I saw discord in there as well as smart TV platforms

Lol which moron downvoted you? NO I LIKE MY BILLIONAIRE PROPAGANDA KEEP THE LIES AND OUTRAGE COMING

😂 it’s always interesting to click the “why are you showing me this” button to see just how wide a net they’re casting. (Before ruthlessly clicking it to waste the budget on their stupid untargeted ads, then blocking it)

Hi! I work with google ads every day, it’s my job, and I have a business running ads for other small businesses.

Guess what, I use an ad blocker!

If all ads were innocent businesses trying to sell things I’m interested in, and they all had their targeting set up correctly, it’d be great. Unfortunately, all my ads are “you are male and under 60” and that’s as sophisticated as the targeting has been set to, so they’re totally irrelevant, terrible ads.

Also, my other issue is that some advertising platforms have really low standards for what you’re allowed to show. Google at least has some standards and is sometimes overzealous with its automated disapprovals, which hopefully makes its platform a little better. But I don’t get to choose which platform ads I see when I visit someone’s site (and Google pays very little when compared to other platforms)

I’ve had this multiple times.

Tried to leave a big detailed helpful negative review and it gets flagged for being suspicious, with no copy of the review attached so I have to write it all again. And then it gets removed again.

I just looked in my emails. The exact phrasing was “We have reviewed our decisions and concluded that the product you received is authentic. As a result, we removed your review specific to this product. This ensures other customers see reviews that reflect the current shopping experience.”

Most recently it happened with a body trimmer, where I never questioned the inauthenticity, and then a zojirushi travel mug that I genuinely believe was a fake, and attached a lot of evidence.

But surely any social media is the same? The UI has always been terrible with hard to follow comment chains, it seems like just a bad platform before any of this, I just don’t see the appeal.

I remember it used to just be “hey this is where Stephen Fry tweets his thoughts in shortform” but why can’t he do that on Facebook,on Reddit, mastadon,Lemmy, Instagram,tiktok, and godknows what other platforms there are out there.

If one person can make an account, and another person can follow you, that’s all twitter seems to offer, and everyone does that now.

That’s still a fuck ton of people using the platform. WHY

. I can only respond from my inbox

On sync I’m able to filter out any domain, if that’s an option you’re open to.

It’s fun, I’ve been making my own!

But what email interface is better than Gmail? I’m literally using my own email address pop3’d into Gmail for the UI

Civitai is where most of these models come from.

And yes, some of the plugins make children, and some of the plugins make sexual content. And it’s absolutely possible to use multiple plugins. I’ve actually reported some things on that site that were clearly designed with ill intent.

CivitAI is a pretty perverted site at the best of times. But there’s a disturbing amount of age adjustment plugins to make images of children on the same site they have plugins to make sex acts. It’s clear some people definitely are.

The worst quality, most ugly, annoying ones that constantly talk about things you don’t want or care about 👍

I’d personally like ads to actually be related to things I care about if there are any at all.

Stomping on your rights lol. Again, I’m not sure you actually know how any of it works, just looking for the next thing to be outraged about.

Unfortunately, bad ads suck. Many advertisers with a lot of money don’t care, they just target everyone, so you see ads about things you have no interest in. Or a site uses an ad platform that doesn’t allow such accurate targeting (but they pay the website more for showing them) and you get horrible spammy ads.

As fucking annoying as Google ads can be, they’re still better than the competition because they actually have strict rules and regulations about what you’re allowed to show.

For most of my customers, they make at least double their money back on ads, because we make sure it’s super narrow focus and only people who are already interested should be seeing the ads.

This highly depends on the site of course, if their site looks untrustworthy or bad in some way, nobody will buy their product or service, so we’re super clear about that up front. This also ensures we’re always working with legitimate businesses too.

I don’t think you understand how it even works. What personal information do you think I get?

I just tick a box that says “I think people who like dogs will be interested in this product” and then, if you search “buy high quality dog bed” my clients business appears, because they sell high quality dog beds.

I see nothing about you personally, and there’s too much traffic on the internet to even care about being that granular even if I could.

I’m not pretending anything 🤣 I literally only work with small businesses

I’m the one with the big comment above, the middleman between Google and the advertisers.

I definitely defend the advertisers. I work with small local businesses who just want to sell their products. I have a guy who just wants to sell quality handles with his daughter. A lady who wants to sell her luxury decorations, and a family who produce extremely secure residential doors.

I’m really happy working with all of them, they’re all lovely genuine people with a good product that will absolutely sell to the right person at the right time.

But how do they get to the right person at the right time? How do they fight the giant corporations for your attention so you don’t just order from Amazon or TEMU or AliExpress? They advertise.

And what’s the best, most cost effective way to advertise right now? Digitally.

Of course they can’t compete with the huge marketing budgets of those corporations, but at least they get a small price of the pie, and I help them maximise that effect so they’re not showing useless ads to people who never wanted to see their product, and they’re not wasting money they could be using to compete with the big guys.

Unfortunately if you block tracking, you’re left with the cesspool of untargeted ads that aren’t relevant to you, and unfortunately sometimes the ads you see are just related to criteria like “you are over 20 and using a phone” which is useless to everyone and usually the result of companies with more money than sense.

As usual I feel the people to be angry at here are the rich corporations, not every advertiser, of which many are innocent small businesses trying to stay relevant and competitive.

To the people who work with it, it hasn’t been quiet at all. I work with Google ads every day and it’s fucking disgusting the way they’re rigging the system against advertisers.

They constantly recommend changes that ensure you spend more money on bad traffic.

They constantly push their “automation” which is essentially just giving Google money and trusting them to spend it where they think is best.

They make your traffic broader and target less relevant people, to get you to spend money on useless clicks.

They made it harder to opt.out of mobile app advertising because that’s the most likely traffic to gain money from accidental clicks.

They stopped us seeing exactly where our money was spent.

They constantly contact people with “advisors” who are actually salespeople from the Philippines tasked with getting you to waste more money by enabling money wasting settings.

It’s just been getting worse and worse in the last decade, with worse traffic and costing more.

Hey, in fact, here’s a screenshot of an “advisor” contacting me today

This is meant to be an official contact from Google but it reads like a scam. This guy isn’t trying to help me, he’s trying to get me to spend more and enable money-wasting settings in the account.

Also I manage many accounts and he hasn’t even mentioned which one he’s emailing about!

Oh also, they always want a call so they can be more convincing and pushy, and so their suggestions aren’t in writing. If I ask for an email with all their recommendations they usually leave me alone. (Until the next advisor 3 months later)

That’s fine. I’m not arguing this is a bad thing, I’m just being pedantic about the word theft.

Having your voice used to say things you didn’t say is a terrifying prospect. Combined with deep faking takes it one step further.

But is it technically theft?