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How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

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Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#161

Post by matheusmoreira »

notafraudster wrote: post #28
crakenzak wrote: post #2

Interesting article. I don't blame Facebook for doing whatever they can to properly show ads tho, they provide a "free" service and in exchange serve ads. It's not free to support a company their size and its expected they do everything they can to monetize the site properly. What do you guys think?

"do everything they can to monetize" Except, evidently, allow users to pay money to not be subjected to ads.

Wouldn't work. Spending money on anything puts people on the disposable income demographic which is the exact audience the advertisers want to reach.

It's impossible to reach a workable compromise with the advertising industry. They don't care about our convenience and would place ads under our eyelids if they could get away with it. The truth is we're way past the point of peaceful negotiation with the advertising industry. Better to unconditionally block everything and hope they go bankrupt.

Besides, making users pay money to avoid ads is just insulting. Blockers exist because of the sheer amount of abuse they perpetrate in order to serve their useless noise. People should not have to pay extortion money in order to avoid the abuse. The abuse should simply not happen in the first place.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#162

Post by jokoon »

gorgoiler wrote: post #108

Relatedly, uBlock Origin’s picker has really improved my quality of life on Facebook. I love Facebook, it’s my only remaining connection to some people, and it’s revived many friendships I thought I’d lost. However, as one gets on in life, People You May Know can be extremely emotionally impactful. It is a little part of the web UI that brings back the dead, ex partners I still miss, exes who have moved on, and toxic…

> I love Facebook

Interesting, what do you think about the backlash against facebook? I guess there could be arguments in favor of facebook, after all.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#163

Post by ChrisRR »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #150
1propionyl wrote: post #53

I'm surprised I haven't seen a single comment say what ought to be the obvious: the easiest way to never see Facebook ads is to just not use Facebook. I should hope I'm preaching to the choir, I'm sure, but... quitting really isn't as hard as you tell yourself it is. It's not as essential as you think it is.

Things I pragmatically need Facebook (including Messenger) for: - My martial arts classes post updates there - So does the community garden I help out at - Keeping up with family news, and directly talking to family - Keeping up with what's happening to my friends in the USA or other far flung places - Access to topical news that matches my political beliefs rather than being heavily centrist-biased and ignoring all…

Create bookmarks directly to those pages and ignore the news feed.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#164

Post by mensetmanusman »

1propionyl wrote: post #53

I'm surprised I haven't seen a single comment say what ought to be the obvious: the easiest way to never see Facebook ads is to just not use Facebook. I should hope I'm preaching to the choir, I'm sure, but... quitting really isn't as hard as you tell yourself it is. It's not as essential as you think it is.

The same can be said of alcohol, but life is lived to its fullest when practicing moderation on many fronts :)

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#165

Post by byuu »

blauditore wrote: post #111

span[data-content="S"] + span[data-content="p"] + span[data-content="o"] + span[data-content="n"] + span[data-content="s"] + span[data-content="o"] + span[data-content="r"] + span[data-content="e"] + span[data-content="d"] { display: none; } This only hides the "d", right? You generally can't hide a higher-level element based on drill-down selectors, so pure CSS wouldn't be enough. But of course, finding the appropri…

Yeah, I always have to write userscripts to get access to getElementsBy(TagName,Id,etc) and then call .parentNode().parentNode()... to reach the ancestor I want to remove.

Of course the downside of userscripts compared to uBlock rules is that they take time to run, so you end up seeing the ads briefly before they are erased, which is annoying. So then I run the scripts prior to page-load to insert CSS rules to hide all elements that might be ads, let the page load, filter it, and then override the older CSS rules. It's quite a hassle, really.

What I'm saying is, :parent selectors in CSS would be greatly appreciated.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#166

Post by s_dev »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #72
1propionyl wrote: post #53

I'm surprised I haven't seen a single comment say what ought to be the obvious: the easiest way to never see Facebook ads is to just not use Facebook. I should hope I'm preaching to the choir, I'm sure, but... quitting really isn't as hard as you tell yourself it is. It's not as essential as you think it is.

I'd like to add that it is not necessary to leave Facebook to not use Facebook. I have a FB account and I'll never close it, because I like having my username on all online services I might use if once. That being said I only have it logged in at a home desktop, not my phone, not any work machine. I use it for like two minutes weekly, one to check a few specialty groups I'm a lurker in and two to co-admin a page with…

>Oh and I use it in a Firefox Facebook container so I'm not at all worried about it tracking me online.

You think that once you log in to FB in a container -- Facebook can't track you? Those container details are now appendage to your online fingerprint as far as Facebook are concerned.

Containers only work if you don't actually log in to such services. The only sure way for FB to not track you is to not use FB at all -- even then it requires other steps too as they'll be building a shadow profile on you.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#167

Post by tyingq »

1propionyl wrote: post #53

I'm surprised I haven't seen a single comment say what ought to be the obvious: the easiest way to never see Facebook ads is to just not use Facebook. I should hope I'm preaching to the choir, I'm sure, but... quitting really isn't as hard as you tell yourself it is. It's not as essential as you think it is.

"It's not as essential as you think it is."

I'm not able to avoid it. Since I can't make extended family members use something else, it's a source for family news. My family is large, both on my side and my spouse's, so FB isn't trivial to replace.

Something that could scrape and mirror a curated "family news" would be cool. But given the rate of change at FB, it would be hopelessly brittle.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#168

Post by ksangeelee »

crakenzak wrote: post #2

Interesting article. I don't blame Facebook for doing whatever they can to properly show ads tho, they provide a "free" service and in exchange serve ads. It's not free to support a company their size and its expected they do everything they can to monetize the site properly. What do you guys think?

The web has, since the very beginning I think, had the notion of public and private resources, where access to private resources requires authentication. I view facebook as an almost entirely private resource, protected by a user name, password, and terms of use.

So, they can do what they want within the law, so far as I care. I only get annoyed when people engage in hostile behaviour on the public internet - resources that we're meant to freely read, share links to, or index, or process in whatever way we choose.

As far as I can tell, facebook do quite a good job of keeping their walled garden well controlled and secure. I barely see anything of their website, but others are willing to jump through hoops just to be in there (e.g. sending in copies of passports). You know, these people will put up with quite a lot of abuse.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#169

Post by goatinaboat »

To me this is very simple, if someone installs an ad or tracking blocker then they are explicitly withdrawing consent, there is absolutely no ambiguity about it. Doing it anyway or de-anonymising them or anything else is impossible to do without equally explicitly knowing that you are violating consent. And every Facebook employee must know it.

Re: How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers

#170

Post by rndgermandude »

michaelt wrote: post #151
tomd3v wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain what is wrong with engineers working on problems like these? As I see this, it allows businesses to connect with more people, therefore being more profitable, therefore making economy grow in general. I just don't understand this hate towards developers who work for companies like FB and Google and whose job is focusing on increasing ad engagement. In my opinion, they definitely provide a hugely posit…

When I visit https://www.facebook.com/careers/ the first things it says are "Do the Most Meaningful Work of Your Career, [...] We design products and deliver services that bring the world closer together - one connection at a time [...] We encourage our people to be bold and solve the problems they care most about. [...] Together, we help others build stronger communities" Does working on anti-ad-blocking seem like t…

Yeah, that sounds a bit like being promised a research job in curing cancer, but then being put on a team that researches how to weaponize ebola for that customer in North Korea...
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