There's this new sucker post going around Facebook with a surprising amount of takers:

I would like to thank Everyone for telling me how to do the bypass. I wondered where everybody had been!

This is good to know: It's ridiculous to have over 540 friends and only 25 are allowed to see my post.

It WORKS!! I have a whole new news feed. I’m seeing posts from people I haven’t seen in years.

Here’s how to bypass the system FB now has in place that limits posts on your news feed.

Their new algorithm chooses the same few people - about 25 - who will read your posts. Therefore,

Hold your finger down anywhere in this post and "copy" will pop up. Click "copy". Then go your page, start a new post and put your finger anywhere in the blank field. "Paste" will pop up and click paste.

This will bypass the system.

If you are reading this message, do me a favor and leave me a quick comment...a "hello," a sticker, whatever you want, so you will appear in my newsfeed

 

 This is the parody I just wrote:

I would like to thank Everyone for letting me know who still falls for the bypass. I wondered if anyone was left!

This is good to know: Nothing you post on your Facebook page does anything to change what shows up in your news feed. It is just text. Someone at Facebook would have to deliberately program everything you think happens! And it would be stupid because it would undermine the control they already have over your news feed.

It DOESN'T WORK!! I thought the general population was excusably computer ignorant when the mainframe in "War Games" just up and decided that tie games of tic-tac-toe meant it should override nuclear launch commands. But that was 1983 and relatively few people had computer exposure.

I was sure everyone would roll their eyes and ask "ARE YOU KIDDING ME?" in 1996 when the humans in Independence Day defeated the aliens by writing a computer virus and copied it into their advanced alien spaceship because the aliens happened to have a port that was perfectly compatible with the plug the human spaceship has. Surely everybody already had a drawer full of cords that never fit the device they wanted! But no! Audiences were fine with it! And that code was so universal even computers from another galaxy executed it. ChatGPT isn't that good. That human still has a job!

It's not possible I'd be the only one in the theatre shouting, "Come on! Why is he still on the access list?" when Tom Cruise broke into the building to kidnap the telepath by using his old eyeballs in a bag in Minority Report in 2002. Surely by then SOMEONE involved in the movie would point out that we already know today how to revoke people's access even if you use retina scanners. By then every movie was being edited digitally on a computer. But NOPE! That weak hack worked not just once but TWICE! Nobody learned from the first break in!

I have a whole news feed with posts from people I haven’t seen in years falling for this incessantly repeated dumb trick.

Here’s how to protect yourself from any future attempts to make you look silly. Hold your finger down anywhere in this post and "copy" will pop up. Click "copy". Then go your page, start a new post and put your finger anywhere in the blank field. "Paste" will pop up and click paste.

This will let everyone know you're never falling for it again.

If you are reading this message, do me a favor and leave me a quick comment...a "hello," a sticker, whatever you want, so you will prove you already get it or get it now

[ Guess what? *That* might affect who shows up in your news feed! With love and the best of intentions from GBM, 8/15/23 ]

Don't Fear the Boogeyman - Ads have always been about information you should parse

There's a recent Opinion piece in the New York Times that further perpetuates myths about digital marketing that should have been debunked years ago.   

I disagree strongly with this article. And except for select parts, it could have been written 20 years ago.  I started working in the ad tech industry in 2000 at Mediaplex. As far as I know, we were the first people to come up with behavioral targeting, though being on the buy side rather than the sell side, we could only use it to select creative rather than the advertiser. I left in 2014, when it had frankly become mechanical and boring rather than an innovative frontier.

 

First of all, advertising in concept is no different from what it's always been. Advertisers try to reach interested buyers, or in the best case, create interest by showing ads to people they hope are interested.  People try to be clever and scare you by saying, "You aren't the customer, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT!"  As if we weren't ALWAYS the product!  The idea that they target people with certain preference or lifestyle choices is not new. Sports sections have always run stamina and baldness ads. The audience at Harper's Bazaar is different from the one at Field and Stream. This has *always* been a profiling game. 

 

Second, ads have always included advertisers who are misleading or exaggerated. "Buyer beware" is part of the deal. We all know this. Despite that, I have been very happy with online-ad driven purchases that have alerted me to concerts I want to see as well as some products like the Grateful Dead metal logo that is now on my new car, or a free custom photo book that they usually charge $150 for but wanted me to try them out.

 

Third, and this is the one that people really don't want to admit, is that advertising is the tool that provides free content. Ads always paid most of the freight for newspapers and magazines. It was less obvious when it was a subsidy, and you still had to pay a subscription price. But the reason newspapers are dying isn't because you can read the news for free. It's because Craigslist and the like absolutely killed the value of want ads. It's another unintended consequence of the Internet, and Craigslist does no banner ads or targeting.

 

People have grown up with the Internet thinking that reading anything you want or using Google Maps or having an email address are all free because the Internet is a technology that makes them free. That is a COMPLETE LIE people like to tell themselves. Those things are free BECAUSE someone else is willing to pay for them. And those people are advertisers. 

 

People complain about compromised privacy, but if you make access to content "Free" if they'll only surrender some, they can't wait to click "Yes." We saw the same thing 30 years ago when people would give their personal information to anyone who would give them airline miles.

 

The true downside risk of the industry to society are these:

 

1) Advertisers are happy to target ads at stupid people because their money is just as green. Technology gives them greater ability to find the bigger fool.

 

2) The same technology can be used to manipulate the spread of fake news to the audience that wants to eat it up. Stupid people again... see point #1.

 

3) The technology only stops short of knowing people's actual identities with names by convention and compliance. There is the possibility of bad actors looking to do more than just sell products or swing an election. THIS is something worth focusing on.

 

If you're a teacher, fireman, or musician and you meet someone who asks you what you do for a living, it's easy to have a conversation about that. 20 years ago, when I told people I worked in Internet Advertising, they'd have one question before the conversation died: "So are you responsible for those annoying pop-up ads?" 35 years ago if I told them I wrote software for the phone bills, their one question would be, "Can you give me free phone calls?"

 

At this point, I have little sympathy for the fears of people who are suddenly freaked about what a big threat digital marketing is to the fabric of society. My own wife tried to use a Netflix special to claim more expertise than me in this area a few years ago and I asked her if she even understood what I did for a living for 15 years. Because I sure understand a lot more about what the psychotherapist experience is after being married to her for 20.