This is where applying AI to this can defeat it quite easily.
AI is overkill here. You simply need to look at the result of rendering the page.
Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
311–320 of 367 posts
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#312Earlier 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.
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's their site. If they want to deliver information I'm sure they don't consider it wasted. You talk as if people go to Facebook to receive data transmissions as efficiently as possible. I've never met a development company which cares about that at such a low level. Especially if it means more exposure on their website for ads, which is how they get money.
Skimming is taught in school from a young age. It's an appropriate skill. It doesn't take much brain power to read something in a detailed way or in a quick way. The notion that we are so susceptible to our brains being influenced by things like this is ridiculous.
But still fuck Facebook.
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gladly. Its not an option.
Many local news sites now have online subscriptions available. Combined with an ad blocker, it seems as though you can generally get a pleasant local news experience, while still supporting the publisher.
> Many local news sites now have online subscriptions available. Combined with an ad blocker
It's kind of disappointing that news website still have ads even after I decide to pay for access.
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#314Earlier 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…
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…
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Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#315Earlier 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... )
A dentist's parents are usually proud of them. "What are you doing at work these days, kid?" "I'm inventing new ways to make people see advertising." "Have you considered doing something positive with your life?"
You are fooling yourself if you think the parents' of facebook employees' aren't proud of them.
What's with the neverending facebook bashing. So much of it is propagandistic and unreasonable. It's funny how the media says something and so many people just parrot it.
Do you really believe parents are disappointed that their child works for one of the most important companies in the world? Where the average salary is double what the average dentist makes?
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#316Earlier 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…
> Nobody is 'hurting anyone' - not even slightly, by ensuring that their free product also has ads.
This isn't a convincing argument. As an extreme example, replace ads with something that's clearly detrimental for the user: "nobody is hurting anyone by ensuring that their free product also delivers a LD50 of cyanide" is clearly bogus. While ads don't kill people, the way that they are distributed currently has many negative externalities that the user must deal with.
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#317Earlier 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.
Yes, absolutely, but this typically feels like companies responding to market preferences of consumers for the cheapest/brightest fruits/vegetables, rather than the feeling I get from companies marketing typical packaged products, which is of malicious deception.
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#318Earlier 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 imagine an argument could be made that all and any ads are terrible. And I'll be happy to make it. Advertising in its most optimized form is terrible, and it's terrible in ways that most people aren't even conscious of. Even in the relatively plodding print and television markets, modern advertising relies on numerous principles of human psychology to subtly alter the way you think about a product, a company, or…
I'm surprised this comment hasn't gotten more attention. This is an extraordinarily succinct take down of the evils of advertising as it relates to our mental health and well- being as a society.
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#319Is it that hard to find the sponsored text and infer the structure from the surrounding elements (regardless of what that structure is?) Some basic knowledge of the DOM tree structure could make the algorithm very adaptive to any changes like this
Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this process for new college grads or senior engineers? I can't imagine principals go through this process, do they?
All engineering hires go through bootcamp, period. The only engineering hires that don't go through team selection are domain experts hired for a specific team/role ahead of time.
> The only engineering hires that don't go through team selection are domain experts hired for a specific team/role ahead of time.
Is this a significant fraction of hires? Because I find it really odd to waste the time of a say an embedded software engineer trying to teach them React when they're pretty set on working on something else anyways…