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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

#661

Post by aembleton »

doix wrote: post #530
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…

Surely it ends with alternative clients? Seems much easier and more efficient. Facebook UI is crap anyway, just have something scrape the data and present it in a format that's not optimized for whatever KPI FB cares about and without ads. Or with just not using these services.

The problem is extracting the data from Facebook. They do a lot of work to obfuscate their markup. You'd probably be best loading the whole thing in a headless browser, taking screenshots, running that through an LLM and getting the data.

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

#662

Post by chongli »

gf000 wrote: post #554
chongli wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please read carefully. All of your complaints were already addressed in my original comment.

I have zero faith in government’s ability to regulate these things correctly. Viz. cookie pop ups.

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

#663

Post by urbnspacecowboy »

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.

Only if we can also normalize not double-dipping via payment and ads. Too often, paying money to avoid "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" just turns it into "You're paying for the product and you're still the product".

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

#664

Post by everyday7732 »

koito17 wrote: post #576
bkaae wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

All that achieves is companies introducing ads to boost revenue for next quarter's earnings. For a concrete example: LINE (most widely-used messaging app in Japan) has paid subscriptions, and even the highest tier subscription doesn't reduce ads. Other services (e.g. YouTube Premium) reduce ads, but do not eliminate them, no matter how much you pay.

Exactly this. The people willing to pay a subscription are also the most valuable to advertisers.

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

#665

Post by okamiueru »

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.

Nah. We should normalize public services and resources to develop knowledge and tools, that are made freely available. Provide incentive programs and reward those that take on such initiatives.

There are many such services where I'm from. And the feeling when using them is refreshing. You're not looking for an ulterior motive to be misinformed. They're responsive as they don't load a 10 MiB JavaScript blob to track your interactions "for marketing".

As an example, consider a service that gives you nutritional information of food. https://www.matvaretabellen.no/en/

The software solution and hosting is not remotely as expensive as the lab work needed to gather the nutritional information.

If this was made by a private company, it would be a subscription service, without a doubt. You'd find certain brands but not others because of deals under the table. It would have user profiles for collecting and selling data, not to mention integration with fitness and weight loss services. You might also wonder if part of the data is incorrect because of all that darn expensive lab analysis. Heck, maybe some CTO figured they could "predict" this information with an LLM.

Here, it is covered by taxes, benefit all, full page load in about 0.2 seconds (or 0.5 seconds for nutritional value). This is how the internet could be.

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

#666

Post by Gigachad »

dspillett wrote: post #651
Gigachad wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your family members don't have a phone number you can call?

For a lot of people these days actually calling is for emergencies or other time sensitive comms. Even sending a text is seen that way by some, who have no notifications enabled for other messaging apps & similar but do allow their device to buzz them when an SMS/equivalent arrives.

For socially anxious zoomers sure, but it's not a desirable thing. Call your parents.

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

#667

Post by everyday7732 »

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…

It seems possible that ads will get even more insidious.

People you follow will post an image, and it could be edited to include a product placement.

People who make a post which incidentally mentions a product or organisation will see that their posts get slightly more viewers. This might be innocent at first but soon people will notice the pattern and start name dropping brands in posts intentionally for the view boost.

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

#668

Post by dghughes »

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…

I hate how normal ads seem to be to young people (under age 30). Just seeing TikTok videos secondhand on YouTube the videos seems stuffed with people pushing crap. YouTube channels none are without ads either by YouTube or by the channel owners.

Plus the "oh you have an add blocker!!" whining if you dare try to slow the firehose of ads coming at you. Yes I do have an ad blocker because it seems my entire existence is fodder for your website or app's ad machine to capture and use.

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

#669

Post by qiine »

SCLeo wrote: post #377

As much as I understand their decision, I hope they didn't stop. I don't use Facebook myself but now I am worried YouTube now knows that if they try a bit harder uBO would just give up.

They probably gave up in part because Facebook provides very little value...

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

#670

Post by hexagonwin »

stevenicr wrote: post #350

Can you (ublock, privacy badger, etc) at least block the videos / animations auto-playing all over the screen to give me some control over which ads steal my focus and time? Stopping the movement of all things unless click / tap to play would be a huge adblock win in my book.

video autoplay can be blocked in firefox with a builtin feature, though i can't test if it works for facebook
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