---
author:
    email: mail@petermolnar.net
    image: https://petermolnar.net/favicon.jpg
    name: Peter Molnar
    url: https://petermolnar.net
copies:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25990996
- http://web.archive.org/web/20210201222907/https://petermolnar.net/note/why-i-hate-targeted-ads/
in-reply-to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25990825
lang: en
published: '2021-02-01T17:43:12+00:00'
tags:
- opinion
title: Targeted ads narrow your world

---

Long, long time ago, when last.fm radio was still a thing on it's own, I
loved it: instead of pre-arranging a playlist, it kept adding the next
song based by searching for similar ones based on the one currently
playing. It kept crawling away, sometimes into terrible direction, but
more often into an area I'd like to refer to as "satellite".

"Satellite" would be friends-of-friends or even
friends-of-friends-of-friends in social media terms.

And this is how it comes to ads: when I bought a magazine, I got a set
of ads that only had a rough idea about their audience. Those edges were
the ones that allowed ads to broaden my views on the world, and,
therefore, ads were useful for me. This, and the financial impossibility
of ever getting one - early teen in Hungary -, were the reasons why I
loved Sony catalogues in the '90s.

Targeted ads are the polar opposite: they want to change me, force me to
buy a certain, specific product, instead of gradually opening my
interest to a lot more things in the world.