Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk
I consider this phenomenon part of what I like to call the "Amazon syndrome", even though Amazon is far from being the only culprit. As China started flooding the rest of the world with cheap but decent products mass-produced in a random factory in Shenzhen, people turned away from brands they used to trust and towards no-name options from the likes of "Kxbnheb" or "Ypknwoj" in order to save a buck. Eventually the big brands themselves had to lower the quality of their products to be able to compete with the generic products, which benefit greatly from economies of scale by virtue of being manufactured by multiple companies in massive quantities.<p>Meanwhile, targeted ads deployed at a large scale with flexible pricing models made it possible for not-so-reputable outfits to get their name in front of millions of people's eyes. While only huge companies with a good track record could get past the ad vetting team of a newspaper or TV channel, anybody and their dog can start a Facebook ad campaign for almost no money and then keep paying as the number of impressions scales up. If on one hand this democratized prestigious ad spots that used to be available exclusively to brands everyone already knows, on the other hand it also allowed random dropshipper nobodies to establish a presence as a "niche shop" of some sort and then end up selling you rebranded Chinese no-name products you might as well have bought directly from AliExpress for half the price with free shipping (or straight up scamming you).<p>As much as the HN bubble likes to see a level playing field where all companies are treated equally, I think it's good to have gatekeepers in the advertising industry. But, I get it, the tech giants are all about quantity-over-quality and Facebook's ad revenue would drop to basically nothing (by their standards) if they started vetting each ad campaign manually, so here we are.