Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

digitalescapetools.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 953 posts

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

#71

Post by [deleted] »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #40
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?

[deleted]

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

#72

Post by Marsymars »

The immediate fix to this is regulatory action.

Facebook has made itself indispensable in a number of areas that are in the public interest and should be treated as a public good for these purposes.

Ads are pollution, and Facebook is forcing people to choose between ingesting pollution and using facebook marketplace, or throwing their used but functional goods in the garbage.

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

#76

Post by account42 »

stochastic-parr wrote: post #29
ImHereToVote wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic how trust would solve the issue and ads would become impossible to remove. Trust comes at a huge premium of course.

uBlock can filter arbitrary elements from a website, no chance that every company spends as much as facebook on making writing rules hard

uBlock filter list authors are however also not going to spend as much effort as they have been spending on Facebook on every random site that is currently covered by generic rules that catch entire ad networks.

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

#77

Post by whywhywhywhy »

The approach they should have taken is to start whitelisting the components that are not ads.

Think of how the structure of Meta is gonna work, there's some team in charge of ads who has a sub team now in charge of messing with the ads to stop them being blocked.

If you start whitelisting everything that isn't an ad you move the problem into an area the team in charge of blocking the ads don't have control over.

Highly unlikely the team in charge of stopping ad blocking has swing to then start changing the code of every other element on the page to break your non-ad white listing.

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

#78

Post by XorNot »

ufmace wrote: post #34
XorNot wrote: post #23

My solution to this was just to stop using Facebook. Though evidently someone's cut a deal because Facebook groups is all over Google search results these days.

Well clearly you'll need to stop using Google search too

We've been circling that since "thing reddit" became the most optimum search.

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

#79

Post by qup »

Marsymars wrote: post #72

The immediate fix to this is regulatory action. Facebook has made itself indispensable in a number of areas that are in the public interest and should be treated as a public good for these purposes. Ads are pollution, and Facebook is forcing people to choose between ingesting pollution and using facebook marketplace, or throwing their used but functional goods in the garbage.

IMO you shouldn't get to be in charge of a company just because it became successful.

Facebook is allowed to make ads show on their own product.

I hate their product, but it's theirs.

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

#80

Post by acabal »

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.

But can't they just use an xpath expression to test the computed text content of a node, like `/path/to/ad/div[contains(., 'sponsored')]`? In that expression, there could be any number of nested elements inside the terminal `` and it wouldn't matter. (And you'd probably have to use a regex test to account for tricky white space.)
Post reply on HN