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  redsymbol
  I'm a software engineer who is also a media buyer, which is the term for someone who purchases and configures advertising campaigns. I have spent over $100k of my own funds on Meta ads the past several years, which makes me moderately experienced. I spend a lot of time in the "ad manager", i.e. the webapp that Meta has for configuring these ads, allocating budget, and so on.I think the current UX of the ad manager will make Meta the target of a class action lawsuit, and there is nothing they can do to avoid that now.Why: many aspects of the ad manager UI will activate settings that had previously been disabled. The details vary over time, but right now three specific examples come to mind:1. Promo codes 2. Site links 3. Related mediaI won't explain these here (you can ask a media buyer and/or an llm). But these are features of Meta's ad system that are useful in certain situations, but for many types of ads, it is better to disable them.The problem: If you disable them, and then edit the ad creative (i.e. change the image or video), in many contexts they are silently re-enabled.This is not noticeable unless you navigate through the complex web interface to check, and disable them again. I now have a detailed checklist, but before that, I would often find I had activated ads with these accidentally active.The outcome is to increase the cost of the intended result of the ad campaign. In other words, it makes the ads more expensive.It has certainly caused many media buyers to spend significantly more than they otherwise would to get the same results from their ad campaigns.These three specific examples have been happening for many months, maybe all of 2025. If they disabled the auto-enable right now, that is still a potentially massive amount of ad spend which has been wasted by many companies around the world.That is why I say a class action lawsuit is inevitable at this point. There is simply too much money on the table for that not to happen.Why did this happen? My best guess is poorly thought out internal incentives. I.e., someone in some layer of management has their compensation tied to the percentage of running ads with site links activated, for example. So that person(s) is forcing the design/engineering teams to implement a UX that inflates those metrics. That is the best explanation I can imagine for what I am seeing.
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  chuckadams
  > Three advertisers also said they'd encountered a problem where Meta automatically switched those toggles to "on," even when they'd explicitly turned them off — meaning they inadvertently spent their budgets on AI-generated ads they didn't intend to run.Goodness, such uncharacteristic behavior for Facebook apps :-|
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  naet
  I'm a big fan of podcasts; this year I've heard multiple podcasts that I listen to say that the bottom fell out of podcast ad sponsorship money and they lost a lot of funding. Many were looking for alternative ways to fund their podcasts like selling monthly subscriptions.I wonder if the ad market will start to drop out for other stuff like websites too. AI might cannibalize search engine traffic... if google can basically scrape your site and then front-run you in the search results with an AI summary, you might not be able to make some money off the content you produce with online ads. Some will say good riddance to the SEO spam type of websites that are stuffed with horrible ads, but there are also people making legitimately good or well intentioned content that live off ad spend. I know I personally enjoy reading certain web comics that seem to be largely funded with online ads. I certainly don't like ads, but sometimes I'd rather see something for free with an ad instead of paying for it.--On a different note, I sometimes use Instagram and recently I have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event already passed a good while ago, so every time I see the ad it's completely pointless. Someone out there is getting screwed on their ad spend. I think a lot of companies are probably losing money on bad metrics reported for ad views, ads shown to the wrong audience, fake clicks, etc. I'm not saying ads are completely worthless or can't drive sales and conversions but I do think it's easy to get fooled into thinking they are doing more than they are.
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  lukev
  Putting AI in the primary loop for optimizing ads (or anything) is risky... because you can only optimize what you have metrics for. Any implicit or unstated values will go ignored.There was an article going around a few years ago how if you just "optimized" without any constraints, you'd invariably iterate towards just selling porn.This feels kind of like that.
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  ffuxlpff
  We are all waiting for plot twist that these actually work better than human made ads and the weirder they get the worse humans can compete with them.
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  xthe
  That’s a bit risky. When AI starts swapping proven ads, you often end up with more volume but lower quality lots of junk leads. If something is already working, replacing it automatically can hurt real results, not just the metrics.
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  agumonkey
  there will be a chapter some day on the link or limit between human involvement and emotion, and the economic value of somethingfor 2000 years we removed some hardship to improve everything but everything automated seems like an economic blackhole
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  ben_w
  To the main topic: I am so not surprised.I like GenAI, I use it, but even in the best case I don't want to publish stuff it made without checking the results for weirdness.As an aside: I find the linked page reloading randomly as I read it, and eventually crashing (iOS, Safari). Anyone else getting this problem?
• anon
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• conradfr
  An AI agent watching AI ads and buying groceries for you.
• anon
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• anon
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  hawtads
  It's not just Facebook, the entire ads industry is heading in this direction. There's a seismic change going on right now.
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  SunshineTheCat
  Ads are one of those things that are pretty much universally hated by every person on the planet and yet companies/platforms continue to find innovative ways to make them more insufferable.
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  jkuria
  This is really annoying. They force the "Optimize Text Per Person" and it is really hard to turn off. If you accept even one "enhancement" they turn OTPP and there isn't a disable button. And then it spews garbage in some of the ads--copy that is full of non-sequiturs and first and second lines that are complete nonesense. They should be held to account.
• measurablefunc
  This is nothing, wait until Zuckerberg delivers those 15 virtual "friends" he promised & they start shilling for whoever is the highest bidder.
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  agentifysh
  are Meta's ad conversions that good as people say it is? anytime this comes up its always advertising on X is the worst and Meta is the best but is this backed up by real data?it makes sense why X is the worst performing but mystery as to what makes Meta so special.
• imiric
  The tech ouroboros manifest.
• garganzol
  Pretty much what Google did back in 2021 or so - all the ads suddenly became "adaptive" - meaning that they started to produce funky texts trying to lure the unassuming viewers. Needless to say that those generated texts sometimes were unprofessional / borderline ignorant. The worst thing is the impossibility to turn that junk generation off.It was the last time I seriously considered Google Ads because loosing control over sensitive narratives is more than uninspiring; it kills most of the benefits of advertisement for an advertiser.
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  tehjoker
  this might be a submarine advertisement. someone is pitching their startup near the bottom of the article
• anon
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• alex1138
  I apologize for the somewhat low-effort comment but across the board Meta is the single most malicious tech company I can think ofI'm no fan of Google but at least Google didn't use your 2FA for ads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16378888, or for example you can actually contact people via gmail https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433It's why a CEO being on record as saying "dumb fucks" matters, joking or not. And I don't think he was joking or else "trying to make a point". He does not care about you. When people show you who they are believe them
• EA-3167
  I think that's nice! Now my ad-blocker and their ad-generator can have a loving relationship without me being involved. The circle is complete!Seriously though, every bit of ad-tech news I've heard for the last decade explains why even my 70 year old mother knows what an ad-blocker is and uses it religiously. Meanwhile paywalls are popping up everywhere and you know... I prefer them to ads; they were always used as a bogeyman by ad-tech bros, but truly they're not bad at all. For one thing a paywall really helps you to stop and think how much you care about a site.