Posted by freetonik 3 days ago
Same here.
I think the songs get pushed by who pays to push, and most of those songs have vocals.
Goth industrial stuff from like the female singer from L’Âme Immortelle was a nice exception with “Bitterkeit”.
I liked their playlists/radios, though and I miss them.
However, that "non-skip" thing was always a showstopper. Undiscovered music is often obscure for a reason, and I would end up exhausting my skips fairly quickly.
The one exception was an experiment where I gave every single song a thumbs up. It converged on comedy rock (Weird Al, Tenacious D, Flight of the Conchords, etc).
I've seen the same kind of thing in other services that weight recent choices as a part of their graph based recommendations like Spotify and YouTube. They can get stuck in a feedback loop where the pool of recommendations shrinks to the point where it recommends the same stuff over and over.
I have quite a few channels:
1. Comedy rock, seeded by "Code Monkey". (Mainly Jonathan Coulton and Weird Al Yankovic, but other people sneak in there. The biggest hit, in personal terms, was a song by Matthew Ebel.)
2. Secondary comedy rock, seeded by "Weird Al Yankovic"; this channel is mostly dead. It tried to converge with the main comedy rock channel for obvious reasons.
3. Country (sad), seeded by "She Used To Say That To Me". The main thing on this channel that I personally see as a genre outlier is Mark McGuinn's "Busy Signal", but going to youtube I see that that song is tagged "#countrymusic".
4. Country (happy), seeded by "Emily Harper".
Those two channels also constantly attempt to converge with each other. But they mostly don't try to converge with the comedy rock channel.
5. "Clancy Brothers".
This has blossomed into a more general Irish folk and sea shanty channel.
6. "Steeleye Span".
This one plays Steeleye Span and some other English folk and folk rock music. It constantly tries to play Irish music, though the Clancy Brothers channel does not try to play English folk.
7. "Alan Menken". This one is good at staying separate. It plays showtunes. (And sometimes branches out a little; Annette Funicello's "Pineapple Princess" is on there.)
8. A channel seeded by "Kiss Me", by Sixpence None The Richer. I like the way this song sounds. I was never happy with anything that played on this channel and it's been abandoned.
Within the past several years I have gotten the feeling that Pandora would rather I just have one channel that plays "everything"; there have been attempts at crossing the deeper channel boundaries.
I have never ended up with Ellie Goulding or Dubstep.
I have a bunch of different Pandora channels with different themes.
Pandora's skip limit is per-channel. If you run out of skips on one channel, and give up on it and start playing another channel, you get the full complement of skips back. You can go for quite a while if you have several channels.
In a development that is probably not related, but nevertheless feels like it is, Pandora tries hard to get you to collapse your channels, playing songs on one of them that don't fit at all but that you've thumbed up on another channel.
(Another obvious pattern is that if you haven't signed in to Pandora in a while, all of your channels will heavily feature songs that you've already thumbed up. They start playing new potential "discoveries" only after working through a "welcome back" backlog.)
You are Spotify's product. They get money making record labels happy. User preference is secondary to this goal.
In fact, the algorithm is there to make money by changing the choice a person would make otherwise - the subtlety I assume is figuring when someone will accept a "good enough" choice handed to them. But just limiting choice to what you want someone to make might be a simpler approach.
The new Korean monster movie, Hope, keeps getting jammed into my watchlist, and I can’t remove it.
I don’t want to watch it, and I’ll bet that watching it, won’t make it go away.
Maybe Bono invested into it…
(None of this excuses the annoyance but I loathe leaving something untriaged when it’s a matter of seconds for the dice roll of helping.)
Those of us that were Apple users, back when, may remember a certain forced "gift" of a U2 album...
There was a case a few months ago where the App Store was forcing an app reinstall into people’s phones even after they’d deleted it years prior, which I assume ended up being a server-side bug (perhaps a database shard had a defect?) since so few, relatively speaking, were affected.
I had to escalate to a cloud data repair through their support to unbreak my own database entries re: a different service. It took several weeks but it eventually got resolved.
Enabling their "AutoPlay Station" keeps going to certain tracks that I ALWAYS skip and yet they come back again and again.
They get pushed also by what's the most profitable to play out, which is why you get so many bootleggy "Live Version" and shitty remixes.
It's often hard to get Spotify that actually all you want is the unremixed unedited unremastered album version of a track.
There's many auto generating dynamic ones. Like the Monday and Criday ones. Plus the DJ new AI thing and then the better stuff is often in all the human curated Spotify lists.
There's also a way on desktop to take an existing g playlist and "create similar" where it tries to make something similar too one of your already made playlists. You have a lot more control using this
Even YouTube music works better for me most of the time, but SoundCloud clearly takes the lead
The music industry associations around the world generally can’t force you to use their royalty system for your own music. So if you make an ai generated track they’re out of the loop completely. As much as people hate ai music it’s a nice upside.
It may well do, but if so, that's because they have more passive subscribers, or more generally that their users listen to less music. Possibly because their recommendation services are worse (most were much worse than Spotify's last time I checked), or possibly just because they have less users streaming all day in their hair salon etc.
(This payment scheme also why Jay Z's Tidal, when it inflated the listens of Beyonce's "Lemonade" and Kanye's "Life of Pablo", stole from every other artist on that platform. I'm still amazed they got away with that, but I guess Norwegian courts weren't prepared for the "shit-flinging monkey" legal strategy.)
I’m so happy that massive corporations can save on royalties by pushing AI slop in my playlist.
I really wish I could use an LLM to select the recommendations
Holy shit, I’m the exact opposite. I’m so sorry. I am the reason you have to listen to all that vocal trance.
The New York Times doesn't have to bullshit because people want to use it, thus it's a more trustworthy advertising point.
https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...
- People who know you very well (friends, family, spouse) often buy you bad gifts you need to pretend to be happy to receive.
- Ultimately, advertisers aren't _merely_ trying to find things you want. They're trying to get you to buy _their_ things. So someone selling (let's say) hamburgers might be savvy enough to avoid vegetarians, but after that how would they possibly narrow it down? Not everyone wants to try out a new burger place, or even cares about advertising when it comes to restaurant suggestions.
ie, they're trying to coerce you into wanting their products, and no amount of targeting can really fix that problem. Also, targeting is difficult.
Coming from a relatively hardened mindset, it is startling to understand how impressionable people must be for modern advertising to be worth the cost.
There's a lot of question as to how much advertising is actually worth the cost, at least in terms of actual sales. I suspect that many companies could scale back their spending on marketing substantially and never notice any difference in sales.
Advertising does more than push sales though, it also manipulates consumer perspectives and our culture. It sets expectations. It tries to make you feel inadequate, insecure, and unfulfilled. It modifies how we act and the ways we express ourselves. It changes how we see ourselves and the world. Maybe that is what's really worth the money.
As part of his training he had to run an advertising campaign for a minor P&G shampoo brand. Training for a finance position, not a product management position! Why would you make somebody in finance handle marketing for a shampoo? Because they need to understand the fundamental mechanics that drive the business. There's no such thing as a good or a bad ad. The only thing that matters is that you flash the name of your product into peoples' primitive lizard brain over and over and over. Pantene, Pantene, Pantene, Pantene. People buy commodity products, and are willing to pay more, solely based on whether they recognize the name or not. Humans have no defense against this.
When you view ads through this lens, the number of ads for things that consumers do not even directly purchase — like prescription drugs, or oil - makes a lot more sense.
And nowadays they're mainly trying to convince us that these companies are green and part of the zero emissions/carbon negative solution
And for the record, the last one (sales) is what really matters. As another old saying goes, "Nothing happens until you get a purchase order."
Really aligning sales incentives with the company's goals is surprisingly rare, and seems much rarer now than it was 20 years ago becasue of digital media.
Established Titles doesn't make you a lord. Honey doesn't save you money. Brilliant doesn't help you learn things. Betterhelp doesn't connect you with real therapists. I forgot the others.
The VPN side - it feels more like a honeypot than anything else to me.
I'll sometimes use the VPN mode from Proton, but I wouldn't sign up for just a vpn - I simply assume they are selling my data the same as everyone else. The only way to convince me otherwise is an open-source non-profit vpn properly overnighted by the community.
One doesn't need to be frugal or come from such environment, its more about basic human decency and mental hygiene. You try to manipulate me to buy your product, normalize its existence etc? Ok will make sure to avoid that, there is a lot of competition. Too pushy and seeing it everywhere? it means you over-invested on marketing manipulation and product has probably seen some dramatic cost-cutting to make it all together still financially viable. In any case, customer lost.
uBlock origin with Firefox on internet, including (especially!!!) on phone. Ads simply don't exist in my world under normal circumstances, not on general web, nor on youtube. When something bad happens and I see internet or youtube without those protections, its properly nauseating and outright insulting to me.
But - I've seen people en masse already conditioned to accept this, they watch it all, some of them even take hints for their shopping habits. When questioned, they don't see anything wrong, don't care about manipulation. Sometimes I feel like an alien. Luckily my wife sees it the same, I'll go to great lengths to protect my young kids from this cancerous soul garbage. 'Better' parents from our circles see it similarly, for now at least.
They are throwing many different strategies out there through many different avenues and banking one the one that just happens to pull in a new chunk of buyers. It’s like lower-stakes gambling.
If I make let's say a children's toy, how am I supposed to let people know that this new type of toy even exists? That WHOLE process is advertising, no? Whether I give these toys away for free at a Santa Clause parade, pay department stores to put my toy in prominent shelves, or buy space on Cartoon Network.
How do you get even a single buyer without advertising?
It's true that advertising is a great way to promote a product, but its far from the only way. For many years now I've done what I can to cut all advertising out of my life and yet I still buy lots of things, including things I've never seen a single ad for.
The mechanism of how advertising works seems to be not that. I think repeatedly brand exposure does something to the brain and decision making that we don’t fully understand.
Exposure breeds familiarity, which breeds desire, I think.
Even if all you hear is an occasional ad about the company, you might get curious and research them yourself.
I'm sure it's almost completely subconscious.
The last thing a marketing company or media provider wants to admit is that any of their services are underperforming, or worse, turning off buyers.
But, even if there's a better equilibrium, isn't loading a website crammed with obtrusive ads still a coasean bargain between two parties? Simon P. Anderson and Stephen Coate studied this question in "Market Provision of Broadcasting: A Welfare Analysis" (2005). They identified unpriced externalities like the common-pool attention tragedy, as has been raised in other comments here, and asymmetric information & hold-up, which increase transaction costs.
Divide advertising spend into two components: Informative specs, and persuasive/obtrusive spend. The margial external cost is the sum of profits foregone by rival businesses, and aggregate viewer nuisance. A pigouvian tax with an exemption threshold for factual spreadsheets and apunitive rate on expenditure above that (or visual intrusion metrics) both prices the cognitive nuisance imposed on readers, and collapses the positional arms race between rival firms; transforming the industry from a high-waste prisoner's dilemma to a low-cost, high-information pareto optimum.
Obviously, you still have to watch out for firms goodharting the spreadsheet metric, but that's both a partially solvable problem, and a much better situation than the current nash equilibrium.
This doesn't in the slightest replace ads though. Before modern internet advertising we had advertising in whatever else had your attention. Ads were meant as we way to simplify and ease distribution.
It's a horrible business in terms of user experience but it's purpose isn't user experience it's meant for businesses to be able to streamline their outreach for much cheaper than the alternatives, imagine cold calls, emails, door knocks, door to door sales has died for this very reason.
I am not trying to explain away the issues and societal problems but they have value of companies otherwise they wouldn't exist. However much people would like to pretend CEOs and founders aren't completely retared.
For initial distribution spikes Ads are the best possible solution, very expensive yes, but if your goal is growth Ads are the most efficient solution since they almost linearly convert spending into visibility in turn producing growth.
Horrible way to do stuff but it's what it is.
The only companies that have made any real money have had to use Ads from the very start.
You can catch lightining in a bottle but exceptions here prove the rule.
It's absurd to think anyone will care about your product if you don't.
Despite lichess being better in every way except marketing, it's still #2.
It's very impressive word of mouth got it to #2, but marketing experts are marketing experts.
It's like why they use sharp points in the hazmat symbol, it just looks bad even if you don't know what it means.
That kind of stuff is absolutely worth the cost of ad spend online
I did some web development work for an advertising guy about 20-odd years ago and he found my position on it baffling.
"But advertising works on everyone!" he cried, "everyone remembers their favourite adverts! Why do you buy oh for example the washing powder you buy?"
Well, I buy Persil, because it's what my mum buys, and I like how it smells. I tried other washing powders, but I didn't like how they smelled so much, and there are two brands I won't buy because they have annoying shouty adverts.
He just didn't get it at all.
Everyone is influenced by advertising even if it’s third hand: “oh I like that (thing) where did you get it, oh (person) saw an ad and bought one and I tried it too”
But I agree that if you inculcate a default position of rejecting things that are advertised you can avoid being pulled into wasting your energy on unnecessary things
Expanding on this.
"Wanna go eat somewhere? Like McDonald's or something?" -> McDonald's is suggested offhandedly[1], but that's only because it's already somewhere in the back of the person's mind, and it's already associated with "eating". It's only "already" there because the person is aware of it. And they're aware of it for whatever reason (one of which could be advertising, but who knows!).
The endgame for advertising is when people become blind to ads, either because they become used to them, or because they hate them so much they "ignore" them (or so they tell themselves). So in both those situations they completely block out the "ad" part of it, and "I saw an ad about a thing that..." becomes "Wasn't there a thing that...?").
[1]: Maybe even defensively, like "if we don't find anything better (or we're not in the mood for anything in particular) there's always this option as a last resort".
I always try to avoid ads as much as possible and not having any social media really helps. But going to use this remark from now on.
So even the most hardcore nerds adapt their tastes to what other people like. It's not so hard, because hey, there are other good TV shows, there's other reasonable entertainment. It's hard to say objectively that a Star Trek convention is better than a Mongolian Chess tournament anyway.
But when advertising comes into the picture... It's not that you necessarily think the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the best thing ever. It's that you know everyone will be talking about it, everyone will be referencing it, so if you can find at least decently entertaining you should maybe prioritize getting into that over getting into Danish underground comics from the 90s.
If the company can afford to throw money at Frivolous Thing X, the money has to come from somewhere, which implies it comes from consumers who aren't actually getting a good deal on the product or service.
That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough". Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective, there isn't really a lot of meaningful competition in the ad space driving superior targeting. It's more about having the killer network, the list of effective channels (search, youtube, instagram whatever) that is the big players advantage rather than their targeting skills.
> Google is doing McDonalds a disservice as their advertiser by showing you the ad (and won't be doing the user any useful service either).
yes this is right and why the parent is totally off base
> That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".
This is totally wrong. Ads targeting "algorithms" are some of the most complicated systems on earth. First of all, it is completely done by machine learning models now not simple algorithms, and within companies who are doing ads targeting well (ie, Google, Meta, Tiktok, and if you want to go down the list to the less competent companies then you can include X and Reddit and others) there is massive internal pressure and competition to get any edge by either improving models or other parts of the ads targeting stack. The top dogs as in Tiktok, Google Search, and Meta have been posting 10+% yoy ads revenue numbers for many years now with a much smaller increase or even flatlining user counts. It's all due to improvements in the ads stack making them more effective and more useful for advertisers (and they and the article in the post would say users as well but HN mostly doesn't subscribe to this viewpoint) driving more total ads spend and a growing economy.
My perception is that your job is to build a model to psychologically profile people at scale to manipulate them into buying stuff they wouldn't buy otherwise. Now, first of all, that seems incredibly unsettling to me in its own right already.
But where it gets really unsettling is if you think even a little bit past the immediate usecase: Once you have this sort of model, who knows what sort of other stuff you can manipulate people into? Should people like Zuckerberg really have the power to do this? And if you trust Zuckerberg, what about other players? Say an authoritarian state somehow managed to get control over these models. Doesn't it seem like you're building an incredibly dangerous thing here?
Wonder how you feel about these things and if you've ever had similar concerns. Like, I get that there's probably all sorts of interesting engineering problems involved. But one could say the same thing about von Braun building the V2 - these things aren't just puzzles in isolation!
And they have been for a very long time, dating back to at least when von Braun was building those V2s.
If we lived in a more humane world, intrusive advertisement and propaganda would all be banned--but that is like talking about some kind of utopia-level civilization right now. Might as well be discussing modern democracy back in the 10th century.
People buy to solve the problems they already had. All ads do is give them a timely reminder of something they were already thinking about.
What people seem to be looking for is not targeted advertising but targeted recommendations - where vendor "spend" can't skew the results to show you crap you don't want. But that's a product the consumer and not the vendor would have to pay for, by definition. Unfortunately consumers don't have deep enough pockets to make this kind of thing lucrative over just selling ads.
There is a big misconception that ads are just targeted as picking the max(advertiser spend) and it really fuels low quality discussion online.
[1] VPNs are a perfect example here. I would never use NordVPN because they advertise on every square inch of YouTube. This suggests to me that they're either charging too much for what they offer or they're getting money from their actual customers and the users are simply the inventory they sell to those customers.
It's an entirely soulless process, which makes my extensive ad-blocking regime entirely justified the same way that walking off of a beaten path in the woods is justified.
Agreed wholeheartedly, and this is an important point: advertisers don't really lose much by showing you ads you don't want, so it's unlikely the system would ever become ultra-precise.
Google has a lot of incentive to optimize this, and it's a lot of why they (and Meta) spent so much money on AI research that eventually brought us modern AI.
People who bought BBQs or anything else related to hamburger-adjacent foods or equipment.
People who live or travel through a 30 minute radius of somewhere that they're sold.
People who are able to view the ad between the hours of 11am and 7pm.
People who have engaged with burger-related activity on social media (TikTok, Reddit, YouTube)
People with a higher-than-average association with other burger fans.
All of this information is available for a price.
If I've bought a BBQ and hamburger-adjacent equipment, I probably prefer my hamburgers home-made.
I might view the ad after 7 PM, as that's when I get home from work, and still decide to go there the next day during my commute.
Engaging with burger-related activity might also mean that I run a competing joint, so advertising to me is pointless (unless you want me to buy that one time just to check my competition).
That's what this is all about. Where is my tech-powered shopping helper and advocate?
Im not sure if you mean “coerce” literally but if so this is overkill. Maybe “persuade” or to be more critical, “manipulate”?
One of the examples in the posts describes ads for products that aren't even sold in his country. I feel like limiting your ads to people that are or live in a country you sell your burgers in would be a good start.
I have bought a number of $50-$100 things that are advertised to me on Instagram. I think I bought a $1,000 piece of furniture once.
Instagram ads are perfectly targeted to me. I am sometimes amazed at how often they show me good products that I legitimately want to buy - often niche, unique products from companies I didn't know existed. Obviously they are combining information from other sites I visit, because the accounts I follow on Instagram have nothing to do with any products.
Targeted ads in this setting are quite useful and pleasant for me! I wish Meta all the best in making them even better. I'm sure they are also super useful for the small businesses making the products I buy, because they can build awareness much more cost-effectively than other mechanisms.
Yes, I agree that when I visit my local news sites and see "targeted" ads for sports gambling, "800 singles in your area", or other nonsense I'm not interested in, it's pretty unpleasant. But those are just shitty ads.
Why would Meta not raise their costs of advertising until it was the most efficient by the smallest margin?
Not sure why we got to this point. If there had only been video game ads on my video game site I wouldn't have had to resort to adblocking back in - checks calendar - 2007.
On the flip side I only give cash and they all complain its not very thoughtful, no matter how nice the Hallmark money card.
It's almost like rather than identify who I am, they identified the social niche stereotype I identify with, and then pull ads from that reservoir.
So while Google is trying to get me to buy discrete transistors and push cart tires (work related stuff), Meta is trying to get me to buy bespoke Icelandic wool socks, artisan gummy edibles, and hand made ceramic table ware.
Doesn't it make more sense that these things just advertise better on Instagram? These are all things people like to show off on that platform.
> It's almost like rather than identify who I am, they identified the social niche stereotype I identify with, and then pull ads from that reservoir.
So... you're a typical user of Instagram? I'm not following how this alone isn't the largest signal of all.
Convincing someone who does want a burger to buy one at Shake Shack does work.
I just disabled my adblocker on the BBC website out of curiosity and oh am I happy I don't live like this.
What's freaky is there are people who actually like the ads.
Granted, many of us enjoy the kooky ads that occur during the Super Bowl. That's not really what I'm talking about. I've met people who say they enjoy midroll ads in videos and podcasts. There are even folks who like banner ads. To me, those all represent precious seconds that add up to countless hours of my life wasted, which I will never get back. The more ads I avoid, the more opportunity to experience life I have.
Another horrible thing about ads in general is they distract one from being alone with their own thoughts. A lot of people are too afraid to spend time alone with their own thoughts, so in a sense they might enjoy the fact that any sensory input can take them away from that. To me, modern ads are thought vampires. It might be one thing if ads focused on the merits of products, and if most products today were of quality and a fair price, except that is not the norm.
The HN crowd tends to filter out lower IQ people from their social circles so that it's easy to forget this simple fact about humanity.
One thing I've realized - I simply can't grok many of theirs' decisions, viewpoints, values. Its often quite selfish view but rarely just that. And just pure facts rarely pierce the thick veil or version of reality they create for themselves to feel comfortable in this crazy world. Or maybe thats the thing - I don't mind feeling uncomfortable in this world, seeing uncomfortable truths, picking up lesser of evils instead if simple black & white polarity, or the pinnacle - actually changing my opinion on things as I learn more about it.
Or in other words - can't talk to them about anything deeper, nor do I grok them beyond surface layer. But as you say its fine, and also its quite easy to create a life where you just don't meet them, apart from odd situations like car repairs or home reconstruction.
I’ve watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail countless times and I laugh at it every time.
I'll never forget the last time I visited the Dell website, it had some popup dialogue constantly jump into view on the side and then disappear again after two seconds or so. It was so infuriatingly distracting to me, meanwhile someone else sitting next to me didn't even notice it before I pointed it out. Which I guess explains why that same person often has trouble finding a seemingly obvious button on screen - it could jump across the screen and some might still not see it.
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/120541/why-do-people-...
I find it especially funny that when I point my eyes directly at the banner (because it's the subject of the question) my brain still filters it out by ignoring it.
This is especially true when you know how to avoid ads otherwise and are confronted with what must be the default ads for the majority of regular users.
It's like a smell. Some are pleasant, some are fascinating, and some are totally nasty, but I don't willingly plug my nose everywhere I go like a psycho.
What would the world be like without smells? This is a serious question I'm asking. How recalcitrant do you really have to be to get offended by all ads and on the principle of the matter?
But I enjoy creative ads thanks to growing up watching the french tv show Culture Pub: https://www.culturepub.fr/annee-chapitre/2007/
For example, insight into the french advertisement culture makes you appreciate the full depth of the movie "99 francs": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0875113/
One of my best friends had banner ads and YouTube ads on his laptop, and there was a day where I finally had to say something about this. I asked him if he ever considered installing an ad blocker and explained how easy it is. He surprised me by saying "Meh, they don't really bother me. I kinda like some of them." As mind-bending as this is from my own perspective, this mindset does seem to exist.
I can also count with more than one finger how many girls I've gone on a movie date with who said "I dunno, I like it" after I made fun of the stupid Coca-Cola commercial or whatever before the trailers. Looking back at this, I probably was being a bit pompous. I'm pretty sure they liked the commercials for the vibes they picked up from their perceived positivity.
I remember visiting family during the height of the iPod and being offended by how many iPod ads were on TV. I worked for Apple at the time. I couldn't imagine not hating the company if I didn't work for them because of how intrusive the ads were. My family didn't seem to notice / tuned them out.
I'm so glad that political season is finally over because I've been being spammed by politicians over and over and over. The worst part was they weren't even from my state.
Advertisers forgot that you shouldn't spam the exact same ad over and over. I am never going to buy insurance from gigco, state form, or liderty for that reason.
Sometimes there is a glitch and I get more generic ads, and I live on the edge of a "rich" zip code so I get ads for jet rideshares and lately ULA, I mean I enjoy Scott Manley's Deep Space Updates but I am not launching sats, so I am not sure why I get those ads.
(Annoyingly it’s also stored in a cookie; if you travel frequently, you can get stuck in a redirect loop.)
Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought is kind of a separate issue, because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon) and surely is so easy to avoid I find it bizarre that it still happens in this day and age.
As an aside, there is exactly one place on earth where I will actively look around for ads, and that is London Underground stations. Because for whatever reason they advertise a lot of cultural events (concerts, festivals, plays, etc).
I've asked people at Amazon on the recommendation algorithm side about this, since it comes up so often in discussions.
Their answer is that, surprisingly, it is a good heuristic. If you just bought something, you've shown intent, and there's a small probability that you're going to be unhappy with your initial purchase and back on the market soon, for whatever reason.
Is the posterior probability that you'll buy a mattress again shortly after buying one, a small chance? Yes, undoubtedly. But is it smaller than the prior probability of a random person who hasn't bought any mattress at all recently, suddenly being on the market for a mattress? Apparently not.
Weird things can happen with joint probabilities when both sides of the condition are very unlikely. Sort of like how your chance of having some rare cancer after testing positive on a ~99% accurate cancer screening test is still quite tiny.
This makes no sense. If I just bought a mattress, the prior probability of a random person buying it is irrelevant. What's relevant is the posterior distribution of what people buy after buying a mattress. Yes, you might buy another one, but what about other bedroom accessories for example?
A mattress might not be the best example though, because what really matters here is the expected value from the posterior probability, which includes the price. So a more expensive product with a slightly lower probability of purchase might yield a higher expected value than cheaper products with higher probability.
Anyway, that's orthogonal to the discussion: my point is that it's the posterior distribution conditioned on the mattress purchase that should be modeled, not the comparison with random people that may or may not just have bought a mattress.
It probably helps when your marketplace is filled with knockoffs and misrepresented trash.
Back in the bad old days of adobe and flash plugins in Internet explorer, malicious ads targetting those were the malware infection vector in something like 80% of cases. Browsers have gotten better, but it remains the case that ad networks are the single easiest way to inject your mal-content into another website.
In those days, any time I handled a client call about malware, I replaced everything with Chrome (built in pdf viewer, sandboxed/autoupdated flash) and adblock plus. And then, my calls from those users stopped being about malware or slow internet.
We see headlines about this-- about the Israeli firm that was abusing this, for instance, to hit targets-- and I am left scratching my head. Of course...?
IMHO it's the duty of any techie (with the social capital to influence digital hygiene) to ensure they and theirs are set up with at least ublock lite.
I’m not sure about that. I suspect people don’t like how intrusive ads are. Especially in videos.
The security issue strikes me as a post Adblock rationalisation. People know how the sites they visit are funded and need some way to justify cutting that off.
The number who understand the security implications is going to be very small.
Isn't the point of those, that in the end, the likelihood of you buying something again just recently bought might be tiny, but is probably still bigger than showing the same add to a random other person?
The effect is quite strong.
Humans are stupid and fail to make logical decisions, instead they reinforce and justify their previous ones.
Showing you the product you purchased is the best way to get you to transfer your purchase decision to purchase additional other products.
> one place on earth where I will actively look around for ads, and that is London Underground stations
They probably have data on return rates and the brand/model people buy after returning? Or are you saying they show you the exact same brand/model you just bought? That would be weird, unless it’s a consumable.
1) and a lot of them prefer them to be gone
2) why it would be a hard truth? I am not expecting that everyone will match my preferences
Like the ads I get on instagram, I actually don't mind because they are show me clothing consistent with my taste in clothes or appliance/utilties I'd find useful. Can't say I've ever seen a useful ad on twitter/X or Tiktok.
I suspect that Amazon somehow get paid for "impressions" by the ad originator.
(it looks very much like a standard enshitification pattern : 1) gain market dominance, 2) screw the users 3) screw the business customers )
Guys, if I buy a photo camera, I might want lenses, or a cleaning kit, or maybe a camera bag. But I'm almost certainly not interested in starting a camera collection, nor am I interested in incompatible brands to what I just bought.
It shouldn't be so hard to run some stats and figure out that there's things one doesn't buy again often, like washing machines, cameras, laptops and other big purchases.
Also, search still sucks. Searching for things like sizes where fuzzy ranges are involved is pain. Like I need to find a recessed light that fits into a 100mm hole, it's a pain to search for still. At this point I think somebody at Amazon could have come up with a way to categorize products and extract parameters automatically. And the pain only increases exponentially if you need 3-4 things in a product to match.
ChatGPT can do it, no reason why Amazon couldn't just have that on their page.
You might not be, but as a guy with easily a dozen cameras from half a dozen brands, we're absolutely out there, and I know plenty of other folks in my network who do too.
(Reason: I travel a lot, I live stream for a living, and my partner does social media.)
I'm old. I don't understand how the economics of this work, and I think of it was explained to me, it would annoy me.
People in livestreaming are paid because their platform is paid, because it sells advertising during the livestreaming. Advertisers pay because the platform can demonstrate that a lot of eyeballs are watching, and they support livestreamers that many eyeballs enjoy watching. There can also be direct sponsors, merchandising, franchises, etc.
If your question is not the economics but the social aspect (why would someone watch livestreaming?), the answer is that either the livestreamer is doing something cool that people like watching -- and you can be as judgemental about that as you can be for TV shows ("they're watching Real Housewives / a guy speedrunning Super Mario Bros / HYROX championships ??!?!?"), and there is now also the live-service aspect, which you've experienced for decades in the form of talk radio with callers, and DJs taking live requests. Also, in the early days of the internet, there used to be forums that would host watch parties, so everyone watched the TV at the same time and commented in a thread to get the metacommentary and it built up a watching community. That is now integrated into the livestreaming, and the chat sidebar is visible to everyone watching, approximating a live audience, who can let their thoughts be known in a slightly more nuanced way than just cheering/booing/clapping.
If you buy one camera, you are likely a billion times more likely to buy another. And, you have the disposable income to be in the market.
>> there's things one doesn't buy again often, like washing machines
You are not a whale, but you might be. Most people only buy one washing machine but a few people buy dozens (apartment managers and such). Such people, whales, sometimes buy one as test case. So ya, if you buy one then you are a strong maybe for one day buying many more.
The washing machine advertiser doesn't want to to spend money to show me an ad for something I'm not going to buy, and even Amazon doesn't benefit because they get something out of each purchase, so they should want to show me stuff I want to buy too.
There's just nobody that benefits from bad ad selection.
* I purchase something and all the recommended products become the thing I just purchased for the next month.
* I do an operation in 3D modeling software that can be applied in 2 directions, it always chooses to apply it in the direction that makes no sense.
* I get recommendations in my social media feeds for what to do in a certain city for 2 months after I already visited and returned home.
* I click on a link to a song, listen for 10 seconds and turn it off because its a genre I don't like, too bad, that is what the algorithm thinks I'm exclusively into now (related, right now I'm struggling with Tidal recommending Swedish language songs because a band I recently discovered is Swedish despite singing in English).
Maybe I don't notice when the computer gets it right most of the time, but it really feels like it gets it wrong more than it gets it right. It also feels like this continually gets worse, when software should be getting smarter at predicting what a user wants. Is it unreasonable to expect that my computer can see that I did the same operation on something twice in a row and that maybe it should prompt me to do it on the rest of the data in the same location?
The difference I noticed was that the system tended to react to me manually ramping up the brightness, by turning it all the way down again after a few seconds, and vice versa.
It was supposed to be "learning" but it stayed like this for at least a year/major version.
30 years in tech has taught me that a system labelled "intelligent" is the often the dumbest imaginable.
A small storefront business I liked closed up over the summer. Literally nothing to do with tech other than they had a website, flat HTML that hadn't been touched in years, to solicit business. They communicated with me and their other customers by SMS, almost exclusively.
I talked to one of the core employees and asked why they were closing. Business was drying up, the usual story of business headwinds but among the reasons business was drying up was they couldn't make money by running ads, the cost of running the ads these days meant they would barely break even on the average customer they acquired at the historical customer acquisition rates.
I don't buy ads myself but the sense they shared was the like the locksmith and plumber experience, except as seen from the other side. Maybe it's different in other parts of the world but the experience is 1000s of ads for indistinguishable fly-by-night-looking operations all of which seemingly lead to the same call centers. Dispatching nearly-faceless vans from who knows where and a different junior-ish guy or gal shows up each time, looks dazed, does an average job and hustles off to the next one.
I don't know the business well but to me as a buyer it's a bit like a hairstylist. Once you find a good one, or for me at least, I am reluctant to switch.
You can be certain that they are using that data. The truth is that the data being collected about you is not intended to benefit you, it's being gathered and stored and sold to be used against you in any way that the person with that data feels might be an advantage for them.
It's not really about showing you relevant ads, or helpful recommendations, or useful product offerings. It hasn't been about any of those things for a very long time now. Your data will still be used that way, but while companies will tell you that is mainly why they collect your data that is a lie. Those are secondary uses for your data and making those things work well for your benefit is a cost to the companies and they are only willing to invest so much time/money/effort into that.
Your data is being used mostly for their benefit at your expense, and where it isn't being used today, it's being stored for a time in the future when it can be used more effectively against you. AI promises to make it easier than ever to trawl through all that data and find ways to leverage it to better manipulate you, or take more of your money from you, or further limit any possible risk you might expose a company to.
Companies don't want you to be aware of when and how that data is being used, so it's natural for you to feel like it's all being ignored, but you can sure that a lot of work is going into finding new and creative ways to put all that data to use.
The primary purposes of the data going forward will be: psychological manipulation by political factions and special interest groups, calculating the absolute maximum cost you will bear on any given item or service, and de-risking you to the insurance industry (by increasing your premiums or denying you coverage). In authoritarian societies, it will also be used to build the various lists of undesirables to be expunged, as defined by the current authority (wrong subculture, wrong origin, wrongthink).
Yep, its not really inflation making things expensive. It's that every company now knows scientifically exactly how much money they can get out of you. Not just how much but literally what minute of the day they can get more money out of you. Probably even charge more by what mood you are in at this point, that is not sarcasm.
Do you think it's unlikely that companies collecting and buying large amounts of data on the intimate details of your life would try to use that data to their advantage? Do you think that data isn't being used to manipulate people? To take more of their money? To lower a company's risks?
Do you think that there aren't a growing number of products and services designed to allow them to do exactly those things?
Do you think that companies aren't aware of how consumer perception and awareness of these practices impacts them or that they don't see it as an obstacle?
advertisers are.
you use adblocker. you're persona non grata to begin with. your purchases are not mapped back, that's why you keep seeing the stuff you just bought. for them, you are top of the funnel still. AdBlockers work! (20yrs in adtech)
for music, you're also irrelevant. you're old. music industry doesn't care about 25+ finding new music. they spend all their effort on keeping teenagers in a comfortable bubble to mine them for music purchases and shows. people under 25 spend pretty much all the money record labels make.
anyway, the system works and they do know everything about you. but your goals and desires are completely irrelevant to everyone involved money changing hands.
Their ad being shown to someone who already bought the thing or is obviously not gonna do so can't be in their interest, can it?
Howver, i do not see why i should not act the exact same to the industry. From my perspective i absolutely hate online advertisements in each and every form. This is a feeling and not something i enforce or endorse to others. You do you concerning advertisements.
If it was legally possible for me to destroy all advertisements, i would. But it is not. I do however control my own infrastructure. I am as sure going to design it so that i am as little as possible bothered by advertisements. The goal of the advertisement industry is completely irrelevant to me.