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An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

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Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#341

Post by TheGrumpyBrit »

ahallan wrote: post #209
wiz21c wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> I'm sure no one in the room of marketing execs has considered personal consequences like this one. Your first sentence was more correct (I suspect) : they thought about it and purposely forgot about it 'cos there was no money to be made there.

Are people that callous? I work for a large corporate, and I can honestly say that I think no-one would make such a decision. Perhaps I am naive.

I can definitely imagine certain execs being single-minded enough to think "Well if a parent has suffered some tragedy, they're not going to click our ad anyway, so it's costing us nothing to advertise to them"

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#342

Post by krageon »

VikingCoder wrote: post #150
NorthOf33rd wrote: post #100

Instagram is not a person. Don't ask it to be decent. Those ads are not your friends. Don't expect them to treat you like they care. You're not sharing your information with a human. You're sharing it with a business who is tuned to maximize profit. The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. They don't care about you. You've made the decision to let a business deep into your personal l…

Any person can ask others to change their behavior. And if they get the attention of the company, the company may change its behaviors. Whether out of sympathy or self-interest is kind of immaterial. As users, we'd like the companies to change their behavior. Companies rely on users' good will. Once they depend on users for revenue, they need to act to a certain degree as though they care about those users. Or users…

They don't rely on goodwill at all. Companies rely on you spending money. The odds of any one person having an attention span long enough to hold a grudge that might have an impact on their wallet are so vanishingly small that they really only need to care about milking everyone for all they are worth. I prefer this explanation, because you can see that it meshes very well with what happens in practice.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#343

Post by danaris »

ryanlol wrote: post #275
danaris wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I think that her post highlights some other obvious holes in what we know about what information these companies collect and what they do about it. Did they notice the posts she made and the behaviour she exhibited after she lost her baby? Did their algorithms capture it in any way, and they just aren't tuned to do anything about it because it's unprofitable? Or are their algorithms dumber and less all-consuming…

>Or are their algorithms dumber and less all-consuming than we give them credit for? How do you mean? Advertisers can tell exactly how well these algorithms work, they see how much they spend and what they get in return. It's not necessarily a significant problem if your ad is only relevant to 1% of the people who see it, as long as it's profitable.

Sure, but there are two separate questions here:

1) Did they successfully determine that she had a stillbirth/miscarriage?

2) If so, did they use that information to improve their ads?

The answer to 2 is clearly "no". Thus, the remaining question is not whether they found it profitable to use the information, but whether they were able to gather it in the first place. Particularly given NorthOf33rd's claim that they're gathering "everything."

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#344

Post by pixelrevision »

VikingCoder wrote: post #145
nyxxie wrote: post #118

I felt immense pity for the mother in this scenario, and after reading the article I agreed that FB aught to have some sort of way to indicate that such advertisements are offensive and should not be shown to the user. Ideally, I'd like to see a paid tier that gets rid of advertising altogether. Then I read some of the comments here and on other sites. To put it bluntly, I don't understand the tone of entitlement peo…

I don't think the OP is asking for regulation. I think the OP is begging for consideration. As a user, we have every right to state our opinions. It's not "immoral" or "unfair" to say, "You're making money off of me, I'd really like you to change your behavior." I don't know why or how you jumped all the way to "regulatory hoops." Have you seen people advocating laws in this discussion? I haven't.

Facebook and Google would garner a lot more goodwill with me if they just offered some sort of option to subscribe out of ads on their networks.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#345

Post by [deleted] »

egypturnash wrote: post #298
skystrife wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if it makes sense for ad platforms to enable a "clear history" option just like our browsers do? That way you can say very clearly "the current model is wrong, please restart and try building a new one for me". That might also help this particular case: rebuild the model from scratch including only content going forward rather than backward. Should eliminate the baby ads effectively, right?

I would immediately try to figure out a way to automatically clearing my advertising history as often as possible. So would other people; at least one of us would build an easy-to-use tool for other people to do the same.

[deleted]

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#346

Post by jimktrains2 »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #293
jimktrains2 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still births aren't rare. That makes this all that much worse. > Stillbirth effects about 1% of all pregnancies, and each year about 24,000 babies are stillborn in the United States. That is about the same number of babies that die during the first year of life and it is more than 10 times as many deaths as the number that occur from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/stillbirth/facts.html

1% is in the same ballpark as the percentage of transgender people in the US (~0.6%). So if we're saying one is rare, so is the other. I consider 1% to be a pretty low percentage, myself.

1% is no where near "rare". It's a low percentage, but still a frequent enough occurrence.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#347

Post by CaptainZapp »

StudentStuff wrote: post #238
mrspeaker wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure that by now the ad networks must have figured out that I compulsively lie to them and take that into consideration. Youtube just can't believe that I've mysteriously never heard of a single product they ask about in their surveys... "Wow, this guy has never heard of Starbucks either?!" Lying to CAPTCHA is getting tougher these days - it takes me a few minutes now before they let me through even though I've i…

That is part of why I switched away from Google & containerized Youtube in Firefox, its really easy to end up in CAPTCHA hell it seems. Qwant and DuckDuckGo are sufficient, and actually better when searching specific item names or part #, its pretty impressive how shit Google's results have become as of late for this use case IMO.

The only reason nowadays to use Google search is verbatim error messages for exotic software products.

There it still seems to outsmart DuckDuckGo. Else than that I haver zero reason to look back. As a matter of fact. That little box, containing basics for questions like "shell date operations" is usually sufficient and if not you have a link to (usually) stackoverflow. I really like the concept.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#348

Post by VikingCoder »

krageon wrote: post #342
VikingCoder wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any person can ask others to change their behavior. And if they get the attention of the company, the company may change its behaviors. Whether out of sympathy or self-interest is kind of immaterial. As users, we'd like the companies to change their behavior. Companies rely on users' good will. Once they depend on users for revenue, they need to act to a certain degree as though they care about those users. Or users…

They don't rely on goodwill at all. Companies rely on you spending money. The odds of any one person having an attention span long enough to hold a grudge that might have an impact on their wallet are so vanishingly small that they really only need to care about milking everyone for all they are worth. I prefer this explanation, because you can see that it meshes very well with what happens in practice.

> They don't rely on goodwill at all.

Wow, of course they do.

> The odds of any one person having an attention span long enough to hold a grudge

So... that's why people draw attention to issues like this. To try to organize users just enough to encourage a company to change its behavior.

Or, failing that, to get government to lean on companies to get them to change their behavior.

> I prefer this explanation, because you can see that it meshes very well with what happens in practice.

Companies have been successfully boycotted before. Advertisers leave when consumers get mad enough. Maybe not all of them. But at some point, the platform does actually make some changes, sometimes.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#349

Post by danso »

mynameisvlad wrote: post #157
danso wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She describes clicking "I don't want to see this ad" and "It's not relevant to me".

That's not using an Adblocker, though. It's just letting Fb/whoever know that the ad isn't suitable for them.

Maybe she’s on mobile? Also, the author isn’t against seeing ads, period.

Re: An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth

#350

Post by tripzilch »

cronix wrote: post #89
paulie_a wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't engage much on social media, I've found it better to randomly click an ad. I'm ruining their profile one click at a time. The ads I see across platforms and websites are so hilariously dumb and irrelevant now. You are going to be tracked, might as well ruin the analytics.

That might be a fun thing to do. Make google and the others pay out the nose by actually clicking as many ads as you can instead of avoiding them. Just have everybody be their own click farm. We could have an international "click to support business day" (hah) where for 24 hours everybody around the globe just clicks ads. That's what they want us to do, isn't it? Maybe we should give it to them.

Or when you're in a hurry, just click the least relevant ones.
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