The adtech bubble has been due to burst for some time now, I expect this is just getting started. Even at its best, targeted marketing often falls far short of its stated goals. The actual...
The adtech bubble has been due to burst for some time now, I expect this is just getting started.
Even at its best, targeted marketing often falls far short of its stated goals. The actual targeting is imprecise and clunky, yet comes with the cost of invasive, near-total surveillance of individuals' web activity. People who are less privacy-inclined, if they're unfamiliar with how the technology functions, will still commonly describe it as "creepy" when ads follow them from site to site or seem hung up on products they've already purchased. I just can't see how there's any "there" there; I'd guess the value of the entire industry is inflated 90% or more. It's all hype, "engagement" is a meaningless metric, and the privacy costs on the whole outweigh the benefits.
I wonder how much of the "headwinds" Twitter mentions are related to increasing adoption of technologies like uBlock Origin, PiHole, and the tracking protection features of Firefox and Safari.
For some reason I get the weirdest ads on twitter. Best example is an ad for nuclear fuel rods. I really wonder how they decided I, someone who mostly posts pictures of birds, should get ads like...
For some reason I get the weirdest ads on twitter. Best example is an ad for nuclear fuel rods. I really wonder how they decided I, someone who mostly posts pictures of birds, should get ads like that.
Also, perhaps I'm not the most economically inclined person but, hasn't the ad-targetable user amount steadily grown over the years? How would that still affect the share value by that much?
I wish I got weird ads. At least that might be interesting and give me a glimpse of stuff outside my normal bubble. All I get are ZergNet tier "You won't believe how this celebrity looks now!"...
I wish I got weird ads. At least that might be interesting and give me a glimpse of stuff outside my normal bubble.
All I get are ZergNet tier "You won't believe how this celebrity looks now!" clickbait shit and a bunch of annoying TurningPointUSA and Praeger University advocacy ads that I dislike and report every single time as unmarked issue advocacy.
I "dislike" and block all of these ads actually, in the hopes it will target me with less bullshit. But they keep doing it. Of all the platforms, I think Instagram actually hits me with the most relevant ads for me. But I suspect the targeting there is mostly fairly generic urban hipster stuff. It's probably more targeting based on the fact that I use Instagram rather than anything about my profile.
You can see what keywords twitter attach to you here (assuming you're connected): https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data/twitter_interests This might have some insight on why this...
This might have some insight on why this specific.
But from my own experience, the ads are not targeted by what you post, but more on who you follow and I think more importantly on what tweet you "engage with", and for someone that don't replies neither like or retweet, this will be based more on what tweet you clicked on to have more details (replies, image in full, etc..)
For anyone that is considering unchecking every one of them manually, consider doing a F12 on this page, and pasting this code in the console: Array.from(document.getElementsByTagName('input'))...
For anyone that is considering unchecking every one of them manually, consider doing a F12 on this page, and pasting this code in the console:
Twitter hopes that you will not insist in doing so by responding to most of the requests by a 500 HTTP status code, meaning they have not processed correctly your request, but they will nethertheless display the list as unchecked. You must refresh the page to be sure of the result.
I repeated this process 3-4 times and they have finally processed it
Can anyone more tech-inclined than me explain why this wasn't really easily caught and fixed?
In one particular bug, a new user to Twitter was asked whether the platform could use device-specific settings to personalize the user’s timeline. The platform collected that data, even when the user responded “no” to the prompt.
Can anyone more tech-inclined than me explain why this wasn't really easily caught and fixed?
Real answer: It's because you need someone to recognize the mistake, and while hindsight is 20/20 it can be awfully hard to realize it in the moment because software has so many moving parts. For...
Real answer: It's because you need someone to recognize the mistake, and while hindsight is 20/20 it can be awfully hard to realize it in the moment because software has so many moving parts.
For example, this feature might've been in development for two months. For the first 7 weeks, it could've worked exactly right. Then in the last week, someone reports a bug where users in, say, Ukraine weren't getting the correct prompt. A developer goes in and fixes that, but unintentionally breaks the dialog so that collection always happens. Now something they thought was a sure thing is now broken.
Or maybe the "show data" code and the "collect data" code are owned by two separate developers, and one of them breaks the other's code without realizing it.
Alternatively, if the data wasn't being collected before, perhaps they only tested whether the data was collected now, and forgot to test that the data should (in some cases) still not be collected. It's amazing the blindspots people have, especially when they're being pushed to develop lots of new features.
Because they don't care. They don't have an incentive to get it right and keep making sure it's right. If they did, it would have been caught immediately. Besides, their targeting system is...
Because they don't care. They don't have an incentive to get it right and keep making sure it's right. If they did, it would have been caught immediately.
Besides, their targeting system is horseshit. I have over a thousand tweets and a browser asking for pages in English and French, and they still haven't figured out I don't speak Dutch.
i don't get ads anywhere lol ublock origin + umatrix + privacy badger + httpseverywhere + noscript + steven blacks hosts files or adaway hosts file cnbc needs to be canceled, not a fan
i don't get ads anywhere lol
ublock origin + umatrix + privacy badger + httpseverywhere + noscript + steven blacks hosts files or adaway hosts file
The adtech bubble has been due to burst for some time now, I expect this is just getting started.
Even at its best, targeted marketing often falls far short of its stated goals. The actual targeting is imprecise and clunky, yet comes with the cost of invasive, near-total surveillance of individuals' web activity. People who are less privacy-inclined, if they're unfamiliar with how the technology functions, will still commonly describe it as "creepy" when ads follow them from site to site or seem hung up on products they've already purchased. I just can't see how there's any "there" there; I'd guess the value of the entire industry is inflated 90% or more. It's all hype, "engagement" is a meaningless metric, and the privacy costs on the whole outweigh the benefits.
I wonder how much of the "headwinds" Twitter mentions are related to increasing adoption of technologies like uBlock Origin, PiHole, and the tracking protection features of Firefox and Safari.
For some reason I get the weirdest ads on twitter. Best example is an ad for nuclear fuel rods. I really wonder how they decided I, someone who mostly posts pictures of birds, should get ads like that.
Also, perhaps I'm not the most economically inclined person but, hasn't the ad-targetable user amount steadily grown over the years? How would that still affect the share value by that much?
I wish I got weird ads. At least that might be interesting and give me a glimpse of stuff outside my normal bubble.
All I get are ZergNet tier "You won't believe how this celebrity looks now!" clickbait shit and a bunch of annoying TurningPointUSA and Praeger University advocacy ads that I dislike and report every single time as unmarked issue advocacy.
I "dislike" and block all of these ads actually, in the hopes it will target me with less bullshit. But they keep doing it. Of all the platforms, I think Instagram actually hits me with the most relevant ads for me. But I suspect the targeting there is mostly fairly generic urban hipster stuff. It's probably more targeting based on the fact that I use Instagram rather than anything about my profile.
You can see what keywords twitter attach to you here (assuming you're connected): https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data/twitter_interests
This might have some insight on why this specific.
But from my own experience, the ads are not targeted by what you post, but more on who you follow and I think more importantly on what tweet you "engage with", and for someone that don't replies neither like or retweet, this will be based more on what tweet you clicked on to have more details (replies, image in full, etc..)
For anyone that is considering unchecking every one of them manually, consider doing a F12 on this page, and pasting this code in the console:
Twitter hopes that you will not insist in doing so by responding to most of the requests by a 500 HTTP status code, meaning they have not processed correctly your request, but they will nethertheless display the list as unchecked. You must refresh the page to be sure of the result.
I repeated this process 3-4 times and they have finally processed it
Can anyone more tech-inclined than me explain why this wasn't really easily caught and fixed?
Real answer: It's because you need someone to recognize the mistake, and while hindsight is 20/20 it can be awfully hard to realize it in the moment because software has so many moving parts.
For example, this feature might've been in development for two months. For the first 7 weeks, it could've worked exactly right. Then in the last week, someone reports a bug where users in, say, Ukraine weren't getting the correct prompt. A developer goes in and fixes that, but unintentionally breaks the dialog so that collection always happens. Now something they thought was a sure thing is now broken.
Or maybe the "show data" code and the "collect data" code are owned by two separate developers, and one of them breaks the other's code without realizing it.
Alternatively, if the data wasn't being collected before, perhaps they only tested whether the data was collected now, and forgot to test that the data should (in some cases) still not be collected. It's amazing the blindspots people have, especially when they're being pushed to develop lots of new features.
Because they don't care. They don't have an incentive to get it right and keep making sure it's right. If they did, it would have been caught immediately.
Besides, their targeting system is horseshit. I have over a thousand tweets and a browser asking for pages in English and French, and they still haven't figured out I don't speak Dutch.
i don't get ads anywhere lol
ublock origin + umatrix + privacy badger + httpseverywhere + noscript + steven blacks hosts files or adaway hosts file
cnbc needs to be canceled, not a fan