alt Hacker News> I get shown ads for products I just purchased. All this spying, machine learning, big data result in "he bought a mattress, show him more mattresses".
You know, I had a really long argument about a decade ago with an Amazon senior engineer on the ads side of things about this. I was complaining about repeatedly being shown ads for the same blender I had just purchased (not accessories, not competing products, the exact same blender). And I hit a brick wall of "everybody complains about this, and we've been trying to change this, but every change to this makes the metrics worse".
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Sounds like they optimize on the full population and not for individual. Because if they did it for OP well the metrics would improve.
It is just the curse of naive AB testing. Same stuff happens with apps like Duolingo where it is optimized e2e, not personalized, and then they behave as if their approach is sane.
My guess is that it's good for repeat purchases. You bought that blender, and if you really liked it, here is an ad to remind you of that model again, just in case you want to buy it as a gift for your relatives, or if you just want to buy a spare or something
Perhaps their metrics are broken. Perhaps their metric is the percentage of ads that are shown for a thing the customer eventually bought and it doesn't consider whether you bought it before or after seeing the ad.
Perhaps the ad performance is so poor that selling someone the same thing a second time is the best they can hope for.