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

771–780 of 953 posts

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

#771

Post by elzbardico »

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…

Yes. We should stop listening to idiots that say taxation is theft.

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

#772

Post by nathan_compton »

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…

I think you mean progressive pricing in disguise. The problem is that they are also a psychological attack.

I believe that we should, generally, as a society, discourage communication in bad faith, and ads very, very easily fall into that category. So perhaps in a local sense it is worth it for the reasons you suggest, but I think the mass dependence of our society on advertising makes our lives worse.

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

#773

Post by nashashmi »

Sophira wrote: post #399
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…

> 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…

Use a comprehensive set of cookie blocking rules to avoid personalized ads. This sometimes means that facebook ad cookies and user profile cookies are indistinguishable. Use clear on exit in such cases. Or block third party cookies.

I dont mind ads that are native to the page. I mind adnets.

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

#774

Post by ndriscoll »

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…

The world's topmost universities (e.g. Yale, MIT) publish those same lectures on their own websites along with other course materials. We could demand public universities do the same for all courses. If they weren't part of monopolized platforms already, by now we'd probably have widespread p2p video chat (we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area), and it'd be unmetered just like phone calls. Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period, making everything up to 1998 available, or we could even shorten it to 10-15 years.

The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology. It's not ads that make it possible. Ads enable market capture that prevents other low-cost alternatives from proliferating. They raise costs to society.

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

#775

Post by v17 »

weavie wrote: post #729
wkjagt wrote: post #164

I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the mo…

I have ad blockers everywhere apart from the instagram app. I have bought a ton of stuff off the ads on there. I'm not proud, but have to admit I am powerless against them. Underwear, t-shirts, soap, online courses I have never used, I am a sucker, which is why I need these ad blockers.

If you have android phone, you could try Instander, even though the last update was ~3 years ago, works like a charm for me

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

#776

Post by augustk »

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…

Bill Hicks on Marketing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

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

#777

Post by guhcampos »

I'm with the developer here. At some point the effort is just not worth it anymore.

Facebook, as a platform, has long since lost the relevance as a social network, it is basically just an ad platform these days. So why keep wasting resources on trying to block ads from an ad platform? A user who does not want to see ads on Facebook probably should just stop using Facebook altogether.

I get the appeal for staying on Instagram, Youtube, Reddit and other platforms despite the ads: these provide some sort of - maybe controversial - value for the user, even if it's just cat videos or whatever. Facebook has lost its value proposition so long ago it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day.

uBlock's resources are much better allocated into other initiatives: like Chrome .

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

#778

Post by Retric »

bialpio wrote: post #701
andsoitis wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just take your seat 30mins later.

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

There’s movie theaters that do that, Alimo is the chain near me which does.

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

#779

Post by dofm »

lrvick wrote: post #650
dofm wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People sure do like to make excuses on why they still -must- use those platforms even though they do not -want- to. They are not always excuses and you really should understand that if you have tech industry experience. Try having a small business in some niches and doing so without Facebook.

I cannot think of a niche where one could not be successful without Facebook, but by all means present a specific example.

You can always hypothesise success without Facebook because if it didn't exist, people would find alternatives.

But it does exist, and in any town or city there are dozens of people running microbusinesses in competitive niches that rely on word of mouth and recommendation which is largely sustained through Facebook comments, "I'll message you!" and tagging in posts and photos.

Anyone in hustle culture — odd job/handymen, mobile hairdressers/beauticians/nail technicians, day workers, gardeners, plumbers, event photographers; Facebook is unfortunately crucial to keeping the doors open.

All of these people could have websites, but people don't browse websites. They could run ads in newspapers, but people don't look at those. And google is dead for stuff like this, listings and trade directories are not much good either.

At the lowest level of freelance income, Facebook is basically indispensible because it is the only social network with a regional basis and solid local group mechanisms, and because your both your customers and competitors are there. It probably sustains tens of millions of such workers.

This is where the tension lies. For sure I wish Facebook would shrink and that the web was healthier and people would understand the damage it can do, but "just don't use it" is not advice that works for millions of people.

It is Facebook that needs to change, through slow attrition of engagement with bait content and scam ads.

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

#780

Post by swat535 »

elzbardico wrote: post #769
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even when you want to pay for things, the companies will find ways to extract more money from you. Plex lifetime pass is now over $700 dollars My dashcam that used to let me use the app to locally pull down videos now requires an account to view the files on my camera that is putting out it's own password protected wifi network, just so the company can harvest more data and track me easier. This device cost several h…

Plex is just a nice UI and a DB wrapping lots of open source libraries and tools, you could replace it with a few days of AI assisted coding.

You can replace Plex with all its features and polish in a couple of days with AI?..
Post reply on HN