https://youtu.be/WNpo-V9NqI4

If you’ve ever seen comments on gay porn videos, this isn’t too far off. It kills me all the “repent sinner” comments. Hey, buddy, we all know you’re here for the throbbing cocks. It’s a safe space.

Trichoplax be like 🤷

How is it that billionaires have such shitty haircuts? You could literally hire someone to live in your closet and give you a fresh trim every morning, yet you look you went to Great Clips and the trainee guy fresh out of cosmetology school fucked up your head with a 5 guard.

When the water goes down the front of your wetsuit.

This is an excellent way to get everyone looking at your comment/post history. You played yourself.

Well, I laughed, so shitpost. But it was a close call.

My brother in Christ, you are conflating free speech with the freedom from consequences. You are free to express your opinions. You will not be arrested for that. You can use the internet however you wish to express whatever opinions you have, no matter how stupid or hateful they are.

However, if your opinion sucks, the community will “deal with it” by down voting your dumb ass, and if you piss enough people off, you’ll get banned. Your rights have not been infringed. You’re just an asshole and people don’t want to listen to you anymore. You can freely go complain about it somewhere else.

I’m sure there is a community on the Internet that would welcome your shitty opinions into their little echo chamber. Go there if you don’t like it here. Or, as you say: “deal with it”.

That was shit, for sure.

I’m aware of the existence and superiority of maple syrup. I only use Aunt Jemima in this example because that’s what oversweetened tea tastes like to me: shit.

The trick is to order half sweet/half unsweet. Otherwise you get Aunt Jemima on ice.

Assuming this isn’t because the person you’re contacting has lax privacy set up in their FB account, have you ever played “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon”? You (I assume) probably live near this person, are probably approximately the same age, single, you may even have some obscure friends in common. Or friends of friends. And what you don’t remember are the countless recommendations that are totally off base. For every “uncanny” friend recommendation I get, there are dozens of people I don’t know.

I cannot replicate any of these claims no matter how hard I try. I ran out of contact solution this weekend and I spent a good 20 minutes repeating the words “contact solution” “contact solution delivery” “1-800-contacts” "I need contact solution " with Facebook open, directly into the microphone. All I get are vaguely relevant ads for shit I obviously would want (bike parts and bikes because, spoiler alert, I use FB almost exclusively to keep up with local mountain bike events) and absolutely nothing about contacts or contact solution.

But guess what? This still doesn’t prove anything because, like your example, it’s an anecdote. And a single anecdote counts for fuck all in terms of evidence. I find it exceedingly unlikely that any of the tech giants are wasting time and resources listening in on our conversations simply to target us with advertisements when they already have sufficient data based on past search history, app usage statistics, our friend groups, location data, demographic data, …

This stupid conspiracy is just as illogical as the vaccine tracking chip conspiracy. Hello, you are voluntarily carrying a tracking device you bought with your own money and keep charged with your own power, and you willingly expose even more data to it like private messages and photos. There’s absolutely no reason to invent GPS tracking nano technology to solve an already solved problem.

And I by no means am saying that these big tech companies are innocent or that they don’t abuse the data they collect. There’s a 100% chance they do. But you are ascribing a level of sophistication they don’t really need to “read your mind” or listen in on your private conversations. You are human, and they have a few billion other examples of humans they can use to analyze behavior. We’re pretty predictable, it turns out.

Damn, only half a billion dollars you didn’t have before. Might as well not even bother.

It’s not really all that crazy to think though. We create categories for people in our own heads and predict their behavior all the time. Often times we get it right because people are at least somewhat predictable. Look no further than starter pack memes.

Way too many people in this thread need to read up on cognitive biases. Frequency illusion would be a good place to start.

I once stopped in a gas station to get coffee, and instead of using brand names to refer to the sweetener, they used the colors: “yellow sweetener” for splenda, “blue sweetener” for equal, etc. It was weird to me, so I noticed. Later that day, I was on my flight and ordered coffee, and the flight attendant offered the sweetener using the same color coding instead of brand names. Weird, right? Then after I got to my destination, at the hotel, same thing!

The only logical conclusion isn’t that our brains are wierd and stuff like this happens as a result of the way we categorize and remember information, but instead that I am in a Meta simulation and Zuckerberg is reading my thoughts.

The video you linked would be stupid easy to reproduce by recording a voice over after scrolling ads on Facebook for a minute. If you want to convince me, you would need to perform a controlled experiment with multiple unrelated search terms, fresh Facebook accounts with no browsing history, etc.

Or, what if this is real? Maybe the YouTuber wasn’t just phishing for view counts with clickbait to boost his channel and actually did make that video in good faith and sure enough, Bluetooth speakers show up in his feed? What’s to say he hasn’t been seeing Bluetooth speaker ads because he’s a tech inclined, middle aged man with disposable income and the opposite effect is true: maybe he subconsciously chose Bluetooth speakers because he’s been seeing ads for them on Facebook recently? Our minds aren’t exactly good at keeping track of that kind of thing and advertisers take advantage of that shit all the time. Look at the familiarity principle or mere exposure effect.

My point isn’t to say Facebook and Google don’t collect tons of data about us, they do that all the time for sure. It’s just that there are simpler, more reliable and less processor intensive ways to build a behavioral model. Google knows where I work, what I search for, how old I am, how many kids I have, what YouTube videos I watch, … There’s more than enough there to figure out what kind of ads to serve me.

Low income, less than high school education, late teens, living in the deep south, buying pickles in bulk from Costco… Survey says: prèganté

Please, please, please, can people just understand this?! It’s infuriating hearing all these conspiracies when in reality, it’s so much simpler to just use the data we already know they collect.

Now it’s the boomer in the lake, lol