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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

#391

Post by musictubes »

concinds wrote: post #27
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.

Safari was the first to cripple adblockers and went further than ManifestV3, but it seems their reputation will never catch up to that.

Ad blockers work fine for me in Safari. They may not have the flexibility of manifest v2 but they are hardly crippled. Their reputation will continue to be what it is as long as they keep making things that people like.

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

#392

Post by k1m »

adam_arthur wrote: post #330
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.

That's an interesting idea to try as a browser extension. I think Facebook is particularly egregious here, so I doubt you'd need to run something like this on other sites. But if it worked fast enough on just Facebook, it would be useful.

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

#393

Post by stubish »

npilk wrote: post #311
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…

Yes, 100%. I played around with building this last year and even a simple version was already fairly effective: https://notes.npilk.com/experiments-with-ai-adblock One interesting thing is that it also removed some "internal CTAs" to engage (like "Start your day with our podcast!"). These aren't technically ads, so something like uBlock doesn't remove them. But honestly, I don't really mind having those filtered out…

I'm hoping those NP chips ending up in some new computers will be able to run something like this. Thanks for your work!

A general purpose system, especially if trained by the users, would be more than just an adblocker. It could be trained to block out spiders or other phobia triggers for instance. Even regenerate the photo but with a kitten. Blur our tabloid clickbait 'in other news' links.

The killer app for AR glasses will be blocking out billboards and logos.

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

#394

Post by devilsdata »

Terr_ wrote: post #373
RunSet wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I feel that could easily backfire if your account or IP gets marked as an agent for malicious click-fraud.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

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

#395

Post by Terr_ »

devilsdata wrote: post #394
Terr_ wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel that could easily backfire if your account or IP gets marked as an agent for malicious click-fraud.

Don't threaten me with a good time.

The problem is the creepy big-data-advert-ocracy might propagate that scarlet-letter in ways that are unfair an unpredictable.

So a throwaway account for reading Reddit (even as it decays) might lead to an totally unrelated account you do care about getting unfairly suspended, or the MonopolyCloudFlareBot "helping" your bank starts rejecting your IP/browser-fingerprint, etc.

This would worry me less if we had laws that make it easy to demand accountability and fixes, but we don't. (Not much in the US, and in the EU efficacy is still questionable.)

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

#396

Post by stubish »

lrvick wrote: post #358
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…

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…

> and pretending the toxic platforms you hate no longer exist

Thank you. One reason I spend more time on my Mastodon feed than my Bluesky feed is there are fewer people there complaining about Twitter. Less rage and complaining in general.

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

#397

Post by devilsdata »

yaportmax wrote: post #359

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

Easy. No corporate social media networks. Hobbyists run local light social networks (such as forums) again (like they do currently; see Mastodon, Lemmy), with super efficient SSR HTML that is cheap to host.

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

#398

Post by stubish »

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.

And thus the social media addiction lawsuits and age gating are gaining traction. It seems clear the problem isn't going to solve itself, so society is turning to regulation.

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

#399

Post by Sophira »

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.

That isn't enough for me. I don't just want to not see the ads, I want to stop them being fetched entirely.

There are two big problems with ads.

* The ad network can build up a very complete profile of what you like, dislike, and generally what you're looking at on the web. Yes, that profile is "anonymised" so far as it goes, but in reality, that doesn't really matter. If you know what you're looking for, there would be enough tells in the data that can de-anonymise you. Covering up the ads doesn't stop this data being collected; it merely stops you wanting to click on the ad.

* Ads are a very common malware delivery system, and although nowadays it's probably less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it, there are instances of it happening in the past. Stopping ads from being fetched entirely would obviously prevent this.

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

#400

Post by magicalhippo »

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 was asked to test the redesigned web page of a large bank. They had eye tracking cameras and such hooked up to study how I used the web page.

They ran through some scenarios, and one was how to get a car loan. I studied the homepage and found nothing, then clicked the menu and found loans, but no car loan on the loans page. I ended up searching and found it.

After each scenario they asked me some questions, and the first question I got for the car loan scenario was why I hadn't clicked on the link on the front page. There was no link, I replied puzzled. There was a large image they said. I stared in disbelief.

The person running the scripts navigated to the homepage, and pointed at the screen. There, at the bottom, a blinking banner about car loans.

I replied that it must have triggered my mental ad blocker, since ads are typically banners, frequently near the edges and animated somehow, so I never even registered the banner.

They looked genuinely puzzled at my response.

This was 25 years ago. My mental ad blocker is still active, though uBlock Origin on Firefox takes care of most of them.

For me physical ad blocking is more about a first-line defense against malware and such than it is about getting rid of obnoxious ads. The latter my mental blocker does fine enough, though it can be annoying.

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