Instagram Has Become SkyMall | Hacker News Reader

Instagram Has Become SkyMall

clivethompson.medium.com

652 pointsDLay328 comments

Maybe it's just me, but I dislike the whole concept of advertising in places that aren't related to shopping. I go to Instagram to look at my friends' pictures, not to be sold something I don't actually need. If I were to shop, I'd go to a mall, thank you very much.

Anyway, at some point Instagram ads (especially the autoplaying video kind, with sound) drove me crazy enough that out came jadx and apktool and I found a beautiful way to inject my own code into Instagram's networking. The code I injected rewrites the API responses before the rest of the app sees them. I can now scroll through my feed without annoying salesmen begging for my attention. I've also enabled a "secret" debugging menu while at it, where there are manual overrides for server-side settings, and there are at least several hundred of them — it's a bit creepy what they're A/B testing, like slightly different wording or different button colors.

The only problem that still remains is that the feed is still algorithmic, and there's nothing that could be done with that with client patches.

It's definitely just you. Women go on Instagram to see fashion with links to shopping "the look".

Some people go to instagram for fashion, but that is definitely not all women nor just women.

I personally just wear a black shirt and black pants almost every day, am not all that interested in fashion, and am a woman.

>Some people go to instagram for fashion, but that is definitely not all women nor just women.

No, but it is the third option you ommited: mostly women (doing that).

Great, does it matter? I think GGP's comment's point was that some do want that. They said 'women' but I don't think it really matters (or affects the point) who it is.

Are you on Instagram? If so, do you find the fashion ads annoying?

I just scrolled through Instagram and I think they changed the ads. I still want to shoot myself, but I'm not getting any ads for weapons anymore

YWNBAW

You are not welcome here. Get out.

How do you detect ads? If not in following empty response?

Ad posts have additional fields in them. They have to, because they're shown in the UI as "sponsored" and with extra buttons and stuff. Ad stories are retrieved via a separate request, so it just suffices to either return an empty response or throw an exception from there.

Can you share the modified apk or any tutorial to make similar modified Instagram apk?

I did a thread on xda a while ago: https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/app-mod-4-4-instagram-wit...

https://thedise.me/instander/

This isn't mine but it does use my approach to ad blocking.

I wonder why they left the debugging stuff in live release builds. Common best practice for Android is to have a separate build flavor with debug settings and layouts, and make sure they aren't included in live builds.

I’d love to read a write up on how you did that. I wonder if it’s possible that one endpoint returns a chronological feed whereas another endpoint returns an algorithmic field?

In short. The HTTP client Instagram uses (Proxygen) is written in C++, which means it needs JNI bindings, which means those classes are necessarily excluded from obfuscation. I decompiled the dexes into human-readable bytecode (smali) using apktool, compiled my own class with additional code to strip ads, converted it to dex, decompiled that into smali, added that to instagram smali files, added calls into my class in the JNI classes, and, finally, put it all back together with apktool. I didn't want to touch the obfuscated parts because that would make the patch break with every version. Though I did have to touch them to enable the debug menu.

I should also probably make this in the form of an Xposed module. Do people even use Xposed any more?

Doesn’t compiling the code into an executable inherently obfuscate it?

Good question, but no. Obfuscation is an additional step you can take to make it harder to turn that executable back into code.

So with obfuscation you can still decompile the binary into source code, but that version of the source code is much less human-readable and it would take more effort for a human to go through and understand it?

Yes. Imagine that a class like "me.grishka.app.something.SomeDescriptiveClassName" gets renamed to "zzq" in the default (root) package. You end up with thousands of classes in there, none have sensible names, and nothing inside them has sensible names either. So you do have to spend extra effort to rename them back to something that makes sense. A good starting point for figuring out what an obfuscated class does is to look for log messages.

Java classes must still have names, and methods and fields must also retain type information for the JVM to work. Inside a JVM, classes and fields are accessed using names, and methods are accessed using name+signature, the signature being of the form "(Ljava/lang/String;II)V", that's a method that takes a string and two ints and returns void.

Technically yes, to some degree. However, JVM and Dalvik bytecode retains enough information, compared to machine code, to recover the source with a good enough level of quality that you could sometimes modify it and compile it back.

In the context of JVM, obfuscation is an extra step where identifiers are renamed to various kinds of nonsense to make code more compact and supposedly hinder reverse engineering.

I don't use Instagram much, but I am on Facebook too often. The limitations of the advertising algorithms are very interesting to me. For example: I participate in ex-evangelical groups because of my childhood experiences. Also follow pages which discuss American Christianity from a secular or journalistic perspective, and in Christian groups which interpret their beliefs from a left-ish ideology. "Liking" any post from those groups will trigger an onslaught of ads almost exclusively for conservative churches and conservative organizations.

The algorithms can't differentiate between "pro", "anti", and "observer" on a particular topic. Nor does it seem to have any awareness of ideology. It's very rare when I see progressive churches advertise.

I understand that the algorithms are going to have difficulty with subtleties. But I'd think they'd still have some rough awareness about "anti" vs. "pro". And thus not flood people who dislike a thing with ads promoting the thing.

At any rate, I suppose it's oddly reassuring Facebook is so inaccurate. Judging by the high number of critical comments on the religious ads, there are many uninterested people being targeted.

I don't necessarily think you're experiencing an important flaw here.

I'd wager that the vast majority of people interacting with content related to evangelical Christianity are in the "pro" category, so people in the "anti" category are an acceptable false-positive.

For example, if I'm trying to sell something to evangelical Christians and 95% of my views are "pro" and 5% are "anti", that's still hugely valuable to me and something Facebook can charge a lot for.

Maybe FB could increase the price without the false positives, but neither they nor their advertisers care that much.

You're probably right and it isn't necessarily a huge flaw. But, the failures are interesting. Especially when it involves a subject where the for / against lines are so clearly drawn. If Facebook is failing at such an easy subject, then what else are they getting wrong?

Their definition of successful targeting is different than yours. Back in 2019(?) Google published average display ad click rates of 0.03% I think. If FBs targeting gets them to 3% (100x better), that’s hugely valuable to them, while you still see mostly non interesting ads.

Sure the algos can always be better, but consider the possibility that conservative churches just spend absurdly, mind-boggingly large sums of money on fb advertising.

To pick a nit, I don't think that it's the churches per se that do most of the advertising (though they probably do some), it's mostly Evangelical publishers, etc. selling to church-goers.

In my experience, this is incorrect. Majority of the religious ads are directly from churches or individuals. And, what's interesting to me, is most of those ads are from people who have no experience with marketing. The ads are often very crude.

But that's just my timeline. For other people who live in the evangelical universe 24/7, maybe they mostly see ads for Zondervan or the big brand-name churches. I wouldn't be surprised.

If you were running these ad-campaigns, how en who would you target and what would be the revenue?

I think those ads could have a very good return, the more provocative the ad the more they will be talked/thought/bought, and that is the whole idea of advertising.

It would be interesting to know the return.

Probably only 10% of my religious ads come from large, well-funded churches or organizations with any remote understanding of marketing. The rest are largely just "here's our meeting time" for a 50 member church 800 miles away from me. Or some text-only rant that goes on for 12 paragraphs. Those rants are usually not selling anything. Those ads are probably just from people who paid $20 to "promote this post". Not some substantial campaign run by social media professionals.

At least from my experience, there's a ton of misfires in terms of targeting. And it's largely small time advertisers. But I have no idea about the revenue. Perhaps all those $20 ads add up to some substantial amount.

At any rate, I suppose it's oddly reassuring Facebook is so inaccurate.

Facebook's ad market tools give advertisers plenty of power to choose who to advertise to. If advertisers didn't want your demographic cohort to see their ad they could easily filter you out. Rather than seeing this as inaccuracy, it might be more prudent to ask why they haven't. It's probably just that the advertiser hasn't configured their ad settings very well, but it's also possible that they believe skeptical people will return to their church in a crisis and they're building brand recognition or something.

I still think it was inaccuracy. Once I was bored enough to dig through all the ad settings. For those who don't know, there's a section called "interest settings" that's buried inside of "category settings" in ad preferences. "Interest settings" has a list of interests Facebook has generated based on your activity.

My list contained things like "Calvinism", "angels", "church growth strategies", "sermon topics", "contemporary Christian music", "Southern Baptist Convention", etc. Based on this list, a Baptist church which embraced Calvinism might think I would be a huge fan.

I've never once interacted with a FB post which talked about these things positively. Only from the critical groups. But the algorithms aren't sensitive enough to pick that up. Had the interests listed "News about Southern Baptist Convention" or "Critiques about SBC", then that would have been accurate. But simply listing "Southern Baptist Convention" mis-labels me as being positively interested in the subject and their churches. Same goes for the other topics. While the list is more or less neutral, it implies positive interest.

At any rate, FB gives you the option to delete these things from your interests list. I did so. Religious ads went away for a little while. They came back as soon as I interacted with one of my critical groups. Apparently, FB is keeping a shadow list of interests I cannot edit. Which is a shame. They should listen to me. I occasionally click the ads when they're nothing but Raspberry Pi accessories or art books.

> It's very rare when I see progressive churches advertise.

You’d just be setting your money on fire. You’re trying to find the people at the intersection of progressive attitudes and serious commitment to Christianity. Progressive churches have lower commitment because they have minimal to zero differences in morality with progressives who don’t go to church and they’re less likely to have children continue in the faith. Same phenomenon as how the Jewish assimilation treadmill goes Orthodox > Conservative > Reform > Secular > does not identify as Jewish.

I think this depends on what the ads are being used for. Majority of ads I see are for church services, or long rants on a particular religious topic by individuals who aren't selling anything. Most of my religious ads are not part of a big marketing campaign.

Centrist or progressive churches would also benefit from telling people what time services start. And some progressive Christians would want their opinion piece or podcast promoted. I'm sure those ads exist. I just don't see them very often.

For ads of this type, we're not talking about expensive bids. These fall squarely into the "$20 to promote this post" category.

I guess the simple answer is that progressive churches, or any progressive places of worship for that matter, don't receive as much funding as their conservative equivalents. Nor do they harangue their masses for funding like their conservative equivalents.

That really depends. If you're the ELCA and trying to get people to call Congress about the latest SNAP bill, you'd love to get your message in front of liberal Christians.

Sorry to sound stupid, but I live in the UK and have literally never seen an ad from a church (except maybe on a board outside). What is the purpose of the ad? What is their motivation?

It seems somewhat shady, there is a profit motive?

Maybe it is about conversion, which at least has honorable intentions.

When I drove through the US South, I saw all sorts of anti-abortion church billboards, so maybe this?

I remember about 15 or 20 years ago when Alpha was new, they were advertising in newspapers and on buses. It seemed weirdly un-British and didn't last long. (The course is still going, I just only see the branding on actual churches now)

Yes, I remember the Alpha ads. Thanks, and that is aimed specifically at new Christians which seems laudable.

There are mega churches in the US which push the prosperity theology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology Many of their pastors make several million USD every year.

Also, There is a strong overlap between conservatives and right leaning politicians.

So there are money and power motives

That's because churches in the UK are all bankrupt, more or less. I vaguely recall seeing ads for churches or Christianity in general in the UK some time ago, and I still see pro-Christian ads (usually just bible quotes) in Switzerland.

>I live in the UK and have literally never seen an ad from a church

To be honest, the UK hardly has a church anyway :-)

I was working out how to put a p2p wifi antenna on the local 800 year old church just last week as part of a modernisation

Oh, sure, it has churches in the sense of the buildings :-)

> a p2p wifi antenna

What?

money? their income is donations from the flock

Majority of the religious ads I see are for church services or special events. What time, where, etc. There are many aimed at proselytization. There's a surprising number which are just sermons in text form, or just rants. Plus there's people flogging their book, podcast or Youtube channel. And then there's a fair amount of religious tchotchke. T-shirts, crosses as jewelry, custom Bibles, etc.

The rants I find most interesting. They almost never want to sell anything. They just really wanted you to read what they had written and paid for the privilege.

"And thus not flood people who dislike a thing with ads promoting the thing."

But isn't that what these ads are about. They want to show the people who dislike a thing with ads promoting the thing so that hopefully one day they will like it.

Sure it could make you hate it more, but unconsciously or whatever, you will be affected.

I see ads for shoe brands I don't like or care about, but for sure, the next time I need to buy a pair of shoes, that brand name is on top of my mind.

I'd think Facebook has an interest in showing ads people will like. Or at least will tolerate. Not just for getting the click through rates as high as possible, but also because ads for things you dislike will negatively affect your experience with the site. Something FB doesn't want since they're trying to make the experience as addictive as they can. That's part of what makes this inaccuracy interesting.

And I don't think the ads are aimed at changing my mind. Most of these ads aren't coordinated branding campaigns. They're largely small-time $20 ads placed by individuals and normal-sized churches. That indicates a failure by either FB in targeting, or a failure in choosing audiences by the ad buyer. I suspect it's both.

I‘m a cyclist in an European city and in groups about making traffic better and safer for everyone. But the ads I get are all about cars, like you can only get around with a car, while that‘s the thing we are trying to fight. And this is not just on Facebook. I see this generalisation of topics everywhere, while they say they‘d need to track me to improve the ads. Bull.

I get great ads on Instagram. Generally, they’re niche products related to my interests from small companies I’ve never heard of before.

Yes, there’s a few misses, but it’s way better than the absolute scum-sucking garbage I see elsewhere on the internet from other ad networks. “Doctor shares one weird trick for emptying your bowels every morning”, “Alan Greenspan tells you what to buy instead of Litecoin”, and similar.

However, I don’t really use Instagram to connect with people I know. I follow a bunch of accounts related to my hobbies and interests. That probably primes the ad-targeting pump a lot better than if I was just following my friends and family on there.

I agree.

Honestly, as a consumer, Instagram is the best advertising experience I've ever had. It's scarily good. I find sales from e.g. Cole Hann, Brooks Brothers, Piloti, etc all the time. It's quite possibly the only platform where I would say I bought an item specifically because I saw it an ad.

Im the same. In 30 years of using the internet ive only saw an ad,clicked through and bought twice. Both times were clothing from Instagram.

Cole haan are my favorite brands of shoes as well! Check allbirds as well they’re super comfy :)

I have a similar experience on Instagram in that the ads often seem well-tailored to my interests there, which are exclusively outdoor sports and photography.

But I have to say that I am disciplined about training the algorithm. I never click on content outside those interests (even if it looks interesting to me). And I occasionally go to the “discover” tab and click only the images that align with those interests.

And there are so many ads now. It feels like 25-33% of my feed, which is absurd. Every set of stories has an ad between them.

> And there are so many ads now. It feels like 25-33% of my feed, which is absurd. Every set of stories has an ad between them.

I believe it's published somewhere that both Facebook and Instagram insert an ad for every 3 news feed items or so.

> I never click on content outside those interests (even if it looks interesting to me)

That’s a little sad isn’t it? We’re too scared to click on content that looks interesting in case it angers the algorithm :-)

It is, kind of, but less so if you view instagram as a "tool".

I personally only use IG to follow my fellow figure skaters, but I do use YouTube like GP does: Curating, heavily, and clicking only with purpose.

I'm rewarded with superb recommendations. A seemingly endless treasure trove of high quality content. Educational content, as that's the main stuff I'm interested in.

I see youtube's algorithm as a tool: I learned how to use it to my own benefit. On paper it should "do its own thing", but AI isn't there yet and I don't know that I want it to be. What I know is that doing things this way has allowed youtube to have a profoundly positive impact on my life. In exchange, I bought youtube premium. So, win win.

Yeah I was thinking of this the other day with my YouTube usage. Me (and most I know in my generation) open any YT video with content we don't want marketed towards us in a private tab. Had someone comment on it when they were looking over my should the other day - and I realized that I just do it instinctively these days. Not even sure when I started or if it was a conscious decision... my generation just grew up with these algos and learned how to play them i guess

Instagram ads are the only ads I like and I am insanely anti-ad. They're currently showing me ads for furniture and house stuff. What I find frustrating is there is no way to view my recently seen ads. They'll cut off early in stories and I'll not be able to get them back.

I agree Instagram ads are usually good and certainly the only ones I've ever seen properly targeted to me - I've even used it 2-3 times for high value things - but I'm still annoyed that it keeps trying to sell me startup Viagra for millenials. ("hims" and "Roman")

Thinking about it I dont see many ads on the internet but I do on Instagram and have clicked on them multiple times and been happy to find some stores which I wouldn't otherwise.

The other side of the coin: people who get easily fished by scams get more and more well targeted scams.

I had to help deal with a scam on a very low profile product (less than 20$ worth) that will just never arrive, the company just vanished away and she was left to deal with her bank to convince for a chargeback. I thought it was just back luck, but I got to look at her timeline later on, and half of the ads could have been same level scams.

> I get great ads on Instagram¹.

¹ S̶o̶c̶i̶a̶l̶ Ads network.

Same. I bought a bunch of stuff from instagram ads (unless they’re easy scams/dropshipping products which you can easily tell). These days I’m looking at modular floor couch (like roche bobois majhong, I recommend checking that if you don’t know about these couches because they look amazing) and I’m now getting a bunch of more affordable alternatives as ads.

I like the fabrics on those mahjongs, and maybe that’s what it’s all about, but is there anything that sets them apart from all the floor cushions you can buy on Etsy and elsewhere? Can also search “majlis”.

Not sure. Probably quality? The thing with majlis is that they’re always full of dust and a nightmare for allergic people, so perhaps the roche bobois are cleaner also?

I don't know about yours, but the ones i see are also niche products from uknown companies and the reason for that is because those are drop shipping people rebranding china stuff and selling it for 2x or even 3x the price. When I see something interesting, I'll always go to Aliexpress and 100% of the times the product is there (not with the same name of course).

Before I completely dropped social media, I had a f—k the algorithm attitude towards the ads. I made a point of clicking through everything that was completely uninteresting to me. That road led to a non-stop flood of class-action lawyer ads.

I like to read this with the belief that his attitude towards the ads had somehow led to the class-action lawyer ads being 100% relevant.

It’s a race condition to the bottom.

I’ve heard that mesothelioma class action lawyer advertisements are among the most expensive on social media.

Cynical hypothesis: once the platforms realized you’ll click on anything, they decided to show you their highest-compensated ads.

Personal injury (caused by negligent 3rd party) but not necessarily class action (and especially not workers comp cases) are consistently the highest cost clicks I bid on regularly.

Those ads mock me. Have a severe negligence case that nearly killed entire family. By time we recovered enough to deal with legal side the statue of limitations had passed.

That's not cynical at all; that's exactly what i-the-human-looking-at-trends would do, and it's almost certainly what an automated system would go for as well.

You're not wrong but it depends on the platform and campaign. If the ads are bought click-optimized then yes... if conversion optimized then the algorithms will learn to avoid zealous clickers.

It’s funny, once I started watching luxury houses (I became rich last year, bought a house and wanted inspiration to decorate), I got flooded with ads about “How to become rich”. (Obviously none of those include programming…).

Not cynical at all, this is exactly how Real Time Bidding (RTB) works.

It's interesting how this exposes the dynamics of ad-space.

Advertisements as points in a metric space A. Clicking ads as a contractive mapping C:A->A. Class-action lawsuit ads as a fixed point in A when iterating C.

This must imply something interesting about human psychology or ad economics, or both. Why does the fixed point end up as class action suits and not something else? It's not what I would have expected.

I don’t think you can infer human nature here as much as psychology of advertisers. I think it was GrubHub that started advertising on porn sites at one point and published some interesting findings from that. The reason the started to advertise there was because it was cheap and because other food related businesses were not advertising there. What they noticed is that most ads on porn sites are for porn, so ads for food stood out. And it didn’t hurt that often times people get hungry after they are done with porn. So in my mind the class action lawyers are just a niche that happens to advertise there and is the lowest common denominator that matches a wide range of people when nothing more targeted does. It could be mattresses or shoes or something else, but right now it’s lawyers.

Thinking about it, one of the marketing received wisdom things is that you often want to associate your product with sex. What is probably the easiest way in the world to associate your product with sex?

Ye it is quite strange that there is such a price difference between sites for the same ad CPM when the advertiser can select audiance somewhat through tracking anyway.

Why is clicking ads a function from the space of ads to the space of ads?

Why is it a metric space? Why is it a contraction?

I should have been more specific - what I meant is that the ads that instagram chooses to show you can be thought of as points in ad-space. So when you click on ads and instagram chooses to show you different ads as a result, you have traveled around in this space. I say the space is metric because it is meaningful to say that two ads are more or less similar. I assume the "click all ads" mapping is contractive because if you take two different people with different histories of clicking ads and therefore different flavors of ads shown to them, and they both just start clicking on all ads regardless of content, the ads they both see after doing this should be more similar, or closer in ad-space. So iterating this should just get to a point where they see the same ads (or at least ads that are progressively similar)

I've done this, and it led to a lot of ads for shoes.

What's tragic here is that the author is complaining about one ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash of a product, on another ad-infested, tracker-infested piece of trash that is Medium.

Why the the fuck people still write on Medium even though it prevents people from reading content after a few times without either paying or logging in is beyond me.

There’s ads on Medium? I’ve never seen any. BTW you can easily open an article in incognito mode, to bypass the login-wall.

They do however use analytics, like any other platform that wishes to quantify engagement and provide value to their content creators.

With or without ads, Medium is the absolute essence of trash software.

Medium had a brief period when it was enjoyable and not overflowing with clickbait, listicles, and ads. Now it is, indeed, trash software.

Just like Quora at its early age.

What are some good alternatives? I’m not a fan of Medium either. Their user experience is very disrespectful. Edit: alternatives for a reader

I'm pretty biased myself, but I always recommend folks publish to their own sites (https://www.jvt.me/posts/2019/07/22/why-website/)

If discoverability is lacking there's quite a few aggregate platforms that can boost readership / visibility of your site, but always publishing on your own site first!

You say that discoverability options for individual websites exist, if you could, please name a couple that you recommend, because that one issues is a huge problem for would-be writers and one major reason why they do indeed pick sites like Medium. It's easy to criticize big platforms from one angle but how thousands of other people believe they will help them should be taken into consideration as well.

Github Pages

Second that

If the author is willing to spend 30 to 60 minutes (depending on technical skills) to learn how to set things up, nothing beats static websites. My current favorite is Zola, but there literally hundreds of options with varying pros and cons.

Otherwise, substack seems to have a better business model imo. I wouldn't use it myself because I don't trust them to stay as they are when/if they corner the market, but for the time being I think Substack is what Medium pretends to be/

Where do you see the author complaining?? He's celebrating the tracker-induced trashiness of the ads!

I have to admit that I didn't read it since it's on that trash website, but I just guessed. I block Medium on my network.

Yeah commenting on an article without reading it kinda sucks doesn't it?

Not in this case, I wasn't commenting on the substance.

I use Instagram in a browser different than the one I use with my personal details, and it's completely anonymized. I did this before Facebook bought it. I've never posted my face or other personal details there. Nobody I follow seems to care, and only some know it's me. I always thought Instagram was for pretty pictures, when people misuse it as a social network.

> prevents people from reading content after a few times without either paying or logging in is beyond me.

I don't think this is fair or accurate.

Authors are choosing to put their articles behind Medium's paywall because they want to get paid. So when you see a paywall that's the author's choice. It's not any different than a Substack newsletter other than scale. So to say Medium is preventing people from reading... it's really that Medium is home for a lot of writers who want to get paid for their work and probably wouldn't even have written the piece you are trying to read without that incentive.

Then this Skymall article isn't even behind the paywall and doesn't have any sort of block on it or login wall. Or am I seeing something different than you? I tested it while not logged in.

FWIW, there is a ton of great writing on Medium even if there is also a lot of trash. For example, I helped port the full back catalog of books from The Pragmatic Programmers over to Medium. Those are great and it's great to have easy access to all of them.

Please don't defend Medium. Just, don't.

Medium has a lot of great articles including this one which you just submitted and that trended here on HN.

https://arnuldondata.medium.com/julia-and-the-reincarnation-...

Also, isn't the best thing about HN comments when you get comments from someone with actual knowledge? I can't imagine there is anyone on HN who knows more about Medium than I do.

> I helped port the full back catalog of books from The Pragmatic Programmers over to Medium

People feed the beast and then wonder why it's come back for more.

I feel you. I hate Medium, too.

But I hate even more that this is the top most comment on hn, even though you admit to not even having read the article and clearly don’t know what it’s about.

Sorry, I know this comment is OT as well…

"Great Minds Discuss Ideas. Average Minds Discuss Events. Small Minds Discuss People."

Not to accuse anybody here of being small minded, but I think the point is relevant. Instagram transitioning from a photo sharing social network to a marketing catalog pretending to be organic content is an event, but it's only a single social network. The larger trend of the internet transitioning from individual home pages to walled garden social networks that then push hidden marketing over actual substance is a much larger concern that is going on, and the posters point about the irony of using Medium to complain about the issue is spot on and I'd argue relevant to the real conversation, which is how interesting, quality, quirky self-published content of the internet has been replaced by walled gardens showing you want their algorithm wants you to see.

> clearly don’t know what it’s about.

How is it clear to you? I got the context from other comments... My point was not about the content of the article specifically, but more about the obliviousness of this (and many other) authors. It's like criticizing running an Alexa because it's like bugging your house while, at the same time, using Google's or Apple's thing. Total whoosh!

What's silly here is that you felt the need to reply on my comment as well, knowing that yours is not related to the original topic. Do you not see this as mildly duplicitous?

Use the following uBO rules:

medium.com##div[data-test-id="post-sidebar"]

medium.com##.branch-journeys-top:upward(2)

medium.com##div[id^="lo-highlight-meter"]

medium.com##+js(aeld, scroll)

medium.com##+js(aeld, touchstart)

I would just like to take this opportunity to post these screenshots I took over the past 2 days:

https://imgur.com/a/SLrJaUJ

I am surprised by just how many ads for drugs I get.

They know their audience.

But still. Lots of ads for testosterone, growth hormone, and now ketamine.

IG is a gateway drug

To?

Tiktok

[Meanwhile at Facebook] "Wait no"

You want a real hot take based off a throwaway comment?

It kinda is for steroids. (Hold on, don’t downvote me yet, I’m going somewhere.)

I am a 30-something gay male. Here’s my Recommendations view:

https://imgur.com/a/1Paravn

Hot dudes, dogs, and one computer setup that’s either based off my search for standing desks or mechanical keyboards.

Instagram is a body dysmorphia engine. If you are in a certain demographic, it is so easy to drink from a constant firehose of thirst traps of men with very suspiciously large traps. You get that every time you open Instagram? It does start to warp your brain, and make you consider trying pharmaceutical interventions.

Conflict of interest: I am absolutely one of those monsters posting thirst traps: https://imgur.com/a/2JGOYwL

> Instagram is a body dysmorphia engine.

100%

Very interesting. Almost like it wants to flatten society, all gays are all the same. To me I hope this doesn’t keep people from being unique or growing in the future

I only use insta in the browser on my phone, which is quite a nice watered down experience that doesn't show ads (even without an ad blocker) or annoying account suggestions.

i've never seen those ads before. aren't instagram ads tailored based on your browsing history? if anything, those ads may just be indicative of your recent interests.

What could I possibly have posted that would trigger these ads?

Oh.

https://imgur.com/a/CXvySpa

(Like I said. They know their audience.)

Wow, you've posted pics of yourself twice. Take that attention-seeking shit back to IG.

Yeah, they’re tailored. I get ads for perf dev tools, compilers. I still get ads for vehicles months after buying one.

I’ve only had one ad that was “eerie.” Coworkers were talking about a kind of beverage I’d never heard of (talking over zoom, on a work-only machine), got an ad for the product later that day. Could be that I just recognized the name from our convo which caused me to scroll back up...

I finally figured out the spookiness after talking to my mom on the phone about vacuum cleaners and then getting ads for vacuum cleaners:

My mom bought a vacuum online after our phone call, and one way advertisers choose an audience is “all the friends of someone who searched for the product”

My roommate and I confirmed this by getting ads for something the other just googled.

What I’m trying to say is, targeted ads ruin Christmas, but no one will hear me out :’(

The entirety of HN is now following chicagoresearchcentercrc and furiously liking every one of its posts.

What?

Free (es)ketamine!

My biggest problem with both Facebook and Instagram is that I feel completely out of control over what I see.

There is neither a way to avoid what I don't want, nor a way to ensure I see my friends' posts. The timeline shows me the same handful of people in mystery sort order mixed with ads, and then I later find out I haven't seen months' worth of someone's content when I happen to visit their profile.

The only half-ass solution I've found is to bookmark each profile and check them individually, which is, of course, not very practical past a dozen or two.

All in all, it feels like Facebook thinks I'm an idiot and treats me accordingly.

And maybe I am an idiot, since I've yet to figure out an alternative.

It seems like they really do mangle the main timeline, no matter what you try to do.

But a small workaround, if you are a member of any useful Facebook groups: there is a real, permanent sorting option.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/[groupid-goes-here]?sorting_...

Bookmark that with a group for a proper chronological view.

Thanks for the tip, it's nice to at least be able to do that for one group at a time.

However, I follow about 300 groups :-/

Seems they disabled that since you posted it?

> Your request couldn't be processed

> There was a problem with this request. We're working on getting it fixed as soon as we can.

>There is neither a way to avoid what I don't want, nor a way to ensure I see my friends' posts

There's both on Facebook. You can set it so you always see a person's posts and you can click on any post to see less of that type of content (or none from the poster).

How do I check what my current settings are, list all the people I've set to "show always", and all which are hidden?

I also do not recall ever hiding anyone intentionally, because then I'd probably just unfollow them. I could be wrong, however.

Also, is there a way to see friends I'm currently not following, in case I did that by accident?

Thank you, that would be very helpful.

Edit: I am reminded now of the settings you must be talking about, the "show me more of this" preferences. I tried them, but they seem to have no effect on what I see or don't. And, of course, I can't hide the ads.

There's also an option (maybe it was by adding them to favorites) to make it so you always get a friend's posts.

You can also do the 'see less of this' on ads.

Alternatively you can also just install FB Purity or a similar extension to tweak what you see better.

> All in all, it feels like Facebook thinks I'm an idiot and treats me accordingly.

This is the way of social media algorithms. I suspect it makes sense be cause the majority of users are indeed "idiots", in the sense of doing a poor job managing their subscription feeds and such. I'm sure they have tons of data showing how they improve user retention in aggregate by treating them like idiots.

But those of us willing to build and curate our own experience, we're the edge case not worth accommodating.

When you say that people are doing a "poor job managing their subscription feeds and such", it almost sounds like you think that's possible using Facebook's interface?

I don't use Facebook anymore, but in the past... I guess?

At a minimum, you could unfollow people/pages that were too low signal:noise to be worthwhile, and mute the ones that you wanted to follow but not here from. Crude, but easy way to ditch a lot of the noise.

But people didn't really use those basic tools. They just followed... everything... didn't mute the annoying family they were obliged to friend, and complained when their feed sucked.

It's hard for me to imagine Facebook et. al. providing useful controls that people will actually use that doesn't reduce down to "give us some signal and our AI will magically figure out the right thing". And basically that's the extreme version of what they have now.

During election season I went through and blocked every forward source that wasn't highbrow, ie 99% of them. Unfollowed a few OCD people as well. Cleared things up a lot.

After the latest revamp my favs no longer showed in the timeline. Went in and unlikd then liked again, and now they are listed prominently. Sheesh.

Well, that sounds straightforward, reliable, and transparent. :D

Nah, it’s not because they think you’re an idiot but because this way they can keep you longer in the website.

One clear example for me was when YouTube changed the homepage to show random videos instead of the subscriptions. My subscription videos run out, but random videos don’t. Same goes with unrelated sh*t every other social media companies show you.

Related: Twitter literally suggested a post under the topic: Hot dogs. [1] You can’t make this stuff up.

1: https://ibb.co/WpCXCxt

Is there anyone else out there who refuses to buy something if they first learned about it from an ad?

Absolutely. If I see an ad for something I make a mental note to search for competitors before buying that brand, assuming I need the product.

If a company is spending money on ads, that’s money they’re not spending on R&D or cutting prices, and it also means their product is too weak to get traction organically.

> If a company is spending money on ads, that’s money they’re not spending on R&D or cutting prices, and it also means their product is too weak to get traction organically.

Or they just want to make even more money than they could make organically, which they can then put into R&D or into cutting pricces (through economies of scale).

Yes, it is possible to do things ass- backwards. The first way is better for consumers, the second way exploits consumers at a subconscious level, and is more often leveraged to maximize profit than to benefit consumers.

E.g., Imagine all the good pharmaceutical research that could be funded if we just allowed blatant snake oil to be sold for unlimited profit? Surely the ends justify the means?

Corporations trend toward consumer exploitation and as they get bigger, there is less chance for any human concerns like ethics or morals to correct negative behavior.

> Imagine all the good pharmaceutical research that could be funded if we just allowed blatant snake oil to be sold for unlimited profit?

Head into your nearest pharmacy and check out what they sell. Aisles upon aisles of homeopathic "drugs" that do nothing and cost nothing to produce.

My nearest pharmacy doesn't sell many homeopathics, and I live in the USA - land of the hucksters and home of the deregulators.

It's got aisles for fungii, ears and eyes, cuts and bruises, stomach stuff, cold/flu/allergies, prophylactics, etc etc. But the closest thing to unapproved cure-alls are the stronger sort of cough drops.

There are plenty of stores that sell sketchy supplements, but they usually don't have prescription pickup counters with pharmacists.

> Aisles upon aisles of homeopathic "drugs" that do nothing and cost nothing to produce.

Homeopathics only reliably do nothing (different from whatever inert carrier is provided) if they are real homeopathic dilutions, which thanks to the absence of regulation and testing in the homeopathic market, they often are not, which has led to homeopathics with dangerous levels of ingredients that would be < 1 molecule per package if the stated dilutions were accurate.

Which, I guess, doesn't contradict your point.

Advertising works at a subconscious level. The more you see a product, the more you subconsciously learn to like and trust the product, especially if you are being exposed to that product in a trusted context (popular celebrity posing with it, etc).

I wish I had saved the link, but I read a study that showed people consistently underestimated how likely they were to buy a product after seeing an ad. They would buy it at much higher rates than the control group yet still assert that they were aware of the ad and not allowing it to influence their decisions.

> still assert that they were aware of the ad and not allowing it to influence their decisions.

The claim you're responding to is not that they won't allow it to influence their decisions, but that they will actively refuse to even consider a product if they learned about it through an ad.

Most of the ads I encounter are through podcasts because I don't watch TV and ad blockers of various kinds apply everywhere else. I will never use or recommend Squarespace for any purpose, simply on principle.

Which principle?

Similar to endisneigh I take as many steps as I possibly can to avoid letting advertising influence me. I block ads wherever possible, and anything that slips through goes on a shit-list of companies that I will avoid buying from unless I have no other choice.

So if you see an ad about something, you never recommend it. Sounds like you let advertising influence you quite a bit.

Sure, if you're going to insist on an overly literal reading of my words.

Advertising is mental pollution. Reacting against it isn’t the same thing as being influenced to consume what they’re hocking.

Where can I buy some of your Bitcoins, please?

Maybe its reverse psychology by competitors

Not rewarding the awful ad-tech ecosystem is a good principle.

I don't think you can say this in general. I really, really dislike ads, but they _do_ sponsor a lot of content creators which could otherwise not focus on their content creation and they help companies to get their product known to you - which does not need to be a negative. If they sell you a product which genuinely improves your life, it's a win-win-win for you, the producer and the person advertising.

The current ecosystem is overly focused on manipulation and there are simply to many ads, yes, but I have found really good products via ads and I don't think companies should be generally demonized just for playing the game. It's not all bad.

The mafia was also famous for its community outreach and charity, that didn't make it a net positive.

Yes, but the key difference is that the mafia is, by definition, a criminal organization and the upside is not linked in any way with being a mafia. Ads, on the other hand, do inherently have the positive quality of showing you products and could exist without their current downsides.

Regardless of their current downsides (which are indeed considerable!), ads by definition are there to make me want to buy things I wouldn’t otherwise want to buy. That’s not exactly noble, even if we pretend that they’re just showing me stuff I wasn’t aware of.

> That’s not exactly noble

That's where we disagree. Imagine you always cooked your noodles in a pan. This is clearly a suboptimal situation. Then you see an ad for a pot, you go buy it and it turns out that making noodles (and other dishes) could be so much easier!

Sure, you would not have bought a pot otherwise, but this ad would have been a net positive for you and the ad company, no downsides.

Or maybe you see an ad for a Chinese restaurant, so you try it and it turns out you really like them. There's nothing inherently wrong with their food just because you got to know it via an ad.

As stated above, the current system is stupid. But it's not all bad.

Opposite for me, I go out of my way to avoid brands that drown me in ads. I don’t mind the occasional ad, that’s just nature of doing business. It’s the ads that are nonstop in your face or the forced viral campaigns.

Coke stopped buying advertising once. Cause everyone already knows about them, so why pay for ads? Their sales dropped dramatically. Now they pay for lots of ads.

citation?

Different context but in 2012 eBay stopped buying keyword search ads and nothing happened

https://hbr.org/2013/03/did-ebay-just-prove-that-paid

https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...

That's only surprising if you mistakenly imagine ads to be about competition. Instead, ads are about getting you to consume things you don't need, and since no one needs Coke,lless advertising -> less sales overall. Of course, that's only a bad thing for Coke, and should be encouraged actually.

It’s especially true of me when I’m making a purchase where I don’t already have a favorite brand. I know I gravitate towards the most familiar thing, which may be the deodorant brand I saw a friend using (true story).

I mean, it's a valid signal. The same way you may ask your friends for a dentist recommendation.

>I read a study that showed people consistently underestimated how likely they were to buy a product after seeing an ad. They would buy it at much higher rates than the control group yet still assert that they were aware of the ad and not allowing it to influence their decisions.

How frequently must these people be buying things for this to even be noticeable.

If I think about regular day to day purchases, I'm not sure how influence plays a part at all. There is no branding or advertising for fruit/vegetables/meat from the local store. Even with household goods, I don't speak the local language so brand names are not easily noticeable.

Maybe bigger purchases? But those are rarer and usually involve some kind of research. I'll happily buy from brands I have never heard of if they show good results in independent tests. It just never feels accurate when people tell me I'm being subconsciously manipulated by ads when I see so few and buy so little.

Not only that, I made it a point to contact those companies and tell them why I won’t buy their products.

Depends on the ad - if it's excessively irritating or intrusive absolutely.

To the point where I'll boycott entire stores if an ad pisses me off too much.

Tangentially, youtube's ads are getting worse by the day and Hero Wars' efforts are now so damned desperate that they've gone beyond deliberately misleading to damned near pornographic.

It's bad enough that I'm considering completely dropping Google despite the inadequacy of DuckDuckGo and the fact I've had the same Gmail address since university.

YT is certainly levering up the ad annoyance lately. It drove me to look around and I discovered not only is it better without ads, it's better without any social component at all. CloudTube uses YouTube APIs for what you actually want, just the video: https://tube.cadence.moe/

It would very much be worth it to dump GMail and purchase a privacy-focused email service with IMAP/POP3

I buy things from ads if the things solve problems I have. Sometimes I don't know about the solutions and the advertising works because FB/Insta know what I like. They work well and I'm grateful I get relevant ads.

I bought some sensors that Instagram advertised to improve ski technique and they’ve worked wonders

If you don’t mind me asking, can you please share a product name or link? Sounds cool

Looks like it's called Carv, here's a link: https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=skiing+sensor+improve+techniq...

Thanks!

As the other poster said, it’s Carv (https://getcarv.com/) . It has helped me a lot to improve technique, I actually learned how to carv in skis, and I’m much more comfortable when going fast (my speed record is now 105 km/hr) . It’s beautiful having objective data to tell if you have improved and what did you improve, as well as what needs more work. For me it was a cheap buy as a private lesson one whole day would go for the price of the device, which I can use the whole season and gives me objective data. Stomp it tutorials in YouTube is also a big help.

Thanks!

I do this too but I generally search on google/amazon for the product before buying. Much of the time, the same product is available cheaper from someone else. I think certain companies buy and resell stuff through paid advertising, so they have to pad their margins appropriately.

Generally, though they did recently nail me by sending me an ad for a new type of earplug. The algorithm must've figured out I suffer from misophonia.

Yeah, I do this too. I don't know why or how, but on a subconscious level, my brain registers online ads as something bad / malicious, and so anything I see through an ad is automatically labelled as bad.

I even freak out if I accidentally click on an ad on mobile because I feel as if I have downloaded a piece of malware.

I don't know where this comes from...possibly due to having been there back when many ads really were malware? I am not sure.

wait so if I showed you an ad for every product in existence you would buy nothing at all?

poster didn't say anything of the sort. but given the situation you're constructing, i'd expect they'd buy only what's necessary and all things being equal from the one that advertised least.

Yeah, precisely. In that case I'd only buy what I need. If there are multiple sources / alternatives, I'd buy from the one that advertised the least. If they all advertised equally, I'd probably ask people I know which one they found the best and research on the best alternative.

If I do buy, I buy it from somewhere else after clearing cookies.

Depends on the ad, tbh. Some ads just scream low-quality crap. No matter what, that impression will stick with me, even if I see the product in a retail store I trust.

However, I recently bought some Dr. Squatch soap, so ads can work.

Whenever someone tells me a video URL that I decide to invest time in looking at, Grammarly or Liberty Mutual will tend to barge in, and interrupt whatever flow that was.

Sure, I remember the brand names. And I'm going to be sure to remember that those brands spent a lot of money wasting my time.

We’re fixing a “bug” in our app that it stops Grammarly working properly, such is their hold on things now!

Liberty Mutual. Same here. Will never buy from them.

This one really ticks me off for two reasons:

I now understand that ads are purposefully nonsensical and annoying because they’re stickier that way. The ostrich in the insurance ads doesn’t have any damn thing to do with their product, but because it’s out of the ordinary my mind is left to absorb it, wondering, what was that ostrich doing there. It’s just straight mind manipulation and I resent it.

And 2, it hardly makes sense to advertise insurance (I’m never in the mood to cancel my current plan) but they have a gargantuan adspend because their profits are capped by a percentage (search 80/20 rule)- This is basically the same reason Coca Cola is famously ad-spendy - since they are locked into a low percentage of revenue, the only way to grow is “make it up on volume”

I don’t mind what people are marketing or that they’re marketing and I occasionally buy things I learned about from ads, but I do mind that’s it’s a keystone of the modern internet.

These things are difficult to separate these days. I don’t blame the people who want to sell their goods though. It’s scary to try competing without using online ads in many industries.

I make it a point to support small businesses that are creating interesting products, even if I learned about them from ads.

There's lots about the human experience that you can't control, and advertising works on those levels too. You are affected by the mere exposure to it. You're not just sold a product - you are told about the brand, values, how they approach the world, how it's acceptable in these times to express yourself, lots of stuff. And you see it and you learn it. It doesn't really matter what you think about afterwards, you are already affected, because that's how humans work, and advertisements are exploiting how humans work. The solution is to not be exposed to it in the first place, and because you can't really block them all, to accept that you are affected and work with that. Denial will bring you nowhere. But, it can be a good milestone to realization.

No. There might be the perfect suiting product to me. There is, however, a huge red flag for all these companies and products. This usually drives my buying decisions (against them).

Yes and no. But I do avoid buying products which price is mostly based on their advertisment budget. So in the end yes, never bought anything suggested from an Instagram or Facebook ad. However I only get shown absolute bullshit that has zero relevance to me (prolly because of blocking so much of the tracking)

The app itself can quickly turn into a never-ending scroll of infomercials from ads and accounts if you go beyond your social circle. Even if said accounts are not directly selling a product through the store feature, it's often advertising a desirable lifestyle not your own and general consumerism. How many photos are staged versus candid? This type of content-as-ad imagery is what the app lends itself best to versus any other social media app. Of course, you can just not follow any of these accounts or limit them or have better self control over your time spent there. But, the company is also probably working against your best interests, bottom line and all that...

Some of the brightest minds and smartest people go to work for companies which spend every minute of their existence to figure out how to place an ad in front of our eyes for 1 more second.

I really dislike the suggestion "just have better self control". It's you versus an army of machine learning experts all tuning algorithm on personal data about you to learn your weaknesses and bait you into spending more time on the app.

Blaming the consumer ignores the adversarial role that the apps play in our lives.

I agree. I wasn’t trying to place blame merely stating that there are ways to make the experience personal and closed to the people you know only. The sentence following the one you’re referring to was meant to convey your sentiments.

The fact that you use the term "bait" illustrates that it is about self-control and not compulsion.

It's absolutely not adversarial. People voluntarily install these apps. This is opt-in advertising.

They don't install the apps for the purpose of seeing advertising, and there's no way to opt out of the ads, so I don't think that is a good assessment.

I never see Instagram ads, but then again I don't have an Instagram account or have the app installed.

The opt out button is the "delete account" button. Instagram and Facebook's surveillance-based advertising systems are one and the same.

Delete the app and the army goes puff.

Then I can't message my extended family. I have no way to reach the friends I made in Costa Rica. Some of my business contacts in Europe only use adtech platforms to communicate.

You can't just delete the app. You have to fully opt out of a significant portion of the global ecosystem.

Some significant portion of IG is just "influencers" peddling something for a buck, or euro.

Instagram, a place where I used to share pictures with my close friends and family.

Now, useless ads and inappropriate posts from random kids I have zero interest in seeing.

I don’t understand, are you following random kids you have no interest in seeing?

Have you ever scrolled past the tiny “view older posts” link?

Yeah, that’s where I end up in a sea of wildlife photography.

I think that’s only when you have a new account and you don’t follow many people?

I follow a bunch of wildlife photographers.

No, I don’t follow these people. Once I view all the new content from the people I follow, Instagram starts showing me posts from people I’ve never seen before.

Are you using the app or browser? I just use Safari on iOS and I only follow my two kids and I just go back years of posts and there’s nothing from strangers on there.

I’m using the app on iOS if that makes a difference…

It does! The native apps show a plethora of ads while the web app shows nothing. Crazy interesting but I imagine most users use the app.

Can’t it be because of ad-blocking ?

You might be using one of those tabs that I never go to. The leftmost tab with the home icon only shows posts from people you follow (and ads).

That’s not true. It forces reels on you now (maybe feature flagged?), all kinds of random people you don’t follow. Instagram has become a hot mess.

How long has it been since you updated the app? It used to work that way, but they changed it. It was a really disappointing shift. If you have a pending update from ~last year, don't update until you have to. I only get a few new posts from friends each day, so it's three scrolls and bam, random accounts and content ads. To see old posts from your friends, you have to click a button that says "See archived posts" after the last new post by a friend, but before the inserted ads and strangers.

Imagine the people who you follow only post stories from now on. For me there is no new content on the start page. It's just Ads. Nothing else, from the very first post

Kind of like reddit or YouTube when you're not singed in. The amount of garbage takes your breath away. Neither is not great anyway but then you find it can be worse.

Ok, so I'm going to hijack this slightly...

I'm an elderly (mid-40s) non-USian techie, and I've never done Instagram. On Facebook I mostly follow people I've largely lost touch with in real life (particular these past couple of years), and on Twitter it's news sources and journalists, plus a selection of 'celebs' from various niche interests like tech, sci-fi, winter sports and comedy.

Am I likely to be missing anything interesting by largely ignoring Instagram?

I follow a few artists on it. It's good for when you want to see what people are making without the kind of chatter you get on Facebook or Twitter.

Agree with this, I'm a big fan of sci-fi and high-fantasy art, and follow a great deal of amazing artists on IG, there's more than a couple of great space paintings in my living room that I saw on the site, contacted the artist and offered to buy a print from. That and of course seeing friends in their own necks of the woods is what makes the platform for me.

> Am I likely to be missing anything interesting by largely ignoring Instagram?

I'm going to say, no. But then, if you consider mid-40s elderly, I'm positively geriatric.

I’m an elderly mid-30s dinosaur. Are you pre-big bang?

No, just pre-comet. You must be a bird, they're the only things so young that in any sense "are dinosaurs".

Some of your younger friends / relatives / colleagues think Facebook is for their parents’ generation and put the stuff they want their contemporaries to see on Instagram. But not too young, there’s a generation behind them that thinks Instagram is for old people.

In terms of pure functionality there’s absolutely nothing special about Instagram. At this point the two products are reskins of the same functionality.

Facebook is a lot more comprehensive, I think. But I've also deleted my FB account a while ago.

I know a few people who get severe anxiety after spending too much time on there. I don’t use it but it seems really negative because of the algorithm forcing polarizing, stress-inducing content on you and your friends and family. It might possibly be okay if you strictly follow a non political artist or two that you like

I think even the apolitical stuff causes a different flavor of the same anxiety though on some deeper level based on the comparing-your-insides-to-other-peoples-outsides phenomena. What I cant figure out is why so many of my artist friends are on there so willingly with seemingly no conscious awareness of any toxic effects. I seriously feel like my partner and I are the only artists who find IG toxic but we have to be on there because its essentially required for anyone in the arts...

There's a lot of good photography on IG, and a lot of my friends primary social publications are photo blogging.

That said, I have all fb properties dns blocked: fb, instagram, and whatsapp. The privacy invasion isn't worth the content at all.

You should delete your fb account, as it serves as an implicit endorsement of the platform to your friends, family, and associates.

Maybe. I’m a little younger than you and I both post and consume Instagram Stories. It’s mostly of my kids and my friends kids. I like that the posts only last for 24 hours and there a no likes, etc etc. By contrast my actual Instagram profile and FB profile are very quiet.

Maybe you have friends that are the same (but if you don’t care to watch endless videos of other people’s kids maybe give it a miss!)

I agree, I like the ephemeral nature of stories in theory at least (Mark Zuckerberg cackles in the distance somewhere).

quite literally - download a data export and see you'll see every story you've ever posted.

Oh, for sure there are permanent copies, you can go to your profile to find them. But I actually kind of like that too, I like to be able to privately look back through my old memories. Just don’t want a permanent public record.

I like that to comment you have to send them a message also, ends up leading to a conversation as opposed to comments on a post.

Its become the defacto central hub of the art world, especially with the exacerbated decline of in-person small and large art galleries. For the overwhelming majority of emerging / non-established artists, if you aren't on instagram other artists will literally just forget you exist. I know somebodys just going to respond with something contrary here but Im open to it if anybody knows about some other healthier platform for artists to connect and share their work on...

I'm a US tech person in my 20s who does not use Twitter, Facebook or Instagram at all.

I do miss out on things because friends and family use Facebook for event planning, so I have to hear about things secondhand from mutual friends. But I never feel like I miss anything from the others.

I resisted for a long time, but the reason I use instagram now is that some of my friends have moved to that platform. So I’m sort of split between fb and instagram now. Also, I like checking “stories” on instagram as you get a quick glimpse of what people are up to and you can send them messages to react instead of writing a comment, which is more likely to lead to a real convo.

I want to buy every single thing I see here. I've been really happy with the kind of ads I've been seeing lately. Instead of generic commercials I'm getting very specific products solving problems I have but didn't realize could be solved by a gadget.

I turned off my adblocker for Facebook as the ads started being far more relevant to me.

Lots of interesting games or hackathons or nifty tools.

I use Brave and love my ad-free life.

Facebook seems to put a lot of effort into making ads hard to block too.

I'm in the same boat. Normally I despise ads, but the ones on facebook I'm seeing I have actually clicked on to learn more. Not a robot, hate facebook to the core, but some of the ads I get are interesting.

I almost never check Facebook and when I do, I only login in a private tab, but even from this sandbox, Facebook somehow has the best ads for me by far.

I actually get very little value from the normal content, but I’d probably even sign up for a newsletter of their ads for me.

Edit: They always seem to have very cool Kickstarters for me, for example, so then later I’ll try to go right to the source, but I’ve never found something good myself on Kickstarter.

This reads like a subliminal message from John Carpenter’s “They Live”. I hope it’s sarcasm :)

If you can't beat them, join them? I for one, welcome our benevolent advertising overloards. /s

Eh. There are a lot of ads. A lot of it is nonsense.

But: there are some diamonds in the rough. Do I really need another novelty tank top? No. Would I rather have an ad for a novelty tank top versus going back to the TV days and getting an ad for vitamins for senior citizens? No—give me my targeted ads, versus ads for drugs for old people.

I found a t-shirt brand that actually has well fitting, nicely colored, comfortable shirts. They shrink in my dryer so I have to hang-dry, but I have been buying some things I find on there.

The canonical example of SkyMall equivalence for me is wish.com ads. They're odd enough that they're frequently clipped and commented on - https://www.google.com/search?q=wish+ads

What is wish.com? Comes up in a lot of search’s, shows me an absurdly cheap price for a product and then I can’t buy it, it’s out of stock or something went wrong

It's an ecommerce platform with very low quality and anti-counterfeiting standards. It's become a meme with how prevalently products are misrepresented on there.

Aliexpress with venture backing from /dev/urandom

> The thing is, SkyMall was a blast. It was so consistently unhinged — night-glow toilet seat!

night-glow toilet seat actually turned out to be quite a popular product on Shark Tank. Kevin O'Leary put $100K for a 25 percent stake in it.

https://mashable.com/deals/oct-11-shark-tank-bathroom-produc...

There's been many copy cats all of which have tons of sales:

https://www.amazon.com/illumibowl/s?k=illumibowl

The product preceded this company. It has been advertised on infomercials since at least the 90s and possibly earlier.

The app has become about 30-40% advertisements which I think is far too much. I don't ever want to buy any of these things because all of my ads are for coffee beans, which I would much rather buy fresh from a local shop.

i don't see any ads. the desktop version is better

If you want to see SkyMall open aliexpress and with no search terms start scrolling. Some of my favorites: a watch with a lighter flame, toilet with motion sensor that switches a blue led on and champagne squirt gun.

I honestly wonder whether the people who make these things are having the time of their lives or in some kind of idea-sweat-factory trying to come up with things all day and burning out quickly.

If you’re in search of a Skymall alternative, check out Hammacher Schlemmer (https://www.hammacher.com/).

The brand has existed for over a hundred years, they have a physical store in NYC, a website, and a catalog (still being sent out).

I just looked at a few products for sale on their homepage: make sure not to miss the transparent canoe or the kickball dart board.

IIRC Skymall used to feature Hammacher Schlemmer products pretty often, so it's not surprising that there'd be a lot of overlap.

Instagram is like a magazine if the magazine was just ads and the ads were written all by the staff writers who you trust.

Yeah imagine a real magazine that would do...hey wait a minute

All of this reminds me of the scene in Fight Club where they animate the magazine ad as the apartment.

and there's a reason magazines are mostly irrelevant these days - we found new, better sources of entertainment. i'm not sure emulating magazines is a good goal for the medium that supplanted magazines.

It is if you want to see them supplanted by something else.

It's so weird how long the reach is. Just yesterday I was looking up a product on a company's website on my phone. Then I went to use my desktop and logged into facebook and there was an ad for the product I was looking at on my phone's web browser.

I think what's essentially happening here is that Instagram has lots of tracking and targeting so it's very good at telling advertising "Hey, here's the list of people you want to advertise to, and here's how much it will cost". The result of this hyper-targeted approach though is that if you're not in any of the targets no one wants to advertise to you at all. This is the weird part though, rather than accept this, Instagram juts lowers the cost of advertising to you to practically zero. This is what opens the door to these trash ads - it's a kind of noise floor where ads are so cheap you may as well just spend some money on advertising something that costs you zero capital and has crazy margins - cheap chinese drop shipping rubbish. Because there's practically no barrier to entry, it immediately becomes a race to the bottom and the price of the adverts will perfectly match the margin times conversion rate.

What's interesting here is that Instagram have basically decided not to put a floor in. They could very easily say "Hey, we don't yet know how or what to target at these people, but they're still users, let's just not show them many ads, keep them happy on the platform, and give up on that ad revenue until we get it figured out, once we've firgured it out they'll probably be valuable". Instead what they've decided is "Hey, we have no idea how to target at these people so let's just drop the price of ads to the point where anyone will advertise any crap, it'll give the users a terrible experience and forever associate our app with cheap tat, but atleast we get to pick up that tiny revenue stream from drop shippers"

"hey, do you ever find it a huge hassle to pour cereal from a box?"

Just like the Snuggie, many of these products were invented to help people with various disabilities. See e.g. https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/20/17791354/products-pe...

Humm, not exactly

"Some of the most useful products for people with disabilities weren’t developed with them in mind"

Can you show me a snuggle ad with a disabled person in it

Can you show me any ad with a disabled person in it?

The examples taken from instagram are probably very region specific and further matching a profile.

However, I must agree that IG ads got worse and worse. So what is very common here:

1. Take a stock picture of Americans lining up for petrol at a petrol station because of an extreme situation/limitation.

2. Link to a website that looks like a normal webshop (the ad is done by an account that only exists on facebook and its page is empty, not promoting a shop)

3. The user gets redirected from the shop website (that actually exists and can be loaded manually from desktop) to a fake website, that looks like the website of the largest local news outlet.

4. There is an article about how to get rich with crypto and some celebs promote it. On the bottom of the page you can register with your phone number. You will get redirected to a trading platform that most likely rips you off.

Way to go instagram. Allowing scammers to their platform.

I bought something from one of these ads last summer. It was supposed to be a battery powered pump (like to blow up a pool float). The thing that came in the mail was just a cheap hand pump. Moral of the story here is be careful of these products. I assume lots are bait-and-switches like what I experienced.

Why was it "supposed to be" battery-powered; just because the ad copy read "batteries not included"? :-)

No, it was supposed to be a rechargeable air pump but the one I received was a cheap hand pump easily purchased at any dollar store.

General principle: if the gadget seems pointless or lazy, ask yourself, "how could this be useful to disabled people?"

Because it was probably developed for them, but they aren't a big enough market. So it has to be sold as a gimmick.

I mostly tend to get ads relating to music production, owing to the fact that.. I follow quite a few music producers and related hashtags.

But now I kind of wish that I got to see ads for these kinds of ridiculous products in my feed too.

Something changed about Instagram recently, maybe it’s just because I changed how I used it. I used to only follow people I know, but then I added a few accounts that post Simpsons screenshots and clips. Now my feed is overrun with meme accounts, other Simpsons accounts I don’t follow, similar accounts for Futurama, Seinfeld, etc.

Admittedly, some are amusing sometimes, but it feels likes it’s turned into 9gag or something. It’s like if you follow one instance of something Instagram immediately assumes you exclusively want to see every single thing like that.

I think https://ThisIsWhyImBroke.com is closest to the SkyMall experience but I’m a sucker for a good catalog.

Here’s a gag gift that caught my attention:

Roast Beef Sandwich Bath Soak https://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/roast-beef-sandwich-bath-so...

I was going to reminisce about a print catalogue that we had in Australia when I was a kid, when I realised that it actually still exists, possibly even still in print form?

https://www.innovations.com.au

Lots of equally hilarious garbage in here. I used to love it when I was young. My grandma would get them delivered in the post.

I joined Instagram well before Facebook bought it. It has been a downward slide ever since. Slow, but downward none-the-less. I had a Facebook account early on, but as the filtering advanced, my feed turned to shit, so I closed the account completely. It wasn't enjoyable at all any more. I fear Instagram is headed in that same direction.

An enjoyable read!

I found the same enjoyable read on BLERFMARKET.COM. It’s where I buy all my reads now.

Everyone is just posting stories today. So when I open Instagram I don't get pictures and updates from people I care about but I do actually get a wall full of ads. Sometimes there is no actual content for 20+ posts. Nothing that could actually interest me.

It's awful and I don't know how people can use this for their own entertainment.

This guy should try AliExpress. In fact that's probably where all the stuff advertised on Instagram comes from.

This. Even most 'influencer brands' are basic Ali rebrands

I wonder if this happened because every time he randomly got a SkyMall-flavored ad, he stopped and clicked through.

The author is on-point here. I now love the instagram ads for their comedy value. Although I'm currently seeing a lot of elasticated waistband trousers that apparently look like normal well-fitting trousers. I guess my instagram browsing habits now fit that middle aged fat guy demographic. Damn!

The ads, like on YouTube, are getting unbearable. And this time you can’t even block them

Why can't you block them?

Presumably using the app?

The thing I hate most is if I click on search it starts autoplaying some random thing that has no relevance to my social circles, until I start typing my search query (usually just trying to find a friend or an account I already follow).

I generally assume that installing an app to use a website is voluntarily opting in to a worse experience, so you're probably right. Still, though, maybe a PiHole would be effective?

I'm running one and it makes no difference.

Most ads are loaded as 'normal posts' I tried but pi-hole is not the solution here.

Yep, the explore page always turns up some barely clad women.

Some time ago YT and other majors started serving ads from the same domains as content, so it's become much more difficult to reliably block them.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pihole/comments/88vsz1/youtube_ad_d...

Yeah, it's hard to imagine the pihole approach working for most ads in the long term. Fortunately, the traditional browser addon approach still works great.

and thats why i use firefox nightly for android.

Pihole has been useless on desktop for quite a while now. uBlock Origin still works on YouTube as well as it did 7 years ago

I have trained Instagram (and Facebook) over the years to give me only the most pointless and unappealing ads as possible. I have no qualms about ignoring and forgetting each and every one. I despise ads and do my best to block and avoid.

I love it. I don’t even post on IG. I just browse and find stuff I want to buy.

I go to great lengths to anonymize myself on Instagram (futile, but I do what I can), and as a result I get what I guess are 'standard' ads:

- gun modification products

- survival stuff: knives, para cord etc.

- conservative 'mens group' retreats

It's dark.

get out while you still can...

I've noticed a lot of ads like this on Twitter too recently.

I feel like Instagram was always like Maxim or Cosmopolitan magazine. Lifestyle marketing to people looking for what to buy to be cool. Guess I can see Skymall too.

Everything I've bought from an Instagram ad was easily-breakable, not as described, and shipped from an Asian country (to the US), or never arrived.

Is it the app that shows ads? I just checked Instagram for the first time in a week, and I made it all the way down to where I’d left off without seeing a single ad.

This is using the website on an iPad, with no ad blocker or anything.

If it’s just the app, then no worries. I gave up trying to use it on my phone because the photos and text are just too small to see and they go out of their way to make sure you can’t zoom or change the font size to something legible. Its just way more pleasant on a tablet or desktop.

I wonder who is manufacturing these items? Are they able to design and manufacture these items profitably with the volume?

I think it looks more like The Shopping Channel than SkyMall. Although there’s definitely an overlap.

OK, the colored acrylic cube looks like a fun desk toy. But not at $23.

I've noticed nearly everything I see on IG is a version of something that can be found elsewhere for less. Sometimes MUCH less. In some cases the IG ad is for a "prestige" brand, so you're paying for the name, but in many cases it's a brand with no recognition but advertising as "artisanal" or hand crafted. Look deeper, though, and discover these just big cheap brands rebadging their stuff.

what else was it supposed to be? An educational website?

I clicked all the conservative sites, I clicked all liberal ads,all Chinese ads, all Spanish ads, all rich people ads. I'm a Mexican drug cartel Trump supporter who speaks Chinese according to IG.

One day, someone will have the courage to build a paid-for social media platform and we can put all this nonsense behind us.

The one SkyMall i remember from a US flight ages ago was one for shoes with springs built into the heels which claimed they would make you walk faster. Deciding whether the whole magazine was a witty caricature of US capitalism or honest advertising took me a while. I then decided to keep the magazine as a souvenir but have unfortunately lost it since.

The thing I hate about Instagram is how lenient they are on nude pics. While Facebook has a strict policy, on Instagram a lot of celebrity content is borderline porn.

I see that as absolute win.

I'm not a puritan by any means, but literally millions of kids use this app. It's not a good idea to have these things mixed.

The would you think of the children?!? Argument is so destructive for anything privacy or freedom related, it is politicians silver bullet for any issues. When anyone makes that point now I completely ignore it, as you can use it for anything to do whatever you want, specially curtail freedoms.

Educate your children if you are so worried about them, that’s the best thing you can do.

Instagram is a closed source, proprietary app developed by a megacorp. Freedom has nothing to do with anything on that app. Or so I'm told...

I've heard children don't actually die from seeing a bit of boob, or even actual genitals.

Why are you browsing celebrity content in the first place?

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