"I have long been opted out of search history or ad personalization on G/FB/AMZN/Twitter/Instagram/Verizon, and have repeatedly clicked "hide ad - irrelevant or not interested". "Why am I seeing this ad?" says "(wide age group) in your area", yet I've asked and my peers don't get ads like this."
I think this could actually explain your situation, if you give ad feedback like that too much you might run out of things for "the algorithm" to reasonably show you and you're getting fallen back to some sort of odd pool of low quality or new account test ads of some sort that are pre mainstream since you give feedback often or hitting some sort of weird bug after a point where it tries to find something to show you and then grabs for these weird ones somehow less shown and therefor less reported by other people?
I don't know the right answer, but I feel like something in this area could totally explain what you are experiencing. If you want to test the theory maybe make a new account on a service and don't give feedback on anything and see if you end up with mostly normal stuff?
Good point. I meant that I give feedback to try to hide the weird/creepy ads, though. I've never clicked "stop showing me Ritz crackers or Crossfit ads" just because I'm not interested.
This is the first I've heard of this new oversight board concept, who knows how this will go, but I think it's a really unique concept and let's give it a shot! If anything, it's just nice to see an innovative strategy applied to very big problem of today. I wish the best of luck to all of the members.
