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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

#671
post #593
post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> That’s why movies (...) can clear a billion dollars,

And yet somehow I still get 30 minutes of ads before a watching a goddamn movie in a cinema.

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

#673

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…

Lets be fair, here. Traditional TV was ~40 minutes of content with 20 minutes of ads. I still remember televised holiday movies "presented with limited commercial breaks by Folgers, where the best part of waking up..." or whoever was sponsoring it. Radio stations had to power their transmitters and pay their staff, so they had ads. Newspapers use ads to keep themselves affordable. This has always been a business model.

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

#674
post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

They stop showing ads if you pay for Instagram in the EU. However they do not stop tracking you.

If you turn off personalised ads in the EU for insta they hijack your scrolling to give you "ad breaks" which is actually a really neat feature because it reminds me I've started doom scrolling and I close the app

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

#675

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.

There's trillions on the line. So you can be sure this will lead to trusted computing widewine style for ads till the pixels are lit up and the audio waves hit the speaker.

Pessimism wins when capital is opposite individual interest.

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

#676
the answer to facebook being bad is obviously not block-listing but allow-listing content. we had the same learning in security years ago. what this might look like is ai assisted desired data extraction and using clients tailored to user needs and user agency to use that data. Unfortunately alternative platforms that are user aligned are not the solution as you cannot force your whole cities groups or old family members to move which is the main pain point for people who use adblockers and still also on facebook.

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

#677

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.

This reminds me of how Scientology reportedly targets intelligent people because those people think they are too smart to be sucked in.

The advertising industry has hired some of the world's best talent (tech, psychology, legal) to make you more susceptible to it. They probably love those who AstroTurf thinking they are "less vulnerable" and "ads are useful actually"

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

#678

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,…

Unfortunately, there are already techniques that track you through static elements on a page (think tracking pixels, but any resource load is sufficient). Considering the money in advertising on the internet, if web moved to more of a content delivery platform, we'd have both 1. content start including ads inline (you see that on Youtube already), and 2. static/server-side tracking techniques improve even further. Ev…

Just put no cross-origin resources into my proposal. This eliminates ad networks entirely, including networked tracking pixels and networked ads (banners as well as text).

Yes, a site would still be able to host their own ads but advertisers wouldn’t be able to collect any analytics without implicitly trusting the host site. That really matters!

It means the advertisers need to enter a business relationship with the site directly. They can’t simply join a JavaScript ad-auction (the way nearly all ads work now). This makes them more akin to the sponsors we see now in videos. No tracking, just plain old fashioned audience targeting pertaining to the subject matter.

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

#680

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…

> They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions.

Isn't your comment an attack as well by that line of thinking? Am I attacking you by arguing that people nowadays are way to quick to consider something "damaging" "attacks".

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