51–60 of 462 posts
It's really saddening how the world's finest minds are only working on ways to push ads down our throats.
That's a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
Good luck. I suspect in no time uBlock Origin will have found a way to remove the ad elements from the DOM, even if they are served directly with the html of facebook and not a 3rd party domain.
uBlock can already do this (I use it for hiding the Twitter "while you were away" nonsense), although I suspect that the next step is Facebook scrambling DOM classes and ids with no discernable pattern.
Why not just allow users to pay to not see ads? It's a crazy idea, but it just might work. Hulu's getting a lot more from me per month for their ad-free tier than they could ever dream of getting from me for ads with my watching habits, probably at least an order of magnitude more.
A big issue with paid subscriptions is that it dilutes the strength of the ad network, since you're specifically excluding desirable target customers.
You've got two basic choices with a user who has demonstrated their passion to remove ads, spend money to play an arms-game race with the ad blockers to pound through their defenses, or directly make money from that passion, possibly an order-of-magnitude more money per user.
Is it really so obvious that the arms race is the correct solution?
If I were a major shareholder of Facebook, I would be asking this question in a pointed manner. There's an argument to be made that they're leaving billions on the table here, and the argument is getting better every month that goes by.
If Facebook wants a truly global network, then they best not alienate or piss off those that are technically inclined. If they take control away from their power users, they'll lose them.
Good luck. I suspect in no time uBlock Origin will have found a way to remove the ad elements from the DOM, even if they are served directly with the html of facebook and not a 3rd party domain.
It's going to be hard for facebook because they're such a big target. I think where ad-blockers will start to have problems is with the millions of lesser known sites. Once these publishers swap over to proxying ad-content through their own domains and using a handful of simple evasion tactics (random file name for the self hosted JS file that pulls in the ad, site specific pseudo-random DOM element names for the ad…
Honestly, I don't really mind so long as the ads are being served by FB and not third-party networks, and their performance isn't abysmal. The major reason I block ads in the first place is for usability reasons - ad networks are slow as all hell especially on mobile. They also make certain pages completely unusable either through ad overlays, interstitials, or just constantly causing layouts to change as you're tryi…
Honestly, I don't really mind so long as the ads are being served by FB and not third-party networks, and their performance isn't abysmal. The major reason I block ads in the first place is for usability reasons - ad networks are slow as all hell especially on mobile. They also make certain pages completely unusable either through ad overlays, interstitials, or just constantly causing layouts to change as you're tryi…
I block ads because I hate it when a tab starts playing sound without being asked. I hate getting malware from ads. I hate having pages take 30 seconds to a minute to load because of ads. Or when the page loads fine, but then a minute later the article I'm reading jumps because an ad loaded. Or changed. Or popped up on a timer.
I hate ads because ads hate the user experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if Facebook actually commits to having oversight over what they serve. The idea that websites rent space to ad networks who then sell space on their servers to bad actors who then upload viruses and other such malware which then goes into my computer and everyone in this whole chain just goes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is ridiculous. If someone added a billboard to a highway that caused every thousandth car that passed to blow a…
Yeah, the security angle is a big deal. The long and short of it is that ad networks and publishers are both apathetic to what a gigantic dumpster fire ad-serving is. Publishers are eager to blame ad networks for the terrible performance, while ad networks just can't give enough of a shit to work on it. Publishers also are eager to blame ad networks when they're caught serving scams and malware, while networks just d…
Why not just allow users to pay to not see ads? It's a crazy idea, but it just might work. Hulu's getting a lot more from me per month for their ad-free tier than they could ever dream of getting from me for ads with my watching habits, probably at least an order of magnitude more.
Oh well, I've been suggesting this for a long time to no avail.