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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

#691

Post by 12345ieee »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #680
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…

> 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".

Then by OP's suggestion, you should close this page.

Wording aside, once you feel the other party is trying to force a certain line of thinking in you for their gain you should close the tool.

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

#692

Post by dageshi »

yaportmax wrote: post #359

Controversial but honest question: How do anti-ads people propose the free open internet monetizes itself?

They don't want it monetized.

They want it to go back to how it was circa the late 90's.

In a lot of ways they're going to get their wish. LLM's via endless spam and replacing google search have basically made monetizing legit and useful content impossible, so I imagine nobody will upload it anymore (except for on youtube which is still monetizable in a meaningful way)

Compared to the past there's basically no incentive to put useful info on the web any more, so it's just not going to happen.

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

#693

Post by Mashimo »

alt227 wrote: post #551
davkan wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately it’s hard to replace local groups for me. It’s mostly crap but there is very useful updates there as well and I live in a small enough community there’s no alternative. I’ve used them to get rides, forest fire info, community event info etc. I used to use marketplace as well but they’ve completely ruined it with shipped products and ads and stuff from too far away. They’d rather show me pages upon pages…

> it’s hard to replace local groups for me. Once you stop using them for a few months you wont miss them. Its all part of the game to keep you sucked in.

We just had 3 ladders stolen from our house. After a few days of wondering we posted in the local facebook group and got a respons after 5 minutes. Now we have them back.

I do wish there was a valid electronic alternativ. Hosted in our own country. But here we are.

Also nice for events.

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

#694

Post by okamiueru »

mrngld wrote: post #689
okamiueru wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

So, steal from everyone (taxation) whether they want to support or use government-run Facebook, give the money to government-run Facebook, and everything will be great because Government? What incentive does that mechanism have to spur innovation for government-run Facebook? Does the government fund two Facebooks and scale funding based on market share? Or, like what virtually always happens in government, does it me…

Not sure to what extend, if at all, I should engage here, as you do have some strong preconceptions that probably makes it less likely productive.

> Steal from everyone (taxation) [...] give the money to government-run Facebook, and everything will be great because Government

Not touching this. As an exercise, take it upon yourself to figure out how much it cost per meter (or, I assume more familiar to you -- football field) for the road you last used, and where that money came from.

> government-run Facebook?

Yes. But, it depends what you think Facebook is, which I'm assuming isn't what Meta does with Facebook. They are in the business of collecting, profiling, and selling to data brokers, and influence to foreign countries or private interests. All of this is of negative value to both end user and society. In a world with a "government run Facebook", it wouldn't exist.

So what is the service Facebook actually provides then? A way to manage communities and events. A way to find, connect, and communicate with others. And it would absolutely be a good case for something that could easily surpass the value of services provided by "facebook", if done right, without incentive beyond making good services.

Not sure if you've noticed or paid much attention. None of the most important services do product development guided by . Google wouldn't have replaced Play Music. Your search result might be immediately useful but that would make you move on. I'd also wager that your YouTube client doesn't automatically skip the sponsor segments.

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

#695

Post by Mashimo »

liendolucas wrote: post #228
aanet wrote: post #218

Controversial opinion: This entire thread reads like a game of cat-and-mouse. People trying to block intrusive ads, and FB reaching into the depths of code and making it nearly impossible for anyone to do so en masse. I've been there. Tried to uncheck all the boxes on their ad platform; used all manners of ad blockers, etc; used incognito mode; used Tor; etc. etc. etc. At some point, you realize that the only way to…

Gold advice. People should get out of there and enjoy more of their free time!

> People should get out of there and enjoy more of their free time!

I think that would be a net negative for me. Instead of posting questions on the local facebook group or selling something on marketplace I would have to print it out and hang it up on the local grocery shop wall. Or go door to door.

Or sit around on the flee market.

Just posting "Selling 4 chairs at Waynstreet 4" in the local group is more time efficient.

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

#696

Post by andsoitis »

bialpio wrote: post #671
Retric wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just take your seat 30mins later.

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

#697

Post by puttycat »

pizzly wrote: post #559
Sophira wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That isn't enough for me. I don't just want to not see the ads, I want to stop them being fetched entirely. There are two big problems with ads. * The ad network can build up a very complete profile of what you like, dislike, and general…

If a computer vision model can identify ads and draw a rectangle over them, it can identify the DOM elements rendered inside that rectangle. Thus, the HTML, JS, and network calls of those ads can be detected. This data can then be used to train an ad detector model based on the DOM and network examples. The computer vision model essentially trains the DOM/network blocker, acting as a fallback mechanism when the block…

Not sure that's correct. You're replacing a simple visual recognition problem with something similar to the halting problem (but maybe less fatalistic, depending on the formalism you're working against ie DOM vs js).

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

#698

Post by pseudalopex »

zenoprax wrote: post #83
neuralkoi wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Reddit tested login walls on the new site since months.[1]

[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/32706

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

#699

Post by abirch »

gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #686
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 propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site. But this very site has lots of ads on it. Up until a few days ago, there was an "Apply to YC Fall 2026" link at the bottom of every page, and the front page usually has ads on it too [0]. So it seems tricky to strictly f…

The difficult thing is people don't want to pay for things. Ads are a way to mitigate that so that people/companies can capture some value that they create.

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

#700

Post by Gormo »

spidercat wrote: post #166
m348e912 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday It appears to still be up for me. ??

"anonymous" is the key word. old.reddit still works (though it seems to get progressively jankier), but it's now requiring a login.

It's using an algorithm to determine whether or not to allow anonymous access. It looks like it's considering origin IP, browser useragent, among other things. I've had login prompts show up once or twice, but when I'm using my regular browser in incognito mode and not connecting through a third-party VPN, it continues to allow logged-out access.
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