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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

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you lost the topic here. The OP was talking about judging people based on just having Facebook on their resume. Likewise, under that rule, you too would be judged for having worked in finance. Your history is therefore relevant, and by your arguments I'm assuming you think it's fair to judge that way? Good for you for changing careers but that doesn't make you better than anyone else nor is it applicable to a…

I'm okay with a prospective employer judging my finance past similarly to a past that includes Facebook. Ego has everything to do with failed ad hominem attacks, my friend

Then we disagree on making snap judgements of character based on just work history. I don't understand how that is ever a good thing.

However that comment wasn't an "ad hominem attack", but I suspect we disagree on the definition of that as well.

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

#302

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 expe…

Why bother covering the rendered ads when you can just use a bit of machine learning on the client side to recognize the text, yank it back into a decent layout and then filter it and present it back as HTML. When it comes down to it all web sites still need to present something to the user that their eye and brain can understand, so just intercept before final presentation and treat it like an OCR problem to solve.

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

#303
I'm surprised that companies don't create packaging materials that are actually also ads and have them be stuffed in all the packages that say Amazon sends.

I'm resentful of advertising in general, so the comment above is a morbid expression of "how low can they go". There are some kinds of ads that I do like for their entertainment value e.g. the Squatty Potty ads by the Harmon Brothers or the Apple Cookie Monster ad [0][1][2].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q [1] https://harmonbrothers.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF6OYq_2Ooc

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

#304

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.

There's another homepage thread about Spotify doing the same thing and that's received positively. When you deliver value to billions of people who don't want to pay, ads are part of the package. And those ads have helped thousands of companies grow and provide all those other fun jobs. The amount of hate advertising gets is just silly. It'd be great if we could push personal responsibility with even 1/10th of the ef…

Same way how Face ID is cheered for and Windows Hello is “creepy”

Same concept. Very similar implementation but company brand goes a hell of a long way.

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

#305
post #83

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.

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.

This particular "creative solution" is adding wasted data transmission and slowing down page responsiveness to _everyone_'s use of the site to combat a few people that feel strongly about their privacy or sanity of mind[1]. All of these tactics are terrible.

[1] Skipping over ads takes effort from your brain and it seems to be training us all to be worse readers. In the modern world of sponsored messages and content it pays to skim information for honesty before digesting it and it seems (IMO) to be hurting our general level of reading comprehension and attention.

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

#306
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have collected more than 100,000 political ads in this way. But Facebook’s latest update blocks tools like ours from clicking on the “Why Am I Seeing This” menu. > The company added code that prevents clicks generated by computers — including browser extensions — on just that one button. Web browsers make a distinction between a click generated by the computer and one generated by your mouse. Clicks from your mo…

You can patch the browser to make isTrusted configurable, or to set it unconditionally true.

In my opinion extensions should be able to synthesize clicks on behalf of the user where isTrusted=true from the perspective of web content.

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Regexes can be evaluated in linear time, so you'd have to send gigabytes worth of text to cause any noticeable slowdown.

I believe with lookahead/behind a regex is technically not "regular" anymore, so you can definitely DoS a regex without GB worth of text.

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

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me ads are fundamentally about misleading you, manipulating you, or in short: making you do something that you wouldn't do otherwise. This to me is morally wrong on a base level. Advertisement is an attempt to attack/manipulate your vulnerable mammal brain to make you do something against your interest (be it buying a product, voting on someone, etc). In other words, to do something that you wouldn't do rationally…

What if I took your argument, and instead of making it about ads, made it about all human communication? Isn’t all communication intended to influence the thoughts of the listener? I don’t think attempting to influence someone’s behavior to your gain by providing them with information is inherently immoral - we all do it constantly (eg. when messaging a friend to ask them over for a drink, I am manipulating them so I…

A lot of communication is about honest expressions of one's experience, and reflecting others' such experiences, as well as asking for feedback, or asking for another's input.

These modes are all very foreign to advertising.

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

#310
post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I were king, all ads would have to be black text on white background, containing ONLY the name of the product/service, its description and advertised merits. The description would have to consist of well-defined and falsifiable statements only.

Prediction: in your kingdom, product names would evolve to become "World's Best Hair Tonic" with "World's Best" being the company's brand/trade name...

Except it would be: World's Best(tm) Hair Tonic -- I think I could parse that correctly.
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