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

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461–470 of 953 posts

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

#461

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 am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be. I don't know if I am the same. But I do find it very difficult to use an internet browser with no adblocker. Perhaps it's because I have now spent more time using browsers with blockers, than without

I have not used an adblocker for many years.

Ad servers seem to generally just nope out of serving me ads on their own when I have Firefox's tracking protection cranked up.

Between that and Kagi down-ranking shitty ad-infested domains, it just ... isn't really a problem for me.

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

#462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm like this with YouTube. It's fair that they don't want me blocking ads and will try their best to prevent it. If they ever succeed, I'll leave without complaint. Already never use it on my phone cause adblocking is annoying on there.

I just pay them a pittance in exchange for no ads for the whole family across all devices.

Yeah. It's the only streaming service other than Nebula that I pay for, and I use it enough that they're probably paying out more to creators than they're getting from me.

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

#464
post #218

Controversial opinion: This entire thread reads like a game of cat-and-mouse. People trying to block intrusive ads, and FB reaching into the depths of code and making it nearly impossible for anyone to do so en masse. I've been there. Tried to uncheck all the boxes on their ad platform; used all manners of ad blockers, etc; used incognito mode; used Tor; etc. etc. etc. At some point, you realize that the only way to…

I like FB Messenger because all the state is stored on there instead of being annoying about E2EE. My group chats aren't important enough to need security, but I still don't want them getting randomly nuked like has happened on Signal and Whatsapp.

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

#465
post #367
post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tech, privacy, law, activism, authors, artists. All types on these platforms.

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

#466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm like this with YouTube. It's fair that they don't want me blocking ads and will try their best to prevent it. If they ever succeed, I'll leave without complaint. Already never use it on my phone cause adblocking is annoying on there.

I just pay them a pittance in exchange for no ads for the whole family across all devices.

[deleted]

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

#467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday It appears to still be up for me. ??

"anonymous" is the key word. old.reddit still works (though it seems to get progressively jankier), but it's now requiring a login.

Reading the claim that they're requiring login to old.reddit.com "for safety" made me laugh out loud.

When are they going to admit that the redesign sucks and there's a reason everyone keeps loading the old reddit interface? Who has the ego that can't handle the truth, that their UI/UX design is garbage and loathed?

The random phrases turned into links that are never helpful means I can't trust any link in comments now, there's that stupid AI box that never has useful or helpful info, conversations are a nightmare to try and read through.

I will never understand how it is that a site which exists almost entirely for conversations, made a new UI that severely fucks with "read the conversation."

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

#468

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…

Never delete your account. That account has a bunch of associated signals that scream "real user". Therefore you should sell it on an account marketplace to a spammer, if you really hate the platform.

[dead]

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

#469
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 find the fall of Reddit to be particularly upsetting. In its prime it was one of the best social networks I'd ever used and I found incredible value in it - but after having my app blown up by their API changes and the continued (unsurprising) push away from their old open platform to a more "curated" experience, it doesn't feel like the same place anymore.

Honestly? Reddit is a massive public manipulation platform.

Consider that the daughter of the guy who purposefully weakened his product's encryption on behalf of Mossad (and was considered a hero of the state), the same daughter who was rubbing elbows with the world's richest and most powerful people, was a reddit powermod with moderation power on a huge number of major subreddits.

Anyone who thinks that the ~500 most popular subreddits are anything but government/corporate manipulators is deluding themselves.

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

#470
post #218

Controversial opinion: This entire thread reads like a game of cat-and-mouse. People trying to block intrusive ads, and FB reaching into the depths of code and making it nearly impossible for anyone to do so en masse. I've been there. Tried to uncheck all the boxes on their ad platform; used all manners of ad blockers, etc; used incognito mode; used Tor; etc. etc. etc. At some point, you realize that the only way to…

In general the internet has become shit so I try to just use it less.
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