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Comments (209)

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  ChrisMarshallNY
  > When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.Same here.I think the songs get pushed by who pays to push, and most of those songs have vocals.
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  IMSAI8080
  Google's real advertising proposition is they will sell you the audience of an expensive website on a cheaper website. Want to advertise on the New York Times? Why pay their high rates? Google tracks who visits the NYT and offers the advertiser the same audience when they visit Bob's hobby gardening website, which is considerably cheaper to advertise on. That's really why they want to track where you go. Understanding what you want is just a secondary aim to that, if they are interested in it at all, and I agree with the article that they are very poor indeed at it.
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  yakkomajuri
  On occasion I get a glimpse at someone else's experience on the web and I'm so thankful that I haven't seen many ads at all in years.I just disabled my adblocker on the BBC website out of curiosity and oh am I happy I don't live like this.
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  everdrive
  Targeted advertising will never feel good, and it's not due to lack of information. Consider the following:- People who know you very well (friends, family, spouse) often buy you bad gifts you need to pretend to be happy to receive.- Ultimately, advertisers aren't _merely_ trying to find things you want. They're trying to get you to buy _their_ things. So someone selling (let's say) hamburgers might be savvy enough to avoid vegetarians, but after that how would they possibly narrow it down? Not everyone wants to try out a new burger place, or even cares about advertising when it comes to restaurant suggestions.ie, they're trying to coerce you into wanting their products, and no amount of targeting can really fix that problem. Also, targeting is difficult.
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  dale_glass
  Yup, it's weird to me that companies as big as Amazon haven't figured this out.Guys, if I buy a photo camera, I might want lenses, or a cleaning kit, or maybe a camera bag. But I'm almost certainly not interested in starting a camera collection, nor am I interested in incompatible brands to what I just bought.It shouldn't be so hard to run some stats and figure out that there's things one doesn't buy again often, like washing machines, cameras, laptops and other big purchases.Also, search still sucks. Searching for things like sizes where fuzzy ranges are involved is pain. Like I need to find a recessed light that fits into a 100mm hole, it's a pain to search for still. At this point I think somebody at Amazon could have come up with a way to categorize products and extract parameters automatically. And the pain only increases exponentially if you need 3-4 things in a product to match.ChatGPT can do it, no reason why Amazon couldn't just have that on their page.
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  NoboruWataya
  It is a hard truth to swallow for many on HN (myself included) but the reality is a lot of normies don't mind ads at all. I recently told my wife how to install an ad blocker and her response was "but sometimes I see cool stuff in ads". I'm sure the percentage of "cool stuff" she sees is higher because of what they know about her.Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.As an aside, there is exactly one place on earth where I will actively look around for ads, and that is London Underground stations. Because for whatever reason they advertise a lot of cultural events (concerts, festivals, plays, etc).
• pelican0
  1. Perhaps in their cost/benefit analysis, it ends up being better for them to carpet-bomb you with ads accounting for 10% of your recorded behaviors, rather than analyze and use all of your behaviors.2. Most of the data they collect about you, they sell/share. And most buyers/stalkers of that data aren't in the business of "selling you stuff"; they use it for other things.
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  Animats
  I have enough ad and tracking blocking that the ads I get are totally misdirected. I get ads for drugs for diseases I've never heard of. I get ads for equipment for processing and bottling olive oil in bulk, despite being nowhere near that industry. I get ads from China for very large hydraulic presses, despite not having any great need for metal-forming equipment. And World Dairy Expo wants me to attend, although I don't have any cows.
• kraig911
  So needed a new toilet seat. My middle aged hairy booty broke the one I had finally. Now Amazon thinks i want toilet seats on subscription. Toilet seat of the months etc. Buy it again... toilet seat reviews even... I wonder if it's not amounting to how much tech companies 'know' but more how much have they automated 'caring'I think it'd be a great opportunity for someone to make an ad network where the user can type in things about themselves in an ad space. Randomly targeted questions and then we get ads perhaps around that. Ads that start off about current events in a fun way and give users an opportunity to feel like they have control in what they see. I know users would abuse it but I think that'd add value to the interaction. If I didn't want toilet seats but I write that I do it'd be valuable to an ad network to see how users interact with their preferences. I'm sure we'll say google already sort of does this but I disagree. I think google infers based on our traffic. Some sites I visit I don't necessary want to but am forced to. I'd love to see ads or have the option to even pay for things I want to see like pictures of my kids instead of an ad.
• djdeutschebahn
  Like it really much. Very valid points!The ad-example with the ovens/AEG appliances could also be designed for someone who recently moved in to a new home. But nevertheless, point of the OP is still valid.
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  lq9AJ8yrfs
  The flipside of this was a shoe-shine boy moment for me about ads and advertising, recently and personally.A small storefront business I liked closed up over the summer. Literally nothing to do with tech other than they had a website, flat HTML that hadn't been touched in years, to solicit business. They communicated with me and their other customers by SMS, almost exclusively.I talked to one of the core employees and asked why they were closing. Business was drying up, the usual story of business headwinds but among the reasons business was drying up was they couldn't make money by running ads, the cost of running the ads these days meant they would barely break even on the average customer they acquired at the historical customer acquisition rates.I don't buy ads myself but the sense they shared was the like the locksmith and plumber experience, except as seen from the other side. Maybe it's different in other parts of the world but the experience is 1000s of ads for indistinguishable fly-by-night-looking operations all of which seemingly lead to the same call centers. Dispatching nearly-faceless vans from who knows where and a different junior-ish guy or gal shows up each time, looks dazed, does an average job and hustles off to the next one.
• d-lowl
  Yeah, the fact that too many websites just ignore language settings/preferences (both system, and browser it seems) is really annoying. Location-based language picking doesn't even make sense in some locations. Like ebay not even giving an option to switch from German to anything else, if you are in Switzerland. They seem to be unaware that Switzerland is a multilingual country?
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  swiftcoder
  > I get shown ads for products I just purchased. All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses".You know, I had a really long argument about a decade ago with an Amazon senior engineer on the ads side of things about this. I was complaining about repeatedly being shown ads for the same blender I had just purchased (not accessories, not competing products, the exact same blender). And I hit a brick wall of "everybody complains about this, and we've been trying to change this, but every change to this makes the metrics worse".
• kccqzy
  Yeah I agree. I also think western tech companies try not to display the fact that they could know a lot about you in their content recommendation algorithms as a sign of deliberate restraint.In contrast go try out a Chinese social media such as Rednote, and the recommendation algorithm is creepily good at displaying that it knows what content you like. Yes it does feel creepy. But in this case I wanted it to know my interests.
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  tjansen
  This! I don't mind tech companies knowing things about me. If I don't want them to know, I browse in Safari's anonymous mode.But I hate it when they suggest things that I don't want.. show me stuff I have already bought.... show me things I already decided against... show me stuff that is not in my price range. That's annoying. I don't mind a good, paid recommendation. I just don't like all the bad recommendations.
• FrameworkFred
  I suspect it's just expensive to do a good job of it.Amazon used to be better at targeted advertising than it is now. I used to browse for a few things on Amazon, then go do something else, content with the knowledge that they'll do the hard work of figuring out what is actually a good recommendation for it. For a few years, this strategy helped me buy tools, light fixtures, and other things I used around the farm.I'm not sure when it stopped, but it definitely did.Ultimately, it's probably just a lot more compute than it's worth. They can probably spend $1 in compute to drive $10 in sales with dumb ads or they can spend $2 to drive $15 with smart ads. It's a diminishing returns thing and they drew the line such that I get dumb ads. Maybe folks that buy more, higher priced items get better ads.
• AlexITC
  From my social circles I hear many people claiming how amazing are google ads and amazon/youtube recommendations. Which I have never understood, none of the online websites I use tend display anything relevant to me, when they do I bet its kind of random.When I'm looking to purchase an item, it would be nice to get relevant ads for the kind of specs I'm looking for but like the blogger said, why do I care about getting ads for something I just purchased?
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  JeppyG
  Recently I had my AIs do a massive deep-dive into all traffic going into and out of my phone. The amount of analytics and data being collected is absurd. Even the Android launcher app I use (Nova) is essentially controlled by an analytics company. Everything you do, even on your home screen, is sent to their servers.
• ano-ther
  Not even tracking, but when I land on a page from a Google search, some sites try to be helpful by steering me to a local site, but the local link does not exist so I end up on the homepage, not the specific help I was looking for.Adobe and Lenovo are really good at this.
• nroets
  And Google cannot correctly classify the spam I'm receiving. For example:Subject: 6MONTHS OF'COVERA.GE'START.ING.AT $2From: RR_BANKAI.NET.bankai.NET.MCK.NET.MCK.NET.MCK.NET.RR_BANKAIdb@ad288.com
• elashri
  I wish YouTube does know the I speak Arabic and stop default their videos to their sh*tty autogenerated English voices. The thing that is annoying and no option to disable it. It is cheaper for them actually. Specially that I don't live in Arabic or English speaking country, so no idea why they do that.
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  dongecko
  Loved that little rant. You had me at "I skip every single electronic track with vocals".
• sumitkumar
  If the ad market was efficient and worked for the end user it would not work for google/meta/amazon. Their client is the marketing executive with the budget who is under pressure to spend it and not the end-user who is overwhelmed with ads.
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  autoexec
  > I have no doubts that a lot of information is being tracked, stored, and sold. Since that's already done, could you guys at least use some of it?..You can be certain that they are using that data. The truth is that the data being collected about you is not intended to benefit you, it's being gathered and stored and sold to be used against you in any way that the person with that data feels might be an advantage for them.It's not really about showing you relevant ads, or helpful recommendations, or useful product offerings. It hasn't been about any of those things for a very long time now. Your data will still be used that way, but while companies will tell you that is mainly why they collect your data that is a lie. Those are secondary uses for your data and making those things work well for your benefit is a cost to the companies and they are only willing to invest so much time/money/effort into that.Your data is being used mostly for their benefit at your expense, and where it isn't being used today, it's being stored for a time in the future when it can be used more effectively against you. AI promises to make it easier than ever to trawl through all that data and find ways to leverage it to better manipulate you, or take more of your money from you, or further limit any possible risk you might expose a company to.Companies don't want you to be aware of when and how that data is being used, so it's natural for you to feel like it's all being ignored, but you can sure that a lot of work is going into finding new and creative ways to put all that data to use.
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  BigTTYGothGF
  A very odd stance. Personally if I'm going to be tracked and advertised to I want it to be things I have absolutely no interest in, even better if it's in a language I don't speak.
• demibabs
  I sometimes think that people believing targeted advertising doesn’t work is exactly why it does.In the sense that you aren’t able to build an immune system against it.
• smusamashah
  I turned on personalized advertising on my google phone once hoping to get actually related ads. It did change ads, but after a while I realized I was having hard time ignoring ads. I turned it off.Now I am totally opposite, more unrelated the ads easier they are to ignore. If I start seeing related ads in feed (e.g. twitter), I try options provided by platforms to change those ads ('don't like this ad' etc)
• anon
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• erelong
  > Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.There are some remotes that can be programmed to automatically send a "select this" code I think, to automate having to do this every time (was researching something like this recently so just mentioning I think it exists, don't know a lot about it)
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  modeless
  I don't understand the skepticism that people who bought something are more likely than a randomly selected person to buy another one of that kind of thing. Yes, even stuff like mattresses. If you think about it for more than ten seconds it should be obvious why this is true.
• dvorka
  This is so true - my favorite is when I have hard time to buy something and after I buy my dream thing, the flood of adds with better deals kill my happiness for getting it cheaply:-)
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  titzer
  I worked for Google for 10 years. All of my personal email and all of my work email (back then, Google, now CMU) goes through Gmail. They know basically everything that's ever been sent as a receipt in an email. They know what I watch on YouTube, what I search for Google, and Android's little Google rootkit knows everywhere I go, and by extension, everyone I hang out with. They know I install an adblocker everywhere I can. I rail against advertising and tracking on the internet (this site) all the time.Yet they don't freaking get it. Google has not discovered that I do not like ads. Advertising (mostly) doesn't work on me. I don't buy the shit that is advertised to me. Sometimes, it's the absolute opposite....and yet, on the one device I haven't got an ad blocker on, they insist on showing me ads for stuff I WILL NOT BUY. (one specific insurance ad I have been seen for 4+ years--no, no no).I just don't get it. They expect me to pay for YouTube premium or something, I don't know. I won't pay them.Google bought my 30s and now they just can't help but nickle-and-dime my mind from here to eternity. It's kind of infuriating. They don't need to know more about me. What they do know about me should be enough!
• MostlyStable
  The answer to this is not better information for better ads. It's a Pi-hole or other DNS level ad blocking + uBlock origin.I think that in theory, advertising based monetization is fine, but practically speaking, the incentives are so terrible that it invariably leads to bad outcomes. The reality of our ad-supported web is unsustainable and unacceptable and it needs to die. This does mean that lots of things will go away, and that we will be paying for a lot more things, but that's far preferable to the current state of the internet.
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  Kuyawa
  "Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen."Programmers :-D
• rerdavies
  Above all, avoid googling for really expensive things.That time where all the ads I got for months were ads for ridiculously expensive servers, after I had (out of curiosity) googled for "what is the most expensive server you can buy on ebay?"Or the time when all I got was ads for military-grade cables and connectors for months, after having googled (out of curiosity) for something or another about submarines -- most likely something about the dud submarines that the UK had sold to the Canadian government.
• lrvick
  Well informed technical people should have the right to ensure what their liqueur store and pharmacy receipts are shared with their insurance provider to accurately model risks so their rates increase if that is what they want. Everyone is entitled to their kinks.But most of us want it legally mandated as an opt-in with explicit consent.
• skyberrys
  Let's just follow this wishful line of thinking down the success train. So say we have all your data and are perfectly executing on it. What would that world look like? It probably won't have any ads at all. However, when he walks from his house to catch his flight an English speaking taxi will already be waiting, he will be dropped at just the right terminal and his baggage will vanish only to seamlessly re-appear at his hotel in Germany, while he enjoys a flight to Germany with just the right snacks and beverages of his liking on a plane ride, while listening to vocal free techno music.Sounds impossible to figure out.
• charlieyu1
  I follow a few football pages and FB shows more football pages, mostly rival teams. Guess what, I hate the rivals.
• kaashif
  > When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.Actually they have and they use it to charge advertisers who want to target you.Hope this helps and reassures you! Now get back to the trough, piggy! And don't complain about the taste again!You are the product!
• ruined
  they know plenty about you, they just don't care what you want.
• eithed
  What surprises me is that this is state of affairs for Google, a company with unlimited budget - to show you ads for things you expressed just a slightest interest in or have already purchased. And it's a state for a loooooong time.Like - I just purchased some plants from Dibleys, a plant nursery in UK. I've gotten confirmation email to my gmail account. Now I'm served plant ads for that very same company. I'd expect that The Algorithm would be smart to decide "hey, here is a guy that is interested in plants, let's take a look at other people in his age group and occupation, what are they also interested in, and let's serve him ads for that. Or having failed that ads for other plant nurseries in UK". But no! It's astounding, that it's so utterly mindlessly stupid.But you know what, actually I prefer that there's no computational effort here. Maybe this means that me being served a shitty ad for a company I like and already know will not attribute to global warming. Maybe this means that Dibleys isn't being charged for a clickthrough, but for impressions that cost a lot less. Maybe this cyclical stupidity is something that we're stuck with as a human race, because why the fuck should an ad serve some kind of purpose.
• Muhammad523
  Not to brag, but I don't have any of these problems. I also don't have a google account
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  KeiferWise
  My favorite waste of ad money I see is google maps constantly putting "Dollar Tree" as a suggested/sponsored search. Problem is the closest dollar tree is 100KM away.
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  Dependance
  Who is advertising for ? Maybe your mistake is supposing it is to benefit you in any way shape or form ?"I wish the farmer knew more about me, it gives me corn but what I want is sunlight !"
• anon
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  cadamsdotcom
  Terrible targeting has a simple explanation.Advertisers aren't incentivised to show you ads for what you actually want. They're incentivised to get money for showing you ads for what you plausibly might want, for the lowest cost possible.And if you buy one thing and the algorithms go "finally! Some signal" you should be happy - it means you're hiding from them quite well.Any "discovery" algorithm that shows you a wildly varying set of things is still mostly in explore mode. And if they're easy to tune out and swat away you can be grateful.
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  Frieren
  > I live in HelsinkiSo, you are protected by the GDPR. There are some types of tracking that are just forbidden or very difficult to implement inside the law.If you want to stop thinking and let companies decide what is the best for you, your problem is not lack of tracking. Trusting that big corporations will have your best interested in mind seems an odd believe to have in this day and age.The thing about the language in websites is different. Most websites are created to be used locally. So, they conflagrate language, residence, currencies, etc. It has nothing to do with tracking.
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  mrkeen
  On YouTube, I get the same rotation of 3 ads almost constantly. A shampoo that I have no interest in, a detergent that I used to have (but no longer, because I associate with spam), and a dusting brush (I had no idea these things still existed!)Mastodon was my main source of doom-scrolling, but I got sick of the endless stream of posts about US politics and posts about Mastodon not having an algorithm, so I decided to give BlueSky a go, and climb back into my filter bubble, but it's even worse. Just an endless stream of people reporting US pol happenings at each other - unsourced - using screenshots of multicoloured block-letters.
• williamdclt
  I've been making this point for at least 10y, and I think it's gotten 0% better. It's already infuriating how much data is collected about me against my will and any sense of ethics, but it makes me LIVID that all this invasion of privacy has completely shit results. Pretty sure I'd be more sensitive to advertising if it was fully random, at least I'd see stuff I was curious about or didn't expect I'd be interested in, instead of myriads of variations of things I already bought or that are adjacent to something I bought (and therefore I already have too).
• cadamsdotcom
  All the terrible targeting is because advertisers aren't incentivised to show you ads for what you actually want.They're incentivised to get money for showing you ads for what you plausibly might want, for the lowest cost possible.Also if you buy one thing and the algorithms go "finally! Some signal" you're doing pretty good on the hiding.
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  watwut
  > My user account, system locale, browser locale, and keyboard settings are all set to English. I am logged into Chrome and all Google services. I travel to Germany every few months, and lots of services that I've been using for years suddenly decide I speak German.This does not require more tracking. This requires LESS tracking - just show the language explicitly requested by the user.> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.This does not require more tracking. Just dont show the screen if there is only one user.
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  matkoniecz
  As ads are inherently adversarial I prefer in fact badly targeted ads.I do not want ads matching my weaknesses and likely to convince me to buy anything.
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  dyauspitr
  Google almost certainly uses stuff in your gmail to recommend ads to you. I had a very, very specific thing that was ongoing for a year or so and as soon as I sent someone an email about it last week, a lot of ads starting showing up for that very specific, not common situation on YouTube.
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  BeetleB
  Mildly related: I always felt this way with Youtube's recommendations. For me, they're the epitome of dysfunction. It's so rare it will recommend something I want to see.
• eatsyourtacos
  How are we blocking ads on an iPhone these days?
• nailer
  > All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses".Amazon surely have some ofthe best engineers in the world, and it's surprisng they can't figure out this problem. No, now that I have purchased a fridge, I don't want to buy a second fridge.
• jdw64
  Companies track us with cookies[1] [1]https://www.makonea.com/en-US/blog/how-cookies-became-the-we...
• gedy
  Targeted advertising just has not worked on me or many people - If I'm interested enough to buy something, my digital trail is of that moment and in the process of buying and already sifted through the noise. Ads a week later for some random thing are pointless.Other daily metrics like from Instagram, etc are not very monetizable as, like great, you know I sometimes doom scroll through Korean pole dancer accounts, etc. What exactly does that help with?
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