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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

#351

Post by jonathankoren »

eertami wrote: post #247
jonathankoren wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I’m singing, “Don’t Ban The Bomb”[0], but algorithmic advertising literally pays the mortgage and puts food on my table. You can live your life just fine. No one is interfering with it. No more than getting a flier in the mail asking if you want to drive for Uber is a big disruption. In fact, enough people find some level advertising useful, and have for literally hundreds of years. [0] https://youtu.be/lSEtCz6…

Useful to whom, the companies employing predatory behaviour and psychological tricks to convince people to buy things they do not need? There's no nice way to put this but the world would not be at all affected or a worse place if your company ceased to exist tomorrow. In fact you could argue many would be better off. I struggle to believe competant software developers can argue "oh but I didn't have a choice". You c…

I didn’t say I didn’t have a choice. I said, there’s not a problem with this, and even people that supposed not dirtying their hands are being paid by advertising.

Let’s examine the naïveté you expressed. I work for Mozilla, which is basically a non-profit, which in turn gets its money from Google, which gets its money from advertising.

Your favorite website? How does it make money? Advertising.

Why? Because it’s about the only way to make money on the Internet. Even if you’re selling a product, how do you think anyone is going to find it it if you don’t advertise it? Even nonprofits have to “dirty” themselves by advertising.

So spare me the holier than thou routine. You’re in the muck just like everyone else.

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

#352

Post by tripzilch »

cronix wrote: post #206
lenzm wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably aren't. That's highly suspicious behavior that isn't hard for the ad networks like Google to detect and they'll just refund any costs as fraudulent activity.

I wasn't meaning to use a plugin, or necessarily specifically target Google. Everybody manually click on ALL ads they see on ALL platforms. Make it so "the ad and tracking system" model just doesn't work and becomes to expensive for them to justify. They claim all of this capturing our data is to "provide better, more relevant, personalized targeted ads." They charge companies for those ads. We can basically make the…

Maybe not really click on all the ads though. Some of them can be shady as hell, or they open a new site with even more ads, and you'll never be done! Clicking on ads opened by other ads, I find that the "deeper" you, the worse it gets. By which I mean my personal feeling of: How likely whatever's being offered is a scam, but also how they are messing with my browser, pop-unders and other weird behaviour.

And most of the time I have uBlock enabled. I'm not entirely sure if messing with the tracking system actually weighs up against having to browse without uBlock.

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

#353

Post by tripzilch »

freeone3000 wrote: post #254
lenzm wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably aren't. That's highly suspicious behavior that isn't hard for the ad networks like Google to detect and they'll just refund any costs as fraudulent activity.

It gets you banned rather quickly as a bot from most ad networks. Win-win.

But I suppose getting banned doesn't mean they stop serving you ads, right? It's more like a shadow-ban in that sense. There's still a win in that they'll have to invalidate a whole trail of tracking data about you.

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

#354

Post by tripzilch »

mrspeaker wrote: post #211
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.

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…

I was recently thinking, I'm not entirely sure if they would still use those photo-CAPTCHA's for ML training data any more. The classification "puzzle" that is offered seems like something deep learning is already capable of today? It seems like such "toy data", considering the images and the task given.

I could be completely wrong though. Is there anyone up to date on modern ML capabilities to comment on whether this data is useful and what for? I used to think it made sense, especially with ReCAPTCHA (digitizing books) but it just doesn't seem that valuable any more?

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

#355

Post by lkdjjdjjjdskjd »

citruscomputing wrote: post #340
lkdjjdjjjdskjd wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does she know what is "normal"? That was my point - nobody is "rejecting her reality". There are simply some ads that don't appeal to her, as happens to everybody else, too. How can she blame the algorithms for rejecting her, if her past actually contains things that the algorithm happens to pick up on? Since everybody gets ads that don't appeal to them, clearly it is just a case of algorithms not being smart eno…

There is no malice on part of the algorithms, but I'm sure you can see how it would appear that way and make someone feel bad. Even people unintentionally hurt others feelings all the time, but their not having malice does not invalidate the way they made the other feel. Would you say the same about the situation in the linked article?

"It would appear that way" - that was my whole point, that the perception is presumably wrong here. There is no rejection, and nobody built anti-trans parameters into their ad server by intent. Sure, the OP feels that way - but feelings can be changed, in theory. They should be amendable by rational thought. Also I suspect it can become a habit to frame everything in terms of "rejection of my identity". I am not blaming that person, just pointing out that it may not be a healthy habit.

Maybe, to sum it up in a more friendly way, this quote is a good summary: "never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence" (don't know who said it).

As for the miscarriage, I likewise wouldn't blame the algorithms or companies. However, I would think that most of them would be happy to learn and improve their algorithms. So pointing out such a flaw should hopefully be received well.

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

#356

Post by paulie_a »

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.

On a side note why does Google offer a captcha service to the public, then for their services use an incredibly shitty one. It takes me 4-5 tries to decrypt the random squiggles on their sites. I don't mind decoding a bit of text or an address, but lately even their public captcha has gone rapidly down hill.

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

#357

Post by kapad »

BeetleB wrote: post #216
allemagne wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mostly very true, but I think the author understands this better than you're implying. The point of this tweet is to influence public opinion. This: >The ROI on dealing with still births for advertising is probably negative. would hopefully not be true anymore due to negative PR, companies would take action out of pure self-interest, and it would stop this situation from happening to future people. There's of…

>This is mostly very true, but I think the author understands this better than you're implying. The point of this tweet is to influence public opinion. I suspect your parent understands this, and you're not understanding his/her perspective, which is that the general public needs to have a better understanding of how the Internet and monetization works. And that it is problematic to expect almost anything of value fr…

I don't think the author of this tweet is trying to educate the general public. I simply think she is trying to engage companies so that their ad targeting accounts for her case and someone else in the same situation doesn't face what she faced.

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

#358

Post by kapad »

mc32 wrote: post #35
40acres wrote: post #13

I've been really interested in a 'digital agent' model for a while now. Some profile, and/or grand set of settings that apply to all my interactions online. I interface with way too many platforms online to keep track of, this can lead to unwanted and annoying targeting similar to (but obviously on a much lesser scale) to this mother. I recently bought a shaving kit for my future brother-in-law for Christmas, I looke…

You know things are broken when after you buy things you begin to get ads for the very thing you just bought. Now, you could forgive one ad network not knowing, but when you get served up ads by the people who know (have a record of the transaction) you bought something, you know something’s not working the way it should, optimally.

This happens all the time. And I don't understand the reason for it. Companies are incentivized to understand that I have already bought something and then NOT have to spend on advertising the same thing to me. Yet they do. No idea why.

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

#359

Post by anigbrowl »

throwawaymath wrote: post #312
anigbrowl wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've made the decision to let a business deep into your personal life, a space once reserved only for loved ones. These are the consequences. Nice victim blaming there, let's hold individuals responsible for the bad experiences they have with the vast data collection and ad targeting infrastructure they're virtually forced to interact with. If only they had been studying the blade instead.

I didn't read that as victim blaming. Maybe it's a little callous but I don't think the commenter is trying to shift the blame or responsibility from the companies to the author; instead I read it as trying to change expectations about the level of empathy and humanity the author will receive. > If only they had been studying the blade instead. Uh, what?

It's a meme that pokes fun at callous personas. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-studied-the-blade

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

#360

Post by gregknicholson »

fernandopj wrote: post #162
i_phish_cats wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't clicking on ads reward google, instead of punishing them?

The budget from advertisers is already credited to Google - if such tactic becomes popular, advertisers would get lower returns (bounces would be way higher than now), and move their budgets elsewhere, harming Google's business.

> move their budgets elsewhere

This assumes Google isn't effectively a monopoly. Is that assumption valid?

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