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> For all Facebook knows about me they've always been exceptionally bad at advertising to me Because it's not Facebook really, it's the advertisers who choose
by mojuba 7y ago
> For all Facebook knows about me they've always been exceptionally bad at advertising to me
Because it's not Facebook really, it's the advertisers who choose targeting criteria. You as an advertiser have a myriad of options. For example if you've built a competitor to X, you can target users who've visited X recently, aged N-M, residing in countries A, B and C, and so on. There are options with broader interests too. Poorly targeted ad means poorly selected criteria by the advertiser (or sometimes just advertiser experimenting) and consequently money wasted. Facebook doesn't care though.
Then there is retargeting/remarketing (target bounced traffic) already mentioned here is probably the stupidest looking invention that actually works.
- Enginerrrd 7y agoBut they are also really really bad at curating content I like to see. Like even worse than the advertising actually. My feed is just garbage and has been ever since they switched over from being chronological. But I sometimes get on a wild hair about some particular person, and I'll look at their page directly and see actually interesting content on their page that was never shown to me. Facebook's only real guess is then to just say: oh! You must like this person, let me show them, all the time.". The reality is, I'm interested in stuff like when a biased person I don't like shares a more neutral or inclusive opinion, or someone does something interesting. Facebook is just unuseably bad at selecting for that. Their algorithm just pushes really shallow crap and buries anything with substance or depth. I keep it around just to stay in touch with hard to contact people.