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euphronius posted:My YouTube feed is unusable. There are broadcasts ??? And shorts and all kind of crap idk The recommended system has been awful for years - I managed to get around it by spamming “not interested” any time I accidentally clicked on a bugman screaming - no more though. I’ve somehow been micro-targeted, and there’s an ecosystem of bottom feeder content randomly selecting from my interests and mixing them in a blender. “Tony Soprano in Elden Ring.” Why is he there? Is there… some sort of punchline? No. It is a greenscreen of James Gandolfini simply walking around. “Lalo Salamanca in the backrooms.” “If Arthur was Midwest emo.” “Family guy Peter with half life 2 citadel ambiance.” Most of these videos are only a few days old. It’s like 5 monkeys jumping on a bed but for adults. Gotta be pumping out dozens a day by swapping a template, hoping to catch someone with an IQ of a goldfish. How are they even making money? Isn’t youtube stiff toward paying out creators?
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Dec 17, 2023 14:56
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 02:43 |
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I can’t search for photos of people anymore, even celebrities. I wanted to remember what this one actor looked like and google images gave me an ebay link to a poster and blurry paparazzi shots for sale on Alarmy. It is 100% just a marketplace now. Hope I don’t have to use bingSalt Fish posted:You clicked it. Research purposes only!! Been seeing them for weeks and not interacting, wanted to find out if it’s a content mill. Of course it’ll only get worse now but I might just make a new account. FalconImpala fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Dec 17, 2023 |
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Dec 17, 2023 15:01
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I accidentally drove onto a toll road. There's no toll booth, though, just a sneaky sign saying that you have to pay online now -- which would be fine except I'm now making an account with all my biometric info & emails for which to send News and Information About Products and Services, and something they call an Environmental Newsletter. I'm using fake info and opting out but this surely will not stop them from selling it.
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Dec 19, 2023 00:36
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erosion posted:The funny thing about advertising is that so much goes into this messaging that doesn't really do anything but everyone has to pretend it's really important or everything collapses. This led me into a jstor rabbithole about if digital advertising works *at all* and I thought I would share my dummy layman thoughts. There's a good freakonomics episode from 2020 called "Does Advertising Actually Work?". There's some compelling anecdotes that it doesn't - consultants being paid to create jargon, and not knowing how to measure the thing that needs to be measured, which is the causal impact of ads on sales. We don't know this because there's no control group for not doing it. Consumer psychology research is very secretive, proprietary and insular, which runs against the whole scientific method thing, and most psychology is *already* bullshit that can't be replicated; so beyond the common sense idea that seeing something more often creates familiarity, what's up with the $600 billion that goes into the ad industry and why is it getting worse? At some point in 2011, eBay was fighting with Bing and decided to turn off all their keyword-search ads. They expected sales to drop by 5% - it dropped by 0.5%, in the margin of error of 0. eBay slashed their marketing budget by $100 million a year. But nobody followed them. This happened again, by accident, when a company forgot to run newspaper ads and saw no impact. Steve Levitt told them to maybe stop the newspaper ads, and they refused. "It was almost if they found out they didn’t work, it was far worse for these people than it was not finding out it didn’t work. Because then they had to explain why for the last 15 years they had been wasting $200 million a year. So, they were happy to just live in a world in which as long as there were ads in every market, every Sunday, life was good." Here it is happening again to Steve Sailer: "... my contacts at G&Z explained that no brand manager had ever gotten promoted by cutting his ad budget. G&Z believed in advertising. To consider reducing commercials was heresy. In short, Americans like to advertise. Our assumption that somebody must have proved that advertising works is reassuring even if nobody can remember the exact details." There's collections of stories like this in the book Subprime Attention Crisis - Tim Hwang talks about how Facebook fraudulently created advertising numbers to kill other websites, he talks about how 60% of ads on the internet are never even *seen* (hidden out of screen or something), and how people pay far less attention to ads than they used to (click rate is like 0.01%.) So why are ads getting more invasive and prevalent (anecdotally, the brand new video billboards in my neighborhood)? It could be the silent depression we're in - as business slows, the industry would advertise more to try to drive more sales. It could be people desperate to insist that their job has an impact on the world, as above, pumping any amount of money and research to justify it. The latter, I think, led to increasingly arcane poo poo like neuromarketing - strapping EEGs on people and making them watch commercials, which horrified me at first, until I realized the EEGs can't even be read. It has nothing to do with targeting consumers and everything to do with showing your patron a graph that says "engagement" and the line is going up. They love it! (Ex. chocolate is better than kissing in collaboration with Cadbury, car design proven to be on a par with the most basic of human emotions by Volvo, etc.) The big claim of neuromarketing is that we can finally figure out things like consumer preferences and shopping habits by recording brain activity. What it ended up in was bad ad copy. All of this is a pretty strong implication that most of advertising, beyond the simple stuff like awareness and attribution, is a rain dance. Those fake studies also obscured most of the research I was trying to do into a connection between advertising and psychology, of which there's surprisingly little outside of poo poo articles like those. No one has taken a serious, non-corporate-funded look at the purpose & impact of modern advertising. (The closest thing is Manufacturing Consent and Chomsky's propaganda model.) It's not super cut and dry though, because the whole industry is secretive. Ads do have function beyond sales, they do help small businesses, and the "ads aren't real" theory is popular among techy people, who have ad blockers and have been trained by the internet to ignore ads. What we do know is that almost all the entertainment we consume - sports, journalism, apps, podcasts, even transport & medical research - is being subsidized by ads. It's deeply intertwined with whatever remains of American infrastructure and the service economy. If it turns out that it's a bubble, like the 2008 mortgage crisis, well that would suck
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Dec 19, 2023 06:28
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Diet Poison posted:Yeah about the only place I actually see ads anymore is on Duolingo (because that is not a good enough learning tool to pay for) and it's the same one or two ads over and over for the ~15 min I use the app per day, changing every couple of days, and just... Who is the person doing the research that obviously says "seeing the same ad 5 times in a 15 minute period makes the human cattle remember your brand" versus the reality: seeing the same ad 5 times in a 15 minute period irritates me, makes me associate your brand with wasting my time, and ensures I won't buy anything from you even if it would save my drat life. This was in my post, the answer is there is no research, the evidence is that it doesn’t work, and it’s being kept afloat by stubbornness + the same few companies selling ad space back and forth in higher valuation, which is a scam bubble like 2008. I did read about how people don’t pay attention on the internet as a result so I had that coming. Buy cokey cola
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Dec 19, 2023 22:48
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 02:43 |
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This video was, artistically, fascinating to me so I needed to go watch it. Unfortunately I forgot to turn on private browsing, and it infected my homepage faster than a zombie virus. https://twitter.com/sugarsmorecake/status/1773063013748068691 My recommendations are now this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3pwDacNvAQ Turn on private browsing to be able to appreciate how every single commenter seems to be AI
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Mar 30, 2024 01:54
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