Wanna buy a(nother) humidifier?
3mon 28d ago by lemmy.world/u/homesweethomeMrL in tumblr
I wish someone could quantify how much energy goes into this.
Approximately 15 energy
Which, for those of you who aren't energy professionals, is actually a fair bit of energy.
To give a comparison, this is the sort of energy you often see in stars, cars, or springs.
stars, cars, or springs.
Sounds like the name of a weird gameshow 😁
Yeah, Match Their Energy! You've seen it?
Nope, but it sounds genuinely intriguing 😁
How many joules?
Dozens!
I hate to be so American, but what is that in 3 month-old elephant seal pups?
Not sure, but I can tell you it is exactly 226 SMUs. This is - as you're already well aware - standard mcunits. 1 SMU is one standard mcdonalds cheeseburger, 300 Cal or 348 Wh.
Any time someone brings up to me what a waste of power crypto is (and it is, I'm not denying that) I bring this up, and it's so fun to watch them all do this:
Why would they get mad about dissing advertising along with crypto?
(Maybe they think you're saying it to defend crypto using whataboutism?)
I think most people have genuinely never thought about it once in their life, just like how they never would have thought once about crypto's energy usage if the media hadn't told them to be angry about it. So they either get upset at the sudden realization that we're all being played by the rich or they get defensive because suddenly their world view is under attack. Same expression either way.
I always figured the angry npc wojak meme implied they were mad at you for making a good point that they didn't like, but if you're using it to say they just became angry in general, fair enough.
I mean, it is absolutely that on occasion. I may come off as doing a whataboutism, but I mean it more like "Absolutely, we should be angry at people and technologies whose energy use exponentially outweighs the societal benefits. Here's the world's biggest offender!" But they don't actually care about energy usage, they just hate crypto and have never thought critically about targeted advertisement; all they know is it's a part of capitalism which they love so their brain starts doing flips trying to find a way to make it defensible. It's like telling a 'wont somebody please think of the children' evangelical republican all the ways in which they directly support child abuse and abusers. "I agree with you, but do you?"
I wish someone would quantify how useful advertising really is for established brands and then they can stop it.
Maybe >1M man hours per year?
Amazon sells power meters.
They don't really need to make or sell products, they just need to create the appearance of selling products to attract investment from billionaires. They've got all the money, why would they care about the small pittance of money everyone else has?
#NotHumidiferAdvice
as an amphibian this has been extremely useful advice
Seriously, though, is this bullshit actually effective enough to justify all the money and effort they put into it?
I really doubt it. I think targeted ads are just window dressing to hide the real reason they want to spy on us everywhere all the time.
I used to wonder this, too, and think that it couldn't be that effective. Then I went to my last job, and there were MULTIPLE people who said they actually liked the ads because they learned about new products that they would like. What's worse is that a couple of those multiple people actually clicked the ads and would buy things.
All that to say, yes, it is actually at least somewhat effective, and it erodes my faith in humanity.
Would these people buy those items again, though, right after the initial purchase? Some products are certainly repeat buys, but appliances usually take at least half a year until they break.
half a year? good god is this what other peoples' lives are like?
I expect the appliances i buy to last like 2 years, and that's for stuff like a 10€ coffee brewer!
Same, I (probably) just picked a very low lower bound - i.e. even if the product is shit, as long as it's not broken from the get-go, it's probably going to last at least half a year. The point is that even for such a shitty product, showing ads for the thing they just bought just doesn't make sense.
The advertisers are paying for ads to he shown to people who have shown an interest in humidifiers. If they aren't clear enough that people who have recently purchased the humidifiers shouldn't be targeted, Google isn't gonna correct them and show the ads to fewer people.
Yea, google basically profits off of all their data, so it's either use it or be left out. They don't really give a shit if advertisers bleed dry, there's not much of a competition for Google.
You know how most of the ads on YouTube are watched by kids on their parents phones. But on Google's database they're some adult individual with this and this interests. Google fucks over both ends.
So, the scam here is from ad providers like google on anyone running ads. It's the reason that often you see ads for a product you just looked at forever: if you are shown an ad for a product, and then you buy that product, the ad provider gets a cut. If you click on the ad, that cut is higher. Now, clearly you already looked at the product without the ad, and at best it was a reminder of something you already wanted, but in the eyes of the contract, you bought that product because of the ad. That's WAY more of a sure thing than actually compiling a meaningful profile on the provider side. Now, on the opposite end, you DO have stories of storefronts sending out coupons, emails, direct to consumer ads, built on your viewing history on their site that ARE based on complex algorithms that know you better than yourself, which is how you get stories of the algorithm knowing people are pregnant before they do
Use Hanlon's razor.
After reading an article about ad metrics I realized this is ad fraud.
What is going on is a business buys ads and pays one rate for ads shown but pays a higher rate if the ads resulted in a conversion (a sale). But the ad contracts are monthly or longer. So a business buys ads for their product and the ad company after noticing you bought it, stuffs your feeds with ads for what you just bought so they can bill those ads at the higher conversion rate.
It's just lies and deceit all the way down it seems... Every corner of almost every aspect of our lives, these kind of things keep cropping up. Kinda makes me feel like there might be an underlying reason to it all... Hmm....
But that doesn't make sense. The way they know it's a conversion is the ad url you click on tracks you through the purchase process.
Yes but ads shown that result in a conversion are paid higher than ones that don't. If you pay for 1000 ads in a month and it results in a conversion you pay more for those all ads in the block because you got that conversion. You don't pay just for the one ad that resulted in a sale. You say "I only got one sale." They say, "It was those 999 ads that the consumer saw that generated the sale."
Right, but to know the ad resulted in a conversation the customer would need to click on the ad before purchasing. Showing you the ad after you bought the product without clicking on an ad wouldn't count.
A company isn't going to pay more without the platform providing evidence that the conversion happened on their platform. If a company runs ads on Google, Instagram, and TikTok, Google can't just claim that every sale was because of ads on their platform.
A company isn’t going to pay more without the platform providing evidence that the conversion happened on their platform.
The proof is the sale. What isn't shared is exactly which ads ran when because they purchased a block.
How is there proof of a sale due to an ad on a platform if the customer never interacted with the ad?
I can guarantee you that no one is going to sign an advertisement contract if they have to pay more solely because the company sold something within that timeframe.
The platform they advertise on is the one tracking the customer through the purchase, but that can't happen if the customer buys a product before they're shown an ad.
You vastly overestimate the nuance in ad spend.
No I don't. I'm saying that a company isn't going to pay an advertising platform more money just because.
the problem is that you're assuming rationality and competence, which in many many many cases just isn't there.
Especially with smaller companies it's incredibly common for the decision-makers to simply be dumb and make terrible decisions on a daily basis, like how mom&pop stores will prioritize the 4 people who show up in a car over the 20 people who want to bike to the store.
I think you overestimate how much time the companies buying ads spend on analyzing the data, or if they even get that data.
The company selling the ad also doesn't have much interest in transparent reporting.
The end result is that neither the company selling the ads or the company buying the ads have any interest in the ads. They both only care about their own sales numbers. Fuck the consumers, fuck the product, fuck the ads. Only sales.
Right, but the company buying ad space isn't going to pay extra because they sold a product during the time period the ad ran.
I can guarantee you that no one is going to sign an advertisement contract if they have to pay more solely because the company sold something within that timeframe.
I used to spend a million a year on TV ads without ever knowing if I got a sale from those ads.
And did you have to pay extra just because you made a sale in the time span the ad was running?
If they sold a package "X ads for X dollars depending on proof of conversion." it might have been something I signed up for. Realistically if they could have done it, they wouldn't have offered any other option.
"Do you want to run ads? This is our package. You pay $X and if you get sales from those ads you pay $X + $Y because we proved the ads made you money. Take it or leave it. We own 85% of the ad market."
You pay $X and if you get sales from those ads you pay $X + $Y because we proved the ads made you money.
That's the problem. In your original scenario the advertising platform isn't proving ads resulted in sales. They're showing the ads after the sale occurs.
You said the company would be self-reporting their sales to the advertiser so that they'd have to pay the advertiser more money. But companies often run ad campaigns on multiple platforms and even multiple campaigns on one platform. They're not going to pay extra multiple times to multiple companies because they made a single sale.
They’re not going to pay extra multiple times to multiple companies because they made a single sale.
The premise is that the package is ads that resulted in a conversion are paid higher. It's not an individual ad that creates a conversion is singularly billed higher. It's an ad package where a conversion happened, therefore a higher price for that entire package.
But you can't know a conversion happened due to a specific ad package unless the customer interacts with an ad from that package.
And platforms can definitely give you detailed enough metrics to know how many conversions happened due to customers interacted with your ads. It's part of what tracking cookies are for.
And platforms can definitely give you detailed enough metrics to know how many conversions happened due to customers interacted with your ads
Yes that you got a sale and they proved it is why you had to pay more. Every ad doesn't cause a conversion. But the more ads show can cause more conversions.
I remember reading or hearing about this too, but i forget where. Do you know?
I can't remember. My doom scrolling of Lemmy and YouTube is so fast I can't find posts from 12 hours ago.
Exactly the one that came to mind, love this one
YouTube fed me a sponsored ad from Scientology today. Like, Google, you know everything about me, you should know this was stupid.
Google probably knew it was stupid but if scientology wanted to pay them to show you the ad they weren't going to refuse the money.
Yeah I realized that as I finished writing it
My Facebook ads now feature hard-core porn. I don't know what digital footprint I've created to deserve those.
I assume everyone on Facebook likes some hard-core.
...you know...
what, you mean you've never used the "share on facebook" button on pornhub?
At least 22 people were reminded of scientology. Money well spent.
How is that not a literal crime?
Why would that be a crime? Advertising your weird-ass failed scifi author founded cult isn't illegal.
There are plenty of other crimes scientologists have committed that they're not being protected for (like, where is the head of the church's wife? Hasn't been seen in like 15 years). This isn't one of them.
I've been recently rewatching all the X-men movies in order on Disney+.
After each one it's like "why not watch the first one again?" like it doesn't know full well I watched it a few days ago.
All this data collection, and for what?
So they can charge advertisers/companies money for "relevant" ads. I assume there's pushback in the market on this but even so, that's wasted ad space/time (since they seem to think it's so important to advertise that route. Maybe it's not even such a bad idea since so many products are shit and you may well be in the market soon anyway.
Selling ads to people wanting to make money is like selling picks and shovels to people heading to the gold rush. Those selling shovels don't even really care if their buyer finds gold (despite any apparent enthusiasm), they don't even care if they'll even need or want the shovel after figuring out most gold in this rush is found panhandling rather than by digging or that the amount of digging you'd have to do to find a decent amount of gold is more than what a shovel can handle (actually they might use that to sell you a shovel subscription).
They only care that your desire for money has brought you to them, where you can make them money whether you do or not.
I’m also amusedly infuriated when “smart” advertising takes the exact wrong pattern …..
“ I see you recently bought a part for a Toyota. You must have a Toyota. Let me sell you the same part for a Volkswagen. “
You would really think the algorithm would be smarter by now.
They're not allowed to see actual purchase data, so all they have is "this person looked at a humidifier and may or may not have bought one". So they're plastering you with humidifier ads in case you still haven't pulled the trigger, or in case you did buy one but returned it.
I know. So the reason we are seeing this is not that the algorithm is shit, it's because there's laws in place to protect us.
Meaning if we stop seeing this, then we should be worried! 😄😄😵💫
I don't see this and I'm not worried.
...because I know the reason is that I'm not seeing ads at all because I'm blocking them.
It's not made to be smart, just to mooch more money out off your pocket.
I too ask myself why they fuckin offer me another "insert anything I already bought".
Y'all need to go on the dark web, people are gambling millions on humidifier vs. dehumidifier battles, the videos are disturbing and end dry or moist.
Almost as good as when I went to Home Depot and the next day I got an email asking me to rate my experience during my recent visit. That creeped me out so much I removed the app from my phone and forced logout on all devices. I have not been back since. And no, I did not pay using a Home Depot card and I am not part of any rewards program with them. Just eeew. If you advertise to me, I will ignore your product and buy something else. If there is not an alternative, then I will either plug my nose and buy it assuming that it is a need, otherwise I go without.
I bought a specific airfilter from home depot once (prob 15 years ago). 6 months later I went back because I needed a filter. I couldn't remember which one I bought so I popped on their website, from my phone. I found the unit I bought and got the filter that it needed from the store.
For the next 3 weeks straight, every other add on every page, on facebook, on amazon, on everywhere was the air cleaner I purchased. They must have spent at least $5 on me alone it was the only static ad I saw the entire time.
Yup, I just bought a tank jet printer, so clearly I'm turning my apartment into the world's most inefficient print shop.
tank jet printer
Anyone who thinks this is a typo is a communist!
The Tankies They Don't Want You To Know About
Heh. *The printers with refillable ink tanks.
I did actually google it and was on the fence on whether or not it was real after seeing some real products
Friendly reminder that part of the deal of showing you adverts for what you just bought is to increase your satisfaction with the purchase. It reminds you of what you bought and (tries to) make you feel proud of your decision.
Well, that's pathetic. Imagine deriving all your pride just from having bought things. What a sad, hollow life such a person must live.
i mean, i derive some pride from having bought things, but that's because i literally spend a month researching before i buy anything above 20€ and i enjoy the fact that i didn't end up with a pile of garbage.
If i do end up with garbage i bang my head against the table a couple times and spend 3 months researching the next time..
There is also something like a 14 day return policy so sellers have to buy the ads to prevent other sellers from making a better offer during that time.
Oh I dunno, maybe stop using Amazon.
It's not just Amazon.
Voting with your wallet does indeed go a lot further.
I was a part of Amazon vine for a while. It's Amazon's program where they offer you shit for free that other companies want to give away in order to get reviews rolling in for new products.
Amazon offers around two to eight "just for you" items most days from these people, based on your order history and ad info crap they have on you.
Well I made the mistake of getting a black toner cartridge for my laser printer through vine once. That will last me like a decade.
Apparently, Amazon now thinks that I own 5000 printers of all different kinds and I'm never good on ink. Most days I would have at least 5 of my recommendations be printer ink or toner. Every single damned day it wanted me to get more ink. For months and months and months.
I always say that when advertisers think that I'm a Spanish speaking pregnant woman that I have won.
I block ads on my computer and my phone browser (shoutout to Orion), so I only see ads on my TV (because it's an old smart TV. I know, I know, but I'm not in a financial place to ditch it and buy a new one.) I have no idea what info advertisers have on me, but by the fact that at least half my ads are for fast food, they clearly haven't picked up on the fact that I not only don't eat meat, but that I've been avoiding fast food for over 20 years. They also haven't picked up on my age or that I'm a woman, since I also get ads for Medicare scams Part D as well as for men's healthcare products. Sometimes the ads are in Spanish, which makes it even better.
It's all such a waste of time and resources, the only benefit being that my reflexes stay strong as I hit that "mute" button at the first sign of an ad break.
my algorithm thinks i'm a spanish speaking radiological oncologist. i mean i'm surrounded by superfund sites but y'know. i do not work in medicine. i think my decoy worked.
Better make it a recurring purchase! Buy more, get more humidifiers!
Better yet, for only the price of a coffee a day, you can upgrade to the premium humidifier subscription!
I recently purchased a small apartment. According to calculations, it was cheaper to pay the mortgage than rent a similar size apartment. Now meta thinks I am into collecting apartments in the same postcode. On the other hand, I do find it somewhat useful to see what is happening to the apartment prices around.
To be fair there's probably people who're interested in collecting all the apartments in your area.
I see you’ve just bought a HDMI cable, but what about second HDMI cable?
We think you’ll love it
Show me ads for cocaine and I will click it, brother. I was told capitalism solved all my problems by providing the material possessions I wanted in exchange for currency.
What happened with that.
That's free markets. Capitalism is something else. Look it up.
I read a post where someone mentioned they wanted to buy a Royal Enfield Meteor motorcycle.
Ads for that bike have been appearing ever since. I don't own a bike, never had a license, and don't make a lot of comments about them.
Take that for what it's worth.
My partner found the wedding bands they wanted to buy. They're metal bands in the design of para cord as I was in the military at the time and their father is a retired Lieutenant-colonel. The two of them together was like $150 and we got them off Etsy.
For nearly a month after I bought them for us, my phone was giving me ads for wedding rings. Like... Bro, we got them already. We don't need more.
The number of penetrable orifices, extremities with clasping capability reduces the number of useful partners to 3 to 5. Some people are more adventurous. This number appears to work for both men and women and LGBTQ-ist equally unless you count the possibility of taking turns or having various groups and clans in the same household. I mean, one could probably afford a house like that. We would be happier. Kids would get more attention and the population would reduce to a sustainable level. All good things!
On a very related note, a dehumidifier makes such a huge difference in indoor comfort.
I highly recommend Technology Connections' video on dehumidifers. Central air, if you have it, should take care of your humidity if it's working correctly.
Dehumidifiers are great for small areas with poor airflow or in case of a flood. If you need one for everyday, whole-house comfort, there's probably an underlying issue.
Yes, was just about to recommend that myself. Link to the video in question: https://youtu.be/j_QfX0SYCE8
If I remember it correctly, though, dehumidifiers can be useful for comfort in very specific climates where ambient humidity is high, but temperatures are mild enough to not require much actual heating or cooling. I think dehumidifiers are relatively common in many areas of the UK for that reason.
If OP is from the UK, it might be a sensible recommendation for their specific climate, just not in many places elsewhere. In the US, at least, the only place you'd find anything like that climate might be some parts of the Pacific Northwest.
I leave it plugged in year round, but you're right that it's the high humidity temperate temperature times of the year when it really has to work.
The original underlying issue was several weeks of comfortable outdoor temperatures with 90%+ humidity. That meant the central air didn't need to run at all and the indoor humidity crept up over 70%.
more like "how shitty of a humidifier did they sell me that they think i already need another"
"You know what? I'll treat myself. Just one more dozen of toilet seats."
Similarly:
We've been tracking you for decades now. We know your location at all times. We know about the humidifier you bought. We know you do everything in English, but we also know you're trying to learn Spanish. We know who your family members are based on your interactions with them, and we have vast databases on them too. We know about the plane ticket to Turkey. We know about the new bathing suit you bought. We know about the English language guidebook you bought for Turkey.
We know you're now in Turkey on your vacation.
Here's an ad in Turkish for a humidifier sold in a Turkish store.
You go to a different country, and despite the massive privacy invasions, and the terabytes of data they have about every aspect of your lives, they think you speak the local language and show you ads you can't even understand for products you'd never buy while there on a vacation.
Round here we tend to buy dehumidifiers. Why would someone intentionally increase the humidity in their home? That way lies mo[u]ld
I live in Colorado, quite dry, and occasionally wake up with nose bleeds if I don't use my humidifier at night
Yeah but you're a fish, you should stay in your tank.
Too dry and your skin gets all dry and cracky, and every lightswitch or piece of metal furniture shocks you when you touch it
For a lot of people, humidifiers only get brought out when theyre sick, so the hot wet air soothes their lungs and they cough less...
Then there was my grandmother. She had both in her music room, to protect her piano and custom built harpsichord. They were set to keep the humidity in a fairly narrow range to keep her from needing to retune.
The dehumidifier was mounted on the wall, with a hose running into the tank for the humidifier below it, so it kept it topped up with the h2o pulled from the air on rainy days, with another hose running out of that tank at about the 1 gallon mark, that fed through a hole in the floor to the basement sink, to dispose of excess water. Both were wired up to an old school analogue hygrometer, with a control circuit powering each unit when it fell outside of its respective range.
That's some hardcore humidity control!
A very annoying feature of that company. Always trying to sell you what you just bought, sometimes at a lower price its like theyre saying HA HA you got screwed
I buy a lot of (Primarily used) books off Amazon (Though Ebay grows more attractive by the day.) so thankfully my recommends are filled with other books. Apparently they have a semblance of a clue there.
If you're somewhere in central Europe, Vinted is amazing for buying used books!
Stateside, though oddly enough been looking into some central/eastern European and Russian authors of late, like Krasznahorkai (Mostly because of the recent Nobel), Solzhenitsyn (Not because of his Nobel though it didn't hurt), and Čapek
I've had good luck with Thriftbooks the last few years. I accidentally bought a dust jacket on ebay once and I'm too embarrassed to return.
In the case of something weird like a humidifier, the average person is so unlikely to buy a humidifier that it's actually more likely that someone who buys one is going to return it and get a different one. Or they bought the first one to evaluate it and have some reason to need more than one because they have multiple houses or something.
They should push you to buy a dehumidifier. Then you can put them on opposite sides of the room for humidity wars.
that's a crime against humidity
You may have heard of the "sales funnel," well, let me introduce you to the "sales loop..."
ikr like how many goddamn steam mops do they think one house needs
I bought a new mattress last year and I swear not even a month later they were emailing me with mattress ads. Time to start my mattress collection.
Came here to post this, love this video!
Let me introduce you to the dad delivers blog. He bought a dehumidifier 2 years ago and since hasn't stopped buying new ones and talking about them:
The targeted advertising bubble cannot pop soon enough.
I mean, with the rampant enshittification of consumer technologies, there's every chance the thing you just bought off Amazon will break after a much shorter lifespan then expected. There's even a chance this was planned and accounted for...
Do you think people would do that? Just plan to make stuff obsolete?
Who can say? I've certainly never experienced such a thing... 🤷
My hypothesis is that they sell that you searched for a humidifier (more or less) and they don't update it with you having bought one. Probably because it's difficult for the folks buying the ads to deduce if it actually results in a sale. They're likely only seeing impressions and clicks. And the folks selling the ad space don't care, because why would they? An ad is an ad. They aren't really incenticized to.
Yeah I just bought a tank on Amazon and now it's like "here's some ammunition for your tanks" and I'm like "ahh actually no thanks I don't want a visit from the FBI thanks"
carbon fiber bike rims... Nope I'm not stocking up on those thank you...
With some products, that's entirely intentional. The goal is to convince you to keep thinking it was a good idea so you say you like your car in consumer satisfaction surveys that work as better sales drivers since people tend to do a degree of research on them, and to keep people from trying to return the product or make complaints.
But that's typically things like "cars", and they target you very precisely because they know exactly who you are, having just sold you a car.
The humidifier is that they see you bought a "home air treatment device - consumer grade - basic", which puts points in you being in the category of people who want to improve their home air quality. And you know what the most common purchase by that category of people is? Humidifiers!
As big and horrifying as the models are, they can't track everything and rely on putting people into consumer groups, and labeling products by relevance to groups and then tracking them that way.
So even though you're probably in the group because you just bought the thing that most people buy to put them in the group, it's still statistically the thing someone in the group is most likely to buy.
All that to say, it's a fucking sham and you get 95% of the results by matching ads to products instead of people, and it costs a fraction to do it that way.
End arc of consumerism.
You can never be too humid.
I got a really nice humidifier off Amazon this winter. not one of those shitty sonic ones. I almost bought the fancy German one with the wheels but my wife wouldn't let me and I'm glad cause this one is kicking ass and was much cheaper. I'm into humidifiers yet I've never gotten an ad for one.
How do these humidifiers work? All I know about humidifiers comes from that technology connections video, so "one with wheels" tells me very little.
I think all the ones that don't just use heat to evapourate water follow this general strategy: do something that gets water droplets suspended in air, then blow that air out of the unit to let it evapourate in the drier air.
It's why the mist from a humidifier feels cool: it is still in the liquid state, those droplets stick to your hand, but also evaporate, taking heat from your hand or whatever body part you like shoving into the mist. No judgement.
If it was already in a gaseous state, it would condense on your hand and feel hot like the steam that tries to punish you for pouring your pasta into a strainer while holding it. Well, maybe not that hot, but it would be giving your body part heat as it condensed from the saturated air, which probably immediately evapourates again, taking that heat with it, but it would either be a net warming or neutral result instead of cooling.
The technology connections video I linked shows how ultrasonic, steam and evaporative humidifiers work, I was just wondering what "the fancy German one with the wheels" is, because I'm not even sure what it's supposed to look like.
Yeah, I'm curious, too.
I was able to find information on a wheel-based dehumidifier that uses things like silica gel to absorb water from the air and then heats it to dry it (with the wheel rotating between an open section it pulls water out of and a closed section it stores the water in). This can also act as a humidity buffer if it has a mechanism to switch between which side is open.
For pure humidifier, best guess is that it uses a wheel mechanism to increase the surface area of water so more evapourates naturally. Basically you have a drum rotating just fast enough that it dries completely by the time it goes under water again. This would function as a simple AC, too, at least until the air is saturated. Though I do find that it's in winter that I want more humidity and summer where I want less, so that wouldn't help me lol.
But I wasn't able to find clear information about if this is what OP was referring to, so that's just speculation.
"AI" is an expert in the obvious.
You want one? Why not a bunch! Buy buy buy! /s