I’d imagine you got a whole bunch of Google’s Business Model. They sell views to advertisers, and are pretty shameless about the tactics used to connect the two.
Like, go visit someone for a couple days, google notices your phone location (or other identifier) overlaps with theirs, and it’ll spend the next week cross-pollinating – showing you ads for each other’s toothpaste and stuff.
To minimize this, it helps to reduce or block tracking, of course… like by using an un-google-ified browser and a good ad / script blocker… but it also helps to decouple things as much as possible, to keep different sites, services, and devices in separate non-overlapping silos. Like, instead of using one email address and one account to sign into a hundred different sites, use a hundred different accounts and email addresses. You’ll probably get more spam, overall, but it’ll be much easier to identify. Like, if your Amazon email address gets a message saying you need to reset your Netflix password, it’s obviously fake. And if 5 different addresses all get the same message on the same day, even if one of those is actually your Netflix account, you can still assume it’s fake since it was part of a whole batch of fakes.
It’s kind of a pain, and definitely requires some sort of password manager to keep track of all the accounts… but depending on how much you care, it can potentially be worthwhile. Plus, when sites eventually get hacked (when, not if), or when companies sell their customer databases, this approach limits the scope of damage to just that site.
Anyway, about the new forum, it’s definitely different… but stick with it for a while and you might find things you like. As with any change, it just takes time.
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