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I have a running joke with a friend about "what Jeff wants to sell me today".
(Jeff being Jeff Bezos, i.e. Amazon recommendations.)
Strange things Jeff has wanted to sell me recently:
After playing a bit of Baldur's Gate 3, I now imagine Jeff Bezos as a deep gnome merchant with an astonishingly random assortment of products ....
I'm imagining you going into wal mart, arriving at checkout with all those items in a row. Queue very skeptical look from the cashier.
Queue is a line of something. Cue is a hint or signal.
Uhh, nah I totally meant that they're queueing up their skeptical looks. Yeah, totally on purpose.
This is my falcon, Awk Sed Fred ...
I constantly get ads about horny milfs in my town but horny milfs are an invasive species where I live and we’re not allowed to have them as pets. I don’t even live in a town. I live in a grand duchy.
That sounds less like ads and more like a local emergency alert system.
So it isn't a strange item, but the length of time I got targeted ads was absurd.
In 2018 I had to buy a new mattress. I Googled directions to the nearest mattress store and got a mattress. For the next 3 years every single video ad I got anywhere was for mattresses. Do y'all know how many people decided to just start making mattresses... I didn't think the ads would end...
You don't buy a mattress every week?
Subscribe and save!
Wait, how many of you aren't getting a weekly mattress? Our family gets a new mattress every fortnight TOPS.
3 years seems like an insane amount of time between mattresses.
I've been living my life all wrong and I have nobody to blame but myself...
Around 2010 I was going through a traditional Irish music phase. I remember listening to Pandora while eating my lunch and after the song "Finnegans Wake" I got an advertisement for "Funerals starting at $900 in the {where I lived} area".
I understand why it was suggested, most people listening to The Dubliners are probably 30-40 years older than me. It also made me laugh to imagine some sales guy going to a funeral home and pitching advertising as a way to drum up more business.
It's brilliant audience choice, though. Fully 100% of Spotify listeners are going to die.
Few years ago I got an "ad" that was just some dudes really bad call of duty black ops 2 sniping montage.
I mean full on some of the most meh trickshots and quickscopes I think I've ever seen, against the built in AI opponents that you can enable in custom games, something like 5 or so years after the game was actually relevant to pop culture.
Oh my algorithm is FUCKED because I'm so insanely curious.
So first of all I'm always googling stuff from medical procedures to culture and liguistics. That's part of how I found out that apparently black Americans will sometimes get a nose job to confirm better to western beauty standards.
Second of all, I will click on everything that I can't identify, which often turn out to be kitchen implements or specialized hobby equipment. One time I clicked on some weird looking shoes, shortly followed by some bizarre looking amorphous plastic things which turned out to be special climbing shoes and screw-in footholds, respectively.
So anyway, that's the story of how Google adsense thinks I'm an African American woman who hates her nose but is also extremely passionate about indoor climbing (none of this is even remotely true).
I like the way you use the internet.
Aren't you worried about ransomwares though?
From Amazon/target ads? The sketchiest ads I click on are probably temu.
I never see any online ads.
Back in the day, my shaver broke so I looked online for a new one. Bought one, and afterwards I had ads for nothing but electric shavers. It was so friggin bizarre, like reading some random article and getting 6 ads for shavers. That's when I finally started using adblock.
I don't understand the logic of that for long term products! Like maybe do it for 2 weeks after you first search, and then maybe 3 years later.
Like, how can that possibly work?
YouTube gave me an ad for an organisation to deradicalize islamic terrorists.
The night before a terror bombing very close to my house, organised and readied in a house a few blocks from me that I walk past to get the bus.
I should check my ad vault to see what ads Adnausem is blocking for me.
youtube hit me with an ad for a company that makes those little outlet boxes that go in walls. so of course my ass watched the full video, liked it, left a comment, shared the url, the whole nine yards.
I block all possible ads so I haven't been getting any random ones in ages, but my email provider has an ad for "Moorhuhn" on their page that always slips through the filter somehow so whenever I check my emails I'm asked to shoot virtual chickens.
Helped my parents get treatment for $old_people_health_complications. I used my phone for contact. I had barely started using that number in particular.
Next week I received a call asking if I wanted to "reserve a place in the town cemetery in case of the unfortunate" (it wasn't in the US, words might be different).
It wasn't me, it was my parents, and the fuckers tried to manipulate potentially grieving people.
For duvets, the day after I bought a duvet, from the retailer that sold me the duvet. You have all the data in the world, steal all my data to target me personally, and that is the best you can come up with?
For [acronym] the day after I was emailing someone about a completely different thing that used the same acronym. That one was more creepy than strange, tbf.
I was bra shopping and clicked on one that was also a breast pump. Started getting ads for baby stuff for a couple months. I also listen to Spotify at work, there are currently a bunch of Hispanic construction workers working on the building. Since then about a third of my Spotify ads are in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish.
Xbox gives me Spanish HBO max ads. No other ads are in Spanish and the only thing slightly Spanish on my Xbox is part of one of my friends real name.
American football fans probably remember the crazy wildcard playoff game between the Colts and Chiefs during the 2013 season's playoffs. The Chiefs built up a big lead, but Andrew Luck led the Colts to an insane comeback victory.
I am a Chiefs fan. At the time, the Chiefs had not won a playoff game since 1993. After a devastating 2012 season, the team cleaned house and brought in a new regime, led by Andy Reid. It worked well and the Chiefs had one of the biggest record improvements year-to-year in NFL history. My optimism was at an all time high. This was the year the playoff curse would end.
I spent the week leading up to the game just absorbed in the hype, reading, listening, and watching every bit of analysis I could find.
When the game finally ended, I was absolutely devastated. It's probably the hardest I've ever taken a loss as a fan.
...and then, I started getting targeted ads for Colts merch, including a cardboard Andrew Luck mask (which was just a cutout of his face with the eyes cut out stuck to a popsicle stick.) Everywhere I went on the internet, I was haunted by a grinning, eyeless, Andrew Luck reminding me that the Chiefs would never win a playoff game. This went on for several weeks.
I haven't seen an ad online in years.
Last one I remember was in like 2012. I was searching around for a wireless HDMI system and actually found and purchased it. For WEEKS post purchase this thing kept showing up in my adds. Everyone has case after case of these fuckers reading their mind and my only story is one that was so fucked it was funny. They were always overselling their capabilities I think.
I do a lot of building maintenance, so occasionally need to buy tools.
I'll do my research and end up buying stuff like Knipex, Wera, CK etc. I use them a lot so I'll pay for stuff that will last 100 years
Google - OH MY GOD YOU LIKE HAMMERS LOOK AT THIS HAMMER WOULD YOU LIKE TO BUY A HAMMER WE HAVE HAMMER
Bitch I'm getting buried with this fucker
Less juicy than some here.
I keep getting ads about my employer - a B2B / B2E business. Not sure how Facebook thinks I may be a purchaser at a business. I am not.
I keep seeing adverts for hearing aids, retirement homes and 'miracle' cosmetic treatments. WTF Google, I'm not out of my 40s yet!
I was snowmobiling with my brother in an area with no cell service. We stopped for a break and I mentioned that the headlights kind of looked like Blinky the 3 eyed fish from the Simpsons. I have never said that out loud before or after, and I haven't even watched the Simpsons in years. The next day I get an ad on Instagram for a sticker of Blinky the 3 eyed fish. Thats so specific it could not have been a coincidence. My phone must have heard me say that that one time, REMEMBERED it until I get back into an area with cell service, and then phoned home to tell whatever corpo that I might be interested in Blinky. Wild stuff.
Every time I talk about food, I get ads for certain restaurants. That is the typical experience of mine. I mentioned "those fancy onion looking houses in Russia" and the next thing I know an ad for blooming onions from Outback Steakhouse appears before a YouTube video. I dare not even speak other languages near some technology because then the language of my ads change. Not only that, but my phone must know when I wake up in the morning because I get phone calls as soon as I wake up, and I've had certain websites misgender me because a guy is talking near my technology or is in a photo or because I sound tomboyish or look tomboyish in photos and they were trying to "detect" my gender using the spy stuff. I'm surprised these people who are behind the surveillance still trust their own judgment.
