[broscillator]

Those ads cannot cater their content and their timing towards your vulnerabilities based on behavior analytics, such as metadata indicating that you might be depressed, going through a breakup, etc. An app can shoot varied content at you and determine that if you view happy cat content, then enraging political discourse, then sexual stimulating content, and then and ad, you're more likely to click on the ad, or stare at it for longer, etc.

Social media ads are essentially interactive, but their mechanics are hidden and there's no winning state for the player.

And just to play with dark ideas: what exactly (besides technological limitations) would stop any of the big companies from basically running a long social experiment to determine whether, over years, you can shape a kid to become an adult that's a big consumer?

An ad on TV has no information on who you are when you view it. An ad on SM has detailed information of who you were years ago, who you are now, and there's no reason why it can't make predictions about who you'll be based on the growing data. Nor is there a reason not to try to shape that to their benefit.

[jahewson]

> An app can shoot varied content at you and determine that if you view happy cat content, then enraging political discourse, then sexual stimulating content, and then and ad, you're more likely to click on the ad, or stare at it for longer, etc.

Yeah, no. Facebook ads are mostly pay per impression, not click, so there’s no reason to even do this. Ad targeting is controlled by advertisers for the most part, not algorithms - they want to target specific demographics, not some random cross-section of humanity. It’s very different from the kind of algorithms that power your news feed.

[broscillator]

Huh? A demographic is a random cross-section of humanity. The only thing that matters is if the way you're determining the group yields more sales.

The final goal is obviously a sale, but the real commodity is attention.

I'm not saying "this is how it is", I'm saying "show my a reason why this is not the case now or where we're heading.

Like, if FB could do this, and it yielded more money for them, what would stop them? You sound very convinced, so I'd be glad if you can go into detail as to what that conviction is founded on. Have you worked on these algorithms?