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Comment by esoteric_nonces | Hacker News Reader

Maciej (HN handle 'idlewords') has an interesting take on this that I'm struggling to find in my history right now. The basic idea is that all of the data these companies collect is still ultimately useless in practice. We still don't have advertising that is even close to being relevant.

But the data retains its toxic qualities (of being a database of every action I take on the Internet and some in the real world).

I fire up the YouTube homepage and all of my recommendations are for UK daytime TV. Celebrities, 'Jeremy Kyle' (the UK Jerry Springer), etcetera.

YouTube sends me adverts for female hygiene products and dog food. (I am male and I own no dog.)

Even when I get advertising that's not selling me stuff that would require I buy something else first (sex change, dog) it's invariably for something vastly overpriced or some sort of megabrand.

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He fleshes out the toxic waste metaphor most fully in this talk, which he gave, rather boldly, at a big data (Hadoop) event. It's text and images but there's a video link at the top to the actual talk if you prefer it that way:

http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm

That's quite a good talk. The takeaway is to treat data, especially personal data, as a liability rather than an asset, to discard data by default, and to retain only with a very specific goal in mind, and even then to transform the retained data into some kind of useful aggregate and discard it.

It doesn't contain the YouTube metaphor, which is included in this http://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm

Do you use YouTube while logged in?

In my experience, the content recommendation on YouTube is the best. I've been learning about electronics and watching a few videos about it. Now YouTube recommends me new content and channels that are extremely relevant.

My brother is into guitars, and his frontpage is all about that.

That's the thing... There's one company that figured out that the way to make money on ads is by simply making them relevant to the user, and that's Google.

The majority of the other ad companies are still--despite all the massive dot-com failures during the boom--trying to just throw in ad referrals everywhere hoping something will stick, and trying to hand off those connections to the highest bidder... like, maybe if they just keep doing it for decades, somehow it will magically become profitable.

The related/recommended videos are very relevant and well targeted on youtube, if you are logged in.

Unfortunately, the adverts aren't.

They're not great. About 40% of the recommendations are things I'd never watch, 40% are things I've already watched.

YT has trouble figuring me out because I watch a lot of gamers that also appeal to a younger audience (eg Yogscast). I get recommended a lot of terrible stuff targeted at that audience that I have no interest in (eg PewDiePie and Markiplier).

I have no idea why they recommend stuff I've already watched.

I too can not figure out why YT wants me to watch things again. Or also common, the last 10 seconds of a video is just links to the user's other videos, so I move on. Then YT wants me to "finish watching" it. No, I don't want to finish watching the last 5 seconds of an outro.

My own daughter uses YT almost exclusively as a music jukebox so sure, here comes that Taylor Swift song again, why not.

IF YT even understands that different populations use their system in completely different manner, then perhaps they've miscategorized you.

Something interesting to think about is we may be raising a population who see personalized suggestions as mere spam, if it suggests it you should ignore it because its always wrong. A poisoning of the well. In that way the whole concept of personalized advertisement might disappear.

> Then YT wants me to "finish watching" it. No, I don't want to finish watching the last 5 seconds of an outro.

I have this issue with Netflix. I have tons of movies on "continue watching" that the only thing left to watch is the credits.

Scroll to the end, let it spend 5-10 seconds to finish. Done.

It's not bad, but it doesn't seem get the hint if you don't care about something, even you go out of your way and click the "No interest" option. Clicked that 20 times for a channel, it still showed me suggestions from them.

I've been requesting channel blocking. As in "never show me anything from this channel ever again". I encourage you to do likewise.

YouTube recommendations have been improving, and I do find a lot of material of interest, which says something as my interests are obscure.

But, and this is a big but: YouTube doesn't provide the options to either dismiss any given suggestion, nor to block specific channels. There's sufficient crap on YouTube that both are essential. I've been campaigning for both features for some time now.

Google's recently implemented an account-wide blocked-users manager. It applies now to G+ and Hangouts, though it may move beyond that. "Google doesn't comment on future plans", as they're fond of saying. I have hopes.

I use Youtube while logged in. The recommendations are total trash. It takes accidentally viewing one wrong video and all your recommendations become related to that one video.

I love Maciej's writings, though he hasn't published anything for a few months now. His last writing on advertising was this, might be what you're thinking of: http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm

I agree with every word.

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