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Comment by Balgair | Hacker News Reader

Ads/recommendations are shown to you at an 'auction', companies bid in micro-second level timing to show you an ad/recommendation.

So, when you say that you get low quality ads, you are telling us that the bidders think you aren't worth much. Hence, you get the same ad over and over, because you are being targeted by the 'long tail' of the bidders. Also, they 'forget' you for the same reason, because you aren't worth enough to them to become a 'regular'.

It's not the bidders, it's that you wisely don't respond well to ads/recommendations on the internet.

No offense ;)

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Ah well that put a positive note on my morning coffee. I didn't know that.

But still wouldn't it be valuable to the bidders for Amazon to fix this? Or shouldn't Amazon value better targeting because relevant ads convince users to engage with the platform more? The people selling the coffee filters are still guaranteed my business, just not before 6 months. I always buy from the same seller too so it could be a good opportunity for a competitor to sneak in right at the 6 month mark and make a new repeat customer.

I guess the answer to that is probably "well the system works well enough elsewhere so that would just be hyper-optimization"

Yeah, with large companies like Amazon, never discount bureaucratic log-jams and just regular stupidity. I agree with you that optimizations can be made, but the system may be in a 'not broken, don't fix' local maximum. The inertia and complexity may be too hard to over come. Twitter only recently upped the character limit after nearly a decade because the old code-base was spaghetti and didn't allow improvement.

But these are the reasons why the large CEOs have always been terrified of 'two guys in a garage'. They know they have issues like this, and that the little scrappers don't. If anything, these little issues are the camel's nose under the tent of Amazon.

Not all the recommendations are paid ads.

But they are equally terrible in quality

So then why is that? I'd assume general stupidity, we're humans after-all. But there may be something else going on. Any ideas?

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