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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

#341

Post by lapoupan »

ergothus wrote: post #29

I interviewed at FB recently (didn't pass the in-person) and the one question I asked each interviewer was "tell me about the parts of FB I don't see" - because they have an odd hiring process where you don't figure out what team you'd be working with until after you are hired...and I had no interest in pushing Ads, but understood that wouldn't be a great pitch from my side. Turns out there is a LOT about ads at FB.…

I work on machine learning and natural language processing projects. We use some tools from Facebook Research. These tools are great and open source.

Every time I want to contribute to them, I feel guilty because Facebook is behind them. I also have very mixed feelings for the devs working full time on these tools at Facebook, they're smart and doing interesting stuff, but they chose to work for Facebook... Earn big money? Destroy the world? Work on fun stuff with amazing work conditions and ignore what their company is doing? What are their motives?

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

#343

Post by black_puppydog »

evgen wrote: post #302
black_puppydog wrote: post #147

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.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I just don't want to tell any dev that that's what they should be spending their time on. It's the ultimate late-capitalism job description: fighting the adblocker wars. :(

Personally, when a page gets too annoying to surf with adblocker, I just drop the site. The web is big enough (so far) that I don't have to be bored.

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

#344

Post by QasimK »

cortesoft wrote: post #270
jackstraw14 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Say you develop some really cool new product that will really help people's lives be better... how would you suggest you get people to know about it?

Perhaps a webpage that people can go to to browse products (an “adstore”).

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

#345

Post by sonnyblarney »

saagarjha wrote: post #316
sonnyblarney wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So 'ads are bad' but 'cyanide is bad' therefore 'ads are bad'?

I'm not down with your logic.

The vast, vast majority of ads are just fine and have no negative externalities.

Most 'food' is fine, but you can gorge yourself to death.

Cars are ok as well, even though they cause death.

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

#346

Post by saagarjha »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #345
saagarjha wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So 'ads are bad' but 'cyanide is bad' therefore 'ads are bad'? I'm not down with your logic. The vast, vast majority of ads are just fine and have no negative externalities. Most 'food' is fine, but you can gorge yourself to death. Cars are ok as well, even though they cause death.

> So 'ads are bad' but 'cyanide is bad' therefore 'ads are bad'?

More like "ads are bad" means that your free product with ads is also bad, just as "cyanide is bad" makes your free product laced with cyanide bad.

> The vast, vast majority of ads are just fine and have no negative externalities.

The problem is that bad ads show up basically everywhere. Sure, 99% of the ads on news websites can't infect me with malware, but there's that one that Google hasn't gotten around to banning yet that is running on every website…and even if this wasn't true, basically 100% of them track me or make my web browsing experience slower.

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

#347

Post by badpun »

bartread wrote: post #297
badpun wrote: 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.

> 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. Sorry, but for a lot of products this approach is simply ridiculous. I want to know what I'm buying looks like before I buy it in many cases. E.g., clothes, sportswear, f…

You’re right - we should allow one photo - presenting product only (i.e. without pictures of scandily clad women used to sell for example wallpaper paste, as is common in my country), against a clear background.

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

#348

Post by badpun »

wolrah wrote: post #292
badpun wrote: 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.

What Google AdWords used to be, just plain text that was generally pretty relevant to whatever you were viewing, clearly defined as an ad.

Yep that was pretty cool, I respected Google for it.

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

#349

Post by blub »

manigandham wrote: post #264
blub wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're always cheerleading for the advertising industry, so I don't think anyone will be changing your mind soon. That being said, it should be obvious even to you that the place where one invests one third of their day for years on end defines a large part of who that person is and how they behave during the other 2/3rds of the day. I remember reading an article a few years ago where several senior ex-Facebook emplo…

There's nothing inherently wrong with advertising, and offering ads in exchange for free services is perfectly fair. As far as Facebook's underhanded practices, I'm definitely against them but I'm sure you realize there is nuance when talking about such a big organization and the life choices of everyone who works there. As far as "cheerleading for the ad industry", I also built an adblocker, spent 6 figures to test…

Actually there is something inherently wrong with advertising: it manipulates people into buying things by making them feel ugly, uncool, alone or using completely irrelevant information instead of facts. Like the award-winning, stupid, fat santa commercials for a certain sugary drink.

It's a surprise to read that you want to regulate advertising, given your continous criticism of the GDPR and support of data collection in several comments.

What exactly do you understand by better ads and what kind of regulation do you support? Are we talking about yet another one of those "industry successfully regulates itself" stories?

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

#350

Post by warabe »

lapoupan wrote: post #341
ergothus wrote: post #29

I interviewed at FB recently (didn't pass the in-person) and the one question I asked each interviewer was "tell me about the parts of FB I don't see" - because they have an odd hiring process where you don't figure out what team you'd be working with until after you are hired...and I had no interest in pushing Ads, but understood that wouldn't be a great pitch from my side. Turns out there is a LOT about ads at FB.…

I work on machine learning and natural language processing projects. We use some tools from Facebook Research. These tools are great and open source. Every time I want to contribute to them, I feel guilty because Facebook is behind them. I also have very mixed feelings for the devs working full time on these tools at Facebook, they're smart and doing interesting stuff, but they chose to work for Facebook... Earn big…

I feel totally the same way. Their open source projects, especially pytorch, are masterpieces. Also, there are many renounced researchers of ML(LeCun, He, Goodfellow, etc) in FB. If I had a chance, I’d like to ask them the reson why they work for FB. It might not be just for salary, but where are the motivation to work for FB?
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