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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

#591

Post by sevenzero »

skybrian wrote: post #585
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…

Skill issue? Some people are clearly more vulnerable than others. You can occasionally get useful information from ads.

Give me 1-2 examples of useful info we can get from ads?

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

#592

Post by TheDong »

skybrian wrote: post #585
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…

Skill issue? Some people are clearly more vulnerable than others. You can occasionally get useful information from ads.

Just because some people are more resilient to opium, and some people can have a good time on it, doesn't mean you should get an opium injection when you're going for a regularly scheduled doctor's appointment.

Ads are being forced on you when you're trying to do something else, like you go to facebook to see your actual friend's pictures of their kids, you're not looking for ads, and yet you get some micro-brainwashing on the side.

The true "skill issue" is that governments are too unskilled to prevent these mass mental attacks to prey upon their citizens, and haven't gotten off their ass enough to make advertisement even more illegal than other similarly harmful substances like opium, tobacco, and online gambling (both sports gambling and gacha games).

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

#593

Post by Retric »

bkaae wrote: post #555
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.

Paying for quality content has been normalized, the price floor for payment is way above what Facebook and the vast majority of Web content offers.

That’s why movies and AAA games can clear a billion dollars, but the internet is still dependent on people failing to install ad blockers.

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

#594

Post by srdjanr »

wodenokoto wrote: post #586
stinos wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you realize that the only way to not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely You're probably right when it comes to benefiting the company, but technically - at least for me - using only https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr means no ads/sponsored/whatever. Only the posts I actually want to see, and chronologically so easy to continue where you left off.…

What does `?sk=h_chr` in the URL mean?

Apparently it forces your feed to show posts in chronological order, not how algorithm decides

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

#595

Post by zenoprax »

dayone1 wrote: post #97
zenoprax wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A counter example: I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday but it turns out uBlock can filter out the ads, boilerplate, sidebars, join/login buttons etc on the main site. It's actually faster and more usable than the old site now. Small win.

How do you filter it out? Do you select each element individually?

Yes, the Element Picker in uBlock Origin. Requires Firefox because of Web Manifest stuff in Chromium.

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

#596

Post by TheDong »

sevenzero wrote: post #591
skybrian wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skill issue? Some people are clearly more vulnerable than others. You can occasionally get useful information from ads.

Give me 1-2 examples of useful info we can get from ads?

There are some cases where ads are useful for sure.

For example, I found out about the local farmer's market in my city via advertisements being hung up around town, and that helped me get fresh produce and find some community. I'm not sure if I ever would have found that farmer's market otherwise.

I also found one job via a "Who's Hiring" hacker news post, and that's obviously an advertisement thread advertising open positions.

Of course, these do not balance out the negative impact of ads, such as advertising credit cards and sports gambling and gacha gambling games to get people into debt, advertising tv shows and movies to waste people's time watching garbage, and generally advertising garbage that makes people who were otherwise happy waste money and time for no real gain in life satisfaction.

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

#597

Post by el1s7 »

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…

That's quite paranoid, they surely are annoying, but certain ads can be relevant.

Actually, from what I've noticed X/Twitter ads are way worse than the ones on Meta platforms.

And I completely hate seeing ads on YouTube or when browsing random websites in general.

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

#598

Post by martheen »

meerita wrote: post #580

Question for everyone: I'm building two browsers: a terminal browser ( https://github.com/meerita/puma-browser ) and a new GUI browser. For the GUI one, I'm focusing on privacy and reliability, and I was wondering if having a built-in ad blocker would be a good feature. Why don't the major browsers have one? Have they had legal problems with ad blocking, or do they simply not want to kill the goose that lays the gold…

Chrome is made by an advertising company that also fund almost entirely the budget of Firefox. Even Safari is made by an advertising company. FWIW most of them have some blocking for egregious ads, so they will happily kill someone's else goose.

Personally I think the easiest would be to support uBO or at least have a built-in engine that can load filters written for uBO. Anything else is just wasting development time.

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

#599

Post by breakingcups »

inigyou wrote: post #413
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 anything marked NSFW on old.reddit.com unless you upload your ID to Persona (Thiel's company).

Do you have a source for that? I can still access anything nsfw on old.reddit.com from Europe.

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

#600

Post by sevenzero »

TheDong wrote: post #596
sevenzero wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me 1-2 examples of useful info we can get from ads?

There are some cases where ads are useful for sure. For example, I found out about the local farmer's market in my city via advertisements being hung up around town, and that helped me get fresh produce and find some community. I'm not sure if I ever would have found that farmer's market otherwise. I also found one job via a "Who's Hiring" hacker news post, and that's obviously an advertisement thread advertising ope…

I see, these are valid. Especially in smaller communities in rural areas ads can really help bringing people together. I live in a small village since about 2 years now and have NO idea what's going on here (as I don't watch/read ads). Sometimes thats sad, but usually I want to be left alone anyway. A farmers market sounds cool though.

I'd categorize job postings a bit differently, if Facebook was full of (legitimate) job postings I think it would be less of an issue. I agree on all the gambling stuff you wrote.

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