61–70 of 953 posts
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 use a browser extension called F.B. Purity. It's worked across multiple browsers for years. https://www.fbpurity.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so it's very hard to write selectors against This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?
The power cost of doing this widely would be staggering, surely?
EFF: Adversarial Interoperability - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
I don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.
(I used to work in this area, but my knowledge is ~4y out of date)
Not perfect, but it works.
The solution is truly to just never be on Facebook, but - our local PTA only distributes news via Facebook. (There may be a Whatsapp group I don't know about, which isn't better.) So does the local library. If the township publishes things elsewhere, I don't know about it.
I use a service to convert some pages' feeds to RSS, which is semi-reliable, but doesn't work well and is a paid service if you want more than two feeds - I wish I could hand-roll something myself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we're just talking about image based ads it would be easier to simply denylist every image on a page and only render alt-text until the user clicks to reveal it. Worth noting though that Apple injects ads into the News app, which is just a webview, so it's certainly not them that will do this.
I wonder what percentage of images even has meaningful alt-text.
Facebook is trying so hard to defeat adblockers that the actual website is borderilne unusable. I have found in the past year or so that pages just get hung on "loading" transitional screens way more often, even in normal circumstances. They need to surrender this whole anti-adblocker crusade because it will kill them in the long run (along with the billion other problems FB has)