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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

#551

Post by alt227 »

davkan wrote: post #542
aanet wrote: 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…

Unfortunately it’s hard to replace local groups for me. It’s mostly crap but there is very useful updates there as well and I live in a small enough community there’s no alternative. I’ve used them to get rides, forest fire info, community event info etc. I used to use marketplace as well but they’ve completely ruined it with shipped products and ads and stuff from too far away. They’d rather show me pages upon pages…

> it’s hard to replace local groups for me.

Once you stop using them for a few months you wont miss them. Its all part of the game to keep you sucked in.

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

#552

Post by alt227 »

deepsun wrote: post #349
aanet wrote: 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've migrated my fam by just refusing to use it at some point "sorry folks no facebook apps on my phone". It was kinda hard when I needed something from them, but once they needed something from me they had to install my preferred communications channel.

They couldnt drop you a text or give you a call?

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

#553

Post by ssdspoimdsjvv »

c-hendricks wrote: post #37
akersten wrote: post #17

They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of ` ` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

Last I tried writing custom rules for Facebook was years ago, but they did have proper aria attributes, and uBlock origin does have selectors for text content. These are from 2020: facebook.com##span:has-text(Suggested for You):xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..) facebook.com##div[aria-label="Sponsored"] span[aria-label="Sponsored"]:xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../…

Read up on XPath axes:)

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

#554

Post by gf000 »

chongli wrote: post #477
ButlerianJihad wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Furthermore, ads are a resource drain that should not be taking over our personal systems. The web started as this proposition: you send a request to remote computer. Request says "Hey... can I read a document named this?" and the computer shows you the document. Now this may have included images and external links and sound, and whatnot. But today, the web is more of an application delivery system too. So many reque…

But today, the web is more of an application delivery system … I would prefer not to transact--at all--with any remote system that wanted to freeload on my resources What I really want is a non-executable web. I first started using the web in the mid-90s and most websites were like that. HTML, images, colours, fonts (but only from a pre-defined short list), and the occasional sound. If a site used JavaScript at all,…

But why? Why wouldn't I want to enjoy stuff like this: https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/

Or watch a video. Or do some basic editing of some kind of medium that I will only do once and would make no sense to download a whole application for?

Why throw out the baby as well? Besides, ads can be part of text content as well.

This is typically something that should be regulated by laws, not through tech.

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

#555

Post by bkaae »

snickerer wrote: post #549

Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain. They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions. That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies. Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'. But we shouldn't accept being under constant attack of brain worms. I propose a sane rule for all humans: if…

We should also normalize paying for content at the same time then.

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

#556

Post by davkan »

alt227 wrote: post #551
davkan wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it’s hard to replace local groups for me. It’s mostly crap but there is very useful updates there as well and I live in a small enough community there’s no alternative. I’ve used them to get rides, forest fire info, community event info etc. I used to use marketplace as well but they’ve completely ruined it with shipped products and ads and stuff from too far away. They’d rather show me pages upon pages…

> it’s hard to replace local groups for me. Once you stop using them for a few months you wont miss them. Its all part of the game to keep you sucked in.

I only care or participate insofar as they affect my real offline life.

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

#558

Post by zx8080 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #315
titzer wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

> businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings

What they do is actually a robbery of others' time, privacy, screen space, money, and freedom. All for profit.

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

#559

Post by pizzly »

Sophira wrote: post #399
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 general…

If a computer vision model can identify ads and draw a rectangle over them, it can identify the DOM elements rendered inside that rectangle. Thus, the HTML, JS, and network calls of those ads can be detected. This data can then be used to train an ad detector model based on the DOM and network examples. The computer vision model essentially trains the DOM/network blocker, acting as a fallback mechanism when the blocker fails and continuously retraining the ad detector model.

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

#560

Post by johanyc »

cookiengineer wrote: post #36
Ekaros wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most sites are not in business of running ad marketplace. They are in content production and SEO(as in pulling views). I don't think at scale they could operate it would be worth to be ad marketplace. Or would they get the customers(advertisers).

> Most sites are not in business of running ad marketplace. You don't have to run a marketplace. Back then, people were calling via phone to put an ad into the newspaper. The same concept can still apply today. You can just place an ad _where you actually want it_ instead of having a shitty decision engine decide it for you. Marketing budgets are messed up all over the place since social media, because they're really…

> since social media, because they're really inefficient in finding the customers that actually wants to buy their stuff.

Is it really? I would think targeted ads are way more efficient than traditional non targeted ads. Eg I've never seen menstrual pad (something I would never use) ads online.

> take a look at facebook, they're trying to shove ads up your feed

That's the consumers experience, not advertisers

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