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Comment by aluminussoma | Hacker News Reader

I click on the ads of products I dislike so that the company gets charged for the ad. If you wanted to inflict the maximum damage, then click on the ad and install the app. Uninstall it later. I think the ad gets charged more as a "conversion".

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If it's a company as big as Facebook, I think those charges are drops in the ocean of their entire revenue, so you waste more of your time and nerves on doing that than the money they lose.

While you're technically correct, you're also making a conversion right there, which increases your ad relevancy score on most auction driven platforms including Google and — ironically — Facebook, which in turn leads to this ad actually getting _cheaper_ to run for the advertiser on other customers coming after you.

I'm not in deep enough to tell you whether that's a net loss or benefit, but it's probably close enough to zero...

> While you're technically correct, you're also making a conversion right there, which increases your ad relevancy score on most auction driven platforms including Google and — ironically — Facebook, which in turn leads to this ad actually getting _cheaper_ to run for the advertiser on other customers coming after you.

But you're always going to see an ad regardless, right? If that's the case I don't see any advantage in making yourself more expensive.

This only works if you're targeting expensive, competitive keywords like "personal injury lawyer".

Your impact on any other keyword would be effectively zero.

You would be better off spending the 5 minutes you wasted on something positive.

Sadly with Facebook,you can't be sure they won't install a backdoor application that will reinstall it after you uninstall it. That may just be some phones with Facebook and Messenger preloaded though.

Yes you can be sure that they’re not doing that on iOS.

It would have to be something preloaded, and with unusual privileges. Otherwise, it isn't installing anything silently on Android. I don't think this would happen at all on iOS.

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