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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

#381

Post by echelon »

SCLeo wrote: post #377

As much as I understand their decision, I hope they didn't stop. I don't use Facebook myself but now I am worried YouTube now knows that if they try a bit harder uBO would just give up.

Let's just build a new Facebook.

We have the tools to make this orders of magnitude easier. We can do this to all of social media.

Big tech gave us the magic space runes (LLMs) we can use to undo them. They have no idea what they've done. All of their value distilled into powerful exoskeletons we can run from home.

Already, it's become apparent that the world is distancing itself from American Big Tech, and they're using the tools we built to pull away. It's so ironic, but frankly justified since we've impinged upon their sovereignty.

We used to say that Google "hired everyone" to keep the smart people from building alternatives. To take all their free hours, keep them busy, keep them from becoming threats.

Now every single one of our spare hours is a salient of attack. I have never felt so empowered to raise an army against the powers that be. They are all mortal.

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

#382

Post by nojito »

Not that difficult to defeat. A local llm can just update the blocking rules dynamically.

I made my own extension by essentially prompting to create a version of ublock origin with a button that uses a local llm to dynamically generate block lists and update them.

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

#383

Post by polski-g »

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 want to support things that are useful. So I whitelist Fandom wiki in my ad blocker... Good God it's like an infected IE browser from the early 2000s with 8 toolbars.

How do people use the Internet like this? Why isn't there just a single banner ad at the top, like how Altavista used to look?

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

#384

Post by robocat »

gdulli wrote: post #22
monooso wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Safari doesn't even have a built-in ad-blocker, I doubt Apple will be leading the charge on this. Such a move would also presumably be incompatible with Apple's highly lucrative search engine deal with Google.

It's amazing how people think Apple has a clean reputation because they've added a thin layer of indirection to their participation in the surveillance ecosystem.

They copied what our government does: deception about the causes of everything.

For business, our purchases clearly reveal self-deceptive practices, and dark marketing patterns certainly take advantage of that.

For government, our voting preferences reveal that we want to be deceived. Although we often say good things that our social group memes us.

I'm not sure when I learnt to be so cynical.

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

#385

Post by freehorse »

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.

> yet they are not leaving

Are you so sure? Anecdotally, I know increasingly more people who either left the platform or stopped using it last years, and this seems to be a pattern if we believe online sources [0]. Of course many stay, but the platform gets worse and worse ime.

I visit facebook only for events and some groups that I cannot avoid, so I just enter specific pages there than navigating feeds. But looking at the normal feed, it is just so bad. Complete nonsense, irrelevant stuff and more and more AI generated slop. If we exclude some groups, no real, organic people actually post (except some influencers). For those who stay, assuming they do not get the "friends feed", I am really unsure how they can tolerate that.

[0] https://policy.economy.ac/news/2026/05/202605289098

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

#386

Post by layla5alive »

zero_shift wrote: post #356
TeMPOraL wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it. It's not computers that are the problem, it's people. We've normalized (and even embraced) the situation where relationship between businesses and customers is adversarial. The phenomenon you're describing, known as "banner blindness", is just brain filtering out noise, but the thing is, that noise didn't get there by accident. What I can't…

> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings This is a thought I want to pull on I have a view that organisations, with their network of misaligned incentives, mean that companies act something like an alien lifeform. Something with a decentralised brain, unable to plan beyond immediate stimuli Compani…

Yes!

Corporations were the first paperclip maximizers.

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

#387

Post by xattt »

titzer wrote: post #295
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 se…

> 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.

I’ve fallen victim to this when I was doing coursework in the last decade.

Either a moodle module or a block of text in box in a textbook had something important to the concept I was learning, but I subconsciously ignored it because it had a format similar to an internet ad.

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

#388

Post by Scaled »

eszed wrote: post #344
beloch wrote: post #335

Earlier 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?

My phone is blocked but not my desktop (yet).

I guess the upside of reddit selling all that post data to AI firms is I'm not sure I'll really need to use reddit anymore. Which means I'll never login to post since I won't be seeing other threads to distract myself with. Which seems like long term will hurt reddit's future data.

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

#389

Post by k1m »

zero_shift wrote: post #356
TeMPOraL wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it. It's not computers that are the problem, it's people. We've normalized (and even embraced) the situation where relationship between businesses and customers is adversarial. The phenomenon you're describing, known as "banner blindness", is just brain filtering out noise, but the thing is, that noise didn't get there by accident. What I can't…

> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings This is a thought I want to pull on I have a view that organisations, with their network of misaligned incentives, mean that companies act something like an alien lifeform. Something with a decentralised brain, unable to plan beyond immediate stimuli Compani…

This reminded me of an old documentary about corporations: "If we look at the corporation as a legal person, it exhibits all the characteristics of a psychopath" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5hEiANG4Uk

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

#390

Post by boneskull »

yaportmax wrote: post #359

Controversial but honest question: How do anti-ads people propose the free open internet monetizes itself?

I don’t have any proposal because it’s not my problem to solve. I’m no businessman or economist.

The free, open internet keeps chugging along (for better or worse) regardless of how many ads I block. Especially those companies who run ad networks.

Feel free to make a moral judgement on those who block ads, because most everyone who is blocking ads has already made a judgement about online advertising and its surveilling bedfellows.

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