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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

#221

Post by minikites »

tqi wrote: post #185
minikites wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I genuinely believe STEM majors should be required to take more liberal arts (e.g. ethics) classes as a requirement to graduate.

Sure, we could all stand to be more well rounded. Liberal Arts majors should be required to take more science courses so they don't fall for dumb stuff like climate change denial or anti-vax nonsense.

>Liberal Arts majors should be required to take more science courses

They are, that's the point of a liberal arts education:

https://college.harvard.edu/what-liberal-arts-education

>In our liberal arts program, students are broadly educated in the social sciences, the natural sciences and the humanities, as well as trained in a particular academic field of specialization called a concentration.

https://admission.princeton.edu/academics/what-does-liberal-...

>By exploring issues, ideas and methods across the humanities and the arts, and the natural and social sciences

https://www.aacu.org/leap/what-is-a-liberal-education

>It provides students with broad knowledge of the wider world (e.g. science, culture, and society)

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

#222

Post by RoboticWater »

tqi wrote: post #185
minikites wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I genuinely believe STEM majors should be required to take more liberal arts (e.g. ethics) classes as a requirement to graduate.

Sure, we could all stand to be more well rounded. Liberal Arts majors should be required to take more science courses so they don't fall for dumb stuff like climate change denial or anti-vax nonsense.

I can't seem to find any data which suggests that Liberal Arts majors are significantly more likely to fall for climate change denial or the anti-vax movement. I find that most studies correlate political leaning with these beliefs, not area of study. Given that the Liberal Arts are overwhelmingly liberal in the US, I'd say your claim is probably wrong.

If anything, a Liberal Arts educations ought to provide students a higher degree of skepticism towards all expressions of ideology, and seek to find the truth through critical research. Obviously, that's the ideal, note necessarily the reality in all cases, but it seems your notion of Liberal Arts is more akin to "hippy-dippy" nonsense, not critical study.

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

#223

Post by tofof »

JacobJans wrote: post #208
Marsymars wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; they swap out quality ingredients with cheaper ingredients. They change the shape of the bottle to reduce volume and hope I don't notice that the price effectively went up. Etc. If you stick to fresh produce and bulk dry goods, you're pretty much immune to those problems. Incidentally, those happen to be products…

That is not necessarily true, as industrial food companies increasingly push for larger yield per acre, they do not account for the objective quality of the product. They're looking to maximize their profit; and quality is just one metric among many others that have an impact on this.

Exactly. I've taken to buying 'organic' carrots that are smaller and have had the leaves left on simply because they taste like.. well, carrots. The huge carrots in the 2 lb bag mass-market bag are tasteless in comparison.

I'm otherwise as far away from the normal target audience of 'organic' foods as you can get; I'm decidedly pro-GMO, etc.

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

#224

Post by i_cant_speel »

jackstraw14 wrote: post #216
JacobJans wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very immature view of advertising, that, unfortunately many advertisers share -- and it leads to scummy ads, with no eye on the long term relationship with the person viewing the ad. However, many ads are not deceptive in any way, and instead simply offer something of value to people who may be interested, without any deceit, psychological trick, or ulterior motive. Just because there are bad ads does not m…

I'd say the ads are still deceptive even if they weren't created with that intention. It doesn't need to be sneaky, but if it's unsolicited then the consumer didn't opt for their attention to be steered toward it. edit: removed example as it distracts from the point.

You are still using the reasoning of "Here is an example of a bad ad, therefore all ads are bad."

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

#225

Post by tomatocracy »

otabdeveloper2 wrote: post #180
rchaud wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Delivering value to customers"? It's a website-cum-message board. There is no further value to deliver via software features; all of that work is going towards meeting the needs of advertisers. And advertisers are asking them to show what they are doing to combat adblocking. FB isn't doing this to target customers least likely to convert, they're doing it to check a box for their ad sales team.

Newsflash: Facebook's customers are advertisers, not the honeypot victims stuck to their site.

But there’s a trade off. Fewer ads better placed means fewer people likely to block them and more people likely to actually look at them instead of skim past. It’s also likely that the people who were blocking ads are less likely to click on them and thus (for some advertisers) lower value impressions anyway.

Revenue is (simplistically) the product of impressions and value per impression. It’s not therefore immediately obvious that moves like this actually do increase revenue for them, especially over the long term since one potential side effect of doing this is giving more ammunition to the ‘delete Facebook’ crowd.

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

#226

Post by eropple »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #195
eropple wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...And I am lightly suggesting that maybe it should matter . Hurting others unnecessarily is the only sin in the world. Don't ever, ever be That Guy.

This is too much. Nobody is 'hurting anyone' - not even slightly, by ensuring that their free product also has ads. If ads are unscrupulous, or if the company is doing shady things otherwise, then yes - bad. But there is no moral argument against making sure that decent ads work with a free product, or when ads are part of any product wherein the social contract is to that expectation. Facebook has ads, just like CNN…

I disagree, and you should too. This shit is bad for us. Advertising is a tool. That tool has been abused to the point where the societally responsible choice is to take that tool away. As society is capitally captured, the remaining option is for the implementors to refuse to do it. (Not that I am under any illusion that those implementors will; we, as a profession, think the bad shit we facilitate isn't our problem. Sigh.)

You are correct in the idea that there are "decent ads"; they are not in any meaningful fraction, however, web-served ads. If you're familiar with the theory and the development of advertisement, you'll notice that what you won't see on the web in meaningful quantities are things like brand-anchoring advertisements ("brought to you by"), which I tend to think actually provide societal benefits in the way they are deployed; they provide some level of community participation on the part of the advertiser and they anchor the advertiser in the same firmament of society as the person receiving the advertisement.

What we instead have, and will continue to have and this is why advertising on the Web--as an aside, you can find oases of ethical advertising in places like podcasts, it'd be nice if the rest of the Web was like that!--is profoundly toxic and bad and should be killed, is an unending torrent of calls to action carefully designed and split-tested to claw maximal real estate inside the receiver's head. They amount to psychological assault. It's screaming at the receiver and for many people in the industrialized world the background radiation of this kind of advertisement starts when they wake up and continues until they go to sleep. And I think it's no stretch to assert that that's bad for the health of individuals exposed to them and it's pretty obviously, at Facebook scales and with Facebook morals, bad for society as a whole.

And yes, some people are fortunate enough to have the technical capability and the platform choice to escape some or even most of it. But choosing to shrug and blather about how you're happy to make this worse is a really bad look.

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

#227

Post by tomatocracy »

pastor_elm wrote: post #14

All we need is for the EU to pass a law that says paid content must be clearly laid out in the HTML not just final presentation.

My bet is that if and when this happens, it will be a side effect of rules to facilitate accessibility for people who are partially sighted or blind.

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

#228

Post by e1ven »

bastawhiz wrote: post #41
sly010 wrote: post #26

I wonder at which point will we just stream pages as interactive video content with a text optimized codec. Most pages on the internet are bloated to the point where it might just make sense. (I am not advocating, I am predicting)

At a previous job in the not-too-distant past, we needed to support IE7 for contractual reasons. I'd unironically floated the idea of launching a VM on the server running Firefox, and starting a VNC session, streamed over frames of a GIF. Clicks and keypresses would be transmitted with AJAX calls. In a later project, we played with the idea of using an asm.js-compiled Webkit to render SVG (with embedded HTML) into a…

I worked on a project a few years ago to render screenshots to imagemaps, then used server side imagemap processing to click.

Made modern websites work in Netscape 2 :)

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

#229

Post by eropple »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #179
eropple wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...And I am lightly suggesting that maybe it should matter . Hurting others unnecessarily is the only sin in the world. Don't ever, ever be That Guy.

Making people looks at adverts is hurting them? Don't get me wrong, I'm a uBlock user myself but come on .

In and of itself? No, certainly not. Historically, however, advertisements have been a few things that matter. They've been passive--the level of attention a print advertisement is able to demand is constrained. Or they've been supportive--your "show X is brought to you by Y!" advertisements, which historically tended to have some kind of anchoring into the community surrounding the content or service being consumed.

They're not anymore. To the first, advertisements are designed, by the platform, to for maximal attractiveness (newspapers of prior eras spent much less effort blending content and advertisement and it wasn't until about the year 2000 where loudness-compression made television advertisements blow out your speakers). To the second, these advertisements tend strongly--not always, don't but-for me, but tend strongly--to be disassociated from the community. Having some startup or multinational demand your attention for this-or-that doesn't tie back into your community, there isn't even a local aspect to the business to fall back on. It's just...voices, yelling at you for your attention and your money. That's just not good for us.

I both pay for content (I was happy to sign up for YouTube Red, for example) and aggressively use ad-blocking and the difference on my mental well-being when I don't have access to my accounts, or when somebody insists on watching television and having it scream at me about how I must buy this thing, is noticeable.

This shit is bad for us. We as technologists should not perpetuate it.

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

#230

Post by acrispino »

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…

If "no shit" is an appropriate response to advertiser behavior, I'd want "no shit" to also be an appropriate response to users installing ad blockers, instead of whining: https://www.adweek.com/digital/yahoo-exec-calls-out-mobile-a...
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