The other bizarre case is how there's no accounting for social class: it ought to be relatively easy to infer, yet they still serve ads that you'd never ever consider, even though there are ones you might (at a push: I'm generally keen to avoid ads always)

Ad algorithms are not bad. They are designed by some of the greatest minds of our time. They simply want to maximize your pressing of the Buy Now button which is different from what you want to watch, like or even think what you would have bought.

It might also be a hard problem that is unsolvable until now. The most obvious reason is that company has a partial knowledge of the customer making distorted decisions about what to show.

I've been in the same shoes as the Author. The ONLY piece of technology that I have successfully seen actually learn from my usage was Youtube. Just recently, youtube decided I needed a bunch of video game hate videos. But I don't usually want negativity like that, so I pressed not interested on two of them and now they're all gone. This has been the status quo for me for years.

Spotify, Instagram, all those others, it's like the button ENCOURAGES them.

I also stopped getting ads years ago, but it was the same story. Car Ads. I hate cars, I have made it as clear as possible on multiple occasions. Sidebar ads never learn. Amazon never learns. And I bet they keep trying to show me cars to this day.

I suspect it's just expensive to do a good job of it.

Amazon used to be better at targeted advertising than it is now. I used to browse for a few things on Amazon, then go do something else, content with the knowledge that they'll do the hard work of figuring out what is actually a good recommendation for it. For a few years, this strategy helped me buy tools, light fixtures, and other things I used around the farm.

I'm not sure when it stopped, but it definitely did.

Ultimately, it's probably just a lot more compute than it's worth. They can probably spend $1 in compute to drive $10 in sales with dumb ads or they can spend $2 to drive $15 with smart ads. It's a diminishing returns thing and they drew the line such that I get dumb ads. Maybe folks that buy more, higher priced items get better ads.

I feel the same way about Youtube's recommendations. They always end up showing me the most bland milquetoast videos you can think of, videos seemingly trying to bait me into watching them, or videos by people who, to be fair, are somewhat similar to people I already watch consistently, but who just don't jive with me. Clicking the 'not interested' button is a non-signal, just how subscribing apparently just isn't a signal they use as well.

I could probably get something pretty decent going if Youtube would give me access to some buttons that actually give their algorithm signals directly. Subscribing and watching every video should be a pretty strong signal. Subscribing and only watching videos with a certain subtitle should be a signal of what videos on that channel I like. There should be a 'channels I don't really care for' bucket, that it might still show me videos from if it's doing exceptionally well. But giving users these tools isn't in the interest of Youtube, so they never will.

I do much better after switching to FreeTube as a front-end for Youtube, since now I'll only be shown videos from people I subscribe to, and I can be on my own to find videos I actually want to watch. If only Youtube search wasn't hot garbage, I might actually see success more often than I do now.

The language thing shits me to tears.

I lived in Germany for years but don't speak German. I raised a support ticket with Spotify to ask that they stop sending me emails in German, as they full-well know I speak English (the Spotify UI, thankfully, is in English). They declined. I sent their emails to spam.

Amazon is the same. I ended up just not using them, because it was so painful getting their site to talk to me in a language I understand.

And, as TFA points out, we have a mechanism for this: the browser passes a preferred locale to the server. It's simply a matter of the server respecting this and not assuming that everyone who happens to have a German IP address speaks German, which is blatantly not true.

Claude is pretty good at this. I finally caved and gave it access to my calendar so I could run a weekly "check what's on nearby and suggest some activities" workflow. It looked at my past calendar activities, built a "taste profile" from that, and now regularly sends me tips for stuff I might want to go to. If I'm keen for something it adds events to the calendar, and optionally invites my partner. It's also surprisingly good at finding "wildcard" events which don't necessarily closely match things I've been to before, but are often interesting to me anyway.

Not sure I agree specifically with wanting companies to know more about me, but I do wish they made the most of what they know about me (at least in terms of providing me with something of value).