> When listening to personalized playlists on Spotify and YouTube Music I skip every single electronic track with vocals. I listen to a lot of techno and related genres, and the moment someone starts singing I skip the track. I've been doing it for years. None of these advanced algorithms have ever noticed this simple pattern.

Same here.

I think the songs get pushed by who pays to push, and most of those songs have vocals.

Another one here. Vocal techno is a pain in my ears. There are few exceptions like in Bonzai Records classic tracks like “Let there be house.” or Emmanuel Top. These male voices are more aggressive and are helping to inject some additional energy into the songs, while female voices seem to drain it.

Goth industrial stuff from like the female singer from L’Âme Immortelle was a nice exception with “Bitterkeit”.

never thought i'd see bonzai records mentioned on hackernews!

Who is the artist for let there be house?

I personally love Vocal Trance, DJ Doboy mixes

Last.fm and scrobling was way more accurate 20 years ago than anything available today.

It’s still pretty good. I use it for discovery on my self hosted navidrome setup

I would bet that you can train Pandora's algo to respect this preference by thumbing down every vocal techno track. The music genome annotators will have a boolean for vocals in the analysis. You'd likely start using recommendation strategies that use the annotations more than normal. Pandora is still the best for lean back listening.

Pandora was always the best at figuring out what I wanted to hear; long before AI was a thing, and it's still better.

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.

No matter my goal, I found that my Pandora stations always converged on the same endpoint. I always ended up with Ellie Goulding and Dubstep, despite not really liking either of those. It rather killed my interest in the service.

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).

Way back when I used Pandora I found similar behavior if I gave songs thumbs down. It would converge on a small selection of a few artists and their music. It was really good at some genres if I didn't thumbs up or down many songs.

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.

That isn't a feature of Pandora.

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.

Maybe you found the secret sauce to Pandora by everyone I know that used Pandora extensively had OPs experience. Myself and my partner both stopped using it after years of paid subscriptions because of that problem

Spotify fucking sucks - it seems to try to herd everyone into one of a few genres. For me, last.fm was the best. Currently I'm reasonably happy with Soundcloud.

> 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.

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.)

The algorithm was the product, the licensing model was its failure. Proof you can get goodwill via an algorithm if you actually make it for the user rather than treating them like fodder for your ad network. Maybe someday in my lifetime we can actually achieve the dreams our platforms promised but rugpulled to make the worst people on the planet billionaires

We used to have a running joke in the office that all pandora stations eventually converge on Maroon 5. You could pick a death metal station and eventually it would somehow work its way to a paid 2 play popular band track. It was still pretty good though.

This but ‘Home’ by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros.

I've never felt so seen. That _fucking_ song.

Pandora had the problem that I dislike a song and then it's like "how about mix #17 of the same song?", "how about mix #7 of the same song", "how about mix #3" of the same song?"

It happens to me that I keep skipping certain song but no matter what, it gets again into autoplay.

I’m having that problem, right now, with AppleTV.

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…

If you long-press on it and choose View/Goto Episode/Show, are there any third-party apps listed as a way to watch it? If so, and you’re using any of those apps, then check each of their in-app wishlists for it as well; it’s possible that (unlike Netflix) they’re actually well integrated enough into the TV app to cause this. If not, in total seriousness, you could open an Apple Support case that might result in them asking permission to reset your watchlist database records cloud-side.

(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.)

Nope. Doesn't work. It's a zombie. I have watched other movies like it, in the past, and I might watch it in the future, but I don't want to pirate it, and I don't want to pay $25 to watch it now.

Those of us that were Apple users, back when, may remember a certain forced "gift" of a U2 album...

One that was forced on something like one billion people, rather than just one, yeah.

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.

There's just no incentivization to do better at this, or they would in a heartbeat

I actively thumbs down the 99 of every 100 tracks I don’t like, the services still don’t get it.

I really wish I could use an LLM to select the recommendations

I've been using https://www.getsubwave.com lately and it's great, but it is unfortunately already pre-filtered to my music collection. Would be slick to connect to spotify or a streaming service though!

Sure would be nice if we enforced Payola laws. It's hard to believe that at one point the US Government sought to regulate fairness on something as low-stakes as radio. Today corporations do much worse and our politicians mostly sit by and watch. Maybe a small fine.

Spotify especially likes to push its own AI generated slop tracks because then it gets to pay the royalty to itself

In fact simply no royalty at all.

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's important that they pay the royalty to themselves because the royalty is a fraction of your subscription fee divided by the number of royalties paid. Paying one to themselves dilutes the others.

I also perform my own covers of songs in my bedroom for free, thereby saving hundreds of dollars on concert fees.

Yes, just because an algorithm knows what someone wants doesn't mean the algorithm will give it to them.

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.

you're on wrong platform, soundcloud

Spotify is chock full of payola. Every single playlist l they generate (and auto shuffle mode) has paid ads in it. It’s a terrible product.

Google's real advertising proposition is they will sell you the audience of an expensive website on a cheaper website. Want to advertise on the New York Times? Why pay their high rates? Google tracks who visits the NYT and offers the advertiser the same audience when they visit Bob's hobby gardening website, which is considerably cheaper to advertise on. That's really why they want to track where you go. Understanding what you want is just a secondary aim to that, if they are interested in it at all, and I agree with the article that they are very poor indeed at it.

Hard to imagine all the combined various bob spend is really very cheaper than a single better placement. You have to imagine this also puts downward pressure on those nyt placement prices and upward pressure on bobs.

it’s not that hard to imagine. you put in bids on bobs, and they only fill on secondary sites.

If there is such an unrealized margin why hasn’t it been eaten up by now? No one should be advertising on nyt at all if what you say is all thats going on.

Businesses don't want to pay for marketing that doesn't work and the simple answer is targeted ads work. Advertising to anyone that reads the New York Times, when a business can target people that are searching for a couple of key words relevant to the business' product? Even if it's the company's money and not my own, I'd rather spend it on something with a provable ROI, not just blindly blowing money showing ads to people that wouldn't or can't buy the product.

You are forgetting that the big tech ad companies are cooking the numbers in other ways making them generally untrustworthy. Ask yourself deep down do you trust Meta or Google.

The New York Times doesn't have to bullshit because people want to use it, thus it's a more trustworthy advertising point.

The NYT has been caught bullshitting at least a few times including one that started/worsened a major atrocity that's still ongoing

Which one?

Targeted advertising will never feel good, and it's not due to lack of information. Consider the following:

- 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.

My parents were frugal; we acquired most possessions second hand, and we learned to view all advertisements with suspicion. Seeing an ad on television practically guaranteed that we wouldn't be wasting our money on whatever it depicted.

Coming from a relatively hardened mindset, it is startling to understand how impressionable people must be for modern advertising to be worth the cost.

> 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.

I think this is right on the nose. Advertising as it exists today is not so much about inducing customers to buy your product, as it is propaganda to convince people that your product holds a natural place in society.

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.

there are ads for oil??

There are ads for oil companies https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/nov/18/the-forgotten-oil-ads-that-told-us-climate-change-was-nothing

Saudi Aramco had ads all over the world cup.

Oil companies and gas station chains? Sure, maybe not everywhere in the world but absolutely that exists.

And nowadays they're mainly trying to convince us that these companies are green and part of the zero emissions/carbon negative solution

My brother worked for Proctor & Gamble, which is a company whose success is built entirely on the magical effect of advertising.

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.

Marketing ≠ Advertising ≠ Sales As a tech guy, it took me a lot longer than I like to admit to fully understand this. There is tons of money in advertising, but most of it is wasted: As the old saying goes, "I know half my advertising budget is wasted - the problem is I don't know which half!"

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.

I’m sure we can trust the folks whose whole business model is “we’re real good at convincing people to spend their money” when they say their product is a super effective tool that every business owner should spend money on. Right?

It's like that on YouTube today. Every single company that buys in-video advertisements ("sponsors") on YouTube has turned out to be a scam in one way or another. Every single one. The VPNs are probably the least bad, since they deliver the service as promised, they're just overselling how much you need the service, but at least it's not very expensive. Well that and the meal ingredient delivery, which is just overpriced.

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.

There's also manscaped. I just assume they are crap too since the rest are.

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.

They have their uses but their uses are not the advertised uses.

Ridge wallet isn't a wallet.

If the company is paying for ads, it's being paid off by higher margins.

Or they have a problem retaining customers and are looking for fresh meat.

From a similar mindset: Some kinds of expensive promotional signals (like a smartphone showroom with wasted floor-space) become a bad sign, especially if the company/product already has wide brand-name recognition.

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.

Yeah in my family seeing a TV advertisement was a warning that they spent a lot of the money on advertising and not as much on the product itself.

The secret that most people in business don’t want to admit is that the vast majority of internet/media advertising is not worth the cost.

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.

What do you even consider advertising?

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?

Only a very small part of advertising is actually product promotion. Coca-cola spends $4 billion a year on ads, do you think it's because otherwise no one would know that coke exists?

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.

If Coca Cola stopped advertising for a year, their sales would surely start trending down.

Yes, but not because advertising lets people know about Coke. The people who still know about Coke would be the same after a year, I imagine.

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.

Familiarity, I think.

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.

If you drink it now, would you stop? Would you forget that it exists even though it's on store shelves, in vending machines, and pushed at several restaurants? Who would stop?

Marketing. Advertising is only one of the strategies that get used to market a product.

I was referring to internet advertising, I should have made that more clear.

But it's the dirty little secret of most advertising: there's no voluntary feedback to prove (consistently, objectively) how effective your $$ are being spent.

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.

This isn't true in the general sense, for new products with no distribution or customer awareness it's very important to advertise how else will anyone know about it.

Paid promotion in publications is a much more gentler way to advertise though compared to modern internet advertising. Back in the day I'd buy computer magazines - basically the whole point of which was to make me aware of new products. But the articles were at least somewhat at arm's length and not pure ad copy.

Word of mouth is one of the the oldest ways and it can still be very useful. It tends to work best when your product is actually any good though. If you have a product that really is amazing you won't have to manipulate people into paying for it, and you won't be able to stop people from telling others about how great it is.

Most new products don’t get advertised. That happens later after they’ve made some initial sales. Those initial sales often happen from just placing it on some shelf space, real or virtual, where relevant consumers are liable to find it.

That's a fair point, I wasn't really accounting for new products/services in that statement.

Absolutely untrue by any metrics or semblance of study. People overestimate how unsusceptible they are to marketing. Marketing doesn't only work if you see an ad and click on it. It's after seeing hundreds of ads, that you start internally building a perception of a brand as whatever they market as (expensive, value oriented, fun, serious, luxurious, splurge material, etc.) Then the next time, maybe months after you've seen any such ad, you need to buy an expensive, splurge type gift for someone. If you remember the brand then, the marketing has worked.

That kind of stuff is absolutely worth the cost of ad spend online

That is a great example of the impossible to prove woo that advertisers pay for studies to convince clients of.

My father told me: “If they are advertising it you don’t need it”

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

The truth today is that almost all consumer products produced today is crap we don’t need. It’s almost literally manufactured landfill, since that’s where most of it will end up.

That’s a wise remark and I haven’t thought about it like that, but it’s entirely true!

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 someone selling hamburgers might be savvy enough to avoid vegetarians, but after that how would they possibly narrow it down?

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.

That's true for the advertising companies, but Google or whatever advertiser have a big stake in showing you the ad from the millions they serve that you're most likely to click/buy/complete. So there's no fault on McDonald's part, but if you're a vegetarian, arguably 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).

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.

I work in ads targeting

> 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.

Advertisement and propaganda are two different arms of the same mechanism/technology stack.

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.

As someone who has worked in ads, this is scifi. Nobody is building mind control into BLACK HOLIDAY SALE ads. If that were true I could get you to buy long haul truck gearboxes or donate to save the slime mold foundation.

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.

>That said, these algorithms are simple presumably because they work "well enough".

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.

Even if McDonalds could tell Google not to show the ad to vegetarians, they have no way to verify Google isn't.

At the scale of a McDonalds ad campaign that seems easy to measure: go to the nearest Target parking lot and ask as many people as you can two questions: "are you vegetarian" and "did you see {description of ad here}". Then compare how which percentage of vegetarians saw the ad compared to the percentage of non-vegetarians saw the ad. There are even companies specialized in market research that will do this in a more representative and statistically rigorous way

Google has no incentive to do so. McDonalds does, but its somewhat costly to scale against ALL the ads they push.

For pay-per-click ads, if the vegetarians won't click, that's a lost opportunity to show a veggieburger ad Google would have made money from.

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.

infinite things could confound that analysis

Doesn’t Google earn more from McDonalds if Google provides McDonalds with a higher click through rate? If you’re providing a high click through rate, you’ve probably done the due diligence to screen vegetarians already

Can't they ask claude to create account do some relevant searches and then check if ad is shown?

What makes you think Google has built a profile that shows Claude is a vegetarian?

That's the thing - ask claude to do requests to build such profile

I don't really see how you could solve this problem with a sufficiently complex algorithm. Which ads are shown still depends on how much the vendor is willing to spend on marketing. I may have zero interest in Ford cars, but if Ford is the one spending the big bucks in the "car" category I'll see a lot of Ford ads.

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.

No, the price that is charged in a specific impression is adjusted by the relevance to the user. If the user relevance is 0.001% a Ford ad would need to spend 100000x more dollars per impression than the same ad for Toyota with a user relevance of 100%. So in practice you might get some amounts of "high cost lower relevance" ads but not to the extent that people think. The advertising broker (as in Google for Google Search) has an active interest in showing good ads relevant ads for the user in order to not negatively impact Google Search metrics, and also maximize clickthroughs or other goal metrics for the advertiser. Poorly matched ads are antithetical to that purpose.

There is a big misconception that ads are just targeted as picking the max(advertiser spend) and it really fuels low quality discussion online.

But isn't relevance just measured as purchasing the product? That is, someone who can be convinced by advertising to by a ford or a Toyota by which shows the next ad would have equal relevance, even if the Toyota is the vehicle they would most prefer?

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I'm still not sure this overcomes the marketing budged differences between entities like "AI Slop Co" vs. "Independent Artist" or "Ford" vs. "Independent Mechanic". There's also the fact that the heaviest advertisers are often the brands I'm going to be least interested in regardless of any other factors[1]. Yes, you can get ad relevance to some local maximum where I do see some stuff I'd actually buy, but optimality is forever out of reach because the products I really want to know about probably spend almost nothing on advertising or have direct competition from an entity like Microsoft that will pour $millions into their ad spend.

[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.

Exactly. The ad-revenue companies will show you the ads the advertisers pay for that make the most money for them. Your actual wants, needs, preferences, and specifics are only important in the way that they make you a sellable target to the advertisers.

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.

We are doing this all wrong. I don't need to be "targeted". There's things I want to buy. Get to know me. Learn what I need. Then, do a JOIN in your database and show me the best options for me.

That's what this is all about. Where is my tech-powered shopping helper and advocate?

> ie, they're trying to coerce you into wanting their products

Im not sure if you mean “coerce” literally but if so this is overkill. Maybe “persuade” or to be more critical, “manipulate”?

People who know you very well (friends, family, spouse) often buy you bad gifts you need to pretend to be happy to receive.

On the flip side I only give cash and they all complain its not very thoughtful, no matter how nice the Hallmark money card.

Targeting was super easy back in the days, when it was done based on where the ad appeared. Putting video game ads into a video game magazine and not diaper ads was kind of a no-brainer, but on the net I had to suffer through diaper ads on a video game site.

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.

Convincing a person who doesn’t want a hamburger to buy one is basically mind control and it doesn’t work.

Convincing someone who does want a burger to buy one at Shake Shack does work.

Not everyone feels like you do.

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.

I agree with part of this. I don't know what Instagram is doing, but their ads are remarkably well targeted. The rest of the internet needs to do whatever they are doing.

> 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.

Why would Meta not raise their costs of advertising until it was the most efficient by the smallest margin?

Whatever Meta is doing on Instagram is next level advertising.

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.

The few times I ever used Instagram, it knew me where I went to university (a different country) and then recommended I take a cybersecurity course. That was rather scary because it shouldn't have that information.

> 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.

Despite hardly posting or commenting, Instagram is the only place I've seen relevant and interesting ads. Like scary good advertising. My wife has had the same experience, she was blown away that the ads are actually relevant where everywhere else, including Facebook which has the same or more info, acts as dumb as you can possibly be. I've heard others say the same. I don't know why they are so much better at ads or literally everyone else sucks so hard that just doing as would be expected appears exceptional. The addendum to this is that in the last few months this fell apart for her account and now it's turned irrelevant.

A vegetarian can still buy French fries from McDonalds. An ads are not necessarily about you but about the people in your life too. Think parents getting served gaming ads. They might not want the consoles but their kids will surely appreciate a PS6 for Christmas. Point is, a sale was made. Who ends up using the product isn't that important for the ad imo.

On occasion I get a glimpse at someone else's experience on the web and I'm so thankful that I haven't seen many ads at all in years.

I just disabled my adblocker on the BBC website out of curiosity and oh am I happy I don't live like this.

It's an assault on the mind.

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.

I don't know if I would say people inherently like ADs, but are perhaps conditioned to expect ADs and makes it feel normal.

Who are these people that like ads? I'm so curious. What do they like about midrolls or popups or banners???

This is a very uncharitable take IMO that veers into (I’m assuming unintentional) snobbery. Some people just have a routine or whatever that helps them get through the workday. My taste gets a lot simpler when I’m at work for sure. I really enjoy putting on shows I’ve already watched a dozen times, regardless of quality.

This sounds more like autism or other neurodivergent thing than unintelligence. I also have a preferred working soundtrack and get pretty annoyed if someone decides to switch it up on me when I'm working! In fact isn't unintelligence fundamentally the inability to pattern recognize well or easily? That he has a "his" show would counter against it...

I must be dumber than I thought since I too sometimes enjoy repeating the same routine when engaged in repetitive drudgery.

I’ve watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail countless times and I laugh at it every time.

Sometimes things get funnier the more you see them too!

I don't think people like the intrusion. I will say I do like very targeted ads that actually show me the solution to a problem or something fun I'd enjoy. I just don't want them covering the entire internet with garbage, which is the state we're in right now.

Sometimes it's hard to believe how different people perceive things.

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.

I loathe online ads in general because they're the bottom of the barrel, designed to be inconvenient.

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/

Just check the thread in this post like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50378942#50382558

I stopped having cable television in 2001 because I lived in a place where it wasn't available. I moved to a new place in 2002 and went completely pirate media (shitty quality episodes of the Simpsons and such). I went to streaming when that became available, but the point is that I stopped seeing television ads a long time ago.

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 still change the radio station when that song by Jet comes on because I heard it so much in the iPod ads.

I haven’t used an ad blocker in years, and, I don’t know, my brain just sort of learnt to ignore ads. Not “promoted” stuff that looks like regular items in the feeds (e.g. Google ads in search results). But just random banners on the website - I don’t even register them consciously. Every now and then I do notice curiosities like “the meatbag bought a mattress let’s offer him 100 other mattresses”, but otherwise I feel like I am totally blind to ad banners.

The BBC website? Arent the BBC like the only media company that dont show ads?

BBC doesn’t show ads in the UK (bbc.co.uk), but the international edition (bbc.com) does. The site looks quite different, and automatically redirects based on geolocation.

(Annoyingly it’s also stored in a cookie; if you travel frequently, you can get stuck in a redirect loop.)

BBC good food has tons of tracking. Then I found out they don't belong to BBC anymore.

This is true for a few of these “BBC” sites; they were spun out (and merged) into a company called Immediate Media.

I leave my adblocker off for YouTube because I want the small channels I watch to get money.

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.

Similarly, it's eye opening to see the "default" YouTube experience. Conspiracy, manosphere, AI-generated "deep dive" videos: just complete dreck.

It is a hard truth to swallow for many on HN (myself included) but the reality is a lot of normies don't mind ads at all. I recently told my wife how to install an ad blocker and her response was "but sometimes I see cool stuff in ads". I'm sure the percentage of "cool stuff" she sees is higher because of what they know about her.

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).

> 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.

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.

I find Amazon recommendations are quite bad. Maybe only 10% are relevant to me.

> 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.

It probably helps when your marketplace is filled with knockoffs and misrepresented trash.

It's shocking to me that, sometime in the last 10 years, everyone forgot that adblocking's primary argument is security.

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.

> It's shocking to me that, sometime in the last 10 years, everyone forgot that adblocking's primary argument is security.

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.

The reason why I block ads is due to security. Can't be that small of a number

Links that take you to a malicious site are not the only security reason. Ads are often used as vehicles for malicious payloads, some execute when you click on them and some are 0-click.

For me, it was a necessity, as video ads were just starting to be used while I still had dialup, Then came the security angle.

> 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.

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?

Essentially you're right.

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

You raise a good point. I am similar. I am much more influenced by an advert that is somewhat artistic. Plus, I notice that size and scale really matters. Thinking about the same advert: One is a tiny graphic on your phone, the other is a two meter tall version on your subway platform. The second one is much higher impact.

I mean if you get useful ads that don't feel like a waste of time, I'm sure you'd have a more positive view of ads, not sure the takeaway is normal people like ads, but i'm sure there's something to be said about well timed and targeted ads.

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.

Once your wife sees the internet with less ads she'll never want to go back.

My wife signed up to the Pinterest mailing list. I’ll never understand this.

"because it obviously isn't useful to anyone (including Amazon)"

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 )

> Amazon (or whoever) showing you the same stuff you just bought

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.

> It is a hard truth to swallow for many on HN (myself included) but the reality is a lot of normies don't mind ads at all

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

It actually shocks me how often technology in general does the exact wrong thing to what I want. A couple off the top of my head.

* 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?

Yup, it's weird to me that companies as big as Amazon haven't figured this out.

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.

> But I'm almost certainly not interested in starting a camera collection, nor am I interested in incompatible brands to what I just bought.

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 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.

That's cool, but would you say banner ads are actually driving your purchases?

But if these companies know so much, surely they can work out that you have this particular buying habit, and other people don't have it.

Once you realize you are the product on Amazon's search page it makes a lot more sense. Over half the listings are paying amazon for higher placement into that search. It's long since stopped being a search experience that works for the shopper.

No, that makes no sense. Sure, my data is valuable for advertisers, but:

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.

...except Amazon :)

Please explain how Amazon benefits from bad ad selection to an equal or greater extent than good ad selection.

They don't need to compete because they have a monopoly, so offering a worse service keeps the advertiser spending more money.

You do another search, and they get more revenue

>> Guys, if I buy a photo camera

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.

Sometimes I wonder if it's about returns. "You bought one washing machine, but you might not like it and return it, so how about these others". Could even be that they're tracking sales only rather than sales minus returns, because returns take longer to come in so the metrics are harder to track.

Forget the camera analogy. Use something like a new toilet seat. I buy one, I don't need to buy more. I'm not a toilet seat collector.

Amazon must make more money from camera brand ads than from selling camera accessories. Every time they push a camera to someone who already has one, they get paid for that, and the ad buyer can't easily verify. The person is flagged as liking cameras, after all.

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 flipside of this was a shoe-shine boy moment for me about ads and advertising, recently and personally.

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.

What was the nature of the business? Was it the kind of thing where referrals from existing customers would have helped? Was it on Google Maps and similar, and findable by people looking for the service they were offering? Were they losing business to competitors, or were people who needed it not finding it? Where were those people naturally looking, without ads?

Music lessons. There were multiple factors they shared, customer acquisition wasn't the only thing not working but that they brought it up at all is why it stood out. Indeed it is the kind of thing where referrals you would have thought would help, but also macro factors against. Competing against apps whether these guys are digital or not, anyone can start up a rival business at home esp if they have instruments already, and so forth.

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.

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.

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).

Yeah, the fact that too many websites just ignore language settings/preferences (both system, and browser it seems) is really annoying. Location-based language picking doesn't even make sense in some locations. Like ebay not even giving an option to switch from German to anything else, if you are in Switzerland. They seem to be unaware that Switzerland is a multilingual country?

I agree with the author that it is super annoying when you are assaulted with ads for the things that you have bought recently.

If you have bought them recently, they are the most unlikely things to buy in the near future.

I was actually surprised a few days ago when I have seen for the first time in many years a personalized ad that was useful. When I visited an on-line shop, I was greeted with a message that a product at which I have looked during a previous visit, but which I have not bought, has a 20% price reduction, and at the new price I was indeed interested to buy it.

This kind of notification, about a price reduction, makes sense, but ads for products to which I have looked previously and nothing has changed about them do not achieve any useful purpose. If I bought them I have no need to buy them again, if I did not buy them, this means that I decided that I do not need or want them, so I will not buy them regardless if I see ads for them.

> If you have bought them recently, they are the most unlikely things to buy in the near future.

I used to work at a big ad company and went and read about this once. Turns out the opposite is true (in general, maybe not for you specifically).

People are really likely to rebuy things. I’m not really sure why, but the numbers don’t lie. Gifts maybe?

>People are really likely to rebuy things. I’m not really sure why

Time consuming research (starting with filtering out advertising budget powered fake reviews) and short-lived products & brands make personal experience & recommendations a lot more useful. If someone around me has an even remotely similar set of requirements and budget for a product, they are much more likely better off trusting my recommendation and (having me) order another one right away. It used to be less clustered around one person or calendar date, when brands stayed around and kept true to their previous performance for longer. Nowadays I even order duplicates for myself, not because I really need 3 of them in the near-term future, but because I am worried that I will want a replacement in a year and another one the year after.. and I won't find exactly the same then.

This! I don't mind tech companies knowing things about me. If I don't want them to know, I browse in Safari's anonymous mode.

But I hate it when they suggest things that I don't want.. show me stuff I have already bought.... show me things I already decided against... show me stuff that is not in my price range. That's annoying. I don't mind a good, paid recommendation. I just don't like all the bad recommendations.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't want my computer suggesting anything to me unless I ask it for suggestions. A computer should be essentially a REPL. It waits for a command. The user inputs its command. The computer processes it. Then the computer loops back to wait. Now we have all sorts of nice GUIs and modes of interaction, but essentially the computer should behave that way: The user should tell it what to do, and it should only do what the user wants.

Any kind of "proactive" behavior on the part of the computer is unwelcome. If I don't command it, I don't expect my computer to do it. This includes ads but it also includes recommendations, and notifications, and "you should do this!" and "try that app!" and everything else modern computers are now throwing at us.

We need to get back to the user being in the driver's seat.

The issue of you already buying something is interesting to me. It’s so obvious that they’d fix it if it cause revenue loss. My guess is that conversion for any ad is so low that you’re indeed more likely to buy a lot of products twice rather than buying something totally different.