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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

#291

Post by kazinator »

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.

> very hard to write selectors against.

Or was hard to write selectors against before, you know, AI.

It seems ironic to give up now. You can probably rig up an agent to automatically look for new div labyrinths and write selectors for them.

You can bet Facebook are using AI to generate these labyrinths!!!

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

#292

Post by otterley »

pessimizer wrote: post #255
makerofthings wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's with this current trend of grouping GenX with Boomers? I am GenX and the difference between us and Boomers is wild. My GenX friends are on here. Boomers I know are afraid of self-checkout machines.

Zoomers don't know the difference. They don't know much (because we destroyed the schools and the media right before whey were born.) They have no idea if there's any difference between the 70s and the 40s. But to be fair, when I was 19 everybody over 30 was basically the same kind of old to me. Also boomers are the most childish generation in history, and attempt to hide amongst Xers. The weird thing is that they th…

> we destroyed the schools and the media right before whey were born

Hey, leave me out of this!

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

#293

Post by titzer »

thewebguyd wrote: post #192
wkjagt wrote: post #164

I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the mo…

Online advertising is less and less about forcing a pitch to conversion in the moment its viewed. Even if someone with an ad blocker would never click on the ad anyway, repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure. Six months or even a year from then, when that user is looking for a specific SaaS tool, for example, the brand they saw 40 times already is the one that feels established and safe, and…

> repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure.

This is exactly why I don't want to see their shit, ever. It just doubles my resolve to not see it. They are targeting my underbrain, my subconscious, and do not want it.

There's one particular insurance company that continued to evade my ad blocking attempts for literally years. I will never buy from them. My current insurance is fine and the ad-mongers can get bent until their business dies.

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

#294

Post by preg_match »

sentrysapper wrote: post #53
jcfrei wrote: post #3

Once LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.

You anticipate a large language model to understand visual queues for an advertisement?

On the big platforms, the ads actually have “ad” written on them somewhere or “sponsored”.

It will be harder on other sites, but not that hard. There’s an unbreakable ceiling for the ads here - they need to be readable trivially by human eyes, or they don’t work as ads.

So, you can hide or obfuscate the ad… but then it’s not a very good ad.

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

#295

Post by titzer »

jimrandomh wrote: post #282

Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad. I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be. (I think average people are making a horrible mistake about this, and are badly cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realize). If my choices are to look at ad…

I think my brain developed that as a defense mechanism. The web cultivated a certain kind of blindness where I literally don't look at certain parts of pages because my brain has learned that there is never anything useful there. Sometimes I just cannot see things unless I force my eyes to move across the page linearly, top to bottom.

This is pathological. Like I find myself not ever looking at the top result in a search, because that is where Google has been putting ads.

Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it.

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

#296

Post by titzer »

neuralkoi wrote: post #39
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 s…

> Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.

The real fix!

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

#297

Post by robocat »

sodapopcan wrote: post #247
StilesCrisis wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Story time? I want to know about the useless items.

lol, no, it's mostly embarrassing :P Well, they included a silicone sponge and a massive blanket.

Did you notice any change in the adverts targeting you after an impulse purchase?

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

#298

Post by CrendKing »

thewebguyd wrote: post #192
wkjagt wrote: post #164

I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the mo…

Online advertising is less and less about forcing a pitch to conversion in the moment its viewed. Even if someone with an ad blocker would never click on the ad anyway, repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure. Six months or even a year from then, when that user is looking for a specific SaaS tool, for example, the brand they saw 40 times already is the one that feels established and safe, and…

But how to you quantify the effect of the exposure? How do you know a particular sale is converted through some impressions you put on Facebook six months ago, and not from a highway billboard one week earlier? If you can't accurate quantify the effect of each ad campaign with their conversion rate, you have no reason to put more funds into this particular Facebook campaign. So naturally it falls on Facebook to prove to you that their ad socket is actually generating conversion, by not showing the ads to people who is least likely to click through ads when shown.

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

#299

Post by bloqs »

Ublock Origin's creators are absolute god-kings for their consistent work to help me (for free) not be forced to engage in psychological conditioning all day via my eyeballs. I never used to have an issue with ads, but because of capitalism, they simply cannot exist without cancerously taking over everything. They start as a banner, then before you know it, you have full screen unskippable paywalls to the content, with extreme discomfort placed on the user with deliberately engaging bright colours and sudden sounds played without my consent. Sure, if I like the product such as facebook as a free platform I might consider a premium licence for some conveniences, but adverts are simply the direct representation of societal rot for profit. I paid for netflix, then eventually they started showing me ads on netflix. It never ever stops.

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

#300

Post by inigyou »

gwbas1c wrote: post #48
inigyou wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the ad ecosystem has two sides. I used to think my ISP could just magically support IPv6 and didn't need routing protocols or peering agreements, too. (They support it now) Websites with ads need to satisfy the ad buyers. This means running a bunch of JavaScript that's adversarial to the website and fingerprints both the website and the browser to determine where and to whom the ad is actually shown. It's lik…

I think that just goes to prove that content providers and ad providers could defeat ad blockers if they worked together. (And perhaps made the ads less offensive so people don't have motivation to block them.)

Ad networks hate content providers. I guess it comes with the territory when you're trying to operate a money printer - you hate anyone who poses an obstacle to your money printing.
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