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uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

digitalescapetools.com

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Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#36

Post by cookiengineer »

Ekaros wrote: post #26
ImHereToVote wrote: post #10

I don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.

Most sites are not in business of running ad marketplace. They are in content production and SEO(as in pulling views). I don't think at scale they could operate it would be worth to be ad marketplace. Or would they get the customers(advertisers).

> Most sites are not in business of running ad marketplace.

You don't have to run a marketplace. Back then, people were calling via phone to put an ad into the newspaper. The same concept can still apply today.

You can just place an ad _where you actually want it_ instead of having a shitty decision engine decide it for you. Marketing budgets are messed up all over the place since social media, because they're really inefficient in finding the customers that actually wants to buy their stuff.

If you don't believe me, just take a look at facebook, they're trying to shove ads up your feed 99% of the time. It's a feed of ads, not a feed of "friends" anymore. Good luck trying to catch the 1% of posts that were actually the reason why you used the platform in the first place.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#37

Post by c-hendricks »

akersten wrote: post #17

They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of ` ` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

Last I tried writing custom rules for Facebook was years ago, but they did have proper aria attributes, and uBlock origin does have selectors for text content. These are from 2020:

  facebook.com##span:has-text(Suggested for You):xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)
  facebook.com##div[aria-label="Sponsored"] span[aria-label="Sponsored"]:xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)
  facebook.com##div[aria-label="Sponsored"]:xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#38

Post by snapplebobapple »

amazingamazing wrote: post #31
drnick1 wrote: post #13

Blacklisting facebook.com at the DNS level has worked pretty well for me.

That works, but is not really blocking the ads.

I agree. We should call that "blocking the bads" since the overwhelming majority of things served from that domain are bad.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#39

Post by neuralkoi »

akersten wrote: post #17

They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of ` ` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

I recently found this out the hard way. Instagram’s web app has a super annoying popup. To click the comments button for a post, your cursor has to pass over the username, which just happens to launch a profile preview with the “follow” button exactly where the comments button was, causing you to unintentionally follow the account.

I tried to block this popup with uBlock Origin to no avail. No matter what element I selected, it was still there. Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.

Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

#40

Post by JumpCrisscross »

akersten wrote: post #17

They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of ` ` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

> so it's very hard to write selectors against

This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?

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