebook.

Regulation will continue to be mostly toothless like GDPR, which as far as I can tell has been a largely bureaucratic way to extract extra money from Google/Meta/Amazon in the EU by fining them for unclear cookie consent banners and privacy statements. Which, to be clear, is a good thing, but extremely ineffective at doing anything about the actual invasive tracking they do.

This. People like slapping laws on issues when the outcome is usually higher costs in the form of never shrinking burocrazys, little to no actual enforcement (unless you are rich or connected) and the red tape involved in compliance will likely make it worse.

The answer is by adopting different behavior on our end. Add blockers avoiding services litterer in ads (its why i no longer use Instagram, google search, etc)

I consider this phenomenon part of what I like to call the "Amazon syndrome", even though Amazon is far from being the only culprit. As China started flooding the rest of the world with cheap but decent products mass-produced in a random factory in Shenzhen, people turned away from brands they used to trust and towards no-name options from the likes of "Kxbnheb" or "Ypknwoj" in order to save a buck. Eventually the big brands themselves had to lower the quality of their products to be able to compete with the generic products, which benefit greatly from economies of scale by virtue of being manufactured by multiple companies in massive quantities.

Meanwhile, targeted ads deployed at a large scale with flexible pricing models made it possible for not-so-reputable outfits to get their name in front of millions of people's eyes. While only huge companies with a good track record could get past the ad vetting team of a newspaper or TV channel, anybody and their dog can start a Facebook ad campaign for almost no money and then keep paying as the number of impressions scales up. If on one hand this democratized prestigious ad spots that used to be available exclusively to brands everyone already knows, on the other hand it also allowed random dropshipper nobodies to establish a presence as a "niche shop" of some sort and then end up selling you rebranded Chinese no-name products you might as well have bought directly from AliExpress for half the price with free shipping (or straight up scamming you).

As much as the HN bubble likes to see a level playing field where all companies are treated equally, I think it's good to have gatekeepers in the advertising industry. But, I get it, the tech giants are all about quantity-over-quality and Facebook's ad revenue would drop to basically nothing (by their standards) if they started vetting each ad campaign manually, so here we are.