And yet I can explicitly type the exact parameters for an item I'm looking for into Google or Amazon and I get flooded with bullshit that is not that thing.
Amazon's primary revenue driver is selling the top spots in their search results. So it's no surprise that when you search for something, you almost never see what you're looking for. They have literally created a system that intentionally shows you what you're NOT looking for in order for them to make a profit.
DDG is getting worse but it's not this bad. I've tried Kagi's free sample (about search 30/100 rn) and it's excellent. I still don't know if I'll buy a subscription to it but I like the incentive model.
That's because what you're searching for is what you definitely want, so they know you're likely click/buy it. But if throw a bunch of crap that you maybe might want before you get to it, maybe you'll buy some of that too. It's like how supermarkets throw a bunch of junk food in a checkout lane, maybe you'll get tempted while you're forced to stand there even though you just wanted to buy laundry detergent.
If they have to post paid ads to find new employees, you know they're an especially shitty employer. There's going to be a very good reason why they can't find (or keep) enough employees the normal way.
I tried getting directions to a restaurant from Google Maps yesterday and it routed me inefficiently through an intersection with a paid sponsor restaurant. This was the biggest enshittification of direction apps I’ve experienced. Not only did it give me worse directions, but what are the chances I need to stop at the paid restaurant when I am trying to get to another restaurant in 20 minutes?
what are the chances I need to stop at the paid restaurant when I am trying to get to another restaurant in 20 minutes?
That's not the purpose though. This puts this other restaurant in your head for some other time. You may think you're not actually affected by this tactic, but decades of research shows that, even when aware of this, it still fucking works.
That article is a riot. Also disturbing and depressing. And confusing, but not because of the author, but because of Amazon.
I get that balancing out the different factors that play into the likelihood of buying it again is difficult, but with all the data they gather, it really shouldn't be impossible to figure out that the mode of "purchases per customer" for a given product cluster is 1 or that a frequent recommendation has not actually gotten any interest and use those for weighing the random recommendation selection.
Even within some product group you buy more frequently, there might be certain brands / vendors you prefer, so buying something once to try (particularly if it's new) and never again should also reduce the likelihood.
But I'm just a Junior Data Analyst, what do I know.
If they have all this marketing intel about me why do they deluge me with ads for major appliances right after I buy them? I mean how likely am I gonna want another dishwasher the same week?
I think them having all this info about you, is a way to get advertisers to pay them more for the targeted ads.
It's not to help you or the advertisers, but themselves.
And I assume not a single advertiser has gone up to them with a well grounded: "bruh, dafuq are you doing showing fridge ads to the guy that just bought a fridge from us... that's not what we are paying you for."
From the manufacturer's point of view all they see/hear from big tech is "these fridge ads are very effective, see this guy who bought a fridge as evidence."
I don't see why not though - if they know which urls I visit, they should know about order confirmations. If companies are sharing all my browsing patterns why wouldn't they share what I bought?
As far as I know, Google and Facebook do not collect every single URL you visit. It wouldn't be impossible for Chrome to do this, but I think it would be public information because of the nature and volume of that information - even though efforts can be made to disguise what it collects. Facebook basically has no such ability because it collects information by having a little thing on each page, with the agreement of the page owner, and I don't think that thing receives any info from a successful sale (as opposed to "person browsed this product's page)
They don't have to collect them as in saving them, they just have to collect information about activity that would interest marketers who buy the data. "Searched for dishwashers"... "Ordered dishwasher"...
Then the marketers could process the data and go, Lovable Sidekick searched for dishwashers but didn't buy one, maybe he's still looking, let's send him ads for dishwashers. Or, Lovable Sidekick bought a dishwasher, let's not waste ad impressions showing him dishwasher ads, let's show ads for dishwasher detergent. I mean, if I were part of that whole circus that's how I would try to approach it.
But to do that, Google would need to collect and save save and process every URL you go to. It would need to snoop not only that you looked at the dishwasher, but that you clicked "add to basket" and then "order" and then completed the order without ever removing it from the basket. That means analysing not just the pages you visit but also the underlying requests that control the basket and order process.
There's nothing it can do more minimally, and as far as I know it doesn't do this.
Yes, it does seem like a lot of processing. Now google any word and see how fast it returns 200,000 results. Consider that Google delivered the same experience to millions of other people at that same time. Then consider what size drop in what size bucket the processing you described really amounts to.
It can process all of that easily on its servers. But there should then be evidence of this very large quantity of data being exported out of Chrome and uploaded to Google, which I don't believe there is.
There are some other difficulties, too: no two shopping platforms encode "user completed the order" in the exact same way, so performing that analysis is actually quite hard and not nearly 100% accurate, even if you can get the complete browsing data.
I've actually turned off my autocomplete lately. It's become too annoying.. I'd rather make "your fingers are too fat"-mistakes than all the "God" and "ducking" every time. People only have to understamd about 80% of the words you write in order to understand the message. Si, a swnwnve kike thud id not thw ens og the wprld.
Yeah it's worked like it was vibe-coded by AI since long before LLMs became mainstream (I wonder if that's bc they are the predecessors of LLMs in the first place?).
Weirdly, back in the dumb phone days, with T9 I could bang out texts way faster and more accurately so long as I wasn't straying too far out of the dictionary. But it was super easy to add new words, and it would pick them up later.
They already accomplished that, phones in like 16 had chips that were capable of doing it all on device without needing the cloud, which isn't profitable.
Remember when people used to think we were crazy regarding advertising based on speech secretly recorded?
I do this fun thing I've dubbed the "platypus test" to show people how crazy it is. If you open Instagram and scroll through reels while talking gibberish adding the word platypus every now and then you will eventually start seeing them in your feed. Its rather quick too, I managed to get results within 10 minutes.
I still think it's bogus unless I see clear proof of it. That would imply your Instagram app somehow needs to bypass the kernel which let's the system know when the microphone is being used (some OS let's you know when mic or app is accessed real-time). That seems like an awfully open backdoor to microphone access.
Go try it out and let me know your results. Just for context I'm using GrapheneOS. And yeah I know some hardware backdoor would seem paranoid but consider the reach of said company.
I have, repeatedly, because it's not the first time I hear of this, only once did something similar to what I was saying appeared. Sounds like a coincidence to me.
Happens a lot when you talk about burgers or pizza and you get an ad for whatever you're talking about.
You can say that's coincidence, and yes these chains do a lot of ads.
Then one day I'm looking at food to order (I have all the ad/tracking blockers) while my GF is on her laptop doing something completely different.
I mention how bad restaurant X is. (there's only one, not a chain)
And in 2 minutes she gets the ad for that particular restaurant.
Really, history has shown over and over that you can't trust tech companies.
So i have been thinking about it and I often wonder if it is the reverse. They subtly influence us to want a thing. Once you’re hooked and consciously want it, you start noticing it.
The last two times I mentioned Little Sleazers, the LC app pushed notifications for random ass deals. Like immediately; not even some time later that I could think perhaps it was coincidental. "Little Ceasar's sucks" phone dings.
Also Pete Holmes new standup special talks about this. Makes me wonder how many people in that audience got ads for giant black jelly dildos specifically made for ass play. 🤔
I mean, I got scooped last year. I am not much of a songwriter, and I had a great idea for an album. Rapid fire wrote off a couple dozen songs in a week.
Thing is, I'm a specialist. Sure I wrote the book on my instrument but that's just technique. Writing songs, that's a whole different game. I have written only one song good enough to let other people hear. So like, having my songs scooped before I could publish sucked, but what was worse was the way it happened. It was my favorite band. And they didn't rip me off wholesale, the album they released after I was working on my songs, it was conceptually the same album. Like Jesus fuck John get out of my head.
Are you saying you wrote a song and Facebook secretly listened in through your phone and gave the song to your favourite band and they released it? Because that sounds like you have serious mental delusions. This does not happen.
And yet I can explicitly type the exact parameters for an item I'm looking for into Google or Amazon and I get flooded with bullshit that is not that thing.
“Oh you’re looking for a red KitchenAid blender type # 5KSB2073EER? Great! Here’s that 4 CD set of traditional Turkmenistan folk music you wanted.”
Sorry all these other companies paid us more to put their shit in front of your eyeballs than the one who sells the thing you want.
Amazon's primary revenue driver is selling the top spots in their search results. So it's no surprise that when you search for something, you almost never see what you're looking for. They have literally created a system that intentionally shows you what you're NOT looking for in order for them to make a profit.
Ok. I'm adding that to my cart but I'm mad about it.
Now show me the manual for the fucking blender you asshole.
Blender tutorial noises
First, delete the default cube
https://www.manualslib.com/manual/4186191/Kitchenaid-5ksb2072.html
I mean, one must admit that a 4 CD set of traditional Turkmenistan folk music does sound pretty sweet.
DDG is getting worse but it's not this bad. I've tried Kagi's free sample (about search 30/100 rn) and it's excellent. I still don't know if I'll buy a subscription to it but I like the incentive model.
https://musicbrainz.org/work/a20486f5-80b3-4003-afbe-531d52cd18fc
That's because what you're searching for is what you definitely want, so they know you're likely click/buy it. But if throw a bunch of crap that you maybe might want before you get to it, maybe you'll buy some of that too. It's like how supermarkets throw a bunch of junk food in a checkout lane, maybe you'll get tempted while you're forced to stand there even though you just wanted to buy laundry detergent.
It’s also a giant heaping spoonful of incompetence.
Not until I finally buy something do I get floder with the right ads, at which point those ads are pointless.
For all the data they have on us they sure are pretty ass at utilizing it.
I've been looking for a new job. Now I get ads for jobs. That's actually nice, were it not that they're always the same five shitty jobs every time.
Those are the five shitty jobs that paid for advertising.
I wouldn't wakt to work for a company that recruits through advertising.
If they have to post paid ads to find new employees, you know they're an especially shitty employer. There's going to be a very good reason why they can't find (or keep) enough employees the normal way.
“Hey, can I interest you in data entry for AI?”
I tried getting directions to a restaurant from Google Maps yesterday and it routed me inefficiently through an intersection with a paid sponsor restaurant. This was the biggest enshittification of direction apps I’ve experienced. Not only did it give me worse directions, but what are the chances I need to stop at the paid restaurant when I am trying to get to another restaurant in 20 minutes?
That's not the purpose though. This puts this other restaurant in your head for some other time. You may think you're not actually affected by this tactic, but decades of research shows that, even when aware of this, it still fucking works.
So the only winning move is not to use Google
I'm glad they convinced me to turn my mattress purchase into a mattress collection.
This article about a person who bought an urn online is hilarious. Amazon thinks I'm a serial killer now (cracked dot com)
That article is a riot. Also disturbing and depressing. And confusing, but not because of the author, but because of Amazon.
I get that balancing out the different factors that play into the likelihood of buying it again is difficult, but with all the data they gather, it really shouldn't be impossible to figure out that the mode of "purchases per customer" for a given product cluster is 1 or that a frequent recommendation has not actually gotten any interest and use those for weighing the random recommendation selection.
Even within some product group you buy more frequently, there might be certain brands / vendors you prefer, so buying something once to try (particularly if it's new) and never again should also reduce the likelihood.
But I'm just a Junior Data Analyst, what do I know.
If they have all this marketing intel about me why do they deluge me with ads for major appliances right after I buy them? I mean how likely am I gonna want another dishwasher the same week?
I think them having all this info about you, is a way to get advertisers to pay them more for the targeted ads.
It's not to help you or the advertisers, but themselves.
And I assume not a single advertiser has gone up to them with a well grounded: "bruh, dafuq are you doing showing fridge ads to the guy that just bought a fridge from us... that's not what we are paying you for."
From the manufacturer's point of view all they see/hear from big tech is "these fridge ads are very effective, see this guy who bought a fridge as evidence."
Because they get paid to send ads to people who might be interested in Dishwashers.
Google/Instagram/Whatever (generally) doesn't make money when you buy a dishwasher.
I don't believe they actually have the information that you bought the thing.
I don't see why not though - if they know which urls I visit, they should know about order confirmations. If companies are sharing all my browsing patterns why wouldn't they share what I bought?
As far as I know, Google and Facebook do not collect every single URL you visit. It wouldn't be impossible for Chrome to do this, but I think it would be public information because of the nature and volume of that information - even though efforts can be made to disguise what it collects. Facebook basically has no such ability because it collects information by having a little thing on each page, with the agreement of the page owner, and I don't think that thing receives any info from a successful sale (as opposed to "person browsed this product's page)
They don't have to collect them as in saving them, they just have to collect information about activity that would interest marketers who buy the data. "Searched for dishwashers"... "Ordered dishwasher"...
Then the marketers could process the data and go, Lovable Sidekick searched for dishwashers but didn't buy one, maybe he's still looking, let's send him ads for dishwashers. Or, Lovable Sidekick bought a dishwasher, let's not waste ad impressions showing him dishwasher ads, let's show ads for dishwasher detergent. I mean, if I were part of that whole circus that's how I would try to approach it.
But to do that, Google would need to collect and save save and process every URL you go to. It would need to snoop not only that you looked at the dishwasher, but that you clicked "add to basket" and then "order" and then completed the order without ever removing it from the basket. That means analysing not just the pages you visit but also the underlying requests that control the basket and order process.
There's nothing it can do more minimally, and as far as I know it doesn't do this.
Yes, it does seem like a lot of processing. Now google any word and see how fast it returns 200,000 results. Consider that Google delivered the same experience to millions of other people at that same time. Then consider what size drop in what size bucket the processing you described really amounts to.
It can process all of that easily on its servers. But there should then be evidence of this very large quantity of data being exported out of Chrome and uploaded to Google, which I don't believe there is.
There are some other difficulties, too: no two shopping platforms encode "user completed the order" in the exact same way, so performing that analysis is actually quite hard and not nearly 100% accurate, even if you can get the complete browsing data.
I wish Google would put
soall theirsittingsoyingspying toGodgoodisuse to improve their text prediction on theirsiteswipe input.I've actually turned off my autocomplete lately. It's become too annoying.. I'd rather make "your fingers are too fat"-mistakes than all the "God" and "ducking" every time. People only have to understamd about 80% of the words you write in order to understand the message. Si, a swnwnve kike thud id not thw ens og the wprld.
Yeah it's worked like it was vibe-coded by AI since long before LLMs became mainstream (I wonder if that's bc they are the predecessors of LLMs in the first place?).
Weirdly, back in the dumb phone days, with T9 I could bang out texts way faster and more accurately so long as I wasn't straying too far out of the dictionary. But it was super easy to add new words, and it would pick them up later.
cul cul fr fr no cap rizz
They already accomplished that, phones in like 16 had chips that were capable of doing it all on device without needing the cloud, which isn't profitable.
Remember when people used to think we were crazy regarding advertising based on speech secretly recorded?
I do this fun thing I've dubbed the "platypus test" to show people how crazy it is. If you open Instagram and scroll through reels while talking gibberish adding the word platypus every now and then you will eventually start seeing them in your feed. Its rather quick too, I managed to get results within 10 minutes.
I still think it's bogus unless I see clear proof of it. That would imply your Instagram app somehow needs to bypass the kernel which let's the system know when the microphone is being used (some OS let's you know when mic or app is accessed real-time). That seems like an awfully open backdoor to microphone access.
Go try it out and let me know your results. Just for context I'm using GrapheneOS. And yeah I know some hardware backdoor would seem paranoid but consider the reach of said company.
I have, repeatedly, because it's not the first time I hear of this, only once did something similar to what I was saying appeared. Sounds like a coincidence to me.
Happens a lot when you talk about burgers or pizza and you get an ad for whatever you're talking about.
You can say that's coincidence, and yes these chains do a lot of ads.
Then one day I'm looking at food to order (I have all the ad/tracking blockers) while my GF is on her laptop doing something completely different.
I mention how bad restaurant X is. (there's only one, not a chain)
And in 2 minutes she gets the ad for that particular restaurant.
Really, history has shown over and over that you can't trust tech companies.
There are multiple report voice record not even needed. Can infer behaviour and conversation without. Which honestly even scarier.
Air conditioning filters. I need air conditioner filters. My air conditioner filters are filthy. I need to buy air conditioner filters
I searched for a car air filter the other day. I bought a car air filter the other day. I am still receiving ads for car air filters today.
Shit's dumb as hell.
Did you tell it that I need kitchen utensils up the butt
The first few seasons of Bleach were absolutely blessed.
The first Nirvana album? Yea, can only be played at max
That album had multiple seasons‽
So i have been thinking about it and I often wonder if it is the reverse. They subtly influence us to want a thing. Once you’re hooked and consciously want it, you start noticing it.
... hyper-realistic bedazzled dildo
I dunno about bedazzeld, but ummm... 👀
Imagine how good it would look on your desk. The sack shining like two disco balls
Or you could hang it above the fireplace like that singing trout
As if they'd need to actually hear you say stuff. They know what you think before you do
Their tools know how to remind people they had asked them not to listen
also, using Google to search for a term/subject while watching a YouTube video that mentioned it
I searched the first four generic characters of something I'd never searched before, and the full subject popped right up as the suggestion
either the phone is listening, or they're cataloguing video content subjects. either way, building tons of data points on you
And I have balls
I'm a juggler, I mean
And I'm male, though I was a woman for a few years there
The last two times I mentioned Little Sleazers, the LC app pushed notifications for random ass deals. Like immediately; not even some time later that I could think perhaps it was coincidental. "Little Ceasar's sucks" phone dings.
Also Pete Holmes new standup special talks about this. Makes me wonder how many people in that audience got ads for giant black jelly dildos specifically made for ass play. 🤔
GOOG giving it to META seems apropos considering how they're respectively doing with their AI crap.
Where is this original meme from? Bleach?
Yep. First episode iirc
Not me chilling on ![email protected]
I just need to buy my plane tickets for noodling about with no direction of specific importance. Be mad if there was a wedding there too wouldn't it
Tickets to MAD available right now! Live your best Spanish wedding!
"Thinking about buying a machine that turns AI and Tech CEOs into fertilizer."
Been thinking, this is a common trope in anime (using glasses/other objects to try to hear through a barrier), does this actually work?
But good luck getting anyone to sell you a dildo.
I mean, I got scooped last year. I am not much of a songwriter, and I had a great idea for an album. Rapid fire wrote off a couple dozen songs in a week.
Thing is, I'm a specialist. Sure I wrote the book on my instrument but that's just technique. Writing songs, that's a whole different game. I have written only one song good enough to let other people hear. So like, having my songs scooped before I could publish sucked, but what was worse was the way it happened. It was my favorite band. And they didn't rip me off wholesale, the album they released after I was working on my songs, it was conceptually the same album. Like Jesus fuck John get out of my head.
Are you saying you wrote a song and Facebook secretly listened in through your phone and gave the song to your favourite band and they released it? Because that sounds like you have serious mental delusions. This does not happen.
Looking at their last sentence it does seem so
people never fuck with you, do they. they just give you a nice wide berth (because of the odor), so you never learned how to deal with it, huh?