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I know a thing or two on how it actually works and I found the post funny. I know it doesn’t make sense but it’s still funny.
Edit: to clarify (because it seems like you missed this point?), it’s about the recent downtime of AWS and of Cloudflare a few days later, each of which caused a huge portion of the internet to be inaccessible. The AWS downtime was caused by a DNS error (as ever), and I’m not sure about Cloudflare but it might be as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection?wprov=sfla1 the “Root cause” section might explain it well for you.
That’s kind of the problem that targeted ads are intended to solve, in theory.
Without ads, how else are you going to discover stuff? How does an unknown startup make people know about its product? Word of mouth can only get you so far, and if you don’t have the reach you’re locked out.
Targeted ads make advertising cheaper, because you don’t have to waste money advertising to people who aren’t even in your target demographic. It’s supposed to make it possible for newcomers with a good product to establish themselves in the market without starting out with an astronomical marketing budget.
But as I already said, it only works in a dream. On TV or on billboards, you only see the huge budget ads. Coca-cola et al. But on the web with targeted ads, you get spam ads. So many fake products, scam websites, get-rich-quick schemes, etc etc, that the advertising space itself is devalued because just by having your name there you look like a scammer.
But what choice is left? If you’re a new company making a cool product, how do you make it so that people know about it? For a lot of cases, targeted ads are the only affordable option.
In a perfect world, I could appreciate the concept. At the end of the day, I do need to buy stuff, and I’d rather know about the available options. If I’m definitely not going to buy diapers but I’m definitely going to buy a new keyboard in the next month or two, I’d rather see keyboard ads than diaper ads.
But that’s only in theory. In practice, “targeted” ads are invariably sleazy scams. You bet I use uBO.
Thank you for those links. I hadn’t heard of this before and it was a hell of a ride.
For everyone else, the TL;DL of the podcast (which you should listen to!) is that Naomi is good now, she works in the aerospace industry (“commercial jet engine stuff”), and she still cusses a fuckton. She did not get back her NASA internship after that incident. I don’t think she mentioned in the interview exactly how she got back in the industry, all she said is: “I took such a roundabout way to get back into it”, and then the conversation was sidetracked by BOEING KILLED A GUY!