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It's amazing how their entire wealth is backed on demographics they have about you, that are completely wrong.
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Sep 17, 2020 01:22
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They're only wrong for us. For advertisers they're invaluable demographics that will propel them to more and more quarterly growth.
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Sep 17, 2020 01:24
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The way they assume a deep interest from a single Google search is the funniest part. Actually no, the funniest part is that advertisers pay a premium for it. Even the relatively realistic interests. Like one of my interests is washing machines because I bought one a few months ago. How many more do they think I need?
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Sep 17, 2020 01:42
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Thoughtless posted:The way they assume a deep interest from a single Google search is the funniest part. Actually no, the funniest part is that advertisers pay a premium for it. It's the ultra-moneymaking 0.1% they're going for, like there's probably one guy who just compulsively buys washing machines left and right to add to his town-sized collection.
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Sep 17, 2020 01:44
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My searching for more info about my own profile, before the link was posted, now has Google thinking I'm interested in SEO and web analytics. It also thinks I'm married and own a house for some reason.
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Sep 17, 2020 02:18
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Captain Hygiene posted:It's the ultra-moneymaking 0.1% they're going for, like there's probably one guy who just compulsively buys washing machines left and right to add to his town-sized collection. I assume everyone is going for that guy. That's why whenever I buy a thing online I am inundated with ads for that thing and similar things. "Hey I see you bought a blender! Do you think one blender is enough? Don't you need a backup blender? Have you considered collecting blenders? Hey look, this one is red!!!"
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Sep 17, 2020 02:29
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I think SA threads like this gently caress with the algorithm. We're like look at this stupid peanut commercial, so we all click on the commercial and have a laugh. Meanwhile the algorithm is in the corner going "hmm, yes, Facebook Aunt is intensely interested in peanuts".
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Sep 17, 2020 02:34
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My YouTube recommendation consist solely of dark souls videos, 80s wrestling videos and white supremacy videos
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Sep 17, 2020 02:37
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Have you considered watching Demon's Souls videos?
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Sep 17, 2020 02:38
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Like the Chinese could make a game worth playing
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Sep 17, 2020 02:43
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So I just goggled "famous Chinese games" and apparently there's a video game called "Anti-Japan War Online."
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Sep 17, 2020 02:45
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I have a YouTube channel with old commercials. I only open that account in a private window in Opera and don't do anything else during the session. The YouTube recommendations are weird. I got rid of all the right wing political ones that immediately popped up, despite there not being anything political in the uploads. The car ones were at least understandable because of car commercials. Now it seems to think I want relaxing music from waterfalls. I don't know what made it think that, either.
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Sep 17, 2020 03:03
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Facebook also has ad interest categories. For a long time, it had me listed as "African-American Identified" even though I am very white, probably because I went to a historically black high school and have a lot of classmates as friends and also support BLM. I got a lot of ads for natural hair products.
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Sep 17, 2020 03:09
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Thoughtless posted:
This is analogous to a dumb marketing move that annoys me. Every time I take a holiday, and book the flights and hotel on the internet, for weeks afterward I get emails etc. advertising their special deals and discounts on flights and hotels etc. They don't advertise these discounts when I actually want to take a trip, but after I have returned, and as such won't be needing them for at least 6 months.
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Sep 17, 2020 03:20
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AFewBricksShy posted:Let It Go had the same problem. Let It Go is actually the villain song
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Sep 17, 2020 03:39
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It was supposed to be, but then they realized "poo poo we made the coming out anthem of the century, better rewrite the whole movie so the snow queen isn't the bad guy" When any gay could have told them that we always identify with the villains anyway
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Sep 17, 2020 04:37
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I guess it makes Anna's duet with that prince the villain song.
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Sep 17, 2020 04:51
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RandomFerret posted:It was supposed to be, but then they realized "poo poo we made the coming out anthem of the century, better rewrite the whole movie so the snow queen isn't the bad guy" Always? 
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Sep 17, 2020 04:54
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Funfact: if you search for the outdoor brand REI a lot google thinks you love anime
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Sep 17, 2020 05:47
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Barudak posted:Funfact: if you search for the outdoor brand REI a lot google thinks you love anime I was trying to find some more Co-op brand outdoor leads for my chickens but Google showed me some weird results for "REI Hen Tie".
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Sep 17, 2020 05:59
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wow this is fantastic and explains but also doesn't explain the ads I get I get ads for luxury cars (and specifically BWMs), finance, investing, preparing for my retirement in 1-5 years, food and grocery delivery, greeting cards (???), parental status: not a parent, and precious metals, because google says that's me. Why does google think I am as old as my parents? I moved out as a teen there is no mingling of search results. I despise and have never used food delivery apps. I am, in fact, actually a parent. I have never owned a BMW, nor wanted to. I dislike "greeting cards" and ask those close to me not to spend any money on cards for birthdays or christmas or whatever. I am not "interested" in finance and I have no money to invest. The only one I can remotely explain is "precious metals" because sometimes I like to watch NileRed or other goofball garage chemists do dangerous science. Does it think I like finance because I read about bitcoin/darknet things once in a blue moon??? There are some music genres listed that I would agree, yes I listen to those but it's like 5% of the whole of music I listen to. Google, you have no excuse. I use youtube almost exclusively to stream music so you know exactly what I listen to. edit: this is also like the wordiest version of empty quoting "I got Moon Moon" poo poo possible and I hope it doesn't poo poo up the thread edit2: doesn't state anywhere that I speak Spanish, or have an interest in learning languages, but somehow I will get a random 1-2 week streak where all my ads are in Spanish. I don't even know. WITCHCRAFT has a new favorite as of 07:46 on Sep 17, 2020 |
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Sep 17, 2020 07:30
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Since its literally my job to know how all this garbage functions I could give you a really boring rundown of how this works and troubleshoot your various profiles but basically between the various very stupid cookie implementations, google's boneheaded predictions, and people being complex I would expect any given account to be relatively inaccurate. Google also tracks your current phone battery level for ad purposes. Dunno if they did it or not but I know Uber was kicking around charging you more if your battery was low.
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Sep 17, 2020 09:22
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Google has such wide reach that even if it only guesses a handful of correct things about you thats still such a large segment of the population as to be more useful than just blind ads. A perfect map of everyone's interests isn't going to be possible, not with current tech, so going "aha i outsmarted the algorithim" is missing the point.
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Sep 17, 2020 09:38
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"throw a hundred thousand darts at the board and maybe one will stick" seems a bit sub optimal to me. If they're a multi billion dollar corporation and that's the best plan they've got, then they definitely lost.
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Sep 17, 2020 12:50
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Facebook Aunt posted:What if you're sleep walking and Google is the only one that has noticed? this had not occurred to me, i'm going to find out
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Sep 17, 2020 13:00
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CJacobs posted:"throw a hundred thousand darts at the board and maybe one will stick" seems a bit sub optimal to me. If they're a multi billion dollar corporation and that's the best plan they've got, then they definitely lost. Getting the market share that no one else can compete with you means they will continue to make All The Money regardless of the fact they're not doing it as well as they could.
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Sep 17, 2020 13:18
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Snackula posted:Looking through my Google ad profile I get the distinct impression Youtube is a much more valuable tool in harvesting data than search history. It knows what kind of games I like, what car I drive, what pets I have and a whole lot of other miscellaneous things I like. Meanwhile all the things I can pinpoint to search data are obviously useless for advertising purposes, like oh yeah I'm a huge exchange rate enthusiast because I google what X sum in euros is in USD a couple times a week. You could be on to something, my ads usually make little sense, but my YouTube recommendations are often spot-on. And I don't even mind the latter, I've actually discovered quite a few interesting channels because of that. Do you think YT will ever start hassling people to turn off their ad blocker? I dread that day
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Sep 17, 2020 13:22
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Memento posted:Getting the market share that no one else can compete with you means they will continue to make All The Money regardless of the fact they're not doing it as well as they could. So what? I'm forever lolling at them that they have effectively infinite R&D and yet are only smart or willing enough to accomplish the broken sort-of-kind-of-sometimes-accurate way it currently works edit: "Hey boss! I just found out from our quarterly reports that we now officially have more money than god! Do you think we should funnel some of that money into developing more accurate targeted advertising?" "Nahhh don't worry about it, we make enough money as is from people buying shirts that let everyone know they're a forklift operator born in the month of july with two dogs and you'd better step off!"
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Sep 17, 2020 13:44
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Phlegmish posted:You could be on to something, my ads usually make little sense, but my YouTube recommendations are often spot-on. And I don't even mind the latter, I've actually discovered quite a few interesting channels because of that. I find the YouTube algorithm to be kinda poo poo. I get a lot of "You enjoyed $thing so here's a bunch of chuds screeching for hours about how $thing is bad wrong and ruined by SJWs"
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Sep 17, 2020 13:58
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I just checked and I don't have anything like that...except Lauren Chen for some reason. Look Google, I know you know I LIKE BEAUTIFUL WOMEN, but I really don't want to listen to her talking points
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Sep 17, 2020 14:05
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CJacobs posted:So what? I'm forever lolling at them that they have effectively infinite R&D and yet are only smart or willing enough to accomplish the broken sort-of-kind-of-sometimes-accurate way it currently works
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Sep 17, 2020 14:24
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It's not as if they're not attempting to improve. I'm just saying be wary of how you've "outsmarted" the algorithm and worry more about how its only going to keep getting better.
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Sep 17, 2020 14:29
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Before the world ended I used to build and manage social media advertisements, so let me let you in on a secret: Interest-based advertising works most of the time, but it's bullshit on both ends. Your "interest" categories have nothing to do with your actual interests, but that's fine because advertisers can and do go after interest segments they're not particularly relevant to. There are sites where you can pay to find out the most popular topics for any given industry based on click through, and you just assign those. For example, in Real Estate (most of what I did) everyone more or less tags all the house hunting shows they can afford to tag in every ad. This is not because people who are interested in House Hunters are more likely to buy a home (they're not, demographically the viewers of those shows are both poorer and less educated than the average home buyer) but because the types of people Facebook or Insta or Pinterest or whatever tags with those interests are much more likely to be potential homebuyers than they are to have ever actually watched the show. So in this way, house hunting shows are an arbitrary label that advertisers use because it works for them. This results in people getting tagged as liking those shows who don't like those shows at all, because the label "House Hunters (TV Show)" wouldn't be useful to many advertisers if it were literally true but as a euphemism for home buying interest it works well. Conversely, if I were advertising for an actual home buying show I would specifically not target the competitor segments because those people are unlikely to actually watch any home buying shows. Facebook, at least, has tried to stop this several times, but every time they "rationalize" their labels the advertisers go away, because transforming useless demographic segments into useful targeting segments allows the people who do online advertising to do it more effectively. Honestly, what do you think House Hunters viewers have in common to be worth advertising to? The answer is nothing, there's tens of thousands of Millennials who love House Hunters who will never be able to afford a home under any circumstances due to debt, and probably just as many bored retirees or near-retirees who know what's left in their lifetime earnings and can't buy a house with it if they tried. There are sites you can pay for as an advertiser that determine the interest groups any particular industry uses for ads and let you know what interest groups to target, because targeting common demographics for your industry is more valuable than targeting demographically correct ones due to relevance. Also if you never click ads literally ever (like me!) then ad distributors like Google like don't give a poo poo what you like, at all, because there is little money in per-impression advertising but HUGE BUCKS in per-clickthrough and per-engagement. Start clicking ads you're legitimately interested in and your advertisements will rapidly take interest in you and get much more targeted immediately. Don't do this though, because ads are awful. TL;DR: Online advertising is a bizarre scam where you have to trick both your customers and the algorithms to make effective ads. Demographic labels, while not correct, are still useful for this, and it's more important that your interest label selections are common in your industry than actually correct or true.
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Sep 17, 2020 14:39
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Thanks, that was informative.
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Sep 17, 2020 14:47
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Search engines before Google were joke and every query produced the first 25 pages of porn because it was easy to spoof the results. To observe how easy it is to make a search engine check how well Bing is doing, and Microsoft is one of those "all the money in the world" operators. Like RagnarokAngel said, we should not laugh at the Google system because it didn't get everything right, but worry about the ways they make it more accurate. They are the leading edge researchers into profiling users over the Internet, especially in cases where you need to at least pretend to follow the privacy and data protection laws.
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Sep 17, 2020 14:52
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The algorithm stuff is funny because there's that website that claims to have all sorts of information on you and your neighbors and poo poo and I looked at mine and it had my age off by about a decade, thought I was married, and that my income was about twice what it is. It actually got who was in my family right at least (though it had two entries for my sister - one under her name before she was married and one after it seemed to think they were separate people both my sisters).
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Sep 17, 2020 14:54
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That idea that the labels are just a label is just about common with social sciences. You'll have a hypothesis like "dog lovers also donate to charity" and read the procedure and see nothing that guaranteed the cohort actually loves dogs, but the cohort is cohesive in maybe some other way to get a proven hypothesis, sort of. The discussion and peer review absolutely picks up that maybe the hypothesis proven was for some other characteristic but science press picks it up as literally "dog lovers single handedly the most charitable people in the world."
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Sep 17, 2020 15:08
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Statistics is the science of belatedly realising that gathering data is worse than useless if you can't meaningfully interpret it.
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Sep 17, 2020 15:14
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https://twitter.com/SeniorTeenager/status/1306076329444478976
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Sep 17, 2020 15:16
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zedprime posted:That idea that the labels are just a label is just about common with social sciences. You'll have a hypothesis like "dog lovers also donate to charity" and read the procedure and see nothing that guaranteed the cohort actually loves dogs, but the cohort is cohesive in maybe some other way to get a proven hypothesis, sort of. The discussion and peer review absolutely picks up that maybe the hypothesis proven was for some other characteristic but science press picks it up as literally "dog lovers single handedly the most charitable people in the world." The underlying phenomena could also be that "people who own dogs also have enough income to donate to charity" or "people looking into getting a dog also look for other causes that bring them happiness" etc. but usually there is not enough data to make any in-depth connections. Science press is usually mostly a joke; how many "breaking news on life on Mars" we have gotten and still, only evidence of very strong maybe to the side of "yes, there used to be bacteria here". Profiling poorly isn't even a new concept: watch a comedy on "action channel" and you get ads for activity parks, cars, tools, hobbies. Now watch the same movie again in a family channel and you get ads for toys, sales at supermarkets, hygiene products, holiday resorts etc. And you most probably selected the channel because that time slot was more convenient for you, but the system does not care about one instance, when the expected trend is somewhere else. So yes, its a guessing game where all the individual numbers are meaningless but the trend is the thing. On some TV channels all the ads ever would be online casino's, cars and alcohol, but the local laws here forbid alcohol ads entirely and online casinos can only advertise after 2200 in the evening.
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Sep 17, 2020 15:47
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