Tech

Matthew Gault hits the nail on the head with his take on advertising on Twitter these days. Many of the big advertisers have left, leaving a bunch of scammy drop-shipping companies that Twitter users are calling out via Community Notes.

“Twitter has an ad problem. Mainstream advertisers have fled the platform in droves since erratic billionaire Elon Musk took over the site, and what’s replaced them is a flood of dropshipping companies and scammy video games. The problem has gotten so bad that users have taken it upon themselves to warn each other about the site’s junky ads.

Twitter’s feed looks a lot like Facebook these days. Both are awash in bottom-barrel advertisers that were once relegated to the dregs of the chumbox at the bottom of Daily Mail articles but now clog up our social media feeds”.

I’ve been doing a Personalisation experiment on Twitter for a few months.

My ‘For You’ feed is littered with posts from bullshit accounts like ‘No Context Humans’ and ‘CCTV Idiots’. Every time I see one, I click the ‘Not interested in this post’ option.

It has absolutely zero effect. Every time I go back to the feed I see posts from the same accounts. What gives?

If I tell you I hate (or love) something a million times and you do nothing with that information, that’s a huge missed opportunity.

I get that this generic viral content gets a lot of views and engagement, so Twitter thinks that, by blasting it all over the For You feed, they’ll juice their numbers a bit. But if I tell you time after time that this is something that I explicitly do not like, why on Earth are they not using that information.

File this one in the ‘Doesn’t make sense since Elon showed up’ drawer.

Stop showing me this shit

I came across this excellent article by Amanda Mull in The Atlantic about how free ecommerce returns might be going the way of the dodo.

Processing returns is obviously a massive expense to retailers. While letting customers return goods bought online for free was a much needed tactic during the early years of the ecommerce revolution to reduce the perceived risk involved in buying clothes without seeing them with your own eyes, now that most people are used to online shopping, this could be a perk that is open for being chopped.

“A little bit more friction in the purchase process can be a good thing. In part, returns rates have become so high because online shopping has been built into a perfect vehicle for overconsumption”.

One of the biggest roadblocks (pun intended) to the adoption of full self-driving – apart from getting the actual tech to work of course – is addressing the psychological barrier to putting your life in the hands of software to get you from A to B.

Autonomous driving is not perfect, and every accident will be covered in detail in the media. Having said that, it is becoming increasingly safer than human driving, and this is an excellent point to lean on for EV manufacturers.

That’s why I love this full-page ad from the Chevy Cruise autonomous driving project in the New York Times showing how many lives could be saved by letting computers do all the driving.

h/t to Neville Medhora on Twitter.