Controversial but honest question: How do anti-ads people propose the free open internet monetizes itself?
government subsidy
uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
361–370 of 953 posts
Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
#362The 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.
Are you proposing banning advertising on Facebook? You know this will effectively destroy Facebook, Google, every free ad supported website on the internet?
Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
#363Controversial but honest question: How do anti-ads people propose the free open internet monetizes itself?
Volunteer basis or charge users. Optional subscriptions keep small webforums alive, like HN would probably be fine with some kind of 10/mo thing. Maybe charge a small fee for new accounts?
For things that need to scale past that like very large social media, the question is if that's worth those sites existing.
Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
#364Controversial but honest question: How do anti-ads people propose the free open internet monetizes itself?
You make things that cost money cost money? I don't think I really understand the premise of the question.
Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your country has sold your safety to private interests. Demand better from them.
I can't. They spent hours listening to the citizens tell them not to enter a 187(g) with ICE and then they spun around and immediately voted to approve the 187(g). Citizens are powerless, period here, and they keep voting in the worst possible interests because the leopards haven't ate their face yet.
The really cool thing about local politicians is that unlike higher levels of government, they tend to actually live locally. Means you can pretty easily coordinate things like pleasant sit-down conversations, or shouting obscenities at them while they're trying to do their grocery shopping.
Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
#366One of the earliest ad blockers I used would just replace ads with artwork. I'm not the author, but I found something similar here: https://github.com/jfonsecarivera/artblock
Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where Facebook has gone, I fear other U.S. social media is headed. Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in, which suggests they're doubling down on user tracking. On top of that are the increasing privacy, censorship, and disinformation concerns that come with using any U.S.-based social media. There is clearly a need for facebook/reddit alternatives for useful groups like the…
I abandoned my 5k follower Twitter account for Mastodon a few years ago and 1700 people followed me there. I expect out of the 5k Twitter followers most of them are bots, so I probably lost nothing. The secret to making alternative platforms work, is actually engaging with them and pretending the toxic platforms you hate no longer exist. I am a bay area serial founder, with no Twitter, Meta, Google, Apple, or any suc…
I'm 99.99% sure your audience is tech people.
Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where Facebook has gone, I fear other U.S. social media is headed. Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in, which suggests they're doubling down on user tracking. On top of that are the increasing privacy, censorship, and disinformation concerns that come with using any U.S.-based social media. There is clearly a need for facebook/reddit alternatives for useful groups like the…
> Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in They haven't for me (just tested before posting this comment), which I realize might be temporary. Have they published a policy, or did you get caught in A/B testing hell?
They did publish a policy and announced it a month or so back. Phased rollout, it took a while before it started applying to me. But now I am unable to use old.reddit at all, and I can only use new reddit on a desktop browser - and only for a little while until it covers the content and tells me I have to login to continue.
I know why they did this, I get it, but they did me a favor by severely curbing the time I might otherwise waste on their web site. For that I thank them.
Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
#369To those that use facebook in 2026, why?
Re: uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
#370Eventually, 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…
Sites will start streaming in the whole webpage using DRM so the only thing that can actually see the ad is your monitor.
> Sites will start streaming in the whole webpage using DRM so the only thing that can actually see the ad is your monitor.
If it comes that, I'll put my real monitor in front of that DRMed monitor (doable with flat screens) and I'll have a private LLM, in real-time, pushing on the real monitor (the one I look at), an ad-free version of the DRM'ed monitor.
DRM is nasty but private AI models are already more powerful and they'll only ever got better. And those open-weights are never ever going back in the box.