[strulovich]

> I will be spammed with ads for useless shit that I don't need. Check here _

Isn’t this the exact opposite though? Your data being used for targeting will minimize bad ads that you see.

(Facebook employee, never worked on ads or anything similar though)

[armchairhacker]

This is something which comes up a lot: people simultaneously complaining about invasive ad-tracking and all the ads they see suck.

But it's the truth. e.g. I visit the website of some weird brand of coffee. Suddenly, I get spammed with ads about artisan coffee, even though I could care less. Both intrusive (you took data from somewhere way outside of your domain to guess something about me) and annoying (you guessed wrong).

Moreover, this tends to happen very often for gambling, porn, weight loss, pregnancy, etc. all things which are very private, because they also happen to be stuff people spend a lot of money on. So I want to avoid those sites, not just because the government or insurance could use it against me, but because my ads will get even more annoying.

[neutronicus]

I was getting engagement rings ads for years after I made the purchase

[wruza]

Maybe their AI googled divorce rates and found these somewhat promising.

I bet that if the entire ad industry just binned all people into 16384 groups and hired 65536 specialists to curate these profiles, the industry would be much more succesful, because today it is a complete bullshit with all these pointless hi-tech and surveillance efforts. Modern ads is the stupidest thing ever created (apart from crypto).

[neolog]

*couldn't care less

[machello13]

you knew what he meant so what difference does it make?

[buu700]

I don't use Facebook very often, but anecdotally I've gotten a decent number of solid ads for things I've ended up buying (mainly keto-friendly foods/snacks).

I don't think I've ever bought something through a Google or reddit ad, or if I have it was a long time ago and/or with less frequency, and I use both of those much more actively than Facebook. reddit ads will sometimes capture my attention/engagement, though, whereas Google ads tend to be more like noise that I tune out.

[toomanybeersies]

I would argue that this is because Facebook has removed the distinction between actual content (from friends and pages you follow) and paid advertisements, it requires more mental effort to determine if content isn't an ad than for Google Ads, where there's usually a fairly clear distinction between organic content and advertising.

This is why "influencer marketing" has an even higher conversion rate than Facebook or Instagram ads, because the distinction between organic content and advertising is removed entirely.

[rozap]

Ok but y'all do a bad job of it. The ads are irrelevant or they're for something I already bought. They're invasive, obnoxious and useless.

My wife bought me an ooni pizza oven for Christmas. A box showed up at our door labelled ooni and I didn't know what it was because I had never heard of that brand. My wife took it and hid it. Then I started getting ads for ooni pizza ovens on Instagram. So thanks for ruining Christmas, Facebook. Assholes.

[Nicksil]

>Isn’t this the exact opposite though? Your data being used for targeting will minimize bad ads that you see.

Perhaps if it did what it says on the tin, but it usually doesn't, so no.

>(Facebook employee, never worked on ads or anything similar though)

Facebook is ads.

[suprfsat]

It is possible for Facebook to simultaneously vacuum up large amounts of personal data and still serve trash advertisements.

[neolog]

Not only possible, it's actually required by Facebook's business model. The set of things that people actually need to buy isn't large enough to support Facebook's scale.

[judge2020]

> Facebook is ads.

OP gets paid via ads, but does not work on the actual ad team and thus wouldn't know any actual inner workings of the targeting systems.

[dfxm12]

Not really. Whether the ads are targeted or not, you almost certainly don't need the shit they're selling & from that point of view, ads are, by default, bad.

[wruza]

I disagree (on ads in general, not on the crap FAANG does).

Expanded in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27759494