Dull Men's Club
An unofficial chapter of the popular Dull Men's Club.
1. Relevant commentary on your own dull life. Posts should be about your own dull, lived experience. This is our most important rule. Direct questions, random thoughts, comment baiting, advice seeking, many uses of "discuss" rarely comply with this rule.
2. Original, Fresh, Meaningful Content.
3. Avoid repetitive topics.
4. This is not a search engine
Use a search engine, a tradesperson, Reddit, friends, a specialist Facebook group, apps, Wikipedia, an AI chat, a reverse image search etc. to answer simple questions or identify objects. Also see rule 1, “comment baiting”.
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5. Keep it dull. If it puts us to sleep, it’s on the right track. Examples of likely not dull: jokes, gross stuff (including toes), politics, religion, royalty, illness or injury, killing things for fun, or promotional content. Feel free to post these elsewhere.
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7. Proofread before posting. Use good grammar and punctuation. Avoid useless phrases. Some examples: - starting a post with "So" - starting a post with pointless phrases, like "I hope this is allowed" or “this is my first post” Only share good quality, cropped images. Do not share screenshots of images; share the original image.
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If they increase their prices they will lose to their competitors? You take all the stuff that supports your argument and just ignore everything else that exists?
They can sway an opinion with or without tracking people, you seem to be taking away peoples autonomy on this point.
You folks aren’t special enough to be this paranoid about targeted ads. That’s what it is, your choice is to give up and live an Amish lifestyle.
And they did a fine job of swaying your opinions for 1000s of years with whatever tech was available at the time. Didn’t they?
What competitors? Shopping is nearly an effective monopoly. People just don't go elsewhere to check for better prices anymore, amazon is too convenient.
And you seem to be ignoring how predictable the human brain is. There are reasons people consider all these algorithms to be evil, they take advantage of emotional weaknesses to influence people to do things they normally wouldn't have. Saying it has always been that way doesn't make this more effective way any less of a problem. With all this personal information being harvested, these companies can ramp up the manipulation and sell it to the highest bidder. That information is something worth hiding so you can still interact with the world and be targeted a bit less.
You dont need to be special lol. They are targeting everyone all at once. I really suggest to read into the situation a bit more as you seem to underestimate the scope of this issue.
Competitors still exist chief, it is not an effective monopoly yet. Though I agree they are always pushing that way. What do you think Ali baba is?
Again, targeted ads aren’t scary to some of us. Idk what to tell you.
You think because I’m not paranoid about a data set that says when I like to buy toilet paper I am not well read on the matter, I’m sorry you feel that way.
Why don’t we pivot and just agree that the flock cameras are exactly what you’re afraid of, but in the hands of local peasant cops who actually want to harass people and should be banned.
Legal monopoly, no, effective, yes. The US government has even sued them to that effect, alleging they have been using anti-competitor and unfair strategies to maintain its monopolistic power. It may not technically / legally yet be a monopoly, but that is not what an effective monopoly is.
Also yes I do feel you are not educated enough on the matter, as your example clearly shows. It is not "oh no, they know I am out of toilet paper" it is more about "they have location tracking, search habits, purchase history, and more, and now they model predictive algorithms on what variables they need to push to influence you in a specific way". They can extrapolate that some advertisement on your route caused you to speak about X, and the online ad Y afterward pushed you to searching the web for Z, which comes up with specific products or messaging they want you seeing. Now imagine all this data at scale with billions of people and billions of dollars of compute to crunch massive amounts of patterns they can use to push you and others.
It doesn't have to only be about purchases either, this same information can be used to get some political message in front of you, as well as misinformation that you may never properly vet the truth of to sway your decision making over tens, hundreds, thousands or more instances of this.
You can hide behind "But I have autonomy!" all you want, if it didn't work for them they wouldn't be doing it. You will never free yourself of it completely, but why not start reducing your data footprint by not letting your TV record your conversations and viewing habits? Every little snip of their web reduces your vulnerability to it, even if only a little.
But yes, I do agree with your last point. Not really part of this conversation though.
Your mansplaining every step of the conversation was not very cool bro. Nothing you said has been new information for me. I still disagree with you. Have a nice day.
lol, yeah that tends to happen when someone comes around claiming to understand what is happening yet displays the contrary. Good luck out there
No dude, that tends to happen when you’re a self righteous dick who thinks he’s smarter than everyone.
Can’t fathom anyone intelligent disagreeing with you. Have the day you deserve.
Nah not everyone