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this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Just a personal story to bring one example into focus.
I got sober 8 years ago and never talked about it online until I was about 4 years sober. Never saw a single promotion for anything related to alcohol...
Until the day I made a single comment on Reddit telling my story to help support another person who was just starting their own sobriety journey.
And like magic, all promoted communities to me were alcohol related. Even though I'm an ublock user, when I would selectively disable it every advertisement I saw online was related to booze.
So even though there are ethical applications for my data, I found that it was used in an attempt to target me based on human frailties.
I think that's just really shitty targeted advertising, not surprising on Reddit lol
Reddit wasn't even the worst offender.
I made two posts one on asshole design and one on dangerous design and they cumulatively got something like 7,000 up votes and then "magically" the problem was fixed on reddit!
This doesn't even make sense. It'd be much more lucrative to target multiple things you speak fondly about it or have expressed personal interest in by actively searching.
If you enjoy something you buy it occasionally. If you are addicted you buy it every day, every time you have money, you think about it all the time. That's way more lucrative, it's the whole business model of the tobacco industry too.
That definitely doesn't describe how I act with nicotine, and I'm ABSOLUTELY addicted to nicotine.
I could say the same for alcohol, but I'm a very mild alcoholic.
Things we need are higher on our priorities than things we want, and addiction convinces you that you need that thing. So anything that can monetize that addiction is going to be more effective and consistent than something you merely want.
Keyword based advertising is overly simple