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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

If you want to have fun with Twitter ads, block the advertiser whenever you see them. After two weeks or so you start to get really.. different stuff.

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I've been using twitter since 2009 and do this religiously, I have literally thousands of corporate accounts blocked. My ads at this point are incredibly niche, bordering on surreal. Sometimes I will retweet them just because they're so absurd.

Any highlights?

Can you elaborate? I'm not sure if this is something I would prefer to current ads, or something I would want to avoid.

Back when I used to use Twitter is found it funny. I used to get cranks and hustlers with the occasional “Why is this random personal tweet promoted?” experience mixed in.

Once you block out the "big advertisers", you get advertisements from smaller companies or even individuals.

That actually sounds like something is working within AdTech! How can that possibly be?

A good lie is based in truth!

Howso?

(Not on Twitter, can't run the experiment myself.)

When you say "block", do you mean Twitter block the account which is the Advertiser?

Yes, so that Twitter in their algorithm figures out that you can't consume this particular ad, it finds others. The more you block, the smaller the pool of advertisers is.

Nice, I have a new Twitter game to play, thanks.

Block the account whose tweet is being promoted, and/or the account promoting it (sometimes there will be tiny text saying "promoted by"). You'll never see tweets from that brand again, whether promoted or unpromoted.

After a few weeks of this you'll get some pretty strange tweets from really obscure brands. You will however still regularly see promoted tweets from financial services companies, because there are apparently an infinite number of them.

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