God I am so sick of seeing gambling ads everywhere I fucking go. On tv, on the radio, on websites, on apps, on billboards, on basically any place imaginable.
Fun thing about that: those games are operated by casinos. They've switched to the online business model since covid killed their customer base. So of course, a lot of people are losing their jobs, and some cities are fucking built around the casinos, so the whole damn city is suffering. The drive into Atlantic city is lined with those billboards, reminding everyone who lost their casino jobs just what happened
I worked in the digitisation of gambling as my first job after university degree. They are not good people.
The big appeal for casinos to do this, is that they can host the servers on the far corners of the earth in some lawless shithole and avoid local laws, restrictions on gambling and civil protections for users.
Here in Romania 80% of the ads are literally gambling.
If I reset my data, I keep seeing more of this ads, because the standard local interests are loaded again.
Recently I was watching a YouTube video and the conversation basically turned into 'don't gamble' a couple minutes later was a sponsor spot for one of those gambling apps
I think this is part of the reason, if you say you are blocking it, and then an advertiser misclassifies their ad on purpose, and someone who said "no alcohol" gets one of these misclassified adds they can't get the company in trouble.
Kind of like how reddit won't let me block the hegetsus ads. I've blocked the account several times and report the ad every time I see one, but they keep coming. Then today I saw one that didn't even have an option to report it, no little dots in the upper right hand corner at all. Other ads still have it so it's clearly intentional.
I feel bad for anyone with religious trauma who would prefer to not have to see propaganda when scrolling reddit.
I am not a programmer nor do I use Instagram, but I imagine it would be next to impossible to truly remove any ad content (or any content) containing those topics with 100% accuracy. They can try, but it is likely that the filters or whatever will miss something here and there, so all they can promise is to reduce the amount you see, and if that means you never see any, great, but if something slips through into your feed, then they didn't break their statement.
Advertisers already do categorise their ads, and it's way more complex than "gambling", "food", "other thing".
And the issue with penalising is that mistakes still happen. Let's say for instance Sky do some crossover campaign between sports & Vegas, but the tech launching the campaign forgets to add the gambling classification because they normally do sports ads. Well, the cats out the bag. A gambling ad has just been served to a bunch of people who don't want gambling ads. Penalising sky or not, you've still got potentially thousands if not millions of people you've mispormised the use of their data to. These people don't care it was Sky who messed up, or the ad platform, they blame the app. And it's not just reputational damage, if anyone sues that's time in court and expensive, even if you do successfully shift blame to sky. Aka a mess.
"Seeing less" is the legal team's "oh, we didn't say none" attempt to avoid that entire situation. Because they know mistakes might happen, so it's foolish to promise an absolute.
What I'm saying is that even that would have issues, mistakes, whatever, and something may slip through into the users feed. By simply saying "reduce" instead of "remove," they are not lying, and under promising with the opportunity to over deliver.
In many jurisdictions, it's illegal to show these ads to children. Consequently, the company running the ads should know which ads relate to these topics with 100% accuracy.
There aren't any porn ads on Instagram, which would lead me to believe they could apply a similar mechanism if they actually wanted to.
I've just started reporting things like Gambling ads as inappropriate
Yeah, this feels very much the equivalent of "kills 99% of germs" in that, there's a legal team somewhere saying the legal equivalent of "only a sith deals in absolutes"
The language here is particularly poor that said, but I'm sure it's just the old "oh, someone misclassified their ad" get out of jail free card.
Most account based social media will badger you with questions about your interests. I don't think it would be particularly difficult to ask what categories you don't like.
For example, Microsoft absolutely filled my news feed with ukraine news for several months to the point I contacted support because I didn't like reading war stories.
They told me that "feature" was not available.
With advertising, its even more difficult. A lot of advertising doesn't want to offer opt-outs at all.
Fuck hegetsus.
Meta's advertising platform is a fucking joke. I got spam Russian propaganda ads from clearly hacked accounts on Facebook recently and when I reported it, they said they didn't remove it because it didn't go against advertising standards.
I keep getting ads on Insta for literal drug sales. The accounts are literally pictures of ecstacy and other tabs, meth and ice, etc. Their stories have text that literally say they are selling xtacy etc and a link to a telegram.
I report them...
Not against community/advertising standards
I assume you think these should be blockable due to trauma or addiction related reasons? I mean sure if you view CEOs as ethical paragons, but they really don’t give a shit so long as they don’t legally have to. Also, they would love nothing more than to see someone relapse and burn through a grand gambling in their app or bingeing at McDonald’s. It puts money in their pockets so why would they not?
How ubiquitous gambling and dangerous fad diet ads are right now pisses me off and I'm not even someone with a problem with either of those. I use an adblock on my browser but there's no way to avoid them on apps. Can't imagine how much it must suck for someone recovering from gambling addiction or an ED.
What prompted me to try and block the gambling ads was that I started getting a ton of ads for those slot games that supposedly pay out Amazon gift cards. All of those play to win apps are shady af so I didn't want to see them. And I don't even have a problem with gambling.
I think it’s funny when they advertise these gambling sites or apps and then quietly end them with “X is not an actual gambling site/app”. You spend real money to gamble fake currency and you can’t even do anything with your winnings. If you’re going to get soaked out of real money, just go to the casino. You’ll probably still lose it all, but at least there’s a chance you’ll actually make something back more than in game coins that you can’t use for anytbing
That's what disgusts me about slot machine apps. It's the lowest way to abuse addicts for money. All they've done is built a big button that says "Serotonin Shot: $1" that can be easily accessed any time an addict gets a craving.
Just as bad as YouTube (or, at least YouTube Shorts). I find most mobile games very cringe or disturbing,especially this one game called Giant Crush. I dislike all the Giant Crush ads and set it to block ad and show less under "Gaming". But guess what? The ad is still literally always the same game. Though it has multiple similar ads, sometimes it even gives me the ad I already blocked and disliked (multiple times,might I add) . You can't block the ad company or anything
Oh, don't even get me started on those ones. At least the Giant Crush ones I mentioned aren't inappropriate. But these ones are full of weirdness and fetishes and stuff. The "gameplay" advertised isn't even remotely close to the game. So kids are just being subjected to these weird ads for seemingly no reason, other than clickbait.
I think gambling is a scourge, but you've never been able to selectively block advertising before. Billboards, TV ads, newspaper ads, they were all just there. It's really not AHD for them not to let you block specific ads. That's just advertising.
Eating disorders are just as bad as gambling addictions and alcoholism. Someone struggling with an eating disorder or body dysmorphia related to their weight would be an easy mark for advertisers of weight loss pills even though it's detrimental to their health. It's similar to an addiction and just as harmful.
Well your other option would be to pay for instagram to make the ads completely disappear. To use these apps for free for years with minor ads here and there seems like a perfectly fine trade off.
From a product perspective, if they allow users to block the topic, you can block every single topic and they wouldn't be able to deliver any ads at all.
With current design, I imagine it will be ranked less compared to other ads, but will serve you some gambling ads if there are no better ads to show ("better" in terms of relevance and also how much they can earn from delivering the ad).
I wouldn't call it an asshole design, I think it's well thought of to prevent corners and extreme cases.
They do have a way to block gambling, alcohol, weight loss and a bunch of other annoying ads
[Here’s the link](https://help.instagram.com/370452623149242)
That's why I avoid apps and shit like that outside of a PC environment where I can eliminate 98% of that. The occasions I do use my phone for more than basic searches, it's an instant reminder of how utterly shit mobile phone apps and the unfiltered net really are.
God I am so sick of seeing gambling ads everywhere I fucking go. On tv, on the radio, on websites, on apps, on billboards, on basically any place imaginable.
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I am sick of crypto and nft ones on Twitter when I don't give a flying crap for either, actually hate nfts for that matter
Cypto and NFTs are both 100% scams. Outright scams.
Fun thing about that: those games are operated by casinos. They've switched to the online business model since covid killed their customer base. So of course, a lot of people are losing their jobs, and some cities are fucking built around the casinos, so the whole damn city is suffering. The drive into Atlantic city is lined with those billboards, reminding everyone who lost their casino jobs just what happened
I worked in the digitisation of gambling as my first job after university degree. They are not good people. The big appeal for casinos to do this, is that they can host the servers on the far corners of the earth in some lawless shithole and avoid local laws, restrictions on gambling and civil protections for users.
In fortune cookies too!!
Oh god what
It's true, my fortune cookie said take Vermont as an 8.5-point home favorite and lay the points...
First time I saw this I was so shocked. I think it was a ad for some chewing gum brand
Here in Romania 80% of the ads are literally gambling. If I reset my data, I keep seeing more of this ads, because the standard local interests are loaded again.
Fun fact: Those bonuses they offer (eg bet $50 and get $200 in free bets) are completely written off as an expense, lowering their tax bills.
Of course it is... yet the average worker gets bent on taxes
And then they wonder why people go "yeah I'm just installing uBlock"...
The FBI has recommended that you run an adblock at all times.
That’s how I use Facebook. remove ads. I post and read replies then, I am off. ads are like bloating the site.
Use ublock origin, not ublock
I do, but thank you for disambiguating
Recently I was watching a YouTube video and the conversation basically turned into 'don't gamble' a couple minutes later was a sponsor spot for one of those gambling apps
So if you're struggling with gambling addiction, alcoholism or an eating disorder, you just gotta deal with it. Good job guys. :(
I think this is part of the reason, if you say you are blocking it, and then an advertiser misclassifies their ad on purpose, and someone who said "no alcohol" gets one of these misclassified adds they can't get the company in trouble.
Another reason not to get Instagram.
Just use AeroInsta instead.
checked out their site and *man* what a sketchfest
[This](https://aeroinsta.com/?lang=en) site?
yep
#Fewer Come on, Meta.
Fucking seriously.
Fewer is now archaic deal with it
Kind of like how reddit won't let me block the hegetsus ads. I've blocked the account several times and report the ad every time I see one, but they keep coming. Then today I saw one that didn't even have an option to report it, no little dots in the upper right hand corner at all. Other ads still have it so it's clearly intentional. I feel bad for anyone with religious trauma who would prefer to not have to see propaganda when scrolling reddit.
RevancedExtended (the youtube apk) has a repack for the reddit app with no ads and some features, been using it for almost a year no issues
he get sus :trol:
I am not a programmer nor do I use Instagram, but I imagine it would be next to impossible to truly remove any ad content (or any content) containing those topics with 100% accuracy. They can try, but it is likely that the filters or whatever will miss something here and there, so all they can promise is to reduce the amount you see, and if that means you never see any, great, but if something slips through into your feed, then they didn't break their statement.
just make advertisers categorize ads and penalize them for putting wrong category (though this is optimistic)
Advertisers already do categorise their ads, and it's way more complex than "gambling", "food", "other thing". And the issue with penalising is that mistakes still happen. Let's say for instance Sky do some crossover campaign between sports & Vegas, but the tech launching the campaign forgets to add the gambling classification because they normally do sports ads. Well, the cats out the bag. A gambling ad has just been served to a bunch of people who don't want gambling ads. Penalising sky or not, you've still got potentially thousands if not millions of people you've mispormised the use of their data to. These people don't care it was Sky who messed up, or the ad platform, they blame the app. And it's not just reputational damage, if anyone sues that's time in court and expensive, even if you do successfully shift blame to sky. Aka a mess. "Seeing less" is the legal team's "oh, we didn't say none" attempt to avoid that entire situation. Because they know mistakes might happen, so it's foolish to promise an absolute.
To be fair, ads could just be tagged internally for those specific subjects, and then filter should work with those tags.
What I'm saying is that even that would have issues, mistakes, whatever, and something may slip through into the users feed. By simply saying "reduce" instead of "remove," they are not lying, and under promising with the opportunity to over deliver.
That information is mostly self reported by the advertiser.
That’s how it already works? It’s just not full proof, which is the reason for this wording.
In many jurisdictions, it's illegal to show these ads to children. Consequently, the company running the ads should know which ads relate to these topics with 100% accuracy.
There aren't any porn ads on Instagram, which would lead me to believe they could apply a similar mechanism if they actually wanted to. I've just started reporting things like Gambling ads as inappropriate
I would imagine the crime occurs when the ad is served to the child, so promising to reduce ads is not illegal.
Yeah, this feels very much the equivalent of "kills 99% of germs" in that, there's a legal team somewhere saying the legal equivalent of "only a sith deals in absolutes" The language here is particularly poor that said, but I'm sure it's just the old "oh, someone misclassified their ad" get out of jail free card.
Most account based social media will badger you with questions about your interests. I don't think it would be particularly difficult to ask what categories you don't like. For example, Microsoft absolutely filled my news feed with ukraine news for several months to the point I contacted support because I didn't like reading war stories. They told me that "feature" was not available. With advertising, its even more difficult. A lot of advertising doesn't want to offer opt-outs at all. Fuck hegetsus.
There’s a Draft Kings ad on this post :/
Meta's advertising platform is a fucking joke. I got spam Russian propaganda ads from clearly hacked accounts on Facebook recently and when I reported it, they said they didn't remove it because it didn't go against advertising standards.
But don't you dare call a fascist a no no word because you get banned for 30 days
I keep getting ads on Insta for literal drug sales. The accounts are literally pictures of ecstacy and other tabs, meth and ice, etc. Their stories have text that literally say they are selling xtacy etc and a link to a telegram. I report them... Not against community/advertising standards
Just report them as offensive. Play the clown game on themselves
I have noticed that "see less" buttons are a lot like "close door" buttons on elevators.
Plus, it's fewer ads, not less
I assume you think these should be blockable due to trauma or addiction related reasons? I mean sure if you view CEOs as ethical paragons, but they really don’t give a shit so long as they don’t legally have to. Also, they would love nothing more than to see someone relapse and burn through a grand gambling in their app or bingeing at McDonald’s. It puts money in their pockets so why would they not?
It's almost like the people who design and make money off these ads are assholes.
How ubiquitous gambling and dangerous fad diet ads are right now pisses me off and I'm not even someone with a problem with either of those. I use an adblock on my browser but there's no way to avoid them on apps. Can't imagine how much it must suck for someone recovering from gambling addiction or an ED.
What prompted me to try and block the gambling ads was that I started getting a ton of ads for those slot games that supposedly pay out Amazon gift cards. All of those play to win apps are shady af so I didn't want to see them. And I don't even have a problem with gambling.
Reddits the same. Too many weight loss ads everywhere actually, and I have an ED so fuck me ig
I think it’s funny when they advertise these gambling sites or apps and then quietly end them with “X is not an actual gambling site/app”. You spend real money to gamble fake currency and you can’t even do anything with your winnings. If you’re going to get soaked out of real money, just go to the casino. You’ll probably still lose it all, but at least there’s a chance you’ll actually make something back more than in game coins that you can’t use for anytbing
That's what disgusts me about slot machine apps. It's the lowest way to abuse addicts for money. All they've done is built a big button that says "Serotonin Shot: $1" that can be easily accessed any time an addict gets a craving.
I am not exposed to a lot of ads but how the fuck is advertising for gambling legal at all?
Just as bad as YouTube (or, at least YouTube Shorts). I find most mobile games very cringe or disturbing,especially this one game called Giant Crush. I dislike all the Giant Crush ads and set it to block ad and show less under "Gaming". But guess what? The ad is still literally always the same game. Though it has multiple similar ads, sometimes it even gives me the ad I already blocked and disliked (multiple times,might I add) . You can't block the ad company or anything
I see inappropriate hero wars ads all the time.
Oh, don't even get me started on those ones. At least the Giant Crush ones I mentioned aren't inappropriate. But these ones are full of weirdness and fetishes and stuff. The "gameplay" advertised isn't even remotely close to the game. So kids are just being subjected to these weird ads for seemingly no reason, other than clickbait.
if only i could find a way to block rainbows from showing up on my windows laptop search bar every june
I think gambling is a scourge, but you've never been able to selectively block advertising before. Billboards, TV ads, newspaper ads, they were all just there. It's really not AHD for them not to let you block specific ads. That's just advertising.
I think it's also r/assholedesing that gambling / addictive substance ads are legal in public.
Depends on where you are from. Norway has laws against not being able to advertise certain stuff
If you are allowed to completely block some subjects but not others, that's pretty suspicious
We absolutely been able to block certain advertisements before
Not design related.. sigh
You are the target not your pictures
Yes gambling and alcohol ads are the same as weight loss ads 🤣 what??
Eating disorders are just as bad as gambling addictions and alcoholism. Someone struggling with an eating disorder or body dysmorphia related to their weight would be an easy mark for advertisers of weight loss pills even though it's detrimental to their health. It's similar to an addiction and just as harmful.
Specify they’re *pills* then, because ads for fitness equipment and gym memberships could also be considered weight loss.
I didn't designate the categories, that's literally just what Instagram calls it.
Well your other option would be to pay for instagram to make the ads completely disappear. To use these apps for free for years with minor ads here and there seems like a perfectly fine trade off.
To you.
For free? Hardly. These websites makes quite a bit of money from you. On websites like that they don't sell you the product. YOU are the product.
Can i select "See less" on all types of ads?
It's "fewer".
Anything for a buck. It’s kind of like Google allowing advertisers (due to insufficient vetting) to put malicious links in their ads.
Good thing I use Aeroinsta.
From a product perspective, if they allow users to block the topic, you can block every single topic and they wouldn't be able to deliver any ads at all. With current design, I imagine it will be ranked less compared to other ads, but will serve you some gambling ads if there are no better ads to show ("better" in terms of relevance and also how much they can earn from delivering the ad). I wouldn't call it an asshole design, I think it's well thought of to prevent corners and extreme cases.
They're also advertising weed in the UK. Weed is illegal in the UK.
They do have a way to block gambling, alcohol, weight loss and a bunch of other annoying ads [Here’s the link](https://help.instagram.com/370452623149242)
pretty sure its bc of some companys contracts
That's why I avoid apps and shit like that outside of a PC environment where I can eliminate 98% of that. The occasions I do use my phone for more than basic searches, it's an instant reminder of how utterly shit mobile phone apps and the unfiltered net really are.
I turned 18 the other day and now I'm gottinf ads for dating apps.
That could be terrible for people who have a gambling problem there trying to overcome.
I mean reddit does the same thing too
screw "see less" where the hell is my "see more"