Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

digitalescapetools.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

611–620 of 953 posts

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

#611

Post by zelphirkalt »

Parae wrote: post #565
bkaae wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You think Meta would spy less on us and show us less ads if we payed to access their services ? They would just keep doing what they've been doing for ages and they would have even more money to keep their enshitification going. We are already paying too much for all the services with subscription. Like Spotify, Netflix and others...

It could be made a question of legislation. If it was forbidden, and the "cost of business" too high for them to dare, then it can work. We would need to do more than touch them with the satin gloves we are using now though.

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

#612

Post by rldjbpin »

since the leadership change, youtube has been on a similar crusade against adblocking. however, despite all the things that happened, ublock, even in the lite version, is able to work on the website. this has been quite well-covered and even discussed here.

however, found it interesting that fb was able to quietly win the battle. however, it is a shame that nothing can be done on the mobile front, at least inside the apps. it is insane how sometimes every other thing you see is a sponsored post or an ad.

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

#614

Post by ImHereToVote »

dspillett wrote: post #109
ImHereToVote wrote: post #10

I don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.

This is to an extent why facebook can make the ads harder to block, they control the ad infrastructure (or at least some of it) as well as the app infrastructure. For many sites that is not the case, running adtech infrastructure is not even close to their primary business and taking the task on individually isn't worth the admin cost. Companies wanting to advertise don't just come along and say “my product is aligne…

Seems like this is a market gap that can be solved by LLMs. Do offline analysis of the traffic of a page and make adds completely opaque to tracking.

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

#617

Post by littlecranky67 »

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've been saying this for a while: the ad-based business model is dying. It is only a matter of time until local AI models can "see" your screen and identify any sort of ads and remove/hide them. This also includes messages in "sponsored content", paid articles, etc.

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

#618

Post by t23414321 »

Thanks. I think it still could be fine ? I don't use Facebook - but I was able to download any video from Youtube, see no ads till adblockers and youtube-dl - and that's the race making things harder and unaccessible (yes, custom - but excesive DIY URL filtering rules only, same since ~2 years, are still enough to see no ads on YT, hope, that on Facebook too, and I can live with that).

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

#619

Post by carljungslabtek »

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…

You basically pointed this out already but there’s a big difference between something designed to notify you about something you might not have known, similar to what you’d find on a community bulletin board, and something trying to manipulate you into buying something you don’t need at all.

I think a lot of people use the term “ad” to refer solely to the latter category. This goes back to the origin of modern advertising (and even earlier with snake oil salesman and charlatans, which were scamming merchants using music and stage shows lol — sound familiar?) and using the term “public relations” as an alternative to “propaganda”.

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

#620

Post by matheusmoreira »

rldjbpin wrote: post #612

since the leadership change, youtube has been on a similar crusade against adblocking. however, despite all the things that happened, ublock, even in the lite version, is able to work on the website. this has been quite well-covered and even discussed here. however, found it interesting that fb was able to quietly win the battle. however, it is a shame that nothing can be done on the mobile front, at least inside the…

> however, found it interesting that fb was able to quietly win the battle.

I think it's just because nobody actually cares. Too much effort for marginal gains. Who even uses Facebook in 2026? Instagram I get it, but Facebook?

YouTube is a completely different matter.

Post reply on HN