Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

I don't believe so.

Advertisements done right should be a passive consumption model.

I want this -> bunch of leads for what you are looking for.

Advertisements nowadays are focused around an active attention-consuming model. You have companies fighting for any in they can to get themselves situated at the forefront of your attention.

There is really no excuse for it, and the dark paths attach has opened in terms of advancing surveillance technology, and harboring an insatiable appetite for as much information on potential buyer's as possible has frankly ruined any credibility or claim to benignity that I could be bothered to extend to the industry.

I could even tolerate blatant puffery if advertising would just cut out all the 1984-tier privacy destroying behavior.

I don't mind ads. I mind mental intrusiveness and privacy invasion 24/7/365.

If you go to your local supermarket, you will see many branded items with varied fonts and pictures. This packaging is essentially an ad for the item. If you removed that, which you could do, as some brands like Brandless have done, people would not know what to buy. The packaging itself provides value. So too with ads online.

> Skimming is taught in school from a young age. It's an appropriate skill. It doesn't take much brain power to read something in a detailed way or in a quick way. The notion that we are so susceptible to our brains being influenced by things like this is ridiculous.

I learned to read in kindergarten. Between private kindergarten, public grade school, and state university, I have _never_ been taught to skim things quickly; rather I was taught what was called _reading comprehension_ where we were told to read a small story of 1-2 paragraphs, occasionally being given a short amount of time to read it only once, and were then asked questions about it; later this turned into class discussions, where we occasionally debated wording that would likely have been missed entirely if one was skimming. I have _never_ had a teacher tell me that I should skim a text, and I was in fact instructed not to do so as it would cause me to miss things. As a rather fast reader in school, I was occasionally suspected of not reading an assignment thoroughly and told to read the whole thing.

Having said all that, there is a great deal to be said on how things you _don't_ think about affect you. You don't have to be actively paying attention to something to remember it, otherwise billboards wouldn't exist; neither would the ads on the back inner/outer cover of a magazine or the back cover of a newspaper. Nor would product placement be a thing.

All of this talk about decieptful advertising; this only applies if you are a stupid person, or a young child that hasn't been taught differrently. A person who believes what they see on TV is real.

Most rational people 10 years old or above know enough to know that you should research a product before you buy it. What is the commercial/ad actually claiming? What does the fine print say? warranty? If a person is buying a product based on advertisement claims alone, that person has an issue, not the advertiser.

To be honest, I like that these companies are spending so much time trying to identify products that I might be interested in, but haven't had the time to research enough about it to make an educated choice. Google turns my searches into ads embedded into email, or searches themselves. I ask Alexa about something or the Alexa wikiHow app, and the next time I'm shopping on Amazon, I have targeted ads for those same items I had begun research on.

It's a beautiful time saver in my opinion. Once you've narrowed your search down to a specific item, you can read reviews, compare it to similar items, do a search on that same item.

That's the same tactic with selling data; the company purchasing the data is trying to connect consumers with product. If the consumer doesn't do their research and buys a shitty product, there are still several layers of consumer protection where the customer can be reimbursed.

As far as predatory gaming ads and games geared towards kids... don't give your kid access to your credit card, buy them a gift card. It's not that difficult. There are too many stupid people on this planet because technology has broken survival of the fittest; allowing stupid people to live long enough to breed more stupid people.

Hey there. Regarding the semi-automatic “look for these things in the post, and however you find them replicate for others”. I’m new to scrappers, do you have a good resource you could link on this? Thanks!