Towards a bra-free Instagram experience
medium.com
medium.com
I really feel for this comment, as women are hyper-sexualized and we have a broken culture of stuff that optimizes for the male gaze, and so this is a common complaint.
But this isn't about sexuality, this is about insecurity. These specific ads are only showing skin so they can hit a weak spot in the viewer and break them down to buy stuff.
The same patriarchal cultural BS about what it means to be a real woman also exists as a pressure against men, it just leads to a different set of insecurities.
Example: I feel insecure about losing my hair. I still have hair... and it shouldn't really matter?... but it is thinning :/; and, when I think about it, it makes me sad.
(edit:) To be clear, I mean the kind of "sad" where every time I see myself in a mirror and every time I wash my hair and even if my hair falls a weird way, it hits me. It is an ever-pervasive "insecurity" in my life that I fight with every day, and where I am dreading what it will be like in another two or three years :/.
I manage to forget about it a lot, or even get to a place where I look at myself in a mirror and am like "this is fine... I don't mind how I look today, so I am happy"
But like, one day, I decided to research products and procedures designed to prevent or hide hair loss. I spent hours on it. I didn't end up deciding to do anything.
But the Internet remembers. The Internet now knows that I have an insecurity, and people with an insecurity are profitable. People like me are why ads make money :/.
So now, every few damned days, while going through my Instagram "stories", I am given a sponsored interstitial ad for hair loss prevention products and services.
Fuck you, Instagram.
As an slightly overweight guy with no abs and skinny arms (what is now called a "dad bod"), while I do not personally feel insecure seeing these ads I can see why people would.
I feel like the general response to woman being objectified has been to even the playing field by also objectifying men. "Oh? There are too many woman butts in movies? We'll fix it... lets start showing lots of male butts too."
With that said, only one of those ads I feel "sexualized" women. Most of them were less racy than the Macy's catalogs I used to sneak a peak at when I was 6 before the Internet. I only see completely non-sexual fitness and clothing ads in this article.
The internet might not forget that you care about hair loss, but the mattress stores will outbid the hair-loss companies.
Learned a bit more about online ad bidding dynamics, but will continue to browse the internet with JS/cookies disabled by default as well as spoofing info on every request from user agents related to what api's are available with my custom build on a fork from firefox nightly.
I'm also, not on facebook/instagram/twitter etc, so I avoid the downsides of the social media bubble all together. If I "need" to use such services, I'd just create a dummy account, and discard it after.
It's not so much to evade tracking (although it can be effective in some instances), but to dirty the waters/avoid the feedback loop from tracking via ads delivered or the parasitic choices (or lack their of mostly) of others who just do nothing and jump head first into the next available skinner box.
Not like it would be impossible for a nation state actor to move against me.
The actual ground reality of "bought a one-off product and doesn't care about future purchasing of said products" doesn't matter. I saw ads pretty constantly for the coding bootcamp I had just graduated from. All that matters in these transactions is checking off the targeting boxes, which everyone involved is pretty eager to do because it makes their numbers look better.
So for example, you might target an audience of people who viewed a product detail page for 7 days. If you purchased on day 3 and there was no SKU level exclusion list, the targeting has no way to know you already bought it. In this case you might see the ad for a few more days.
“Oh! This consumer bought a new car! Let’s show them ads for more cars in case they buy another car on impulse!”
It is much messier to manage in real life than people think.
[0] I would put an Amazon link here.. but I don't want to do it to you.
I think that's a false equivalence. I'm hoping not to lose my hair, but I also kind of don't give a shit. I didn't grow up with society telling me how important it was to "look my best so I feel my best!" How often do you think Bill Gates thinks about his liver spots? John McCain probably hasn't thought of his hairline in decades. Because society really does not give a shit what men look like, unless they're in one of the few fields where looking good is part of their job.
The closest correspondence is maybe with the focus on guys being good at sports. Yeah, that kind of sucked in middle school, but it's been two decades since anyone cared whether I could make a basket. Heck, even if I was great at basketball now, nobody would give a shit.
Notice that we're providing free content marketing for an organization whose value proposition is "we'll help you get rich". Men are not immune at all.
I am also "overweight" (at the borderline for being clinically "obese", even), but it isn't something that haunts me every day and makes me question if I will ever be valued as a person again when I look in a mirror the same way we do with women.
My cousin is a psychiatrist at a college, who has wishes there was a cure to baldness because so many young men become suicidal from balding.
The social media generation values looks very very highly.
https://youtu.be/XxQX4sh9VqE?t=157
Sure, it's a cartoon, but it's funny because it's true.
Your criticism should probably extend to the way the entire advertising industry conducts it’s operations and that’s a massive discussion with an incredible amount of nuance that we probably couldn’t do it justice here.
Secondly, my own anecdote: at work I cannot install an ad blocker, nor manage other aspects of being tracked online.
As part of that employment, I recently had to do some research on equity-release products/reverse mortgages. These are products targeted at the elderly.
I am not elderly, despite what my 20 year old sister in-law might say :p
My workplace online advertising experience has now become an endless omnipresent stream of older couples looking wistfully out into the sunset, perhaps on a boat or over an ocean, or smiling lovingly into each others faces in that aspirational retirement way, always with the message: sell us the equity in your home so your life can be like this.
And it's not just instagram. It's following me everywhere.
Anecdote 2:my mother before she died, was basically a paranoid schizophrenic. Imagine, for a second, the subjective experience the internet advertising system has on these people and their families.
I had an eye opening conversation with her a few years ago, where she proclaimed that "they" were watching her through the computer, and she knew because of the coincidences in how the content changed across the internet to target her specifically.
I had the failed experience of trying to explain what was going on, and the observation that, dismally, she was essentially, on some level, right. The ability to make a mentally ill person's ramblings essentially correct is a sobering dystopian realization...
Apps are a lot more convenient, and most users wouldn't do what I do. So this is a compromise of sorts.
I realise of course that not everyone will like that response, but i'd also say as non-flippantly as possible, that mature responsibility is, almost by definition, not participating in things you might otherwise wish to because of higher-order principal-based concerns.
I don't check Instagram very often anymore but I just logged in now and here are the ads I see:
* Pluralsight - 10 technologies shaking up business Monday.com - visual project management tool
* 241 Atlantic - Brooklyn's newest residential rental development
* Playstation - Monster Hunter World game
* Whichdoor - some kind of rental search engine
* Marvel Strike Force - action RPG game prob on mobile
These ads reflect my interests in tech, business, gaming, and NYC rentals (my lease is up later this year) and are interesting + don't make me feel bad about myself.
But if all the ads I saw were for clothing to "slim your dad bod" or featured really attractive men in skimpy outfits, with the implication that that's how I was supposed to look - I wouldn't like that. I would feel like the world was telling me that my personality, my intelligence, and my creativity didn't matter and that I am only valued for how I look.
That sucks and I think it's understandable that someone wouldn't want to see that. These advertising messages go deep into our psyches.
It's like some algorithm is going "Balding? Nope, then you must be impotent. Wait, you're not impotent either? You must be a woman."
(Putting on my data-scientist hat, this is actually pretty rational. My actual status is "I'm just not interested in buying things from you", but this is a useless result to an advertiser; as someone not interested in buying things or paying for content, I'm irrelevant, so they can afford to piss me off in the hopes that they'll find someone who is balding/impotent/female and insecure about it, and I'm just a cost of doing business.)
And they're not just showing a stupid ad. They are giving a major brand name that most males may know.
Nevermind negative body image. I would feel sexually harassed or something for having that many boobs and butts shoved in my face over and over and over. That veers weirdly into soft porn territory. If I want to look at naked bodies all the live long day, fine. But she says I mostly just came here to see pictures of my friends’ dogs and kids. If I were visiting a site to talk to friends about their kids and almost exclusively saw these kinds of ads, I would feel like this would be a bit like leaving a stack of Playboy magazines on the desk of a teacher at an elementary school.
There is a difference.
She says "I just mostly came here to see pictures of my friends' dogs and kids", but what she wants from Instagram is different from what Instagram thinks she's interested in.
It's obvious (leaving aside bugs in Instagram) that she has visited other websites to look up information on yoga and also probably on bras, or shown some kind of engagement with these topics in a place where FB/Instagram was watching, so to speak. This is where things become confounding, because the actual sellers of bras and other clothing have decided that they want to target people doing yoga, which is related to general fitness, which is related to feeling comfortable while engaging in fitness related activities, which they also believe is about looking good — it's a broad net that they cast so that they get more people to look at ads and buy their products. The sellers have also decided that these kind of pictures are what help them (oblivious to the actual experiences of those seeing the ads and the consequences). Of course, this seems like the targeting is actually pointless and that they're wasting their money, but this is how a lot of ads work and how a lot of these ad serving products (FB, Insta, Google, etc.) work. They're still not good enough to target people who're more likely to buy, but competition in a specific product/service space makes sellers wanting to grab as much as possible based on ill informed hypotheses of "their target customer is ____, _____, ____".
It's also clear that Instagram and FB working together isn't really that good for the users, and whatever services FB and Instagram use to profile people around the web look shady as well in how and where they collect information and how they use that information to make inferences that are creating such experiences. If it's not bras, it may be lipsticks or moisturizers or slimming products or bags or so many other things that are sold as things that we should aspire for.
This problem is not going anywhere unless people get more educated about online tracking, how to have at least some control over it and also demand more from these companies that provide "things for free".
In this context, this book "The Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy" [1] is something more people should read.
Her eyeballs are a cash machine. Instagram is a eyeballs gathering machine.
While she might think that instagram is about pictures of dogs and kids, it is not.
She’s said that she’s purchased yoga equipment and bras in the past, so it makes a lot of sense that she’s seeing these ads
Facebook’s algorithms take a look at all people who buy certain things, and look at similar things they also buy, as well as a host of demographic information to key in on it more
They don’t do a perfect job. Facebook is not nearly as omniscient as people think it is. Trust me, I have some relevant work experience
As for the ads themselves, they’re selling an ideal, not a product. If they ad just had a picture of a bra on a table with nobody wearing it, that ad would be less effective than if someone conventionally attractive was wearing it. That’s not going to change, because it sells more of the product.
As for the body types, I think my sister (an accomplished Nuclear Engineer) put it best. Women often complain that they’re being pushed by advertising to conform to a certain body type. That’s valid. But those same women often then come to the conclusion to shame women who worked hard to have their body look like that.
My sister feels its an attack (attack might be a strong word here) on someone like her, who puts in serious effort to her health and body, in addition to the hard work she does as an engineer and a mother. Why is she the bad guy for putting in effort. Why cant some women have bodies like that, and some not?
I put in no effort and thus have a beer gut. Before my metabolism slowed, I was super skinny with no muscle definition. Neither are considered an ideal male physique, but I don’t knock people who work out and have great bodies to show for it. It’s just not terribly important to me.
Your comment sounds very much like the insecurity that the parent was pointing out. I’m with the parent on this. There’s nothing wrong with people who spend time and effort to look physically fit, if that makes them happy. Note that I’m not in support of exploiting people who don’t like the way they look.
Nothing you said makes a whole lot of sense. It seems like you wrote your post out of anger more than anything else.
Are they "bad" by advertising standards, though? The history of advertising is a history of preying on people's insecurities.
To those of you who work in this field, I urge you to consider your actions and to exercise integrity in your work.
I'm not one to make sweeping judgments, but I must admit that, personally, I sometimes find it difficult to understand how some people in the field of marketing can do what they do with a clean conscience.
Some ppl might be triggered when they see a billboard for an expensive car that you can't afford.
As an unattractive person, I wouldn't want to see unattractive people in ads either. Seeing fat people wouldn't make me happier.
(Why was this thread collapsed?)
My biological instinct is to find a mate who has the highest probability of successfully reproducing. So even in this regard, someone healthy fits the bill over someone unhealthy any day. Healthy people live longer, are able to more successfully reproduce and have less complications in general.
Now should fat people in society be treated worse in terms of the opportunities they have? Absolutely not. But should society reward people for being fat? In my opinion, no, not explicitly.
Being unhealthily fat is just as abnormal as being unhealthyily skinny. Normalizing either is probably misguided at best.
I think you’re wrong; bigger folks can totally be attractive. That they are unattractive to you is different.
Again, representing the extremes as norms is not great - I think we can both agree on this point at least. But if there was an ideal that I would rather society value - it would definitely err on the side of healthy and fit.
Also, many women have to work much harder than men to stay on the skinny side because they store fat easier. A 5’1” 110 lb woman with 18% body fat would need to eat 1500 cal/day to maintain that weight. That’s practically nothing! It’s harder still if you were raised in a family that encouraged overeating (several reasons behind this).
Then there’s the double standard that exists in many relationships where the woman needs to be “healthy and fit” at all times while the man can treat his body however he wants because practically nobody cares about an out-of-shape looking man.
I say look however you want and weigh however much you feel comfortable with. One life to live and all.
In any case, I mostly agree with everything you've written.
Cheap food is why the norms played out like they did. In places with less easy access to calories, fat is considered beautiful and thin ugly.
I’ll throw another othrogonal point into the mix: our definitions of “skinny” and “fat” are probably very different and very relative to our realities.
Anyway, I don’t claim to have the answers - it gets really messy to articulate the big question of “how do values form”.
Being attracted to fat people is a kink, not the norm.
Norms of attractiveness are social constructs that demonstrably change over time.
There's nothing here that can't be hung on a pre-existing hook of "advertising sucks" (for many reasons including shallowness and sexism) and/or "Instagram sucks" (due to its being an ad platform masquerading as a "social" "sharing" "platform"). But you can also add the bluntness of their ad targeting algorithm to the list. It sucks. "She ordered yoga pants once... TURN THE YOGA FIREHOSE ON HER!"
I think everybody here including the author knows why she's seeing the ads. Likewise "They don't do a perfect job" and Facebook's non-omniscience, are pretty obvious too. But it's worse than doing an imperfect job; it's idiotic and self-defeating for both the ad broker (Facebook/Instagram) and the advertiser. She is never going to respond to any of those ads. Even less so, the more they make her feel like nothing more than a place where leggings and bras go, that has money in it. Though I guess neither the broker nor the advertiser cares about responses, only viewings.
Yes there is: don't use Facebook or Instagram.
I see little value in being surprised that a surveillance based advertising platform does indeed surveil and advertise at you. That's what these things are built to do.
Regardless of whether the ads are repetitive or not, why pollute your life with advertising in the first place? Reduce your exposure to advertising pollution and you really will feel better. That's what I do.
The content of the ads in the example are questionable in context. It's not that she or we're being tracked, it's the psychological triggers used to shame or bait people.
I don't forget. I pay cash whenever possible, I don't join so-called "loyalty" programs, I don't give out my number or email address to businesses freely, etc. The world is a hostile place and you must always guard against the exploitation of your data. I wish this was a paranoid perspective but it has sadly become a pragmatic one. It's unfortunate that this is the world we've built for ourselves.
> it's the psychological triggers used to shame or bait people
Made more possible and better targeted through tracking. These days it's simply good computer hygiene to install a blocker in your browser (such as uBlock Origin) and to also turn on your browser's built-in tracking protection if it has it (like Firefox does: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection).
[1]: https://aeon.co/essays/if-plastic-replaces-cash-much-that-is...
How this caches out is that you will never be served the ads that are best for you. Instead, you'll be shown whatever the most expensive targeting options are for you, given the information the advertising platform knows about you. In this case, since you buy bras, it's ads for bras. Visit a coding bootcamp website and get tracked and you'll get ads for coding bootcamps - even if you're currently attending the bootcamp you're getting advertised for.
Practical advice: start doing a lot of online web shopping and trackable stuff for mattresses. You'll probably get ads for mattresses instead. "Interested in buying a mattress" is a very high-value category for marketers to target.
Deep-tracking, ultra-personalisation ending in creepy ads were bad enough. But the flip-side is if there's only one industry interested in your activities, you only see those ads, whatever you're looking at.
Lets go back to the 2000s, where ads targeted content, not users.
Before you start fretting about CTRs, you can't click what you don't see. That's the hole advertisers need to dig themselves out of. And even before ad-blockers ruled supreme, targeted advertising was sold to publishers as a way of increasing CPM. Truth is payouts have been in free-fall since online advertising began.
Maybe because not enough people install blockers for it to matter.
Instinctively, above cyber bullying and public body shaming, it is these kind of ad / algo quirks that would seem like a key contributing factor. As the author points out, the constant barrage can't help but make you consider your own body.
Apart from the method of using ads and tracking, which I despise, I wonder if this is actually such a bad thing - at least in this particular case: If you aren‘t satisfied with your body there are ways to change that - eating healthy, being active. Of course, that‘s a whole different discussion. I‘m simply wondering if someone should be offended if confronted with healthy and fit people.
Or put differently: Would you complain about ads that show people succesful in their career? A status that is probably harder to achieve and than being fit.
- How many people are really not in control of their health and body? Sure, there are physical exceptions and I‘m not saying it‘s easy, but is it really common that eating healthy and living an active lifestyle is prevented by psychological and social reasons? And if so, isn‘t that an excuse for missing pretty much any goal that requires to overcome some barriers?
- With cyberbullying, suicide and objectification you‘re throwing terms into the discussion that are a major escalation of the ads in question. I don‘t necessarily make that connection or at least think that it‘s a very subjective one and in my opinion those issues rather require work on a personal, individual level for those affected. However, that’s a different discussion.
- Wouldn‘t you agree that one‘s career and professional status is very much related to the perceived self-worth? How is that not relevant to teenagers that are about to start their careers, whether it‘s a high paying tech job or being a cashier at Walmart, very soon. Considering one‘s career options doesn‘t require to already have one - it also applies to future prospects - or lack thereof. And even then grownups aren‘t immune to these considerations and their effects.
https://blocktogether.org/show-blocks/njFjyOn40oKxRW8XJLmN70...
However, I just discovered that the Instagram website doesn't show sponsored posts. I'm not sure if has something to do with my setup, but I just scrolled through the last hundred photos and didn't see a single ad. It looks great and functions just like the mobile app. The icon is even the same! Just go to instagram.com on your phone and sign in.
The mobile sites usually support the features you're actually trying to use, are faster, have fewer privacy implications, and don't kill your phone's battery.
I'm sorry that you're being bombarded with this, it'd be nice if Facebook provided topic blocking for ads beyond alcohol and parenting.
If some ad-supported sites have to go under, well, that's just the cost of social progress.
The people who come to HN are what's valuable to me, not the specific web property.
In the US, billboards are banned in four American states (Vermont, Maine, Alaska and Hawaii) and various other counties or cities. Generally speaking, these are places that put high value on tourism driven by natural beauty (which, of course, roadside billboards tend to undermine).
In photo sharing communities where there is less focus on the "social" aspects, ads are often less of a problem. From what I see, for instance, Instagram is not used as a primary resource by a lot by professional / semi-pro photographers. Many of them build online portfolios to catalog their work, and I imagine most photographers would not be terribly thrilled to see bra ads or any other ads being inserted into their portfolio of works. So these people more go to sites like Smugmug and Zenfolio. Which as far as I know is ad-free, but also isn't zero cost to set up either.
Intrusive, often creepily-targeted advertising seems to be the norm now for any large social-focused Internet business. It's what keeps things "free". The question, I guess, is what is a good alternative model? Something has to pay for the server / bandwidth costs and upkeep. Coming up with a better business model (or at least one that focuses on different values, such as the atypical billboard bans) is the only real way to "get rid of the ads".
http://www.billboardliberation.com/
Their website could use some work so maybe that'd be a good way to contribute.
There's that one city in Brazil that did away with them...
Then you must not have yet had the pleasure of being exposed to the massive, blindingly-bright displays playing animated ads near many major cities.
It was a darkish night, and while I was looking the board board switched to an ad with a mostly-white background. It was like looking into 1000 suns. I was temporarily blinded with those purple spots in my vision and actually rolled onto the shoulder near the wall before recovering.
It's the same problem with click bait, tv, news, nigerian scams, penis enhancement drugs, etc. Unfortunately this comes down to a 'blame the people' - or at least our psychological weaknesses.
I don't think it's OK for anybody -- corporation or otherwise -- to saturate me with messages that are tailored to my psychological characteristics that are only partially under my own control.
I should know. Worked for a small agency. First did print ads. Then specialized in PPC. Find the thing that keeps your target market up at night. That's what gets them to click. When I ran campaigns for "wellness" companies (which were scammy to begin with), the "stay healthy" angle never worked. The ads that performed the best were the ones that made the user feel anxious: Feeling tired? Weak? Gaining weight? Looking older? That sort of thing.
Think about that for a second. Is that nice? To intentionally make someone feel bad about themselves, to sell them something? Of course not.
Is it legal? Yeah. Should it be? Probably. But just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Unfortunately, that's not the win-at-all-cost mentality of business.
However, people who would pay to block ads probably are in a demographic that makes significantly more ARPU for Facebook; possibly 3-4 times.
I know Google’s ARPU off me (prior to installing an ad blocker) is in the $100s per year (calculated by an extension that looks at your search terms, what ads you click on, and how much they cost). I don’t think I’ll pay a few hundreds a year for Google.
For example, while at work, I searched for some documentation on syslog-ng. After that, page ads on multiple websites would refer to syslog.
What is your experience?
The vast majority of users have no problems with the ads, or the ads would change. The vast majority don't write 5 pages of medium.com screed about the ads. The vast majority are imagining themselves as the woman in the ad and buying the products. That is simply how the algorithm works.
The nice thing about the internet is everyone can have their say. The less nice thing about the internet is that includes everyone, including people with serious mental issues. Articles like this one, or infowars, or any other sort of militant fringe generally attracts more of the same sort of voices. It makes the fringe seem legitimate, because there's a balance of for and against in the discussion.
The vast majority disagrees with the author. That's how the algorithm works.
The author isn't asking for a ban on bra ads; she just wants to be able to control her feed and see ads that are more relevant to her life. She is trying to have a conversation about the stereotypes that the advertisers are using but neither the advertisers nor the channel appear to be interested.
I'm reminded of the Cluetrain Manifesto [1] and it's successes and failures in the current context.
In time we'll look back on this wild west of social media consumption just like how we look back on smoking. This stuff needs to be regulated.
Communism is also a profit seeking system -- just one where the everyday person no longer has the ability to make profit and only the leaders are the ones seeking profit. It may solve this bra problem, but will lead to other ones.
Still brings up the question of whether the extra revenue is worth annoying part of your user base - but from my experience I'll only ever see 1-2 ads even if I scroll for 5-10 minutes.
I was with the author as long as it was a complaint about how repetitive and uninspired the ads were, but when it morphed into "pictures of healthy people trigger me" is where she lost me. If you are so insecure you can't see an image of a person who is better looking than you are without freaking out, that is nobody's problem but your own. It's not instagram's fault.
I will only speak to my experience but I'm not bothered by it. I think because my self-worth doesn't hinge on feeling attractive -- I think I should consider myself extremely fortunate in that respect. But putting ugly people in ads seems to be nothing more a band-aid fix for the problem that a womans's worth is largely determined by her appearance.
Claiming that "only a very small percentage of the population can ever achieve these shapes" smacks as totally false to me. Do you have any data or sources to back that up?
edit: Would the downvoters care to contribute? I asked for some data or, at the very least, some sound reasoning for the claim that it's literally impossible for the majority of people to have healthy physiques.
Ironically, Instagram has good filters and beautify mode to make good looking pictures like that.
Sigh.
I really wish the algorithms were smart enough to distinguish between things that you might rebuy frequently (bras are closer to this end) and things that you probably won’t buy again for a long time (like vacuums).
I notice that in today's society people make an awful lot of demands on the services and apps they use, while not directly paying for hardly any of what they consume.
Facebook/Instagram definitely has a lot more power than any individual user, but it doesn't have more power than all of its users. If people were offended enough to actually walk away from the platform en masse, I bet we would see substantial reform pretty quickly.
The "if you don't like it, leave" argument is cruel when applied to cities, countries, or essential services, but I think it is pretty fair when we are talking about totally superfluous apps that don't even cost anything.
So how come there aren't uber-apps (ha ha) that can spoof apps, looking to servers like real apps, but protecting users?
Well there are such things, but due to the security model they typically require root access. This is not great because rooting your phone makes it much more insecure.
The other option would be to implement an alternative Instagram app that does not show ads. I assume that Instagram has various measures in place that preclude this.
Why not just use a browser with an ad blocker?
That's a viable option indeed. I don't do that because the Instagram mobile website is significantly less nice than the app-each tab of the app is a separate web page that loads fairly slowly for instance. So in the end, I use the app, report the ads I see as not relevant, and suck it up. I usually only see one ad per day so it's not the end of the world.
If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
Almost everyone I know hates these kinds of ads and the way social media uses our information, but all they do to combat it is write blog posts and comments about how they wish it were different.
I think its pretty clear at this point that nothing is going to change if all we do is talk. Facebook knows that a bunch of blog posts are really no threat to its bottom line. So I think its not unreasonable to ask why people are unwilling to boycott services that they criticize so harshly.
Maybe the parts of the system (perhaps even the entire system) are so broken, yet also strangely voluntary (in particular ways... shadow profile aside) that we might owe it to ourselves to extract ourselves from it as best as can?
Or maybe it's just being lazy. Or both.
Feedbacks important whether it's code or just experience.
Why would you suggest that she leave Instagram? That’s silly. Rather, hopefully this gets enough discussion so that Instagram makes a change that gives the user a bit more control.
And don’t bother with the “But you can email your friends photos!” - that’s equally silly and just makes people who suggest that look incredibly out of touch.
The author isn’t saying they don’t want ANY ads, they just don’t want these specific and unnecessarily sexualized ads to be a huge chunk of the ads they see.
That seems totally reasonable.
I mean if every other add in a normal woman’s magazine was in almost completely undressed woman do you think they WOULDN’T get complaints from their readers?
If huge percentage of the ads that men saw on Instagram were extremely tight speedo’s being worn by models do you think they wouldn’t hear complaints?
This seems entirely reasonable.
If you're not paying for it, you are the product. You are a faceless, nameless consumer #320981093, with preference code hash #AB7ZXJAL. We have determined that, when lumped into this preference code, you have a click-through advertising rate of XY% on said preference hash. We sell this, and you.
Your 'triggering' doesn't matter, neither does your mental health - we don't care about either because, again, you are the product.
If you get depressed about this enough for our algorithm to detect, you will be moved to preference hash #WNXI802N, which will include advertisements for antidepressants and churches into your mainly bra-based advertising stream. There is a delta of ZA% in your net worth to us, because your click-through rate is now BC% {higher or lower}.
This data is aggregated again and incorporated into our quarterly financial statements. Thank you for being a part of The Machine.
So you’re telling me that because I pay for Coca Cola - that somehow makes it a more noble and more pure product than Instagram?
Have you considered that perhaps I don’t mind “being the product” in exchange for a platform where I can share photos with the world that I’m proud of and follow some cool people relevant to my interests?
Have you considered that perhaps there are trade offs involved, and that just because you’re not OK with them doesn’t mean that somehow I’m not as “enlightened” as you are?
Look, social media is not all good and it’s not all bad. Like most things, it’s in large part what you make it (sure there’s nuance around this - but I’m gonna keep it short). You can definitely abuse it and it’s easy to do, but it’s also possible to use it in a way that is a net positive to your life. Social media is many things to many people so don’t project your unhappiness with the way you use the product onto other people.
Let's step through it: The original post lamented the ads, and mentioned their negative effects specifically. It also mentioned the positive aspects: being able to get photos from friends/family.
My post is clearly sarcasm - what would the point I'm trying to make be? We can ask ourselves about almost anything that is written, it's a good trick when trying to understand something (you might remember this from grade school).
That Instagram/Facebook don't care about the potentially deleterious effect of your usage of the platform. It's a statement about how the negative effects of the platform don't effect the platform.
I never talked about my own enlightenment with regards to social media, although I have considered the tradeoffs. It's amazing - apparently people were unable to share photos with their friends/family on the Internet before Instagram (...more sarcasm, which I feel the need to clearly highlight, now).
The product does make people unhappy, and it does have an effect on people's well-being - that's what the article is about, and a theme that has been more and more discussed about Silicon Valley/Tech in general. It is topical, relevant, and uses sarcasm to indicate an indifference in social media companies because they can 'sell you' no matter what the preferences are.
It was written with Orwellian language on purpose - although that's another cultural reference that might not transfer.
I will be clearer in the future and try to abstain from assumed background in cultural references, although I think this makes a language like English less beautiful, honestly.
It’s a weird mix of people here. Some people on HN genuinely suggest in some of these threads that I should talk to my mom over IRC rather than using a messenger.
When social connection is a primary motivator, solutions like "just don't use X if you are not 100% happy with it" basically throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Why care this much? They are ads, we all know why they are there and what they are suppose to do. So why are we acting like they are some mind manipulating images. I could understand the confusion if the writer was an 8 year old girl.
The reason these ads use skinny people, is the same reason why people dress up nicely for a job interview.
Clearly the author is comfortable with her body and sexuality enough to not find these images and ads offensive per se, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with them and the industry that pushes them.
I’ll go do far as to say people thinking the way you do is the reason these exist. I can just see a timid voice at a meeting about ad content venturing “what if people find these intrusive, creepy, or esteem damaging?” And a brusque and carefree reply from the loud alpha male in the room “psssh it’s 2017! I can’t believe people get offended over an ad! But ok, well just add an “hide because it’s offensive” link and we’re good.”
Maybe the message is that uBlock origin should be installed by default on every browser?
Meanwhile, your comment violates the site guidelines, first by crossing into personal attack, and second by failing to do this: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." And I'm sorry to see that you've been violating the site rules quite a bit, already. We eventually ban accounts that do this, so please read the rules and take the spirit of this site to heart. That means civil, substantive comments only, and no more rants or flamebait.
If huge percentage of the ads you saw on Instagram were pictures of legs with varicose veins advertising some sort of treatment… would you want to see that all the time? Wouldn’t you start to get annoyed and grossed out that they keep shoving that in your face when you’re trying to look at pictures of cats/cars/landscapes/buildings/whatever?
The author doesn’t seem to be complaining the ads exist, they seem to be complaining about the quantity/frequency of that kind of imagery.
Suppose all ads were tagged for their visual content and their ad-hiding functionality looked for categories of content that you frequently hide. That data could be used for better targeting and passed all the way back to creative agencies to influence design decisions.
How is that not relevant to HN?
From that perspective, why would they want to "better" target using proxy metrics for the ones you really care about? Focusing on the CTR[0], why use tags or interests when you can use clickthrough rate itself?
There are so many factors in what causes someone to click; it's a more effective strategy to treat all those factors as a black box, and optimize for the direct behavior you want to encourage.
Added bonus, those black box / supercomplex problems can be efficiently optimized by ML.
[0] CPC is driven by the advertiser side
I'm not here to argue the point so much as let you know that if you don't study the site rules and follow them properly, we will ban you.
And when pointing out that such content is not worthy, as per the site guidelines, people will at best ignore the policy, at worse say you're a sexist.