hn • r/hackernews
Comment on: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
There's more to it. The short form content "crushes" what options are available, so it becomes much easier to classify you into buckets with similar people.This is what actually drives the "We talked about X and then I got an ad for it" effect. You talked about X because something you were presented with prompted your brain to think about it, and the platform knows that people in your cohort who were presented with that thing often navigated to X later, so it should show it to you to claim an impression for it. It doesn't actually have to figure out any connection of the prompting source to X.