If you’ve bothered to look at the ads on Facebook lately (don’t worry, nobody else looks at them either), you might have noticed little thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons at the bottom of each ad. If you click on one of these, a box pops up asking why you liked or didn’t like the ad. This presumably will help Facebook target ads at you more effectively in the future.

The ad-rating feature was quietly rolled at least two months ago. But it seems a bit redundant. After all, ads already come with a natural, built-in rating system. If an ad resonates with me, then I will click on it. If it doesn’t, I won’t.

But ads on social networks in general perform so poorly that perhaps Facebook is hoping to get some feedback from the 90-percent-plus of members who never click on a particular ad. In effect, Facebook is throwing up its arms and asking consumers diercty: why do our ads suck so much?

You’d think that Facebook members would have better things to do with their time than instruct Facebook on how to d a better job targeting ads. But then again, we are talking about Facebook.