I believe it. The algorithm keeps pushing far right videos to my feed despite Google knowing damn well that I can’t stand Republicans. Not to mention that it likes to show left wing media to the far right, so that they can dislike it and brigade the comments. Yet when a Fox News video is posted, nothing but likes and praise in the comments. If you didn’t know any better it could lead you to believe that 90% of Americans are MAGA Republicans.
I buy $2 sale priced ebooks from the play store occasionally and I’ve had a couple dozen hard right trash tracts from folks like Jordan Peterson dropped into my “Books for You” recommendations. The best part is that you can’t flag them as “not interested” from the play store, you have to open a separate app (Play Books), navigate to the same feed, find the book and then you can tell the algorithm to get that shit out of your face.
I would consider myself pretty leftist, but I still occasionally get stuff like that, too. The only thing I can think of is that I am into fishing and the fishing demographic skews towards viewing right-wing content, I imagine. Maybe you have some other interest that aligns with people who watch right wing related stuff somewhere somehow?
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, if anything it’s got to be a hiccup in the YouTube content algorithm somewhere.
The car stuff might somehow be skewing it depending on what type of car stuff, but honestly who knows. It’s Google, so they may be pulling stuff from anywhere that your Google/YouTube email is allowed to access data.
It could maybe just skew towards showing right-wing stuff by default because it gets its normal righty viewers, plus the lefty hate watchers that way. Those kind of videos probably get more engagement, too, with full on debates going on in the comments.
Out of curiosity, are you Canadian, or just on the Canadian instance? I ask because if memory serves the search results tend to be a combination of search history (if you have personalized ads enabled, you can opt out of them), country/region, and general subject/topic (so in this case social apps), probably among other details.
There’s no rule against placing ads at the top of search results, and there is no rule against advertising Truth Social. The reality is that they probably paid more than Discord to show up in the ad section and so are first.
Remember that every time you click an ad, you cost the advertiser somewhere between 10c and several dollars. And that which ads you’ve clicked on informs which ads you will get in the future. It would be a shame if somebody weaponized this knowledge and clicked ads without any actual interest in buying the products.
No. It’s an open secret kind of deal that most online advertisements don’t actually sell or do anything. In fact, a large amount of google views are bots.
How? Because there’s nothing stopping thousands of apps from using the ads incorrectly and showing them to phones or accounts or users that aren’t real people. At least with iOS, it’s very hard to run instances on servers or bot clients. Meanwhile, android can run on windows. Exploits galore.
But, no one cares. The companies are told to spend more on advertisement. The ad department of the company has a budget, they don’t care where it’s spent. So they buy ads from google and they don’t care who they get shown to 90% of the time. Everyone wins except the company but the company doesn’t care because they’re already making money.
Not to mention that the average consumer is shown thousands of ads a day. The more they see the less they notice the ads.
Basically ads are just designed to waste time for everyone. Truth social ads just lead to more installs by people already looking for their garbage app.
Depends on if they pay per view or per click. And then depends on the site/app, the location of the ad, and the bid.
For the Play Store, the CPM is usually around $10-15. So for every 1,000 people who see the ad, they pay $10-15.
YouTube can be $30-40 for the video ads with some going up close to $80. An ad at the bottom of a news site can be as little as $0.50.
The ads you’ll be shown will be the highest bidder who meets the criteria to display it. In general, the more targeted it is, the higher the bid. So McDonald’s might just say, “show this ad anywhere on the site to anyone who is in the US” and bid $0.25. A high-end watch company might say “Show this at a banner ad to men who are between 30-45, have an income above $150K, who care about fine products, likely own multiple nice watches, and are visiting high end watch websites” and bid $50.
I used to have an extension that hid ads from me, but in the background clicked on every one. I’m super annoyed that I forgot the name of it.
It made the sites I visited more money and hid the ads from me while hurting the advertisers (by costing more money) and ad networks (by screwing with the value proposition from advertising). It was great!
While it is true that a major stake in discord is owned by Chinese tech and the company has a long track record of spying on users, and discords hegemony over community stimies the growth of other communities, telling people to switch without being willing to explain why doesn’t make you the hero. It makes you a jerk
I believe that many people don’t even know that using Discord is problematic. So just saying that it shouldn’t be used can be enough to – in combination of other messages they may get – make a difference. Being a jerk is not the goal, obviously, but nor is me being seen as a jerk important at all.
You might say that my jerkness prevents people from believing me. But it seems to me from looking at the behavior of activists and their tactics that nobody cares about that.
Not explaining yourself just makes you look like an idiot. If you explain yourself some people may look into what you’re saying or they may think you’re a jerk. When you don’t all you’re doing is being a petulant nuisance who presumably can’t even explain what they’re advocating for.
You seriously think saying “this thing bad” and refusing to elaborate is an effective form of advocacy in any sense of the word?
Youtube wizard: It’s shorts. Youtube counts all views in shorts as being full watches even if you dislike and click off instantly. One nazi short and your entire feed will be fucked until the view drops off the algorithm. Here’s what you do: Go to your watch history and delete the basically all your short views. Instant algorithm back-to-normal.
The shittiest thing in the Google Play Store is searching for incompatible apps. Not only cannot you get an outdated compatible version (which is fair enough), they just don’t show up with no warning whatsoever. This encourages impersonation because way too many people just install the first result.
That isn’t straight up a lie either. I had a similar experience before on an old device where it simply filters out incompatible apps. Not sure if it was just default setting or wasn’t modifiable at all. I don’t use play store anymore so can’t test it either but it certainly is a valid concern either way. Probably why it’s changed now.
I’ve had the exact same experience many times over the years and I’ve never seen anything like the message in that screenshot. Hopefully that little message in their screenshot is the default way of handling these things now!
If they did it wouldn’t do much, since most Mastodon instances are strongly opposed to anything even vaguely right so a federated Truth Social would immediately be defederated by at least a third to half of instances with any user base.
Hell, several of the Mastodon mobile apps implemented blacklists into the app so you couldn’t use instances the app developer didn’t like with their app. When you see a Mastodon mobile app with negative reviews about “the largest Mastodon instance” that’s what was going on - when Gab switched to a Mastodon back end around 2019 it technically immediately became the largest Mastodon instance and several of the mobile apps blacklisted it at the app level.
Oh no doubt. I didn’t know Gab was mastodon though, that’s interesting. It’s pathetic how these conservative products launch as “a new social media network for conservatives”, and it’s actually… just Mastodon. Gab even moreso since it ended up relaunching as Mastodon later.
It’s pathetic how these conservative products launch as “a new social media network for conservatives”, and it’s actually… just Mastodon. Gab even moreso since it ended up relaunching as Mastodon later.
Using an existing, generally stable open source solution that has the features you need isn’t pathetic, it’s generally a good idea. It’s like complaining that some websites run on Apache, even if you don’t agree with their politics and even if Apache devs publicly don’t agree with their politics.
What it tells you is that Mastodon does a good job at what it does, mostly.
The service, the website it’s running on and the phone app were all new things created for Trump though. I don’t see anything saying anything about what the back end runs on.
Let me use a huge internet company that isn’t tied to Trump and isn’t a conservative thing for a comparison. Netflix uses at least 3 different open source Apache products as part of their tech stack, and that isn’t the **only **open source stuff they use. No one is going to argue that Netflix is lying about providing a new/separate service just because there’s quite a bit of open source in their stack, especially on the back end (including stream processing).
Hell, there’s a term LAMP that has been used because the specific combination of Linux OS, Apache web server, mySQL database and PHP scripting was so fucking common - all of those are open source and at least one of those is part of the back end of a lot web sites you likely visit (including Wikipedia, Facebook and Slack which all use LAMP). Apache is the web server software for something like 30% of websites.
It’s the same thing with Truth Social and Gab - they built a new site, running a new service , with their own newly coded mobile app, that runs modified Mastodon as a core part of their back end. The AGPL (the license Mastodon is under) also requires distributing the source they use, including any modifications, so the source code behind both sites is freely available.
I work with Google ads every day (with small businesses not shit like this)
Press the three dots at the top right and report it as being offensive. Nothing is more frustrating than being disapproved, and it’s often automated with enough clicks. Sometimes it takes a week to get someone at Google to manually unblock an ad even if it was flagged incorrectly (a eye surgeon client of mine being flagged for his ads containing alcohol sales?)
Oh also, I imagine it’ll decrease the relevancy of the ads because Google will automatically take your feedback on board and feed it into the bidding system. The more your ad is deemed irrelevant, the less strength it will have, so will either cost more, or lose rankings against their competitors. (I doubt you can spam this though, it likely has spam protection so lots of people need to do it all the time.)
I went to do exactly this, and then realized I can’t, because I’ve never seen an ad on Google. I’ve been blocking them since I switched from AltaVista and MetaCrawler, where I also blocked ads.
Then again, I rarely use Google these days either, as the results are usually obvious or misleading.
The problem is that the machine is so big that there barely is a “they” anymore. It’s all automated. Support takes days to reply, and they’re all outsourced to sales teams in the Philippines.
It’s crazy I can have an ad disapproved when I didn’t even use the content they say I did, but someone reports an ad multiple times and it stays up. I imagine they have some kind of threshold where a certain percentage of the viewership needs to report it.
I’m talking about Google here, last time I used Facebook was almost a decade ago and their platform was even more of a mess and had much more creepy tracking.
Which is why alternative apps are definitely putting the word “discord” in their metadata to get close to Discord in search results without fear of trademark infringement.
(The App Store on iOS is just as bad as the Play Store, if not worse. They delete tons of legit reviews. The Reddit app is 4.8 where I am. Diablo Immortal is 4.6. I love my iPhone but the App Store is the worst part about it.)
You can’t anymore. You used to be able to MitM traffic globally on Android by using something like Adguard as a local VPN but Google started verifying that the signing cert on traffic actually matches an expected sender like 2-3y ago.
I assume you are referring to the behavior when F-Droid has limited permissions with regard to app installation (but maybe you’re referring to something else):
If F-Droid is included as part of the system, such as with CalyxOS, as a system app, or with the F-Droid privileged extension (if that’s still offered), then the app updating/installation behavior is a lot more like what Play Store has.
Outside right-wing grifters, considering the gullibility of the right probably MLMs and those “free” hat/watch/whatever that’s not actually free and automatically adds you to a monthly subscription. Oh and don’t forget the shitty right-wing services like patriot wireless and their I’m sure equally shitty beer ultra right beer.
I’ve actually thought of opening a business that panders to conservatives but donates proceeds to progressive groups. Give it the good ol’ fashioned God Guns n Glory treatment so it’s passable as a conservative business, but donate to things like the Trevor Project and liberal lobbyist groups.
A lot of people in the third world do this because it’s not like anyone is going to check and the harmful consequences are happening in the very countries keeping them poor in the first place so it’s practically no downside for them.
Not hard to crank out product for something like that, just take today’s borderline hate slogan, slather it in red white and blue and put it up for sale.
Haven’t seen anyone mention it in here yet, but this is exactly why I use Aurora Store to search for and download apps instead of the Play Store. It still installs things so the Play Store can update it automatically if you want, but you don’t have to deal with any ads.
I get a weird AI boyfriend/girlfriend app. I honestly don’t know how Google decides what ads to serve you. I do have ad personalization turned off in every app/device I can.
