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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

#601

Post by breakingcups »

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…

Google builds the biggest browser. Mozilla receives most of its funding through Google (though they have mobile browsers with a default ad-blocker). Microsoft is in the ad business too.

I'm not surprised, why are you?

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

#602

Post by tkel »

alex1138 wrote: post #453
joshuat wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I want someone to actually smack Steve Huffman. Not hard, but enough to get through the veneer of We Take Your Feedback Very Seriously And- No. Enough. The community is fucking screaming at you Someone that loves their users does not fire the mods in response to API change protest. And censorship galore, and too much power concentrated in the mods and site

If you want the community to be in control of the platform, you should be pursuing a community-controlled platform, not a capitalist-controlled one.

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

#603

Post by freehorse »

inigyou wrote: post #414
freehorse wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Are they using Instagram?

Some instagram, some tiktok, some nothing.

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

#604

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#605

Post by matheusmoreira »

neuralkoi wrote: post #39
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.

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…

> Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.

The best solution. Highly recommended.

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

#606

Post by zelphirkalt »

This is probably a good decision, because it will free up time and resources to do more productive things than saving the lost souls, that are still on Facebook. Maybe this will contribute to the downfall of Facebook, due to more people seeing how toxic the place has become, when they can no longer block those ads.

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

#607

Post by inigyou »

breakingcups wrote: post #599
inigyou wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're still A/B testing

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

#608

Post by inigyou »

Terr_ wrote: post #481
inigyou wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go to your bank branch and say I can't access my bank account.

We should be careful to distinguish between "everything goes back to normal" versus "they you move your money to some other bank." Anywho, you're right that the final example is more-likely to be resolved, thanks to a formal customer relationship backed up by decades of law plus physical locations... but what about Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. where they sometimes don't even have any remotely responsive sup…

> what about Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Google

Just quit them. They're all garbage anyway.

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

#609

Post by zelphirkalt »

michaelt wrote: post #574
bkaae wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I for one pay for content I enjoy, when it's reasonably priced and available to pay for. Two sources of print journalism, a few dozen patreons, paid youtube, etc - not to mention one-off purchases like books. [1] And I'd encourage other people who can afford to, to do the same. I'm not sure how scalable my approach is within the status quo, though - I've never seen a subscribers-only article go viral on social media,…

Same here.

I will add though, that the freemium model does not necessarily have to cease existing. Some platform for written articles can have articles available at no cost, and then put a paywall in front of other articles. I don't see the problem with that. It will be a careful balancing act of content creators, how much is in the freemium section, so that they attract a sufficient number of readers/fans/supporters.

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

#610

Post by dns_snek »

inigyou wrote: post #408
Terr_ wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Go to your bank branch and say I can't access my bank account.

That doesn't mean that it will actually be resolved. And do you really want to be doing that with everyone you ever do business with for the rest of your life?
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