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

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

#101

Post by doodlebugging »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #77

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. High…

>Highly unlikely the team in charge of stopping ad blocking has swing...

OT but I think I learned a new term today.

Swing. In oil and gas we would call that suction so for future reference:

Swing = Suction

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

#103

Post by doodlebugging »

maxwellito wrote: post #100

Hot take: uBlock origin could insert even MORE ads into Facebook? Discouraging people to use Facebook, and also make some money on the side. (this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)

Maintain a list of recent ads blocked in that browsing session and redirect all the ads blocked during that session from previous sites visited, especially autoplaying videos, every time someone clicks on a Facebook link.

That would be funny.

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

#105

Post by rmwaite »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #94
pjc50 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The power cost of doing this widely would be staggering, surely?

Local models are not the same as the giant ones in data centers. They're in about the about the same ballpark as running a AAA game on max settings. Sure, it's more computationally-expensive than running an HTML selection, but it's also not "staggering" by any reasonable stretch.

I think “staggering” is a pretty accurate way of putting it if blocking ads is in the same ballpark as running a AAA game on max settings.

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

#106

Post by esseph »

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 hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

So what you're saying is: you want Facebook to pay out something like $200M which is such a small amount it won't even realize, $170M will go to lawyers, everybody else gets $1.30.

That seems like how it might pan out.

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

#107

Post by esseph »

m348e912 wrote: post #95
zenoprax wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A counter example: I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday but it turns out uBlock can filter out the ads, boilerplate, sidebars, join/login buttons etc on the main site. It's actually faster and more usable than the old site now. Small win.

>I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday It appears to still be up for me. ??

Not sure there's been a hard date publicly set but they are sunsetting it

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

#108

Post by kotaKat »

m348e912 wrote: post #95
zenoprax wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A counter example: I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday but it turns out uBlock can filter out the ads, boilerplate, sidebars, join/login buttons etc on the main site. It's actually faster and more usable than the old site now. Small win.

>I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday It appears to still be up for me. ??

It's A/B tested across IP ranges, geolocated regions, etc. I got it super early and it sucks being locked out for the past 2-3 weeks now.

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

#109

Post by dspillett »

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.

This is to an extent why facebook can make the ads harder to block, they control the ad infrastructure (or at least some of it) as well as the app infrastructure.

For many sites that is not the case, running adtech infrastructure is not even close to their primary business and taking the task on individually isn't worth the admin cost. Companies wanting to advertise don't just come along and say “my product is aligned with your content, could I pay for one of your advert slots?” because they don't want to just target the people who are actively looking at relevant content. They want to follow people who look at relevant content around like little stalkers, so the adverts can be put in front of you even when you've moved on to looking at less relevant content - and that requires tracking between sites which a smaller individual site can not do on its own or have the clout to negotiate a good exchange with other sites with.

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

#110

Post by psd1 »

amazingamazing wrote: post #33

Assuming you insist on using facebook you can proxy it, using a simple script that removes all ads prior to serving. The problem of course is that this is not cheap. Easier to just not use facebook.

I'm keen to see this simple script, and to understand why it's simple given that ublock origin finds it hard.
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