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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

#741

Post by jdiff »

spider-mario wrote: post #718
Frieren wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain. Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer. The fact that some of the richest companies in the world are the criminals does not make it less of a crime. The propaganda part is, of course, also totally…

> Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer. The ads themselves don’t do that. Some networks running those ads might.

The ads themselves have been known to do that on many an occasion.

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

#742

Post by timbit42 »

Gareth321 wrote: post #581
timbit42 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe reverse tactics and block/hide anything that isn't something you want to see.

In a few years, I don't think we'll be navigating to Facebook.com. We'll be asking our LLM: "what are my friends up to?" And it will provide a nice UI to browse interesting updates, collated from any open source, including Facebook. No ads, no influencers, no dark patterns, just what the user asks. And it won't require APIs. It will just browse the site itself as an agent and pick out the parts the user cares about.…

At least there is no chance of manipulation and subliminal advertising that way. /s

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

#744

Post by stinos »

chrisan wrote: post #684
stinos wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you realize that the only way to not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely You're probably right when it comes to benefiting the company, but technically - at least for me - using only https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr means no ads/sponsored/whatever. Only the posts I actually want to see, and chronologically so easy to continue where you left off.…

Do you have something else going on perhaps? The very top item on that FB link was an ad, followed by 2 posts, then another ad

Not that I know of. It is a bit weird that for me it shows the same posts in my normal container with uBO enabled, and in a new container with uBO disabled: no sponsored ones. But when visiting facebook.com straight away I do get ads/sponsored posts. Probably I did go over all FB settings once to disable everything possible. Perhaps it's that.

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

#745

Post by BobBagwill »

andsoitis wrote: post #716
bialpio wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tell me when the movie starts, not when the ads start.

by your account roughly 20-30mins in. You could also just sit there and read a book while you wait.

That's what I do! I wear a 10K lumen headlamp and read my elephant folio of Finnegan's Wake aloud, so everyone can enjoy it!

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

#746

Post by yoyohello13 »

abirch wrote: post #699
gucci-on-fleek wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Unpopular opinion but if people don’t want to pay for a thing, it’s probably not worth a whole lot to n the first place.

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

#747

Post by stinos »

wodenokoto wrote: post #586
stinos wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you realize that the only way to not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely You're probably right when it comes to benefiting the company, but technically - at least for me - using only https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr means no ads/sponsored/whatever. Only the posts I actually want to see, and chronologically so easy to continue where you left off.…

What does `?sk=h_chr` in the URL mean?

sk possibly means 'sort key' (makes one wonder what other keys there are) and chr = chronological There's also &filter=friends one can add to that.

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

#748

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

miki123211 wrote: post #740
abirch wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ads are progressive taxes in disguise. If you make the kind of content that costs a lot to create but almost nothing to copy, you have a dilemma: Set the price too high, and you aren't getting any money from the poor at all at all, even though they're willing to pay far above your copying costs. Set the price too low, and you aren't extracting as much profit from the rich as you could be. Ads let you serve the same p…

>Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income,

It may be true that if they just put a little bit of fecal matter in the soup that they could give the soup away for free... but why would I want to eat shit soup? Even if you were to tell me that rationally there's so little shit in the soup that I couldn't notice the taste, and that there'd be no statistically significant health risks from it, why would I eat it? "Both rich and poor pay the same amount for this soup" doesn't sway me either.

And never mind that me, looking from the outside inward, I see them cranking up the shit percentage constantly.

If banning fecal matter in soup means the world has less soup, I've already made peace with that consequence.

>phone and video calls of unlimited duration,

Perhaps I'm so old now that I've lost the plot, but my phone calls (what few I make) are paid for explicitly and directly. Them being unmetered has nothing to do with advertisement revenue. Care to explain?

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

#749

Post by ptaffs »

techdmn wrote: post #707
abirch wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes and no. It's hard to escape ads even by paying for things, with cable TV being a common (though increasingly outdated) example.

the example is good and those ads are less awful because the same ad it sent to a demographic, rather than an individual, eg everyone in Michigan get the same ad or everyone watching Friends at 8pm in Cincinnati gets the same ad. Facebook's specialty is targeting a user with an ad. And a side effect or bonus is that few others see it to talk about how inaccurate it might be.
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