To be fair, it is a service/website that sows discord in American society.
Exactly. Discord isn’t a service name first, it’s a word with meaning.
People acting like discord is a made up word invented by the app.
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.
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 reported their daily wire transphobia documentary ad like 4 times and still ended up getting it. They don’t care. They support it.
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.
They support money, and showing you the ad gets google more money. This isn’t some ideological thing, they just like money. It’s not rocket science.
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.
Aha! So YOU are the reason AltaVista died!
I was never part of their business plan.
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.
have you heard of the browser extension AdNauseam? it basically does this.
AdNauseam extension for Firefox does this
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!
Adnauseam
Why did you stop using it.
That computer died and I’d forgotten the name.
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.
Companies don’t care because it’s equal for everybody. If fake views would be removed, fees per thousand clicks would just increase.
But companies wouldn’t waste money. If you offer more real viewers for the same price, companies would switch.
It’s petty, but when I search for a company and their competitor appears above them as an ad, I always click the ad then close the tab.
It drives up their bounce rate and costs them money each time.
Daily reminder that the F-Droid store exists and has ad and tracking free apps.
People said I was crazy for pointing out that google actively sides with the extremely far right but at least now people are starting to see it.
Dude, mine promotes an app for finding friends.
Google is suggesting this because of OPs history. Calm your tits.
Mines a chat app for singles hahaha
Google is pushing relationships on you! /s
Hahahahah
Cries
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.
For these types of things there’s usually a statistical scale where you fall between your interests and your demographic interests.
An ad might be targeted to your location, gender, age, or your ad-interests.
Go to your Google Ad preferences and see what they know about you, it’s a lot.
That’s pretty funny. I don’t think that app is going to help you if this is how you treat people.
Don’t need it, thanks.
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.
I mean not really, unless cars and computers are a right wing thing now.
The most conservative thing I do is own guns, but only out of necessity and not because I like them. I literally never watch videos about them so IDK.
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.
More likely it’s a combination of his previous search history and how much Truth Social is paying for ad space.
Stop thinking in binary.
That’s a new way of dogwhistling “lets have some nuance here”
It’s actually really sad you see the world this way. I hope you can eventually come to appreciate the imperfect and nuanced world we live in.
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.
Play store search results are mostly ads now. It’s really bad and unhelpful.
In fact, most of the play store is ads. It’s impossible to find anything of quality anymore.
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.
they just don’t show up with no warning whatsoever.
That’s so untrue.
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!
I checked on my sisters phone and got the same message. Seems to be the default now.
Maybe something changed in 2023, I’ve been only using alternatives (F-Droid + Aurora) on my phone since January.
Also, your Android version is too new, which I’ve never seen before (and didn’t know that could happen).
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That’s fucking disgusting, cant wait til that sites dead in the water.
I wonder, if their user activity dropped enough, would they try opening up to federation?
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.
It’s pathetic to brand it as a brand new software you made yourself. I’m not gonna budge on that lol
Do any of them brand it as new software, rather than a new service, new app or new website?
Because it is those other things, even if it’s built on a Mastodon back end. The comparison to websites running Apache is pretty apt.
To be fair, it is marked as an Advertisement. Ads will always appear above your search results. Thats how they get you! /s
Weirdly i got some ad for a programme called Bigo Live - Live Stream,Chat as ad when searching for Discord.
I just tried and got Bigo Live as well, whatever that is. I don’t even see Truth Social in the related or recommendations either, thankfully.
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.
Your mistype got me thinking what Weird Al Yankovic dating app would look like.
It’s marked as an Ad that contains Ads.
I mean, technically Truth Social speads social discord through misinformation and whatnot… more so than Discord, anyway!
I wonder which companies advertise there
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.
I figured I was too late to that game on like 2017. I was really fucking wrong
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.
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.
Both listed are ads. Actual results are listed in a more compact way. Clearly, Discord doesn’t pay as much though.
I wonder which companies advertise on Truth Social, though
I would be interested in a list of Truth’s advertisers, if you find one. I can always add more shit to my “do not buy” list. Saves me money.
Bots, just like their engagement.
A few weeks back on YouTube for like 15 minutes all my suggestions were crazy right wing bullshit then it went back to normal
YouTube is weird. I’m watching solarpunk videos and it recommends me Jordan Peterson. Or I watch Joscha Bach and it floods me with AI-doomerism.
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.
I didn’t watch a Nazi video. But even if that was the case wouldn’t have lasted more than 15 minutes?
Yeah good point
An operator must’ve crossed some wires by mistake and noticed 15 mins later.
I downloaded it for 10 seconds so I could leave a bad review
Block ads?
How do you block ads in the Google Play Store app?
Use an iPhone bahahaha
(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.)
By not using it.
Seriously though, F-Droid (a Play Store alternative) has a lot of nice apps.
If you need some of the apps on play store, use aurora store
Yes, Aurora Store works alright for that
I personally use Obtainium, since I’ve found updating apps on F-Droid’s not a very good experience.
Obtainium looks interesting; thanks for sharing. I wonder about the security implications.
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.
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.
Glad we’re on the same page 🤝
