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I don't like the idea that we discuss this as a law of nature. I am an iPhone user since three years ago but if at some point I get a better deal elsewhere, I'

I don't like the idea that we discuss this as a law of nature. I am an iPhone user since three years ago but if at some point I get a better deal elsewhere, I'm off. And with Apple I pay extra for premium, and there is only so many ads[1] one can shove in before the premium feel is gone. As for the targeted ads, I share your feeling that the targeting is badly over hyped, except you are lucky compared to me: Ads for products I bought 3 days ago would be wildly relevant compared to most of the ads I can remember from Google. It was almost always scammy-looking dating sites. For a decade. Don't know what I did wrong but it seems there was a fluke with my account. Or they just god more money from scammy-looking dating sites than from anyone else. Oh, and when it wasn't ads for scammy-looking dating sites it was pay-to-win games, and based on the ads you could be forgiven for thinking they were made by the same folks. [1]: I'm no hardliner here: contrary to many on HN I actually see value in some ads and think I have sometimes made better purchases/been reminded to do things I wanted to do anyway.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> It was almost always scammy-looking dating sites. For a decade. Every time people tell me that AI is great, I remind them that the most frequent ads I see are: 'Goth Muslim hookups' and 'automatic chicken coop door'.
- nonameiguess 4y ago
  It unfortunately seems to work if you don't go out of your way to block all trackers everywhere and never sign up for anything. I don't personally get any ads I would ever give a crap about, but my wife has been complaining like crazy and constantly blowing up our family plan with data overages since I started ad-blocking at the DNS level because she's constantly being served ads for stuff she actually wants and tries to click on it only to get blocked by my DNS server when it tries to go through a known tracker redirect to grab conversion stats for their campaign or whatever, and then she switches from WiFi to data in order to use the ISP's DNS instead.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> It was almost always scammy-looking dating sites. For a decade. Every time people tell me that AI is great, I remind them that the most frequent ads I see are: 'Goth Muslim hookups' and 'automatic chicken coop door'.

nonameiguess 4y ago
It unfortunately seems to work if you don't go out of your way to block all trackers everywhere and never sign up for anything. I don't personally get any ads I would ever give a crap about, but my wife has been complaining like crazy and constantly blowing up our family plan with data overages since I started ad-blocking at the DNS level because she's constantly being served ads for stuff she actually wants and tries to click on it only to get blocked by my DNS server when it tries to go through a known tracker redirect to grab conversion stats for their campaign or whatever, and then she switches from WiFi to data in order to use the ISP's DNS instead.