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Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

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Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#141

Post by pas »

Spivak wrote: post #120
subdane wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point, maybe just delete your Facebook account?

Look, I don't like Facebook, but it provides me tangible value sans the news feed which I feel is bad for my health. * Messenger is the hands down the best messaging experience that exists. It's super bloated which I'm sure annoys this crowd but it doesn't skip a beat. * FB Events is the only thing I've ever been able to get people to use -- email chains and group messages aren't half as productive. * Their real name…

Messenger Lite feels pretty slim.

FB Events is something that could be a spin-off with FB login. But yes, at least people use it.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#142

Post by testplzignore »

mholt wrote: post #121

A few days ago [1], I found this filter for UBlock Origin to be working for me so far: facebook.com##[id^=hyperfeed_story_id_]:has([id*=feed_sub_title_]):has(span:has-text(/S.*p.*o.*n.*s.*o.*r.*e.*d/)) GitHub issue: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/3367 [1]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1092191140168622080

If I worked at Facebook and was evil, I'd put some text in that span that caused catastrophic backtracking :)

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#143

Post by AznHisoka »

badgers wrote: post #22
locklock wrote: post #11

I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.

That reminds me of a quote about dentistry: "You're in a career where nobody wants to see you and you're the last place they want to come back to and it's depressing." ( https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/5344jz/are-dentists-rea... )

Isn't that true of any medical profession.. and pretty much 90% of all professions? Besides, I think dentists deserve vastly more respect.. especially the ones that check for mouth diseases and precursors to cancer.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#145

Post by hombre_fatal »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #107
duxup wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like a fun challenge. It's just ads. If we're talking about some ad for a coffee maker, whatever. Now their whole selling data to unscrupulous folks, taking money from parents via their kids, selling fake news that makes people hate other people (now that gets into the ad space...) .... That's where I'd want to nope out.

Thank you. I feel like ads have such a bad rap because of the state of the internet. Yet, what does everyone expect? Is it shocking that content providers want money for their product? And yes, I know, some sites and ads do terrible things. The actively hurt viewership. BUT, isn't that the same with everything ? Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; the…

I run an old collaborative writing (roleplaying) forum populated mostly by teens that's paid for by a banner ad.

When I read HN comments about ads, I see people who are forgetting what ads have actually gotten us: more people able to create more things that are available to everyone for free.

HNers like to say "well, then adapt your business model," but look at the incredibly friction that exists for getting people to take their wallet out. On the frontpage of HN as we speak, there's an entire thread of people who justify why they won't even pay Spotify $10/mo. Where does that leave the rest of us who offer something much, much less than a ubiquitous, unlimited music-streaming platform?

Let's be more concrete and look at the forum that I run. I grew up on roleplaying MUD servers and forums, and it helped me develop the passion and habit for writing early on in my life. I started a forum as a teen to continue the interest, and eventually it was popular enough for ads to pay my rent through uni while running a community for young writers.

These days, my banner ad barely breaks even with server costs. It now makes less than 1/15th of what it did at the peak of its ad revenue with about the same traffic.

I'm left with a decision: can I afford to run the site as a charity?

How would the HN champion of "adapt or die" address my scenario? Ads are a middle ground between being a charity and paywalling your website, and the vast majority of websites don't fall at either extreme. Suggesting that this massive chunk on the internet doesn't deserve to exist, like my forum that gets teens into writing, seems incredibly extreme.

The writing is on the wall, though. Just seems like a damn shame.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#146

Post by wolco »

taurath wrote: post #122
asdkhadsj wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I feel like ads have such a bad rap because of the state of the internet. Yet, what does everyone expect? Is it shocking that content providers want money for their product? And yes, I know, some sites and ads do terrible things. The actively hurt viewership. BUT, isn't that the same with everything ? Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; the…

I choose to believe we could have a better world, where loading a local news site doesn’t look like a virus-ridden Windows 95 desktop, where just trying to talk with friends isn’t interrupted by.. (checks twitter) payday loan lobbyists. Where the smartest people of my generation are using every dark pattern in the world to take my attention away from what matters to me.

It's called a subscription and even with that local newspapers were filled with pages of color soaked ads. Dark patterns existed before your generation..

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#147

Post by black_puppydog »

I tried around with the twitter homepage yesterday, and figured that the transferred html, js, images etc when just pressing F5 on twitter (with a hot cache!) was way bigger than a png (!) screenshot of the same page.

My prediction: the next step will be to move rendering server-side, just send pixels, and the only thing ad blockers will be able to do (after moving to deep learning or some similarly ridiculously expensive way to combat this idiocy) is to place literal black bars over all ads.

Now that I wrote it down, I'd actually like to have that in uBlock now, so I can see which sites are horribly ad infested, and make my choices accordingly.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#148

Post by grawprog »

asdkhadsj wrote: post #107
duxup wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like a fun challenge. It's just ads. If we're talking about some ad for a coffee maker, whatever. Now their whole selling data to unscrupulous folks, taking money from parents via their kids, selling fake news that makes people hate other people (now that gets into the ad space...) .... That's where I'd want to nope out.

Thank you. I feel like ads have such a bad rap because of the state of the internet. Yet, what does everyone expect? Is it shocking that content providers want money for their product? And yes, I know, some sites and ads do terrible things. The actively hurt viewership. BUT, isn't that the same with everything ? Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; the…

>They change the shape of the bottle to reduce volume and hope I don't notice that the price effectively went up.

One of the memories that really sticks out for me from working in a grocery store was the time the Breyer's ice cream increased in price that way.

They came in a 5 case of 500g containers. They sold regularly for around $5 or something like that. They went on sale for 2 for $5 for about 2 weeks. After the first week they started showing up in 4 packs of 430g containers. I remember having to rearrange the shelves to get them to fit properly, theit shape was slightly different. After the sale ended they went to $6 for a 430g container. It was the first time I noticed and really thought about price increases by lowering the volume of containers.

That was also around the time they stopped putting handles on the big ice cream pails. A lot of people complained about it, they were no good for berry picking any more. One day I asked the dairy delivery guy about it. He said someone figured out that the handles added 2¢ to the cost of each bucked and some accountant figured out that by removing them they saved, I can't remember the exact number, but in the millions of dollars each year.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#149

Post by majewsky »

ethbro wrote: post #81
badgers wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That reminds me of a quote about dentistry: "You're in a career where nobody wants to see you and you're the last place they want to come back to and it's depressing." ( https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/5344jz/are-dentists-rea... )

One of my father's quips, "There are only two kinds of jobs: those where everyone is happy to see you, and those where everyone is mad to see you. Be the UPS delivery person, not the process server."

That was from a different time, right? By now, package delivery people also has a pretty bad reputation due to the profit pressures exerted on them by capitalists. I don't really feel happy seeing a delivery guy. If anything, I feel sorry for them.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#150

Post by singron »

jordan801 wrote: post #12

Anyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is. Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my "for fun" scraper. It's also really not that difficult to write a smart scraper that you say, "Look for these things in this post. However you find them, replicate it for the others". Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp scraper do. If there's a pattern, I wi…

It actually seems pretty effective in this case. This uBlock Origin issue has been open for half a year and none of the default lists block the ads: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/3367
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