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Finally. I've been intentionally clicking ICO ads so that I get targeted for more ICO ads. It's been interesting. - Many of them have the most buttery smooth

Finally. I've been intentionally clicking ICO ads so that I get targeted for more ICO ads. It's been interesting. - Many of them have the most buttery smooth introduction video that was just so compelling to stare at. - Many has business lines like, "The total market for car loans / social media advertisement / game currency is N trillion... - The "team" page for them are mostly Russian / Eastern European. Some of them have links to LinkedIn. I looked at their (I believe fake) profiles too. (I don't know why would anybody use their real identity to pull such a thing). - Some ads are in Korean (understandable, I speak Korean and cryptocurrency is hot over there), some ads are in Chinese including their landing page. Do they expect people to land on those pages and drop money without reading anything?

pavel_lishin 9y ago
> Do they expect people to land on those pages and drop money without reading anything? Huh? I assume those are just aimed at people who speak/read the language.
- jeeyoungk 9y ago
  Sorry, forgot to add that I don't know any Chinese and I don't have any reason to believe that Facebook thinks that.
  - lozenge 9y ago
    Maybe the fact you keep clicking on Chinese ads is reason enough?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - singularity2001 9y ago
      which would still leave the question why he was offered it in the first place
      - lmkg 9y ago
        Exploration vs exploitation. If the ad has a high CPC and there isn't enough targeted inventory, it's worth showing it to random folks to see if a new target market can be identified.
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        > there isn't enough targeted inventory Did I just get called 'inventory'? God, that's the next step after "human resources"...
        singularity2001 9y ago
        be happy, at least you are targeted
        marnett 9y ago
        I much prefer human capital, myself.
        michalskop 9y ago
        Still better than "natural resources"
    - stevenwoo 9y ago
      If he's Korean, that's a huge market for all of the cryptocurrencies according to recent reports - even a tiny effect would be worth advertising to get in the door through network effects. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42713314 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42713314
  - Filligree 9y ago
    Well, you keep clicking the ads.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    Maybe there's another option the creators selected that they think correlates to reading Chinese. Maybe they went for some pan-Asian option. "Uh, anyone who reads Chinese, Korean, Japanese is probably fine".
  - toomanybeersies 9y ago
    Facebook thinks I speak Swedish, and I don't speak a word of Swedish. I was recently served an ad in Swedish, and when I clicked the little "why am I seeing this?", it said it was targeting people who speak Swedish in my area.
ryankshaw 9y ago
I love your idea of clicking on facebook ads just to see what would happen for a person that did happen to be in that cohort. Other things I have thought of that would be interesting to do this experiment with is multi-level-marketing BS, political ads catering to the opposite side of the isle, and "Preppers". I would find that much more interesting than my current facebook feed that just feeds me more of what I am already into. Tangentially related, I recently spent a week in Hawaii and listened exclusively to a local radio station the whole time. It occurred to me that my view of what people did for fun, or where they grocery shopped, or what issues were important to them, and generally "what the locals do" were largely determined by who happened to be paying that radio station to play their ads. And it was just an "ah-ha" reminder that in every group, culture, hobby, or community there are a few advertisers that have an outsize influence on what people think their own grass-roots culture is.
- thaumasiotes 9y ago
  > I recently spent a week in Hawaii and listened exclusively to a local radio station the whole time. It occurred to me that my view of what people did for fun, or where they grocery shopped, or what issues were important to them, and generally "what the locals do" were largely determined by who happened to be paying that radio station to play their ads. And it was just an "ah-ha" reminder that in every group, culture, hobby, or community there are a few advertisers that have an outsize influence on what people think their own grass-roots culture is. Maybe if you'd spent longer than a week there you'd have a more informed view of how one or more groups of locals really spent their time? Those advertisers weren't affecting your opinion of what your own culture was, they were affecting your opinion of a foreign culture.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    That's literally their entire point, you just repeated it back to them as an insult.
    - read_if_gay_ 9y ago
      That was not insulting at all. It was also said that >there are a few advertisers that have an outsize influence on what people think their own grass-roots culture is. so no, not "literally their entire point" since he said it affected people's view of their own culture.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
How many pages had links to source code or white papers ? Or had any visible code at all?
drinchev 9y ago
> The "team" page for them are mostly Russian / Eastern European. What's wrong with that?
- saym 9y ago
  Intrinsically? Nothing. I think he's just making an observation, not insinuating anything.
- anilshanbhag 9y ago
  1. It shows they are intentionally targeting people in the US. CPC rates for US consumers is much higher than for eastern europe / russia. 2. It is just shady. Investors in these schemes have no protections / legal recourse as these entities are outside the US. Not to single out Russian/Eastern European, investing money via ICO outside US is like asking to be robbed.
  - drinchev 9y ago
    That's not based on Russian / Eastern European, it's based on SCAM levels across the whole cryptocurrency sector. > targeting people in the US Anyone doing >anything IT related<, will target the US, first. Everyone outside the US with a startup idea does that. People there have the biggest investors, biggest tech scene, biggest chance of success, etc. I don't see how Russian / Eastern European targeting US makes them scammers. > investors in these schemes have no protections / legal recourse as these entities are outside the US. And that's related to the entity, not the team. How about a team of Russian / Eastern Europeans with an American entity? Would then be not a SCAM? Of course I think what is stated in the OP is pure prejudice. There are multiple scams originated in every nation, so let's not put the guilt on origin of the team behind it. Vitalik is a Russian-Canadian, as well as lot's of good guys working on Cryptocurrency.
    - heavenlyblue 9y ago
      Oh come on. He's saying people are based in Russia which most probably will not extradite them into the US if they turn out to be scammers. So it has nothing to do with being Russian, but has everything to do with being based in Russia due to legal implications.
gtirloni 9y ago
> Do they expect people to land on those pages and drop money without reading anything? One technique scammers use in general is not to make things too legit because that would attract people with a clue. Make it just barely credible and get the most gullible people possible. So those fantastical emails about a rich prince in Africa that needs your help to cash $20m is just scammers improving their signal-to-noise ratio (or ROI). I think it works for these ICOs too.
- aianus 9y ago
  Why? There’s no manual component to accepting money for an ICO, is there?
- codeisawesome 9y ago
  I never considered that scammers specifically tailor their message to be “dumb sounding scam” in a calculated way (to attract the right targets and repel others). I always thought it was just the nature of the intelligence level of folks who choose to scam rather than work to make something. It’s just even more pure, distilled evil - with no benefit of the doubt of stupidity - when viewed from this angle :-(
  - zdkl 9y ago
    Hanlon's razor has not been proven for cases with money involved.
  - Maakuth 9y ago
    There is even a research paper related to this phenomenon. Microsoft Research researched Nigerian scam e-mails. Turns out intentionally dumb messaging does help in filtering out targets that might be too smart to fall for the scam. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...
anilshanbhag 9y ago
I did the same. For people who haven't seen the ads, here are 3 I seen so far: https://imgur.com/a/tsOOe https://imgur.com/a/tsOOe
- mathgenius 9y ago
  "Join out project and get book your place in the whitelist! " Sounds awesome.
- DrScump 9y ago
  "... Blockchain, Machine Learning, and Video..." just add cannabis and kittens and you've really got something!
- alexanderdmitri 9y ago
  my favorite is the last one: > Tokia.io token sale is live! Secure the -35% discount for early investors. spot on given the (imo) insane speculation that's been building around block-chain currencies for the past year.
  - throwaway1748 9y ago
    Haha, wouldn't a negative 35% discount be a 35% surcharge?
bonesss 9y ago
> Many has business lines like, "The total market for car loans / social media advertisement / game currency is N trillion... I've heard this called "Chinese math", a near-fatal flaw in business plans, because of the follow up to that framing: "... if we only manage to capture 10% of the Chinese soda market, we'll be forever rich!" Turns out capturing 10% of Chinas soda market is hard. Also you can only really set value on the things you can/will capture, not what you wish you could...
- sireat 9y ago
  The fallacy is not that capturing 10% of China's soda market is hard, but that even capturing 0.01% of China's soda market is extremely hard.
  - bonesss 9y ago
    0.01% of the Chinese soda market is hard to capture, for you or I, but doesn't provide the necessary market cap to engage in the fallacious thinking and investment at the scale that people who talk about "Chinese math" care about... And from that VC perspective: 0.01% of the Chinese soda market is not particularly hard to capture.. > Chinese soft drinks consumers prefer to purchase non-alcoholic beverages by brands of foreign origin... in 2013, only 20 percent of the purchase came from local brands. Coca-Cola, remains the dominate brand in China’s soft drinks market. So, Pepsi Cola invested and got a Chinese partner with a market disadvantage, from 2007 to 2012, to grow their market share from 8.8 to 12%... That's __320__ captures of 0.01% of the market in just 5 years from a single player. ... 0.01% of the $69 Billion Chinese soda market is just about $7 million in sales revenue... That doesn't leave a lot of margin to fallaciously justify a business plan with. $7 million in revenue is harder than playing XBox, sure, but not exactly a moon landing either.

pavel_lishin 9y ago

> Do they expect people to land on those pages and drop money without reading anything? Huh? I assume those are just aimed at people who speak/read the language.

jeeyoungk 9y ago
Sorry, forgot to add that I don't know any Chinese and I don't have any reason to believe that Facebook thinks that.
- lozenge 9y ago
  Maybe the fact you keep clicking on Chinese ads is reason enough?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - singularity2001 9y ago
    which would still leave the question why he was offered it in the first place
    - lmkg 9y ago
      Exploration vs exploitation. If the ad has a high CPC and there isn't enough targeted inventory, it's worth showing it to random folks to see if a new target market can be identified.
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        > there isn't enough targeted inventory Did I just get called 'inventory'? God, that's the next step after "human resources"...
        singularity2001 9y ago
        be happy, at least you are targeted
        marnett 9y ago
        I much prefer human capital, myself.
        michalskop 9y ago
        Still better than "natural resources"
  - stevenwoo 9y ago
    If he's Korean, that's a huge market for all of the cryptocurrencies according to recent reports - even a tiny effect would be worth advertising to get in the door through network effects. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42713314 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-42713314
- Filligree 9y ago
  Well, you keep clicking the ads.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  Maybe there's another option the creators selected that they think correlates to reading Chinese. Maybe they went for some pan-Asian option. "Uh, anyone who reads Chinese, Korean, Japanese is probably fine".
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  Facebook thinks I speak Swedish, and I don't speak a word of Swedish. I was recently served an ad in Swedish, and when I clicked the little "why am I seeing this?", it said it was targeting people who speak Swedish in my area.

ryankshaw 9y ago

I love your idea of clicking on facebook ads just to see what would happen for a person that did happen to be in that cohort. Other things I have thought of that would be interesting to do this experiment with is multi-level-marketing BS, political ads catering to the opposite side of the isle, and "Preppers". I would find that much more interesting than my current facebook feed that just feeds me more of what I am already into. Tangentially related, I recently spent a week in Hawaii and listened exclusively to a local radio station the whole time. It occurred to me that my view of what people did for fun, or where they grocery shopped, or what issues were important to them, and generally "what the locals do" were largely determined by who happened to be paying that radio station to play their ads. And it was just an "ah-ha" reminder that in every group, culture, hobby, or community there are a few advertisers that have an outsize influence on what people think their own grass-roots culture is.

thaumasiotes 9y ago
> I recently spent a week in Hawaii and listened exclusively to a local radio station the whole time. It occurred to me that my view of what people did for fun, or where they grocery shopped, or what issues were important to them, and generally "what the locals do" were largely determined by who happened to be paying that radio station to play their ads. And it was just an "ah-ha" reminder that in every group, culture, hobby, or community there are a few advertisers that have an outsize influence on what people think their own grass-roots culture is. Maybe if you'd spent longer than a week there you'd have a more informed view of how one or more groups of locals really spent their time? Those advertisers weren't affecting your opinion of what your own culture was, they were affecting your opinion of a foreign culture.
- freehunter 9y ago
  That's literally their entire point, you just repeated it back to them as an insult.
  - read_if_gay_ 9y ago
    That was not insulting at all. It was also said that >there are a few advertisers that have an outsize influence on what people think their own grass-roots culture is. so no, not "literally their entire point" since he said it affected people's view of their own culture.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

How many pages had links to source code or white papers ? Or had any visible code at all?

drinchev 9y ago

> The "team" page for them are mostly Russian / Eastern European. What's wrong with that?

saym 9y ago
Intrinsically? Nothing. I think he's just making an observation, not insinuating anything.
anilshanbhag 9y ago
1. It shows they are intentionally targeting people in the US. CPC rates for US consumers is much higher than for eastern europe / russia. 2. It is just shady. Investors in these schemes have no protections / legal recourse as these entities are outside the US. Not to single out Russian/Eastern European, investing money via ICO outside US is like asking to be robbed.
- drinchev 9y ago
  That's not based on Russian / Eastern European, it's based on SCAM levels across the whole cryptocurrency sector. > targeting people in the US Anyone doing >anything IT related<, will target the US, first. Everyone outside the US with a startup idea does that. People there have the biggest investors, biggest tech scene, biggest chance of success, etc. I don't see how Russian / Eastern European targeting US makes them scammers. > investors in these schemes have no protections / legal recourse as these entities are outside the US. And that's related to the entity, not the team. How about a team of Russian / Eastern Europeans with an American entity? Would then be not a SCAM? Of course I think what is stated in the OP is pure prejudice. There are multiple scams originated in every nation, so let's not put the guilt on origin of the team behind it. Vitalik is a Russian-Canadian, as well as lot's of good guys working on Cryptocurrency.
  - heavenlyblue 9y ago
    Oh come on. He's saying people are based in Russia which most probably will not extradite them into the US if they turn out to be scammers. So it has nothing to do with being Russian, but has everything to do with being based in Russia due to legal implications.

gtirloni 9y ago

> Do they expect people to land on those pages and drop money without reading anything? One technique scammers use in general is not to make things too legit because that would attract people with a clue. Make it just barely credible and get the most gullible people possible. So those fantastical emails about a rich prince in Africa that needs your help to cash $20m is just scammers improving their signal-to-noise ratio (or ROI). I think it works for these ICOs too.

aianus 9y ago
Why? There’s no manual component to accepting money for an ICO, is there?
codeisawesome 9y ago
I never considered that scammers specifically tailor their message to be “dumb sounding scam” in a calculated way (to attract the right targets and repel others). I always thought it was just the nature of the intelligence level of folks who choose to scam rather than work to make something. It’s just even more pure, distilled evil - with no benefit of the doubt of stupidity - when viewed from this angle :-(
- zdkl 9y ago
  Hanlon's razor has not been proven for cases with money involved.
- Maakuth 9y ago
  There is even a research paper related to this phenomenon. Microsoft Research researched Nigerian scam e-mails. Turns out intentionally dumb messaging does help in filtering out targets that might be too smart to fall for the scam. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-nigerian-scammers-say-they-are-from-nigeria/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/why-do-...

anilshanbhag 9y ago

I did the same. For people who haven't seen the ads, here are 3 I seen so far: https://imgur.com/a/tsOOe https://imgur.com/a/tsOOe

mathgenius 9y ago
"Join out project and get book your place in the whitelist! " Sounds awesome.
DrScump 9y ago
"... Blockchain, Machine Learning, and Video..." just add cannabis and kittens and you've really got something!
alexanderdmitri 9y ago
my favorite is the last one: > Tokia.io token sale is live! Secure the -35% discount for early investors. spot on given the (imo) insane speculation that's been building around block-chain currencies for the past year.
- throwaway1748 9y ago
  Haha, wouldn't a negative 35% discount be a 35% surcharge?

bonesss 9y ago

> Many has business lines like, "The total market for car loans / social media advertisement / game currency is N trillion... I've heard this called "Chinese math", a near-fatal flaw in business plans, because of the follow up to that framing: "... if we only manage to capture 10% of the Chinese soda market, we'll be forever rich!" Turns out capturing 10% of Chinas soda market is hard. Also you can only really set value on the things you can/will capture, not what you wish you could...

sireat 9y ago
The fallacy is not that capturing 10% of China's soda market is hard, but that even capturing 0.01% of China's soda market is extremely hard.
- bonesss 9y ago
  0.01% of the Chinese soda market is hard to capture, for you or I, but doesn't provide the necessary market cap to engage in the fallacious thinking and investment at the scale that people who talk about "Chinese math" care about... And from that VC perspective: 0.01% of the Chinese soda market is not particularly hard to capture.. > Chinese soft drinks consumers prefer to purchase non-alcoholic beverages by brands of foreign origin... in 2013, only 20 percent of the purchase came from local brands. Coca-Cola, remains the dominate brand in China’s soft drinks market. So, Pepsi Cola invested and got a Chinese partner with a market disadvantage, from 2007 to 2012, to grow their market share from 8.8 to 12%... That's __320__ captures of 0.01% of the market in just 5 years from a single player. ... 0.01% of the $69 Billion Chinese soda market is just about $7 million in sales revenue... That doesn't leave a lot of margin to fallaciously justify a business plan with. $7 million in revenue is harder than playing XBox, sure, but not exactly a moon landing either.