Posted by wtcactus 7 hours ago
I once spent days getting rejection after rejection for ads for a Christmas light show event at a vineyard (not winery, it was a dry event), on the grounds that I was apparently selling alcohol.
Meanwhile I get ads for black market cigarettes, shrooms, roids, cannabis, and anything else you can imagine.
1. Frequency: The more I see ads for something, the more of a scam / less value I believe it to be.
2. Channel: Anything on YouTube or social media is 100% unequivocally a huge scam. To the point where if I think a product is legit or worthwhile, and I happen to see it on YouTube, I will change my mind and not even consider purchasing it.
3. Algorithmic vs. word of mouth: Anything I see that is obviously algorithmically fed to me (like recommendations, "you might like" and "featured" products) increases the scamminess / decreases the value.
It's too bad that legit small businesses trying to crack into a market are collateral damage, and I feel for them, but the ad pond is full of scum and if you're legit and you dive into it, you're going to get scum all over you.
Take any of the images from an Instagram ad. Someone, somewhere, did (probably) build or design the product being sold (a lot come from Kickstarter and may have never launched), but if you search you'll find hundreds or more scams riding on that coattails who will hope to collect and fuck off with your money before IG shuts them down (if they ever do).
From twitter's POV, that's a feature, not a bug. It's intentional.
After reading Careless People, it became much more tangible. "Yes people are motivated by money", but Zuck and others at the top of FB actively make a point of expending significant effort to avoid fixing things. It's not that they don't know, or care, it's that they know and care about keeping the gravy train at full speed while they pat themselves on the back for being masters of the universe, so to speak.
Some of the best B2C customers are on FB — willing to spend, low expectations, low maintenance.
If you add IG to the mix, it’s even better.
Your typical HNer does not really fall into “ideal customer” profile for most B2C businesses. Our saving grace is our above average income profile. Other than that, on average we are tolerated rather than sought after (imho).
In my area there are groups related to a lot of different outdoor activities , and they share information, trip reports, etc. There might be some other forums for that, but they aren't as widely used or frequently updated.
I might look at my feed* perhaps 2-3 times a week; despite this, there's a good chance only one of my friends has posted anything new. Unfortunately, that particular friend is also a fairly cliché left-of-the-Cuban-Communist-Party (no, seriously) activist and 95% of her posts are "signal boosting" things I, a Brit living in Germany, do not have any connection to, e.g. "Demexit memes" or Bernie Sander's opinions about anything.
Doesn't help that this trillion dollar corporation still can't handle rotation metadata*, so if I see something and I want to share it, even if it's a good fit for my feed, 50% chance the pic looks stupid the moment I've uploaded it, to which I respond "ugh, never mind then" and forget about trying to solve this and don't post it.
* though the messenger app's web view
I know this is meant as rhetorical snark, but facebook is by far the most popular social network on the planet, so it just sounds silly.
Younger generations won't touch Facebook. It's seen as a platform for "old" people. So Facebook is on a modest decline. (Enter Instagram and Tiktok and all that to fill the void...)
Similar experience where I met someone in 2017 and was enraptured with them, and we eventually drifted apart because they only communicated through Snapchat and Instagram.
I often wonder if abstaining from the platforms that I dislike was worth the increase in loneliness and detachment from society, but I don't have access to the alternative universe where I decided to grit my teeth and accept the data hoarding companies and dark patterns as a tradeoff for being able to interact with people who couldn't care less about the technicalities.
My friends know I am not on Facebook. If they really want me to invite me to an event, they know how to reach me, and they do. Anything being communicated out only on Facebook, I just don't go to, and I probably wouldn't want to go to it anyway.
I've been off of Facebook for so long, I don't even remember when I quit. At least 10 years ago, probably 15. And I never joined Instagram, TikTok, or any of these other ad-delivery platforms. I don't feel that I am any more lonely or more detached from society because of it.
is the loneliness worth it? probably not. is the freedom? yes.
> where I decided to grit my teeth and accept the data hoarding companies and dark patterns as a tradeoff for being able to interact with people who couldn't care less about the technicalities.
I know, right? that infinite scroll/showing all the good things on the timelines isn't their real life, they're filling a void within themselves surfing short videos and voicing opinions on nearly everything.
even Zuckerberg said Facebook isn't for making/interacting with friends anymore, it's other things, and not good things.
you're not alone, and you're not detached from society, you're just unplugged from the matrix. of course I say this while browsing subreddits and hn, but hobbies and activities where we meet people, these are always going to be the best thing available to us. in the digital world there's plenty of people who'd be down for a LAN, a hangout, an event like going hiking, and I've met some cool people outside of social media but there's many days where it was me, 4 walls, a book/finding things to occupy my time.
trust me you did yourself a solid.
This from the same company that conveniently tends to reset privacy settings on posts
(It ought to be possible to access info as a non-user, but you can't, so they force you to sign up)
The checkout screen had no mention of a subscription or any cost of a subscription, so not even sure how this is legal.
It has not gotten to the point where I dont make any purchase via IG. I'll independently search for the product and purchase it (usually less expensively via Amazon.com).
Not sure how this is good for IG, because the attribution is then not matched on the purchase. Further, not sure how this is even good for the merchant, since I'll inevitably have to do a chargeback.
Who at Meta is responsible for posting scam ads? Nobody. But Meta isn't responsible, either. So some executive makes a halfhearted promise to do something about it, but without any accountability.
The "limited liability" was just supposed to be for debts, but it turned out to be good for laundering responsibility, too. Originally, corporations had fixed term charters. And it might be worth looking at that again.
What you would see is firms divesting from companies that do this to save their own skins too, so funds would dry up if they don't remediate it.
It is profoundly ironic that Meta is apparently using cloaking techniques against regulators. Cloaking is a black-hat technique where you show one version of a landing page to the ad review bot (e.g., a blog about health) and a different version to the actual user (e.g., a diet pill scam).
Meta has spent years building AI to detect when affiliates cloak their links. Now, according to this report, Meta is essentially cloaking the ads themselves from journalists and regulators by likely filtering based on user profiling, IP ranges, or behavioral signals. They are using the sophisticated targeting tools intended for advertisers to target the "absence" of scrutiny.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-created-playbook...
That doesn't sound like cloaking. They really are deleting the ads. They're just concentrating on the ads that the regulators are most likely to see based on what they usually search for.
This seems to be the "smoking gun"... but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
> but it's unclear from the article what the source or context of the quotations are.
Good point, this quote could just be painting their actions in the poorest possible light.
https://qz.com/dieselgate-sentences-handed-down-1851782440
I do not yet know if there's wrongdoing here, but even if it was screaming bad, all US government enforcement bodies have been gutted and made completely subservient to the will of the president rather than their legislatively mandated mission, under a novel "unitary executive" philosophy.
Further, that unitary executive is completely corrupt, and has already been paid off by Meta. Ukraine is a model of clean government with proper anti-corruption investigations and teeth compared to the US.
0: https://apnews.com/article/volkswagen-germany-diesel-emissio...
Annual revenue of VW at the time was 217B €. In the EU, they paid 1.5B €. So, 0.7% of their annual revenue for a scheme that went on for years.
Granted, in the US, they actually did persecute VW properly, and they ended up paying close to 30B $. A much proper sum.
As for the jail time, they arrested 2 from middle management in the EU. No member from the board or the CEO went to jail here.
Is that what we call justice now? Specially when we want to pretend we are superior to the USA in that regard?
You are expecting third party countries to begin litigation on crimes that happen outside of their borders - even if they're not even strictly illegal where they're headquartered?
That shit never happens, and if it would, you'd first have to start jailing lots of S&P CEOs for the companies crimes that are committed in other countries and never amount to anything, precisely for the same reason.
Like literally every company thats involved in any mining, drilling etc. They always don't adhere to local environmental regulations etc
What? No, you are completely wrong. The crime was committed in many places. In the USA, but also in several EU countries (Germany included).
In fact, the numbers were more than 10x higher in the EU (since we use a lot more diesel cars) than what they were in the USA.
600 000 vehicles were affected in the USA, while 8.5 million vehicles were affected in the EU.
USA courts, effectively, issued a fine more than 200x higher per vehicle affected, than what we did in the EU.
No one that actually followed the news (and isn't German and therefore completely biased) will say with a straight face that EU justice system didn't favor VW due to established interests. The German government obviously manipulated the judicial system all over Europe to let the case go away.
It also says a lot, that it had to be the Americans bringing the case to light. A lot of people probably knew, but the control that the Germans had (and still have) over European economy and judicial systems didn't allow anyone inside the EU to speak up.
No justice was made over here.