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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

#321

Post by tshaddox »

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…

> 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.

Surely a better way to think of this is that a person's AI agent will simply find, via whatever means necessary, the information that the person is interested in. It's hard to imagine the person will still be operating on the old "pull" model where they deliberately visit a specific website or open a specific app.

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

#323

Post by tshaddox »

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…

Advertising is and always has been a fundamentally adversarial relationship between the consumer and the publisher. Everyone knows that, with few exceptions, no one ever wants to see ads. So I guess I'm not sure why you're surprised that advertisers still want to show ads to people who would rather not see them. That's everyone.

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

#324

Post by bookofjoe »

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…

Whatever cognitive damage I've suffered since joining Facebook early on seems to have had the effect of erasing my awareness of the damage.

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

#325

Post by teravor »

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 expect the end to be a custom client for an in-demand site such as facebook. when you visit it your custom browser (or code injected into google chrome) will pull all the actual content from the site page you are on and display it with its own template.

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

#326

Post by dofm »

dylan604 wrote: post #319
burnte wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only use FB for the occasional Marketplace sale/purchase because the rest of the site is a cesspool of nonsense and toxic ragebait. It's impossible to only see your friends updates now, so it's lost 99% of it's utility. Letting people see how awful it is will force folks to either leave or Facebook to fix itself, which will never happen. It seems like execs prefer to drive companies into the ground and bankruptcy c…

The vast majority of FB users see the unfiltered site, yet they are not leaving contrary to your theory. FB does not seem to be anywhere near the ground or bankruptcy court. These are very strange things you're commenting about one of the largest companies on the planet.

I mean, obviously Facebook is not in financial difficulty.

But it is, at some level, culturally dying. It is very evident.

It would not be loss of revenue that troubled Facebook, for years at least — it would be slowing engagement and lower demand for reach.

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

#327

Post by pbhjpbhj »

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…

Meanwhile, aren't companies already making screen captures to check for presentation (on 'smart' TV at least)? The presence of the output can be required, and it can be tested by hashing or some such (within the monitor, signed by TPU) without need of privacy violations.

We'll have to have an overlay screen that is a separate device. Then your meta-glasses will be snitching on you ...

Mind you some glasses with a built in ML module could block all ads, not just on-screen ones. Rich people will see the World as green and pleasant and make gestured enquiries as to why we don't want to eat brioche!

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

#328

Post by 8note »

zenoprax wrote: post #83
neuralkoi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

nah, now it loads maybe 3 posts at a time and the latency is really slow to pull up those 3

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

#329

Post by RunSet »

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…

This browser extension is so inimical to online advertising Google (world's largest advertising corporation) banned it from the Chrome web store.

https://adnauseam.io/

It loads every ad, and clicks them without display them. So the advertiser still pays for the click but the user never sees ads.

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

#330

Post by adam_arthur »

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…

You can already do this with smaller LLMs, like 10B range. The computer vision/image interpretation has been sufficient at this magnitude for a few months now.

Can run on most decently powered consumer devices.

Latency not great vs ad block though, of course.

Perhaps a fine tuned model explicit to this purpose could be even more compact.

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