I buy a lot of (Primarily used) books off Amazon (Though Ebay grows more attractive by the day.) so thankfully my recommends are filled with other books. Apparently they have a semblance of a clue there.
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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Let me introduce you to the dad delivers blog. He bought a dehumidifier 2 years ago and since hasn't stopped buying new ones and talking about them:
I was a part of Amazon vine for a while. It's Amazon's program where they offer you shit for free that other companies want to give away in order to get reviews rolling in for new products.
Amazon offers around two to eight "just for you" items most days from these people, based on your order history and ad info crap they have on you.
Well I made the mistake of getting a black toner cartridge for my laser printer through vine once. That will last me like a decade.
Apparently, Amazon now thinks that I own 5000 printers of all different kinds and I'm never good on ink. Most days I would have at least 5 of my recommendations be printer ink or toner. Every single damned day it wanted me to get more ink. For months and months and months.
Oh I dunno, maybe stop using Amazon.
I see you’ve just bought a HDMI cable, but what about second HDMI cable?
We think you’ll love it
I’m also amusedly infuriated when “smart” advertising takes the exact wrong pattern …..
“ I see you recently bought a part for a Toyota. You must have a Toyota. Let me sell you the same part for a Volkswagen. “
I bought a specific airfilter from home depot once (prob 15 years ago). 6 months later I went back because I needed a filter. I couldn't remember which one I bought so I popped on their website, from my phone. I found the unit I bought and got the filter that it needed from the store.
For the next 3 weeks straight, every other add on every page, on facebook, on amazon, on everywhere was the air cleaner I purchased. They must have spent at least $5 on me alone it was the only static ad I saw the entire time.
I wish someone could quantify how much energy goes into this.
Maybe >1M man hours per year?
Approximately 15 energy
Which, for those of you who aren't energy professionals, is actually a fair bit of energy.
To give a comparison, this is the sort of energy you often see in stars, cars, or springs.
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Any time someone brings up to me what a waste of power crypto is (and it is, I'm not denying that) I bring this up, and it's so fun to watch them all do this:
Why would they get mad about dissing advertising along with crypto?
(Maybe they think you're saying it to defend crypto?)
I think most people have genuinely never thought about it once in their life, just like how they never would have thought once about crypto's energy usage if the media hadn't told them to be angry about it. So they either get upset at the sudden realization that we're all being played by the rich or they get defensive because suddenly their world view is under attack. Same expression either way.
I always figured the angry npc wojak meme implied they were mad at you for making a good point that they didn't like, but if you're using it to say they just became angry in general, fair enough.
I mean, it is absolutely that on occasion. I may come off as doing a whataboutism, but I mean it more like "Absolutely, we should be angry at people and technologies whose energy use exponentially outweighs the societal benefits. Here's the world's biggest offender!" But they don't actually care about energy usage, they just hate crypto and have never thought critically about targeted advertisement, but it's a part of capitalism which they love so their brain starts doing flips trying to find a way to make it defensible. It's like telling a 'wont somebody please think of the children" evangelical republican all the ways in which they support child abusers.
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They don't really need to make or sell products, they just need to create the appearance of selling products to attract investment from billionaires. They've got all the money, why would they care about the small pittance of money everyone else has?
#NotHumidiferAdvice
Friendly reminder that part of the deal of showing you adverts for what you just bought is to increase your satisfaction with the purchase. It reminds you of what you bought and (tries to) make you feel proud of your decision.
Well, that's pathetic. Imagine deriving all your pride just from having bought things. What a sad, hollow life such a person must live.
Show me ads for cocaine and I will click it, brother. I was told capitalism solved all my problems by providing the material possessions I wanted in exchange for currency.
What happened with that.
"You know what? I'll treat myself. Just one more dozen of toilet seats."
Seriously, though, is this bullshit actually effective enough to justify all the money and effort they put into it?
I really doubt it. I think targeted ads are just window dressing to hide the real reason they want to spy on us everywhere all the time.
So, the scam here is from ad providers like google on anyone running ads. It's the reason that often you see ads for a product you just looked at forever: if you are shown an ad for a product, and then you buy that product, the ad provider gets a cut. If you click on the ad, that cut is higher. Now, clearly you already looked at the product without the ad, and at best it was a reminder of something you already wanted, but in the eyes of the contract, you bought that product because of the ad. That's WAY more of a sure thing than actually compiling a meaningful profile on the provider side. Now, on the opposite end, you DO have stories of storefronts sending out coupons, emails, direct to consumer ads, built on your viewing history on their site that ARE based on complex algorithms that know you better than yourself, which is how you get stories of the algorithm knowing people are pregnant before they do
I used to wonder this, too, and think that it couldn't be that effective. Then I went to my last job, and there were MULTIPLE people who said they actually liked the ads because they learned about new products that they would like. What's worse is that a couple of those multiple people actually clicked the ads and would buy things.
All that to say, yes, it is actually at least somewhat effective, and it erodes my faith in humanity.
Would these people buy those items again, though, right after the initial purchase? Some products are certainly repeat buys, but appliances usually take at least half a year until they break.
The advertisers are paying for ads to he shown to people who have shown an interest in humidifiers. If they aren't clear enough that people who have recently purchased the humidifiers shouldn't be targeted, Google isn't gonna correct them and show the ads to fewer people.
After reading an article about ad metrics I realized this is ad fraud.
What is going on is a business buys ads and pays one rate for ads shown but pays a higher rate if the ads resulted in a conversion (a sale). But the ad contracts are monthly or longer. So a business buys ads for their product and the ad company after noticing you bought it, stuffs your feeds with ads for what you just bought so they can bill those ads at the higher conversion rate.
I remember reading or hearing about this too, but i forget where. Do you know?
It's just lies and deceit all the way down it seems... Every corner of almost every aspect of our lives, these kind of things keep cropping up. Kinda makes me feel like there might be an underlying reason to it all... Hmm....
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YouTube fed me a sponsored ad from Scientology today. Like, Google, you know everything about me, you should know this was stupid.
My Facebook ads now feature hard-core porn. I don't know what digital footprint I've created to deserve those.
I assume everyone on Facebook likes some hard-core.
How is that not a literal crime?
Google probably knew it was stupid but if scientology wanted to pay them to show you the ad they weren't going to refuse the money.
Yeah I realized that as I finished writing it
the real reason they made the panopticon is probably control anyway.
I bought a new mattress last year and I swear not even a month later they were emailing me with mattress ads. Time to start my mattress collection.
End arc of consumerism.
In the case of something weird like a humidifier, the average person is so unlikely to buy a humidifier that it's actually more likely that someone who buys one is going to return it and get a different one. Or they bought the first one to evaluate it and have some reason to need more than one because they have multiple houses or something.
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