Could be big data. If you click a link to furaffinity on Bluesky, this change means they know your account visited that website, and they know you’re a furry. So they sell that data to Fursuits-R-Us. Then Fursuits-R-Us buys some feed priority with furry users, and now you’re seeing a lot of posts about Fursuits-R-Us. Ta-da, that’s the magic of feed-integrated personalised advertising. You get marketed to, and you don’t even know it.
You might think advertising fursuits is harmless. But what if The Heritage Foundation buy that data and that feed priority instead? Or what if a right-wing Twitch streamer just started a playthrough of Red Dead Redemption, so they pay Bluesky to promote their content to all accounts that are marked as politically naive Red Dead fans?
No such thing as a free lunch, amirite? At least with the realization that your data is getting harvested like tuna by pirate fishing, you can purposely feed it bullshit to skew the metrics over time. If you want to get on the inside track of cheese sales, setup a program to search for cheese 1-3 hours/day during your time away from the terminal, and see how many sales of delicious brie/roquefort/edam/camembert/cheddar/emmentaler you get. Might as well get ads for delicious cheese wheels while you’re at it.
Could be that.
Could be big data. If you click a link to furaffinity on Bluesky, this change means they know your account visited that website, and they know you’re a furry. So they sell that data to Fursuits-R-Us. Then Fursuits-R-Us buys some feed priority with furry users, and now you’re seeing a lot of posts about Fursuits-R-Us. Ta-da, that’s the magic of feed-integrated personalised advertising. You get marketed to, and you don’t even know it.
You might think advertising fursuits is harmless. But what if The Heritage Foundation buy that data and that feed priority instead? Or what if a right-wing Twitch streamer just started a playthrough of Red Dead Redemption, so they pay Bluesky to promote their content to all accounts that are marked as politically naive Red Dead fans?
This is how elections are bought and sold.
No such thing as a free lunch, amirite? At least with the realization that your data is getting harvested like tuna by pirate fishing, you can purposely feed it bullshit to skew the metrics over time. If you want to get on the inside track of cheese sales, setup a program to search for cheese 1-3 hours/day during your time away from the terminal, and see how many sales of delicious brie/roquefort/edam/camembert/cheddar/emmentaler you get. Might as well get ads for delicious cheese wheels while you’re at it.