I use targeted ads as my personal shopping assistant | Hacker News Reader

I use targeted ads as my personal shopping assistant

wired.com

18 pointsprostoalex24 comments

So this person uses targeted ads as “reminders” of something they wanted to buy but postponed for some reason.

Dude what you need is to get a copy of Getting Things Done and use a real to-do list. Hint, it will also help cope with your ADHD.

Initially when I read your comment (having read only the title) I felt that an ADHD diagnosis might be a bit extreme on its own.

After reading the first half of the article I agreed that there are some ADHD signs.

Well... apparently the author did mention ADHD below... did I mention I'm too impatient?

I wonder if medications/therapy helps with choice paralysis though.

The writer even mentions that many of the product pages are semi-bookmarked in the way of open tabs in their phone browser.

Why on earth would they WANT ads served to them at random that might be related to the product page they visited?

This post reminded me again of how different neurotypicals and neurodiverget people think, and it's showing in the comments.

Most people are going "that's not a great idea"... well guess what, the author was concerned enough about their privacy to ask an expert out.

Well, for folks with conditions like ADHD it's still likely easier than actually maintaining a list, and this difference in effort required is something I think a lot of neurotypicals don't understand fully.

(To give an example of how something is more "tough" as opposed to "Just do it already!": Imagine you have to wash dishes. Easy, right?

Well, what if you've just come back from a mentally gruelling day at work and just want to order takeout and sleep? Surely it's still "easy"? Well it's about that hard "normally" for some ADHD people without having spent 8 hours at work.)

I think praising pathological workarounds could be harmful. People with ADHD should look for scalable, long term solutions, not shitty lifehacks like this one. Would you seriously recommend someone who struggles with life organization to try this?

I know one person with severe ADHD who managed to find ways of coping with it through healthy habits such as extensive use of notes and calendar. They're effectively better at managing their life than many neurotypicals. Sure, it's probably much harder to make those "stick" if you have ADHD, but it's even more important that you try, instead of falling back on laughable anti-patterns like ad watching.

I think there's a communication gap.

I absolutely don't want to praise what the author is doing. I'm saying that the choices of ADHD folks is different from non-adhd people, and from the outside some choices may not make sense. I don't think using ads like the author does is a good idea, but I understand (and can sympathize) with them.

Don't we have shopping carts for that? Never really understood the point of spending billions on ads only to show me products I already know about. Just feels like a waste of everybody's time.

I am not even opposed to ads, but Internet ads always felt like missing the mark by a mile, be it showing products I have zero interest in, showing me the exact same product I just ordered, not even telling me the name of the product before the 5-sec-to-skip are over and so on. I don't think Internet ads ever showed me a single new product I would actually care about in the last 20 years. It's frankly baffling how far of the mark they generally are, even just showing me random stuff should have a far better hit rate.

That's not to say all Internet ads are useless, reviews on Youtube make great product advertisements. But the classic Internet ads just don't do it for me.

Retargeting works, which is why companies continue to spend money on it (and I'm speaking from personal experience). You can set it up to exclude purchasers.

I agree ads don't always get it right, but they're a long way from useless.

>Retargeting works,

yeah, basically because of this guy!

It felt a bit like paid article from the ads team.

Just a though - if I need ads to remind me to buy something with the next salary, maybe I don't need it enough and it's ADHD talking not me. If I need it enough I will come to the same conclusion later independently. At least that's the way at how I try to control my impulsiveness with online shopping.

Can't be a very good one then considering that no ad products are mentioned.

The writer is a psychiatrist with ADHD. This is a simple article explaining how something most people don't like can ironically be gamed to be helpful for this type of person.

Delightfully delusiounal. If you forget to buy it, you probably didn't need it to begin with. Get adblock and stop yourself from wasting money on useless stuff.

"if you forget it you didn't need it" isn't true for people with ADHD.

Advertising is all about getting you to buy things you don't need.

Clickbait.

Respect, though. An intentionally provocative article about targeted ads to help serve more targeted ads. Pretty clever.

This article is hilarious and I'm certain the author must have missed April Fool's Day by nearly a month just as a larf. It reminds me of the recent articles about zoomers not knowing how to navigate a file system, which I found to be particularly hilarious as well.

The only targeted ads I ever see are for items I have already purchased.

I don't see why these ads don't work like Amazon's "People who bought this also bought" recommendations.

Someone should check on the author to see if they're okay.

As someone likely with ADHD myself, the answer is no, likely not okay. This is likely just one of the many coping techniques the author uses to manage their life.

No, you don't. Was this written by Mark Zuckerberg?

No, YOU don't. Thankfully we're all different.

FWIW, much like the author, I much prefer targeted ads to random ones. Retargeting generally has an influence on me when I'm still in the 'decision' phase.

Keeping my ads as unrelevant to me as possible has kept me from developing anything besides an aversion to them, like when you reflexively give someone password or bathroom privacy.

One of us may have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

You have ad preferences instead of ad blockers? Are you Mark Zuckerberg?

These targeted ads are so cool, they should build a specialized service for it, with a proper login function, so they always know it's you.

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