I agree with parts of this in the sense that I find autoplay on Spotify and many machine recommendations quite bad.

However:

a) I don't want better-targeted ads or more convenient infinite recommendation algorithms because they create friction that preserves some intentionality in my media consumption.

b) there's some survivorship bias here. We notice the bad things because they stand out, but not all of the machine-recommended things that we unquestioningly accept.

I don't think the kind of problem that advertisement tries to solve, in our minds as users, can be solved. You can't possibly predict what I will want in the near future unless you can predict my future evolution in tastes and needs, which is a very hard problem in my opinion. Advertisement is needed because the next time you will by chance want a certain kind of product, you will maybe remember a brand over another.

I wish they knew both more and less, depending. No paradox just a synthesis per the Hegelian dialectic. I've seen ads which were clearly leveraging a creepy/dangerous piece of info they had about me. And I've seen dumb ads trying to sell me products I no longer have any reasonable interest in because I just fricken bought them the damn thing.

The advertising ecosystem is bad and broken in both directions within the dimensions of what they know, how much they know and in how they leverage it.

I use ChatGPT with memories. The contextual memory is super hit or miss. It works like 40% of the time, but if context is actually important (and it is for a lot of what I talk about), I have to say "alright look up the memories for XYX for context" in like every message.

That works pretty well but me just constantly telling it to grep manually is a bit underwhelming as far as UX goes.

It's different with Meta advertising though. Back in the days Facebook was the only webpage that showed me relevant local targeted ads about things I care for, and nowadays it's the same on Instagram (that I also stopped using recently).

But for a while not too long ago, like for one year until last summer I regularly used Instagram, and almost all ads were directly targeted at my interests and they directed me to local events and concerts and products and what not.

> Netflix on Apple TV asks me to select a user every time I launch it. I've had this account for 15+ years, and never had more than one user on it. I always select the only option there is to select. There is no setting to disable this screen.

There are some remotes that can be programmed to automatically send a "select this" code I think, to automate having to do this every time (was researching something like this recently so just mentioning I think it exists, don't know a lot about it)

Mildly related: I always felt this way with Youtube's recommendations. For me, they're the epitome of dysfunction. It's so rare it will recommend something I want to see.

From my social circles I hear many people claiming how amazing are google ads and amazon/youtube recommendations. Which I have never understood, none of the online websites I use tend display anything relevant to me, when they do I bet its kind of random.

When I'm looking to purchase an item, it would be nice to get relevant ads for the kind of specs I'm looking for but like the blogger said, why do I care about getting ads for something I just purchased?

They are in the business of selling you things, their positive signal is not "what makes your life better" but "what makes you buy more".

The article assumes adverts are there to show them relevant products that they actually might buy, but adverts are there for the platform to make money. The result of this is that they cast the net far and wide and say you are 'a targeted user' so they can push the advert to you and make more money.