The growing threat to Mark Zuckerberg's power | Hacker News Reader

The growing threat to Mark Zuckerberg's power

bbc.com

24 pointsheadalgorithm12 comments

Facebook is nothing without its users. If it starts to go down the aggressive route of ad promotion, even more people will leave.

I haven't clicked an ad in maybe 10 years and don't plan to either. The only ads I do click are on pages where I find the content extremely useful. Facebook is not one of those places.

I don’t know anyone that clicks on ads. But apparently they’re still valuable somehow. It’s a mystery to me, but I guess even without clicks the chance to pollute someone’s mind with an ad in a website is still valuable to an advertiser in the same way that it is on a freeway billboard.

Sometimes I click lots of ads deliberately to mess up the malgorithm, especially I click ads that are of no interest to me...What I never do is buy anything on the click through.

+1 for teaching me the neologism 'malgorithm'

Thanks to 'Private Eye' magazine

There's a Firefox extension I often used before installing Pi-Hole that would do exactly this on every page. It was called AdNausium. Not sure if it's still a thing, but it was pretty great at obfuscation.

By the end of using it I'm pretty sure Google thought I was a middle-aged woman with an obsession for patterned summer dresses. There were a few other ways I obfuscated data using this guide :- https://web.archive.org/web/20181107150700/https://iotdarwin...

Presumably why sophisticated advertisers track purchase completions through the pixel and then run ads with a goal of conversion instead of clicks.

I use ads to tell me which companies I should avoid.

Oh what's this now, an advert for Coca Cola? How obnoxious. Guess what I will never ever be buying.

Value might be in capturing how many second it stopped you from scrolling. That could be still acting without acting.

"I don't know a single person who voted for Trump"

I have clicked on multiple ads

1) toys for kids during the christmas season. Dot/dash, marble runs, tinker crate, etc

2) Bought some bike stuff when it was onsale, solo bonfire and a few other interesting gadgets. Facebook ads are a little like sharper image.

3) got scammed for $200 when I bought an electric surfboard that ended up being a $20 boogie board from china.

4) periodically click interesting articles that are ads

I would never click on an ad, even if it's for something I actually want. Clicking on an ad sends a strong signal (and exposes too much data) to the ad-slingers, and the less data that I give the ad-slingers, the better off I am.

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