My 13yr old son has spent $100s on fortnite, I told him he's going to regret that when he wishes he saved for a car, or something that will matter in 6months.
I definitely blew my fair share on video games, but I also believe this is a generational shift. I do not believe charging $$ for "cosmetics" would have been as successful in "my day". But what does it mean?
One major difference to point out is that fortnite doesn’t have loot boxes, you know exactly what you’re getting when spending their online currency.
I keep hearing about the social aspects behind these games (kids who don’t have skins in fortnite are bullied at school, etc.) It sounds like goods that make a child popular are just digital these days as opposed to physical items like Pokémon cards.
I feel 20 or so years ago kids that spent money on something that didn't provide a clear benefit would have been bullied. My wife was a gamer, when my son first asked for a gift card to buy a skin it was fun watching him try to explain that there is no benefit and it only changes the look. My wife kept asking him why do you want this?
You and I grew up in very, very different worlds then. Most things that made kids in my community were purely consumerist.
Air Jordans, Pokémon cards, brand name clothes like hollister and AE, and then popular phones like the razer were ubiquitous among those that were popular. Kids who didn’t have those things were bullied relentlessly.
I always wondered who are these people/kids spending money on useless cosmetics, but the other day a friend of mine told me how his 11 year old, a fine kid, spent his birthday money (about 50€) on his PlayStation. Naturally I thought he bought a new game - it's the first thing we would have done at his age whenever we had some money at hand.
However, he wasn't interested in new games at all - instead he spend that money, all of it, on Fortnite cosmetics, which seems absolutely bizarre and alien to me. Growing up with Quake, Half-Life, Deus Ex and other classics we also loved games and didn't think twice about spending money on it, but I'm sure we would have laughed away any attempt to charge for skins and random items. Of course strong modding communities helped as well.
Anyway, this insight really surprised me - I always thought it's a few whales that participate in this nonsense, but apparently it's everyone, including the otherwise sane and reasonable kid from next-door.
I've not done a whole lot of research but Tesla has it figured it out, compare a Tesla in power and range with the BMW i8. Maybe Porsche can make a better showing than their German counterpart.
My wife and I were watching John Wick and got to talking about owning a handgun. The next morning my facebook feed was showing me marketplace listings for holsters.
Frequency illusion or Baader–Meinhof effect: The illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias).[51] This illusion is sometimes referred to as the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon.[52]
Well this instance spooked me because I hadn't done any kind of lookup for anything "gun" related. While anything I search for is usually what shows up in my feeds. I'm usually not a "tin-hatter" and seems far-fetched, but it spooked me.
These kind of corrolation incidents are why the myth exists. The truth is that advertising companies like Facebook don't need to listen to us. They already know more than enough personal information about us to target ads.
Shame about your downvotes -- I guess people don't want to believe that vac. scepticism can be a reasonable conclusion from limited evidence.
Well: it is. Autism is a childhood disorder (therefore) whose symptoms usually follow vaccination. It is not unreasonable to hypothesize a causal link.
It may be unreasonable to maintain it in light of other evidence (eg., no difference in rate amongst the non-vax'd). But people don't live in the macro (ie., comparative contexts) they live in the micro (ie., their own experience). And its hard to communicate macros to micros.
For me, until now, this kind of target has only lead to funny anecdotes. Like telling a friend on Whatsapp I just bought new shirt only to receive shirt ads for weeks. Well, too late. Another one is receiving cat food ads because I send a pic of the cat I was feeding while a friend was in vacation. Fail again, I do not own a cat. Good try anyway.
But I recon, you're case is creepy. But more likely that the VOD service you use sent data to Facebook.
The information that you've watched that movie likely went into the ad-placement algorithm and it then may have decided that you could be interested in guns.
Now, is this reassuring? Maybe the ad-placement algorithm with all the data available is much better at knowing who you are and what you want that than recording audio, and extracting meaning from it.
From an advertisement standpoint, there is so much noise in a microphone signal. It would be helpful for large-scale surveillance so a human could pin-point individual persons-of-interest and listen to what they're saying (big brother style). But that's not how advertisements work.
