You would really think the algorithm would be smarter by now.

It's not made to be smart, just to mooch more money out off your pocket.

I too ask myself why they fuckin offer me another "insert anything I already bought".

Better make it a recurring purchase! Buy more, get more humidifiers!

On a very related note, a dehumidifier makes such a huge difference in indoor comfort.

Seriously, though, is this bullshit actually effective enough to justify all the money and effort they put into it?

I really doubt it. I think targeted ads are just window dressing to hide the real reason they want to spy on us everywhere all the time.

After reading an article about ad metrics I realized this is ad fraud.

What is going on is a business buys ads and pays one rate for ads shown but pays a higher rate if the ads resulted in a conversion (a sale). But the ad contracts are monthly or longer. So a business buys ads for their product and the ad company after noticing you bought it, stuffs your feeds with ads for what you just bought so they can bill those ads at the higher conversion rate.

I wish someone could quantify how much energy goes into this.

Better yet, for only the price of a coffee a day, you can upgrade to the premium humidifier subscription!

I highly recommend Technology Connections' video on dehumidifers. Central air, if you have it, should take care of your humidity if it's working correctly.

Dehumidifiers are great for small areas with poor airflow or in case of a flood. If you need one for everyday, whole-house comfort, there's probably an underlying issue.

They're not allowed to see actual purchase data, so all they have is "this person looked at a humidifier and may or may not have bought one". So they're plastering you with humidifier ads in case you still haven't pulled the trigger, or in case you did buy one but returned it.

I read a post where someone mentioned they wanted to buy a Royal Enfield Meteor motorcycle.

Ads for that bike have been appearing ever since. I don't own a bike, never had a license, and don't make a lot of comments about them.

Take that for what it's worth.

ikr like how many goddamn steam mops do they think one house needs

It's just lies and deceit all the way down it seems... Every corner of almost every aspect of our lives, these kind of things keep cropping up. Kinda makes me feel like there might be an underlying reason to it all... Hmm....

I used to wonder this, too, and think that it couldn't be that effective. Then I went to my last job, and there were MULTIPLE people who said they actually liked the ads because they learned about new products that they would like. What's worse is that a couple of those multiple people actually clicked the ads and would buy things.

All that to say, yes, it is actually at least somewhat effective, and it erodes my faith in humanity.

Yes, was just about to recommend that myself. Link to the video in question: https://youtu.be/j_QfX0SYCE8

If I remember it correctly, though, dehumidifiers can be useful for comfort in very specific climates where ambient humidity is high, but temperatures are mild enough to not require much actual heating or cooling. I think dehumidifiers are relatively common in many areas of the UK for that reason.

If OP is from the UK, it might be a sensible recommendation for their specific climate, just not in many places elsewhere. In the US, at least, the only place you'd find anything like that climate might be some parts of the Pacific Northwest.

I always say that when advertisers think that I'm a Spanish speaking pregnant woman that I have won.

more like "how shitty of a humidifier did they sell me that they think i already need another"

my algorithm thinks i'm a spanish speaking radiological oncologist. i mean i'm surrounded by superfund sites but y'know. i do not work in medicine. i think my decoy worked.

The original underlying issue was several weeks of comfortable outdoor temperatures with 90%+ humidity. That meant the central air didn't need to run at all and the indoor humidity crept up over 70%.

I leave it plugged in year round, but you're right that it's the high humidity temperate temperature times of the year when it really has to work.

YouTube fed me a sponsored ad from Scientology today. Like, Google, you know everything about me, you should know this was stupid.

Approximately 15 energy

#NotHumidiferAdvice

Google probably knew it was stupid but if scientology wanted to pay them to show you the ad they weren't going to refuse the money.

Which, for those of you who aren't energy professionals, is actually a fair bit of energy.

I wish someone would quantify how useful advertising really is for established brands and then they can stop it.

To give a comparison, this is the sort of energy you often see in stars, cars, or springs.

Any time someone brings up to me what a waste of power crypto is (and it is, I'm not denying that) I bring this up, and it's so fun to watch them all do this:

I know. So the reason we are seeing this is not that the algorithm is shit, it's because there's laws in place to protect us.

Meaning if we stop seeing this, then we should be worried! 😄😄😵‍💫

In the case of something weird like a humidifier, the average person is so unlikely to buy a humidifier that it's actually more likely that someone who buys one is going to return it and get a different one. Or they bought the first one to evaluate it and have some reason to need more than one because they have multiple houses or something.

stars, cars, or springs.

Sounds like the name of a weird gameshow 😁

But that doesn't make sense. The way they know it's a conversion is the ad url you click on tracks you through the purchase process.

Yes but ads shown that result in a conversion are paid higher than ones that don't. If you pay for 1000 ads in a month and it results in a conversion you pay more for those all ads in the block because you got that conversion. You don't pay just for the one ad that resulted in a sale. You say "I only got one sale." They say, "It was those 999 ads that the consumer saw that generated the sale."

Why would they get mad about dissing advertising along with crypto?

(Maybe they think you're saying it to defend crypto using whataboutism?)

Right, but to know the ad resulted in a conversation the customer would need to click on the ad before purchasing. Showing you the ad after you bought the product without clicking on an ad wouldn't count.

A company isn't going to pay more without the platform providing evidence that the conversion happened on their platform. If a company runs ads on Google, Instagram, and TikTok, Google can't just claim that every sale was because of ads on their platform.

I don't see this and I'm not worried.

...because I know the reason is that I'm not seeing ads at all because I'm blocking them.

I mean, with the rampant enshittification of consumer technologies, there's every chance the thing you just bought off Amazon will break after a much shorter lifespan then expected. There's even a chance this was planned and accounted for...

How many joules?

I think most people have genuinely never thought about it once in their life, just like how they never would have thought once about crypto's energy usage if the media hadn't told them to be angry about it. So they either get upset at the sudden realization that we're all being played by the rich or they get defensive because suddenly their world view is under attack. Same expression either way.

Dozens!

I always figured the angry npc wojak meme implied they were mad at you for making a good point that they didn't like, but if you're using it to say they just became angry in general, fair enough.

Yeah, Match Their Energy! You've seen it?

Nope, but it sounds genuinely intriguing 😁

The advertisers are paying for ads to he shown to people who have shown an interest in humidifiers. If they aren't clear enough that people who have recently purchased the humidifiers shouldn't be targeted, Google isn't gonna correct them and show the ads to fewer people.

A company isn’t going to pay more without the platform providing evidence that the conversion happened on their platform.

The proof is the sale. What isn't shared is exactly which ads ran when because they purchased a block.

Shoutout to that time Target knew people were pregnant before they did

Would you like to buy a mattress? Would you like an entire apartment full of mattresses?

Do you think people would do that? Just plan to make stuff obsolete?

End arc of consumerism.