Well, it happened. The stupidest request, no demand, I have ever, and most likely will ever receive...

Me: So what is it you're looking to do with your website.

Client: We're not showing up Facebook's home page. We need you to fix that. We have a budget of $10,000 to make this happen right now.

Me: As much as I'd love to take your money, that isn't something I can control. Every "home page" is profile-based, which technically isn't a homepage, but a "feed" that changes constantly. So say you create a profile on Facebook, only those you follow, and paid posts show up on your feed. What I can do however is use your budget to create and promote posts from your company page to show on users' feeds. If you're serious about marketing, we can start slow at $250/week, then work our way up or down based on results until your budget is exhausted, then re-evaluate the budget at that time. I can tailor a retainer for you based on the number of ads per week that you'd like to make.

Client: No, this is not what we're asking for at all.

Me: Okay...what is it you're looking for exactly? Run through this in as much detail as possible so I can get on the same page.

Client: We want to be on the main home page of facebook.com. We want our logo on that page when people sign up to make an account, linking to our website.

Me: That's simply not possible. That's Facebook's own home page. Nobody has a right to edit that other than Facebook itself.

Client: Bullshit. There's a Facebook developers section with APIs to edit and view Facebook's entire website. We would do it ourselves, but we signed up and don't understand how to change it in Chrome. That's why we need you and [referring client] said you were the best guy for our needs.

Me: That API has no control over Facebook's corporate data, including their own home page. That API designed ONLY for sections in which you are authorized to access or modify, such as your personal profile or created page for your business.

Client: We know that it can be done. If you don't do it, we'll find someone else who can.

Me: Well good luck with that, because the only way it would be remotely possible to do that WILL involve prison time, since that would be illegal. The only legal way to do it would be to buy Facebook, and they'll laugh you out of the building with that offer. But I'm done with this conversation because I have work to complete from clients that aren't delusional. Have a nice day! [hang up]

----

What. The. Fuck.

When you are pissed AF but somehow it manages to get through

Worst pseudocode ever.

Hate "smart" Facebook ads ..

WhatsApp confirmed that ads are coming to the status part of the app!

Fucking finally.

What? Do I like ads? Oh no, I quit WhatsApp when Facebook bought it.

I just know some people who'll leave (mostly for Signal, some for telegram or wire) it the second the ads show up for the first time and I'd love to see people leaving WhatsApp (especially in my country).

Hurry the fuck up with those ads, Facebook!

Why are job postings so bad?
Like, really. Why?

Here's four I found today, plus an interview with a trainwreck from last week.
(And these aren't even the worst I've found lately!)

------

Ridiculous job posting #1:
* 5 years React and React Native experience -- the initial release of React Native was in May 2013, apparently. ~5.7 years ago.
* Masters degree in computer science.
* Write clean, maintainable code with tests.
* Be social and outgoing.

So: you must have either worked at Facebook or adopted and committed to both React and React Native basically immediately after release. You must also be in academia (with a masters!), and write clean and maintainable code, which... basically doesn't happen in academia. And on top of (and really: despite) all of this, you must also be a social butterfly! Good luck ~

------

Ridiculous job posting #2:
* "We use Ruby on Rails"
* A few sentences later... "we love functional programming and write only functional code!"

Cue Inigo Montoya.

------

Ridiculous job posting #3:
* 100% remote! Work from anywhere, any time zone!
* and following that: You must have at least 4 work hours overlap with your coworkers per day.
* two company-wide meetups per quarter! In fancy places like Peru and Tibet! ... TWO PER QUARTER!?

Let me paraphrase: "We like the entire team being remote, together."

------

Ridiculous job posting #4:
* Actual title: "Developer (noun): Superhero poised to change the world (apply within)"
* Actual excerpt: "We know that headhunters are already beating down your door. All we want is the opportunity to earn our right to keep you every single day."
* Actual excerpt: "But alas. A dark and evil power is upon us. And this… ...is where you enter the story. You will be the Superman who is called upon to hammer the villains back into the abyss from whence they came."

I already applied to this company some time before (...surprisingly...) and found that the founder/boss is both an ex cowboy dev and... more than a bit of a loon. If that last part isn't obvious already? Sheesh. He should go write bad fantasy metal lyrics instead.

------

Ridiculous interview:
* Service offered for free to customers
* PHP fanboy angrily asking only PHP questions despite the stack (Node+Vue) not even freaking including PHP! To be fair, he didn't know anything but PHP... so why (and how) is he working there?
* Actual admission: No testing suite, CI, or QA in place
* Actual admission: Testing sometimes happens in production due to tight deadlines
* Actual admission: Company serves ads and sells personally-identifiable customer information (with affiliate royalties!) to cover expenses
* Actual admission: Not looking for other monetization strategies; simply trying to scale their current break-even approach.

------

I find more of these every time I look. It's insane.
Why can't people be sane and at least semi-intelligent?

Twitter: We use your tweets to analyze your preferences and target ads for you..

Facebook & Whatsapp: We monitor your posts, locations, private chats and target ads for you..

Google: We spy your mails, sms, location, pretty much all your activity and tailor ads for you..

All of them combined: No one can beat us in breaching privacy and bombarding you with ads..

Amazon: Hold my beer 🍺

> *WordPress website gets down Error 500: Cannot establish Connection with database*

> Marketing loses their shit: "We need the website up and working right now"

> *Me being calm *: "Nope, we cannot it's the service provider error, there's nothing we can do"

> *MK.G*: "Alright then, switch to another ISP ASAP"

> *Me, Internal rage, a volcano erupts *: "Umm..so you want to spend more money on another hosting because this one has an outage of 48 hours?"

>*MK.G *: "Yes, because we cannot run Facebook ads, just because website is down"

>*Internal lmao*: "Alright, but by the time you purchase a new service provider and host, the website will be up and running plus since the database is down we cannot migrate"

>*MK.G*: "I don't care, just make it up and working"

>*Me chilling*: "Alright, give me few hours"

> after a few hours the website is working *me being badass even though I didn't do anything*

The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads…That sucks.

- Jeffrey Hammerbacher, former Facebook engineer

Was asked to check the sales team server as it was running slow.
Apart from redundant processes and users with too much permissions I found a "Cobol" folder under one of the sales team member's home folder.

If it weren't the sales people I would immediately disregard this as trolling but with them it's quite possible that this is a real attempt to learn programming...
...most likely from the facebook ads with the hooded guys that offer to teach you to code in 10 days for $800.

!!privacy
!!political

I had a discussion with a coworker earlier.

I owed him for lunch the other day, and he suggested I pay him back either with cash (which I didn't have), Venmo, or just by him lunch the next time (which I ended up doing).

I asked about Venmo, and he said it was like paypal, but always free. that sounded a bit off -- because how are they in business if it's always free? -- so I looked it up, and paid special attention to their privacy policy.

The short of it: they make money by selling your information. That's worth far more than charging users a small fee when sending $5 every few weeks. Sort of what I expected when I heard "always free," but what surprised me is just how much they collect. (In retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised at all...)

Here's an incomplete list:
* full name, physical address, email, DoB, SSN (or other government IDs, depending on country)
* Complete contact list (phone numbers, names, photos)
* Browser/device fingerprint
* (optional) Your entire Facebook feed and history
* (optional) all of your Facebook friends' contact info
* Your Twitter feed
* Your FourSquare activity
(The above four ostensibly for "fraud prevention")
* GPS data
* Usage info about the actual service
* Other users' usage info (e.g. mentioning you)
* Financial info (the only thing not shared with third parties)

Like, scary?

And, of course, they share all of this with their parent company, PayPal. (The privacy policy does not specify what PayPal does with it, nor does it provide any links that might describe it, e.g. PayPal's "info-shared-by-third-parties" privacy policy)

So I won't be using Venmo. ever.

I mentioned all of this to my coworker, and he just doesn't understand. at all. He even asks "So what are they going do with that, send me ads? like they already do?"

I told him why I think it's scary. Everything from them freely selling all of your info, to someone being able to look through your entire online life's history, to being able to masquerade around as you, to even reproducing your voice (e.g. voice clips collected by google assistant), to grouping people by political affiliations.

He didn't have much to say about any of them, and actually thought the voice thing was really cool. (All I could think of was would happen if the "news" had that ability....) All of his other responses were "that doesn't bother me at all" and/or "using all of these services is so convenient."

but what really got me was his reaction to the last one.

I said, "If you're part of the NRA, for example, you'd be grouped with Republicans. If they sell all of this information, which they do, and they don't really care who buys it or what they do with it... someone could look through the data and very very easily target those political groups."

His response? "I don't have to worry about that. I'm a Democrat, and have always voted Democrat. I'll tell anyone that."

Like.
That's basically saying every non-democrat is someone you should be wary of and keep an eye on. That's saying Democrats are the norm and everyone else is deviant and/or wrong.

and I couldn't say anything after this because... no matter what I said, it would start a political conflict, and would likely end with me being fired (since the owner is also a democrat, and they're very buddy-buddy). "What if they target democrats?" -> "They already do!" or "What if democrats use it against others?" -> "They deserve it for being violent and racist, but we never would" (except, you know, that IRS/tea-party incident for example...)

But like, this is coming from someone who firmly believes conservatives are responsible for all of the violence and looting and rioting and mass shootings in the country. ... even when every single instance has been by committed by democrats. every. single. one.

Just...
jfl;askjfasflkj.

He doesn't understand the need for privacy, and his world view is just... he actually thinks everyone with different beliefs is wrong and dangerous.

I don't even know how to deal with people like this. and with how prevalent this mindset is... coupled with the aforementioned privacy concerns... it's honestly *terrifying.*

I work for a company known for its unbelievable perks and benefits. Every time a job opens up, we get thousands of applications.

Candidates are becoming increasingly aggressive to stand out. Hundreds of them (literally) have purchased Facebook ads or LinkedIn promoted posts to get their information in front of current employees.

Others have taken to outright stalking our employees. I freelance occasionally and have a separate website for my freelance business. I receive dozens of calls and emails to my freelance number and email account daily from people who want to “chat about the open position.”

My husband — who has a different last name — runs a small retail shop. He’s had people come into his store and tell him that they did internet sleuthing and found out he was married to an employee of my company, and would he please pass on their resume?

I expect to get these messages on my LinkedIn or company email, but am I wrong in thinking that stalking me out and trying to contact me via personal contact info (or my husband) is way out of line?

Is there a way to sharply tell them that this is not okay? Normally, I just don’t respond, but I have to turn my phone off or it rings all day and it’s really annoying. Would it look weird to put a message on my freelance website that says do not contact me about Company X jobs?

My company is aware of this problem, and has said to forward the names of aggressive or alarming candidates their way to remove them from consideration, but it’s so common, I’m thinking this is a product of being told that if they just showed GUMPTION, they’d get the job. I feel bad for them, but it’s also creeping me out.

I'm going to make 4 statements of which only 3 are true. You tell me in the comments which 3 are true.

1. At my job in the marketing department, I manage our Facebook ads campaign where we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising.

2. MIS department inexplicably blocked the marketing dept from the Facebook domain altogether near the end of the day.

3. They also block Dropbox although we still have to manage all the distribution of digital video and commercials to our tv advertisers.

4. I work in a technically progressive environment that understands how things work online.

Facebook is desperately trying to get their userbase to post status updates on their feed like they used. Still, they began autoplaying videos which of course was done in order to monetize video ads.

It may be obvious, but facebook is sliding further down the shitter.

When you are in the elevator with like 20 people and everyone is looking at a white screen with ads and pictures and a blue tab bar in the top.
And i am the only one with the strange looking purple app and only english with no ads.

Time to stop twitter and facebook.

"we use cookies to give you a better experience on our site"

A better experience? Really?

It looks like you're using more than 100 external parties for whatever fucking reason. It is nearly impossible to disallow these, except for some stuff like analytics, which I don't like since it includes mass surveillance parties like Google and Facebook, but I'd at least, to some extent, understand that better.
But, the amount of dark pattern here is staggering and this kind of 'consent' you're using wouldn't, in a million years, hold up under the GDPR.

You know what would be a better experience? No tracking and no ads.

Go fuck your better experience (would that be a better sex experience....?)

So ... Facebook somehow found out I used a 'fake' rear name and forced me to switch it back ...

So now they can again sell my data, and I am again haunted by stupid ads I don't want ...

Fucking Zuckerberg!!!!

It blows my mind that Google, advertisers, and a lot of companies seem to not understand the concept of a need fulfilled.

Google news: If you notify me of an article, and then I click on that notification, you can assume I read it. And you can also assume that I don't wish to read it again 2hrs later! So stop notifying me!!!

Amazon, AdSense, Facebook, everyone else: just because I bought new headphones, doesn't mean I wanna see ads for headphones. Actually it means the exact opposite. I don't want new headphones. I literally just bought some. And I especially don't want the exact same ones. I already have them.

Somehow, the targeted ads are worse than random. That's annoying.

How is this hard?

Apple: We are giving users the ability to block ads.
Facebook: It's Christmas Holy war!

Marketing for Developers done RIGHT!

<!-- Hey Payoneer Its better to hire me... im better in posting ads on fb and more better in writing codes -->

I don't understand why people are making a fuss about Facebook.

It's free to use, the amount of users kept increasing (thus the cost of maintenance) yet the company kept getting bigger and bigger. Obviously they're not making all their money off the advertisements on Facebook's own website.

So why are people so surprised that they're "selling" user information?

This is really funny to me. Especially the media joining in saying that it makes all your information available to everybody when they're actually talking about the fact that the majority of Facebook users have their profile set to public and they can be easily found with a simple Google search.

People are so fucking hypocritical it makes me want to puke. If you don't want anybody to know what you posted, just don't fucking post it on a SOCIAL MEDIA in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that facebook is all flowers and love, they clearly didn't handle this situation well. They could have done something about this whole situation when it started instead of waiting for things to blow out of proportion.

However, people are just being assholes now. I highly doubt that they're reading all chats nor are they sending it over, they're probably just sending out some words you mention often so that it is pertinent for advertisers (ex. If you use the word computer next to buy, then maybe that triggers something). I could talk extensively about it but I'm way too lazy, the point is, they most likely aren't sending the nudes you sent to advertisers because that does not provide any benefits.

If you don't like Facebook, don't fucking use it. Delete your account and shut the fuck up. When you screw up in real life, there's no takesies backsies, why the fuck do people think it doesn't apply online? The government gathers up quite a lot of information on you yet I don't see you crying your eyes out.

Why the fuck do you care so much if an advertisement is tailored to specifically? Yeah, you talked about dildos and now you see dildo ads from Amazon, not happy? Just download adblock and shut up. If you're gullible and the moment you see an ad about single women in your area you click on the ad because you want to get laid right now, that's your problem.

Don't want people knowing about some aspects of your private life? Don't share it online.

Stop acting like people are any better at keeping secrets, I'm sure you had some people leak your secrets at least once, yet I doubt you sued them and you brought them to court.

===========

I'm sorry about this, it's just that Facebook is all over the news and I'm getting sick of it.

Also, I hate facebook, I'm not necessarily defending it, I'm more pissed at the medias for blowing this situation out of proportion.

Facebook you little piece of shit.
We have a page setup for a band since apparently this is what one does these days. But oh boy is facebook annoying. Can you please stop sending me 100 notifications a day about fking post boosting?! What the fuck. We are students we don't have money for this shit. fk off! <.<

How did targeted ads become so...accurate?

I did a search for a new service on Google last night.

Today, an ad appears on my Facebook feed highlighting my search term on Google the night before.

Facebook has changed so much.
There was a time when we were so connected and had so much fun there with friends. Now it’s mostly about videos and ads. That’s all I see when I scroll. I hate it now.

I am curious whether facebook IS listening to conversations or not.
Living with my girlfriend in a small appartment, yesterday we were talking about some shitty game we both played around 10 years ago, I was wondering whether the game still exists and googled on my phone (via LTE, not wifi) - yeah the game is still online and still the same shit.
Today she saw facebook sponsored ads to this game on HER facebook.

Today we watched a movie (Valerian and the thousands planets) - and there was this ship which looked similar to Millenium Falcon. I noted that in the midtime. After the movie - guess what - opened the facebook abd there was a sponsored ad to buy Millenium Falcon miniature or lego figure.

How? Randomized events? I do not think so. This was not the first time it happened.

Note: we are not native english speakers, maybe "millenium falcon" could be the only catch fb could achieve?

Ok this is freaking creepy. I searched for information about login systems on other websites for some time. Not once did I touch Facebook. Then Facebook show me targeted ads when I hoped on 30 minutes later. How the heck does Facebook get that data in the first place? I'm starting to get pissed that my data is just handed out to everyone, even by search engines.

!rant

tl;dr at the bottom

This might not be a popular opinion, so please, if you throw things at me, limit yourselves only to tomatoes and other soft projectiles. Thank you!

So this being said, i must say ut: i actually like how facebook use this data overall. While i am completly against privacy violation, that data is given up by ourselves with a choice to do it, so we can't hand them for it. However, i think the fact that we got ads for what our interests are is quite awesome! For example because of this i found webcomics and artists i curently hold really high in my praises and this might not have been the case if FB had another business model.

This being said, i just think people should focus on problems more important than how social media manages to earn some bucks, and while is our choise to be part of that we can't simply call ourselves "products". History holds many stories about civilization that gaved no choice if you wanted or not to be a product so we could be at least glad it is not the case anymore.

Anyway, if you read all the way down here, tnaks for your time!

TL;DR: Facebook is no holy church but it actually not so bad, we can find things we get to love or actually needed in the first place in their targeted adds system. At least we have a choice to be part of this or not!

Being Honest,
I never had any problem with Google tracking my activities. I love their services and I feel like they're using my data to really serve me better.

But I do have problems with Amazon and Facebook.
Amazon keeps disturbing me with their annoying ads recommending things I've already purchased.
Using Facebook on the other hand is like standing nude in public.

Facebook.
I fucking hate Facebook now.
Adding ads to all their videos, real classy.
Especially when it can show the same ad twice in the same video...
Facebook, I AM OUT.

I was just writing a long rant about how my rant style changed, and how I could fix anything that annoys me in a heartbeat by just putting my mind to implementing a change. Then YouTube once again paused the synth mix that was playing on my laptop in the background, with that stupid "Video paused. Continue watching?" pop-up. I even installed an add-on for it in Firefox to make it automatically click that away. I guess that YouTube did yet another bullshit update to break that, for "totally legitimate user interface improvements" or whatever. Youtube-dl faces similar challenges all the time, and it's definitely not alone in that either. I also had issues with that on Facebook when I wanted to develop on top of that, where the UI changes every other day and the API even changes every other week. And as far as backwards compatibility goes, our way or the highway!

So I did the whole "replace and move on" type of thing. I use youtube-dl often now to get my content off YouTube into a media player that doesn't fuck me over for stupid reasons like "ad fraud" (I use an ad blocker you twats, what ads am I gonna fraud against), or "battery savings" (the damn laptop is plugged in and fully topped up for fucks sake, and you do this crap even on desktop computers). Gee I wonder why creators are moving on to Floatplane and Nebula nowadays, and why people like yours truly use "highly illegal" youtube-dl. Oh and thank you for putting me in Saudi Arabia again. Pinnacle of data mining, machine learning and other such wank could not do GeoIP. for a server that used to be in a datacenter in Italy for years, and recently has been moved to another hosting provider in Germany. It's about as unchanging and static, and as easy to geolocate as you can possibly get. But hey, kill off another Google+ when?

Like seriously, yes I'm taking your Foobar challenges and you may very well be the company I end up working for. But if anything it feels like there's a shitton of stuff to fix. And the challenges themselves still using Python 2.7 honestly feels like the seldom seen tip of the iceberg.

Okay so today I opened a link to buy a screen for my Raspberry pi on my phone(Chrome browser) and was simultaneously using FB on my Laptop in mozilla.

And that very moment I had ads on FB to but that screen.

Now I know it's nothing new, but at the moment of realization it just felt so creepy.

Privacy literally doesn't exist anymore!

I don't understand privacy advocators.

Am I the only one who wouldn't give up practicality in exchange for "potentially more secure"?

I don't understand so much what the deal is with people who avoid Facebook, or don't trust Google or Microsoft, just in the basis of "privacy" or "security".

Websites tracking you to serve ads? Well, it's pointless because I very rarely buy something from the internet or let myself be influenced, ads are waste of time, just use an adblocker.

I can pretty much upload my whole life or documents on Google drive, even if I made it public no one would really care or read it all. It's like that GitHub project you uploaded but never documented, so no one cares. I usually use alternative software not because of "privacy" but because it has features other software doesn't have.

In reality you realize people aren't that interested in your life more than their own life.

Delete your Facebook
Delete LinkedIn and Gmail too

Stop visiting websites with ads
Stop being friends with anyone with smartphones

Draw your own maps
Draw your own water

Avoid drinking tap water
Avoid going out in public with your face on

Kill your own meat
Kill your gods
- From tweet

Facebook is a giant piece of shit. Not only is their platform a massive contributor to mental illness, even their API's are fucking garbage. I'm trying to use their ads API and what it does is it hijacks the entire fucking request so you can't even extract data from the request after calling it. Fuck Facebook and everything they've ever "contributed" to society.

Facebook and Youtube's new feature... You cannot skip the video ads :)

I've just realised, I don't care if Facebook are sharing my data... I mean, what I get more ads for men with big penises and ripped abs? So what...

Amazon has a new patent now "Keyword Determinations from Voice Data", which based on speech around a device, can filter out what you like/prefer/.. which could be used for displaying or fuel ads, so basically what everybody implied the facebook app does, but as a patent

TL;DR: Stop. Hating. On. Ads. Here are 5 reasons why:

1. "No one likes ads"
I love seeing *good* ads before I watch a YouTube video. Or I looked up videos that YT recommended because they sounded fun and they were fun:
- Coke - Hey Brother is an amazing and touching short film
- Fressnapf (="food bowl") had an incredibly enjoyable "things you didn't know about cats" video I clicked on purpose and it was good.
- I found JetBrains through ads (free for me, student perks. But tbh I use atom)
and I could name more.

2. What are the alternatives?
I know there are some non-profits and that's cool but you wanna be paid in your job, right? So ads are why Facebook (I know, Facebook isn't enjoyed here but), YouTube, stackoverflow, etc. Wikipedia asks for a few million dollars of donations each year because they don't run ads. Smaller businesses can't do that really. Hell, even codepen has a "sponsored" section. Imagine you would have to pay for all of those services.

3. "Manipulation"
isn't a bad thing unless you abuse it. I manipulate you when I say that I love codepen in the same way an ad does. No one forces you to use a product or watch an ad (you can look away and often times skip).

4. Adblock
What if everyone did that? Adblock blocks happened a while ago and the war between adblock and ad-senders is still ongoing. The moment you see an ad, you are using/watching etc something which the creators thought is worth making money off. If you don't think so, leave the site. I am an adblock user but if the site politely asks me to disable it and I enjoy the content - I will disable it with pleasure.

5. Targeted ads
Yes. The internet is a huge data-crawling piece of shit. But there are many more questionable or even dangerous ways of data-harvesting online. I am glad to see ads I like and not the ones my sister might like. Some services allow you to disable personalized ads. Or use vpn if you really want to.

Hey guys, does someone knows if Twitter colludes with other websites and/or services to collect data, because I thought that privacy-wise, Twitter wasn’t as bad as Facebook as I just use Twitter to follow youtubers and Donald Trump(to keep up with his craziness) and never post anything. But I just got a Python Machine Learning ad just. And it’s spooky because I’m currently (trying to be) learning Deep Learning and Google knows it (🤬🤬 you udemy ads) but Twitter!!?? Do they have a way to link my account??

Every day I get more convinced, that companies are only hiring the mentally disabled to their marketing departments.

Gitlab now spams ads constantly in my Facebook feed, because "I have visited gitlab.com".

If I have visited it, I am clearly already using it, stop annoying me please.

I'm tired of meth. I mean math. MATH.
I'm sick and tired of everything.

"First!" numerous blog comments shout to no-one, from the colorful abyss of the internet.

And for me, this is a first. But lets rewind.

It's 2 AM, about a month ago, spring in Akron Ohio. Someone reading this is no doubt shocked "You just revealed where you live, ON THE INTERNET! The weirdos will find you." Anyway, it's a dark and stormy night, as the cliche goes. Like most people up after midnight, I'm browsing facebook posts and useless productivity sites. (lifehacker)
I yearn for something more out of life, somewhere deep down inside..maybe in my colon?

All the articles are saying "10 tips to supercharge your life", "how to discover your life purpose in three easy steps", mixed with an ad about ron jeremys one secret tip to grow a massive cock, and exhortations to buy such-and-such's "new ebook!"
I am not moved by any of this.

Scrolling, and tabbing, and intermittently dropping f-bombs because of js ads locking up my browser, I stop and lean back. In the blue afterglow of my shitty compaqs screen, a thought appears, like a cheesy genie, popping out of a brass toilet. "Start a blog! A youtube channel! A podcast" the ad proclaims. "Yes. Thats what I have to do" I whispered (I'm embarrassed to admit I really did say this).

Then I Control+W'd out of it, and flopped onto my mattress. This was the wasteland of my life. I couldn't help but think The whole internet was like some seedy back alley 2.0, where boxcar willie with his train of needle marks had been replaced by more upstart, greasy-haired gurus. Each peddling 'ebooks' of 'advice', stuffed in between ads to buy 'this one hot stock you have to own' and porn. And that alley was really the 'blogosphere' and 'youtubers'. As I drifted off, the last thought was 'We're all just bottom feeders,leeching and whoring on the attention of faceless anonymous users, hoping for another quick fix.'

I fell asleep, these racing thoughts fading into sweet oblivion, but never too far away.

Welcome to My Back Alley

That title is only twice as dirty, and half as thought-out as I planned. As you imagine, the lure of being the electronic equivalent of a conman never quite faded. And the more I read, the stronger the message "Start a youtube channel!" grew. As if everyone and their grandmother having a youtube channel would somehow make the world right, cure cancer, and save kittens from animal shelter gas chambers. Everyones an expert, everyones an agent of change. Maximizing productivity, Evangelizing Technology, ninjas collaborating to socialfy your community diversification benchmark for target traffic
through user-engagement and authentic grass-roots, blah, blah, blah, blah, money. Thrusting, moaning, screaming. Money. Pumping at the center of it all.

Wake up and smell the bullshit.

This blog is not a blog. This blog is the anti-blog, and we are the anti-streamers. 'We' (read "I") resist your bullshit lingo bingo, call out the Truth (Tm) and refuse to be satisfied with any standards of decency, journalistic integrity, or common sense.

Every blog, every channel, every podcast is Starbucks And I'm tyler durden, pissing in your coffee, and calling it a 'latte'.

Freaks, and anarchists, laymen and losers. If you feel as I do, then this is the place for you. Welcome to devrant.

Message to @dfox :

Just so mobile devs know for their apps, what advertising platform helped attract the most users to the app for the most bang for your buck? Was it Facebook ads, Instagram ads, word of mouth, etc?

What the heck is wrong with these recruiters? You have a good facebook group with rules that states not to post ads or job listings. Then this headhunter just joins and ignoring the rules start pointing their job posts. What's worse is they are even posting unrelated programming languages. This ain't a people farm scumbags!

If there's a screen, there will be ads

'Google knows everything about you.'
'Facebook records conversations.'
'Personalized ads manipulate you.'

Guess that's why YouTube showed me an ad in Spanish yesterday. Or why I never clicked on an ad. Or why only every 1 in approx. 10 ads is somewhat relevant to me (and thats with me explicitly stating my interests in ad personalization options).

I don't have anything against shielding your privacy. It's your right not to use a product if you don't want to, but I don't see how people can make these statements without providing solid proof.

Just my opinion.

I was talking about the mobile game The Room around another student yesterday and mentioned how it's like a escape room type of game.

Today I got 3 different types of escape room commercials on Instagram/Facebook. Never gotten anything close to this regarding ads.

I've never felt so afraid, or spied on.

I see ads on marketing tools every fucking where.
Do I look stupid to you, Facebook and Google?
I don't fucking need them.
Who needs those stupid products anyway?

I even saw a reskinned XAMPP being marketed as 'local testing for your WordPress website', like what the actual fuck? Isn't that fucking scamming?
Oh, right. They were targeting WordPress monkies. Oh.

Anyway, please show me some more keyboards instead.
I've been in keyboard market for like 2 weeks you know.

Holy fuck.

Pinterest, one of the most wonderful and elegantly designed products has gone to rats.

The performance was smooth, the UX was kickass, the content was lit.

I once watched Ben's interview and absolutely loved his thought process on how he identified a problem and went ahead to build a solution for it.

Unlike Facebook/Instagram, which are designed to make you compete for dopamine shots and trigger jealousy, Pinterest was kind of different where you have a custom feed and yet no comparison or showing off. Cool right?

However, towards the end of the interview, Ben did mention that they are going (or already bagged) another round of cash. I was sceptical of why that was needed when they already had good reach, scaled product, and overall a stable ecosystem. They could instead focus on exit plans.

Pinterst has become a piece of garbage now. Cluttered with all the original features, which made it different, have been taken away. Moreover, not only the product is complicated and difficult to understand (let alone use), it is bloated with ads. The amount of ads and redirection of every search result to their shopping tab is just nauseating.

Feed has same content for days, if not weeks. You can no way customise the content been showcased and no matter how many times you report unwanted or inappropriate images, shit still shows up. The algo is rusted now.

Remember kids, this is NOT how you build and grow products. Lesson learned, capitalism has the power to destroy everything.

Marketing for us!
Can't believe they forgot closing the <html> tag. 😑

You'd think with all the data Facebook and Google collect, they'd be able to air some halfway relevant political ads.

Having ads I don't agree with shoved down my throat isn't going to make me change my views, it's just going to make me resent that particular group or person more.

when someone puts crazy ads on Facebook

WTF. Facebook now has ads on their videos.

How the fuck does Facebook know about the points of interest in videos, so as to play an ad just before that point?

installed an altered Facebook and messenger apps, without ads or suggestions.. just feels good 😌

DevRant has many privacy-conscious people and honestly just people who don't like when their personally identifiable data gets shared.

Yet, DevRant uses Carbon Ads owned by BuySellAds. Here's what their privacy policy reads:

"Some Personally Identifiable Information may also be provided to intermediaries and other Third Party Service Providers (defined in part (4) below) who assist us with the Services"

You know what's the funniest thing? In "part 4 below" they never actually state which companies do they share personally identifiable information with.

Just a quick reminder that when you use DevRant, your personally identifiable information may be shared with any amount of third parties, and you could bet a lot of money that the list includes Google and Facebook because of remarketing. Remarketing is a fancy term that means not selling personal data but instead giving it away for free.

Use AdGuard or any other browser extension that blocks analytic scripts. Buy a Raspberry Pi Zero W and make yourself a PiHole. When you're using DevRant mobile app, use analytics-blocking VPN.

It's bad enough that Facebook videos in my country have ads but some cunt actually had the genius idea to make the tagline for their ad "Un-skippable quality"

Not sure I can even be mad at how trolly that is 😭😂

I just want to understand how the fuck Facebook ads works.

Facebook know what we want. So I take this opportunity to search for the particular ads or services I am looking for. Like I am currently searching for a technician to repair my MacBook Pro. Simple WhatsApp to my other phone.

And now I got various ads about "repairing MacBook" in Instagram. Hahahahaha

Ooook so I follow a lot of dev pages and a few hunting pages. But I haven’t been hunting in years.

I deadass thought somebody was trying to fucking advertise a course on Microsoft’s long dead Foxpro language!

I say long dead, two people at my work still work on it regularly 😬

Just saw this

Is digital marketer really a legit profile? I mean, anyone can run ads on google and facebook.

How is it that Facebook ads play right before the climax or high point of any video. Just when I'm interested to see what happens next, bam, like clock work, an ad pops up. It does not seem to be a fixed time, but more to do with the specific content of the video. Is it just me or is there some sinister algorithm at work that can detect the moment in a video the viewer will be most interested? so the viewer will have no choice but to sit through the advert to see what happens next. Or is the timing of the ad predetermined by some other means ?

This is a continuation of my previous rant about admob being not very informative when it comes to invalid traffic and the resulting restriction in ad delivery.

I then wanted to use admob mediation to hang in facebook ads. My app is written with Xamarin.Forms.

So first I needed to make some facebook configuration - create an account, let my app review, create some ad placements and other shit. I came to the point where I had to put in a link to my privacy policy and the link could not be accepted due to some SSL fuckup -.-'

I then found out that there is an issue with my SSL Chain. With the help of whatsmychaincert.com I solved that issue. Little side note here: I have limited knowledge of that stuff and my cousin helped me set up my homepage so I had no idea what I was doing. Did a snapshot and luckily I did not needed that as everything worked :)
This took me around half an hour just so I can paste the fucking link to activate my app in facebook developer portal.

After that I made the whole mediation configuration shit - not an issue as google documented this quite well but it took some time.

Now comes the shitty part. To use admob mediation you need adapters to the other ad network. I found a nuget package with exactly what I needed just to find out that it is outdated. So I pulled the repo and saw that this thing is an aar binding library. Never did that stuff so I read some docs again. Updated the package and consumed it in my app.

The google docs then said "Use this mediation test shit to check if you did everything correct before going prod" - aar binding nr. 2 (but I am now familiar with that :P). This thing then told me that facebook ads could not be loaded because the SDK version is outdated -.-' SDK version comes from another nuget package which is referenced by the first aar thingie. I tracked that thing back to a repo where I found out that they are indeed totally behind. So I downloaded the aar, made a binding lib and bound that to my first aar binding lib as that depends on this.

Put that all back in my app - tested mediation and fucking finally after 6 hours everything comes together! all lights are green and things work.

Sorry if this is not quite a rant but it was quite a journey and I just had to share it.

Facebook Ads docs are a joke, spent 4h before I decided to add a field out of pure intuition because the React Native app won’t build if I follow their docs exactly as they post

I like the new WhatsApp!!

There I said it.

Why?

- Snapchat was practically useless piece of crap for me. No one that matters to me used it. That app is a data hog and battery killer.

- Meanwhile, What'sapp cared enough to be datafriendly to those in developing world. Like, enabling video playing while it's downloading.

- Whatsapp is not a data hog or battery killer.

- Snapchat sucks shit unlessn on ios.

- I hate Facebook because if it's spam and i stopped using it. With new WhatsApp update, I'm less likely to miss out on what is happening with people i actually know. I know facebook owns WhatsApp, but it doesn't really matter.

- No stupid discover ads or promos like in snapchat

Just had a memory popup about my uni days about 5 years ago. I was in my Junior year in business school and was doing a "consulting" project involving the whole Class (200 students). Groups of 4 were assigned an international company in either Europe, Asia, or South America. We'd visit them (as well as do some sightseeing) and learn about them (performance, market positions, products) during Spring Break and come up with a real proposal. We would then compete with other teams, and the winning pitchs for each would be presented in the school auditorium in front the entire class.

Our team didn't get that far but that's not the point. We did win the individual classroom competition. Our company was Deutsche Telekom (owner of T-Mobile).

This was in 2010, when the iPhone/smart-phones started to become mainstream... And our team's idea was location-based advertising.

Looking back, we basically predicted the future... though we got the wrong industry...

It's also sort of funny though because I remember the main reason we came up with the idea was to be different.

All other teams just went with some expansion plan to a neighboring country or cutting costs.... pure MBA/business plan. But I guess I was being a natural techie so thought of a tech idea instead.

We had a meeting with our professor after he picked us and he told us he had a history of spotting future hits. We were like "hm... ok... let's give it a shot... we definitely got an A!" but at that point I was sort of skeptical if this would actually work in real-life (the basic idea was they would sell ads to local businesses and if you were nearby, you would get a text message with an offer).

But guess he was pretty right... we just needed to have Google or Facebook to have been our company... though Groupon or Yelp works too... basically a tech company with larger scale rather than a mobile carrier...

What is your opinion on Facebook Business products in terms of API and UI quality?