WHAT IS THIS POST DOING HERE WHY ISN'T IT AT THE TOP CONFUSED AND HUNGRY
Anyhow I mostly avoid Facebook ads cuz adblocker but the main computer has been in the shop and man that is some intrusive, inexplicable bullshit all in all.
Facebook on the phone (mobile version in browser, I don't use the app) is incredibly intrusive. On the wider-screened web, I rarely look at the edges. Also, for a while I reported every ad that appeared in my "news" "feed" as spam.
3: Is it possible that Facebook just thinks you should be on methadone?
Facebook thinks I should donate sperm, get a Master's in digital media, and switch to a Roth IRA.
Facebook thinks I know a guy named Mike G/////. And Facebook is right.
Now it tells me to "Browse Jesus Girls".
5: Facebook needs to mind its own business regarding my heroin use.
Facebook thinks I am a military veteran.
Facebook used to be really fixated on me getting rid of my body hair and lately thinks I'm a lactating mom living in Kentucky. Who is in want of a gay boyfriend.
For want of a gay boyfriend, the body hair was lost.
Facebook wants me to be a social worker. I guess if you average Smearcase and me, you get something.
Facebook is very insistent about the fact that a certain erstwhile front page poster here once commented on an advertising page for some fancy bed sheets. It is normally at the top of my newsfeed.
Also, for a very long time it was showing me a picture of a woman whom I swear was Ari Up from The Slits, as a part of an ad asking me to become a Christian drug abuse counselor.
Oh it wants me to be a social worker too! It thinks I am an Orthodox Jewish single in desperate need of becoming a social worker.
It doens't take a sophisticated algorithm for Facebook to figure out that I'm married, because it's right there in my status. So I assume that the business plan of www.christianmingle.com is to match married men to single Christian women.
Also, anyone who lists both a B.A. and a J.D. in their status probably doesn't in in the market for an online B.A.
So I assume that the business plan of www.christianmingle.com is to match married men to single Christian women.
That's the one it shows for me with the line "Browse Jesus Girls".
Also it wants me to visit knotphysics.net, which appears to be a crackpot website.
Ooh, now it tells me I can get a "Classic Gothic Steampunk Head Statue Jewelry Treasure Box" for cheap!
I always used AdBlocker until I got a new computer a few months ago. But it's kind of amusing to see what I've been missing all this time.
TPM is another site that's lousy with ads. For a couple weeks, the ads there have been encouraging me to take a nice vacation to the Biltmore Estate in lovely Asheville, NC, presumably because I googled a similarly named local bar.
My fiancée and I have not upgraded our relationship status on Facebook from "in a relationship." For the first week after we got engaged, wanting to let certain people know in person was a perfectly good reason. Probably even for the first month, considering how we don't always see some of those people reliably. After that, I have to admit I'm lazy about things like that. She apparently didn't update it deliberately, to avoid the advertising targeted at people getting married that would engulf her.
Facebook really desperate for me to tell it where I live, which bespeaks to me a certain lack of trust in its own inferential algorithms since the IPs I log in from are probably 90% within a radius of about a mile. I assume on my relationship status it is, without my help, entirely hopeless.
20: I think they have vineyard, if you're into that kind of thing.
Oh, also, it tries to prompt me with suggestions for where I might live, the most common of which is someplace I've never even visited.
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I haven't been using Facebook lately - I just go in to check on Scrabble games when I have a desktop and no wi-fi.
However! Today, because of this post, I looked not only at the ads, but at the "Other" inbox - also a sometime haven for shills of a marginally more personal character.
And in that inbox, what to my wondering eyes should appear ... but the latest piece of an e-mail chain setting up a second date, sent from a smartphone and meant by its sender for GMail.
That was sent yesterday, it seems to have been the first message to hit that inbox in more than a year, and I flatly wouldn't have seen it without the intervention of Stanley's post.
Unfogged 1, Disruptive Effects of Chance 0!
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Currently, FB seems to think:
a) I need or want flood insurance
b) I would be a good fit as a swim instructor
c) I want to end surprise legal bills
d) I need a smartphone and the people who'll bring it to me are AT&T
e) I suffer from Multiple Sclerosis
I can only surmise that my browsing habits are so obscure that they're just throwing mud against a wall to see what sticks.
What I find especially pathetic are the ads which pop up on various websites for products I've recently viewed on online catalogs. The digital equivalent of Gil from the Simpsons. "Aw, c'mon old pal, remember when you were thinking of buying those new steel-toed boots? Wasn't that a great time we had?"
Facebook is very insistent about the fact that a certain erstwhile front page poster here once commented on an advertising page for some fancy bed sheets.
I started getting ads for bedsheets very shortly after I searched Amazon for some.
Every so often, someone mentions Adblock, and I think, I should set that up. And then people talk about the ads they get served with and I realize that I have no idea what ads are on the pages I look at -- I filter them out without even realizing they're there. If there's ever something important for me to know that's formatted like an ad, the message will never get through to me.
25: Hey, sweet! If it all works out, you needn't name your first-born child in my honor. I'm perfectly content with a third- or fourth-born naming honor.
A website I frequent will overlay the center of the page with an ad. Because of the poor font and graphic design of the ad, and me frantically click "close", I still don't know what it is for.
the Biltmore Estate in lovely Asheville, NC,
I've probably been to the Biltmore Estate five times. It was a perennial field trip from summer camp.
My adblocker is so aggressive that I have to switch to another browser even to see Facebook.
29: I might be able to offer you a feline namesake, but kids' names, well ... we gotta save something for the Kickstarter stretch goals, y'know?
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Hey, Flickr's free again! (It's always had a free option, but now it allows much more space than before.) Thanks, Marissa Mayer! Also, some Russian company wants to sell refrigerator magnets with my pictures on them. I said they could.
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If there's ever something important for me to know that's formatted like an ad, the message will never get through to me.
I used to think so too, but this thread is suddenly making me question my recent decision to get an MBA and specialize in Social Lactation.