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Comment by winternett | Hacker News Reader

I'm very proud of my history of never clicking a Facebook ad in over 10 years... Most of them are really just shills for capturing targeting data to associate with my profile anyway.

This also explains why Facebook shows me wildly random ads for Viagra alternatives, yoga pants, conservative news, and better kitty litter than my current brand... All things which have no relevance to me, yet quite often triggering my urge to click "Hide Ad", but that too in itself is also a marker that creates a record I'm sure... What a mental health nightmare it's all turned into.

I log on a lot less to social media than I used to, and use AdBlock + UBlock everywhere ritually.

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>This also explains why Facebook shows me wildly random ads for Viagra alternatives, yoga pants, conservative news, and better kitty litter than my current brand... All things which have no relevance to me

Well maybe if your cat practiced yoga, he wouldn't need better litter - or viagra.

I'm still thinking how to associate a cat on viagra with conservative news... maybe something about Bill O'Riley.

Sometimes I make random facebook posts to my page with strategically placed keywords in them based on what I want to see more of though, like "baby squirrels" and it works without fail for about a month at a time...

This is what it's all come to... hah.

Please try something about "Bill O'Riley and erect cats" - then report back on what happens.

I believe Bob Dole was a Viagra spokesperson.

I thought yoga pants were a viagra alternative…

I, on the contrary, clicked every relevant ad on facebook. Now they learned my preferences and show me mostly ads about vintage 8-bit computers and tracker music software and groups.

And no ads about viagra or yoga pants.

I'd say that FB ads generally can target much better than general web ads because they can track and profile you precisely, e.g. from your posts, comments, and other interactions. But at least you sign up for that when you agree with FB's EULA when creating an account. General web ads are worst: they try badly to track you to become more targeted, but can't get targeted enough to stop being annoyingly off the mark even if they wanted.

I honestly enjoy FB ads much more than the average political content, covid posts, food pictures that I see on my timeline. I find such cool tech and software from the ads that target me.

You can accomplish this without clicking on any ads. Just send a DM to someone with all of the keywords you want to see ads for, and you will start seeing them within a few minutes. It's the best way to find new startups with highly specific relevance.

TIL!

>All things which have no relevance to me

For the past 6 months, every single ad on Youtube (TV app) for me is about Indians singing something in Hindi... I wonder why that happens. I'm not Indian, I don't understand Hindi, and I'm not interested in Indian pop music. Yet Youtube thinks I'm a huge fan and I have no idea what to do about it.

Have you by any chance sold any Android phones you used to own at one point? Google I think does associative linking based on phones. If your phone eventually found its way to India, Google might have started to think something similar. This happened to me personally, except I was both of the people in the exchange, that’s how I know.

Wow, that sounds interesting and slightly disturbing.

A bit like my experience with a friends Android phone, cross-referencing data from the contacts app to associate e-mail addresses with phone numbers on Google services.

There must be a whole bunch of systems like this, that are never surfaced to the public except trough these occasional glitches in the Matrix that only very few people actually recognize.

"explains why Facebook shows me wildly random ads for Viagra alternatives, yoga pants, conservative news, and better kitty litter than my current brand."

Scroll to the bottom of CNN - it's all rubbish ads. That's just the long tail of attention-scamming, it's not FB.

On the back-end it's likely linked to FB data though... A whole lot of sites began to lag when facebooks DNS went offline earlier this year and that was quite telling. That data on us flows all the way across the net.

Yes I agree, but that said, it's just noise.

Also, FB learning algorithm is not some Orwellian disaster - the ads will get marginally better if you click them and that's it, I don't suggest there is any real harm there.

Google, on the other hand, is much more powerful and they know much more about you and the results they chalk up (that you depend upon for life, work) are geared to this.

Google doesn't have a 'Zuck' to pin it on, such is populism.

And FYI the 'big culprit' is VISA. They sell your data to FB and that's a big chunk of how FB learns. But it's not in the headlines, no Congressional 'Whistle blowers' etc., they fly under the radar.

I deleted facebook and twitter in January and it's been a measurable improvement in my quality of life. Before I did, I made a point of clicking every ad for a while to f-ck the algorithm. It took only about a day of that for every ad to be personal injury lawyers.

Life is better without Twitter.

Grandparents had a fit over me cutting FB. Grandkid pictures are a serious matter.

You might be interested in ad nauseam, an extension that clicks on every add for you: https://adnauseam.io/

> What a mental health nightmare it's all turned into.

So much this! Too often I will overthink why certain ads are shown to me, as I will notice how they overlap with search queries/purchases I've done recently.

Then I wonder why I didn't disable "targeted ads" in the settings for that service, when I go there to change, it's already disabled..

It's really a shame that this is the top comment, because the article itself tells a pretty interesting adventure and is not in the slightest about Facebook Ads beyond the title and introduction.

The purpose of all ads isn't for you to click them. By the time you have decided not to click it or engage further with it, it has already won.

I wouldn't suggest you use AdBlock AND uBlock - use one of the two (I'd take uBlock). https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1033706103782170625

I haven't used Facebook in years, but when I did the ads were fantastic. The only platform were the ads seemed like a net positive for me.

Have you considered the possibility that facebook might just not be that good at targeting?

Yes Facebook is more loose with targeting then it represents to its ad buyers, but also as buyers are notoriously bad at selecting clever targeting. There is a case of misaligned incentives. The more highly-targeted ad, the more likely it leads to a sale, yet for Facebook or really any ad seller they want to maximize the revenue of every impression, and broadly targeted (irrelevant) ads fill that demand quite nicely. Less filters = more potential revenue, even at the expense of their advertiser’s ROI. It’s a balance. It’s also why if you are buying ads you never try the platform-provided tools, which claim to optimize for ROI but generally tend toward yield. Google’s liberal suggestions of broad-match keywords are not to be trusted.

Facebook is probably hiring more human psychologists and marketing specialists than developers now. It explains why they aren't really innovating anything particularly new and useful in anything but their profit funnel.

Many companies get stuck on pleasing investors more than users once they reach that stage of monopoly after they've gone public, and that's why regulation kills them once opportunistic manipulation is exposed.

Unfortunately it takes a really bad/unfortunate consequence of their manipulation to occur before regulation properly steps in.

Well, with regard to conservative news, there's about a 50% chance that you would be interested, not necessarily enough to click though

Significantly less given that they’re on HN, but I suppose there’s no way FB would know that this person posts on HN.

And thats why they just blanket spam ads to everyone :)

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