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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

#261

Post by sumtechguy »

Markoff wrote: post #242
tonyhart7 wrote: post #165

I know this is gonna be unpopular take but for modern social media to function, they need showing ads to pay creator many people livelihood depends on it, creator make content in turn of revenue sharing that user get for free

TIL there are creators on FB, I thought it's social network for people to meet friends or for companies/restaurants to present themselves, but creators? that sounds more like Youtube

There are. Several model maker communities use it to put stuff up for sale. It is a nice way to find other model makers.

The reason I joined FB no longer exists for me. I remember why I stopped talking to many of the 'friends' I had. I silenced all of them and only join interesting groups now. Even then I only log in once or twice a year.

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

#262

Post by ndriscoll »

usui wrote: post #240
throwuxiytayq wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we just get on with it and delegalize ads already? They’re a net negative in every form, subsidizing disgusting companies that shouldn’t exist, infringing on everyone’s privacy (including your children! think of the children!!!!!), and making us jump through all kinds of ridiculous hoops to minimize our exposure to them. I don’t think the solution is more hoops.

I don't think ads should be illegal because companies have a right to try to send me information or inform me of their products, but I also have a right to block them. The problem is that client-side computing seems to be lagging behind. Once an effective local video+audio filter is invented, it's either game over for adware or another arms race will begin where humans and classifiers can't tell what an ad is anymore…

Ads and the surveillance ecosystem are more than just a company sending you information. They're paying another company, which that other company uses to provide services below cost (often free, and often creating network lock-in effects), which is clearly an anti-competitive business practice. Ads completely destroy markets they operate in.

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

#264

Post by bothers »

kotaKat wrote: post #146
dzonga wrote: post #104

the tragedy is 'mainstreet' runs on Facebook. not shitter, google but fb. some local business don't even have their own sites but maintain an insta / fb page.

the ONLY way my county communicates emergency alerts is facebook. it's absolutely wild. how do I know if I'm in a state of emergency? facebook. :)

I can't imagine how pissed I would be if my local government told me I need to use and thereby support a website that is fine with showing users ads with AI-generated CSAM.

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

#265

Post by rented_mule »

tomnipotent wrote: post #253
jpleger wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean you are both right, it's been a few years since I have been in adtech, and it isn't black and white. There are few places that will pay for stuff that isn't clicked through, but there are places that are willing to pay on an impression basis for things like video or images. It's just like not worth it to most places to throw those ads on their property since it's fairly low quality advertisers. More to the poi…

The teams spending the kind of money these ad networks care about are doing a lot of upper funnel brand marketing where exposure is more important than clicks and where conversions are expected to be much lower for this segment of spend.

The largest brands (Walmart, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, etc.) put a lot of analytics into their ad spend. I worked on an ad platform with a large audience that these kinds of brands wanted to get their name in front of, but the audience was exceedingly unlikely to click on big-brand ads on our platform. The brands figured this out quickly and pushed hard for cost-per-click rather than cost-per-impression because cost-per-click was essentially free brand marketing for them, even if they were paying $100 per click.

The next tier down was kind of the opposite. They weren't big enough to surface things like this, and they hired agencies for most of their ad spend. When focusing on the top of the funnel, there's this strange incentive with agencies where they often get more budget to spend if they can connect that directly to eye balls. Agencies are incentivized to throw the ads up everywhere and pay well to do so. They love cost-per-impression because we could deliver a large, predictable number of eye balls in a hurry.

All that said, we put no effort into getting around ad blockers as we were serving these ads on our own site/app and we viewed fighting ad blockers as fighting our users. Our ads were served inline in HTML, but clearly identified in the HTML of the page. It took blockers a while to catch on and block them, but they eventually did.

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

#266

Post by glitchcrab »

istjohn wrote: post #258
celestialcheese wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Marketplace. It's horrible, but the area I live in has mostly abandoned craigslist and if you want to buy/sell used stuff, marketplace is where you have to be.

I recently perused Marketplace, and it appears to be so thoroughly infested with barely disguised scams, bogus prices and other garbage as to be usable by only the most intrepid and determined shoppers.

It really depends on what you're looking for, there's a lot of great stuff in my local area, but there's also a lot of shit too

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

#268

Post by gopher_space »

gh02t wrote: post #239
globalnode wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and thats why you lock down your privacy, so they get nothing other than "generic privacy enthusiast #1000101010101"

Good luck. I'd wager that most methods to protect your privacy aren't nearly as effective as we think they are. While I don't think it means that you shouldn't try to protect your information, I typically assume that anything short of very extreme measures is only mildly effective.

One of the biggest problems in software development is that our graph of authoritative personal data is cyclical. You might have heard about how difficult it was for someone erroneously declared dead to change the record, and I'm sure most of us have experienced problems with changing an address. A friend recently went through two name changes and one phone number change, and it took like eight months for the bottom-feeders to realign.

We are now in an adversarial situation regarding our personal information, but our adversaries depend on sources we have a modicum of control over. If I signed my dog up for a physical mailer, I wonder how long would it take for a portion of the internet to consider Doctor-Professor Kensington a legal individual.

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

#269

Post by c-hendricks »

pimlottc wrote: post #147
c-hendricks wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../…

What's with the xpath selector? Is that just matching deeply nested elements?

Going from memory, but that's how many elements are in the tree between what I wanted to be hidden and where the matching text/elements actually lived.

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

#270

Post by ASalazarMX »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #116
rmwaite wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If the computational requirement is within the realm of another normal day to day task, and if it cannot generally achieved with another cheaper approach, it would be contradictory to say it is staggering. I would agree if this was an easily solvable problem with classical approaches. Clearly it is not, since even uBlock is giving up. At any rate, "staggering" is relative. White-labeled web browsers becoming the most…

"Honey, I want to buy a gamer PC. This one is too slow to block Facebook ads."
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