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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

#791

Post by burnte »

dylan604 wrote: post #319
burnte wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only use FB for the occasional Marketplace sale/purchase because the rest of the site is a cesspool of nonsense and toxic ragebait. It's impossible to only see your friends updates now, so it's lost 99% of it's utility. Letting people see how awful it is will force folks to either leave or Facebook to fix itself, which will never happen. It seems like execs prefer to drive companies into the ground and bankruptcy c…

The vast majority of FB users see the unfiltered site, yet they are not leaving contrary to your theory. FB does not seem to be anywhere near the ground or bankruptcy court. These are very strange things you're commenting about one of the largest companies on the planet.

FB is losing users, especially amongst younger demo groups. There's a wave of AI craptent on the platform driving people away. Google also sees high profits right now but it's from squeezing, not improvement and customer happiness.

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

#792

Post by tiznow »

balderdash wrote: post #705
titzer wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think my brain developed that as a defense mechanism. The web cultivated a certain kind of blindness where I literally don't look at certain parts of pages because my brain has learned that there is never anything useful there. Sometimes I just cannot see things unless I force my eyes to move across the page linearly, top to bottom. This is pathological. Like I find myself not ever looking at the top result in a se…

I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on an add on purpose on a website (I’ve definitely click on one or two a month because of dark patterns). I’m always perplexed as to who is clicking on them because like you they’re just noise I don’t pay attention to.

The same people who still pay for cable and get roped into spending half an hour watching an infomercial at 4am.

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

#793

Post by kaicianflone »

feel like we’re close to a customized compute era where ads get filtered out by default via something like a diffusion browser or diffusion based Mixed Reality. Feels like it’s already possible with LLMs with enough test time compute to RE endpoints users want to keep and exclude those they don’t.

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

#794

Post by genewitch »

Terr_ wrote: post #373
RunSet wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This browser extension is so inimical to online advertising Google (world's largest advertising corporation) banned it from the Chrome web store. https://adnauseam.io/ It loads every ad, and clicks them without display them. So the advertiser still pays for the click but the user never sees ads.

I feel that could easily backfire if your account or IP gets marked as an agent for malicious click-fraud.

I can't tell if it's adnauseam or the fact i use ipv6 that gets me to click traffic lights and busses all the time, but i don't care, click those ads!

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

#795

Post by genewitch »

inigyou wrote: post #407
RunSet wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This browser extension is so inimical to online advertising Google (world's largest advertising corporation) banned it from the Chrome web store. https://adnauseam.io/ It loads every ad, and clicks them without display them. So the advertiser still pays for the click but the user never sees ads.

Are we sure it actually works? That the ad networks think it's a real click?

who cares, though? they have to expend effort to filter their data if they don't want to give the wrong impression to the people giving them money. It increases friction.

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

#796

Post by whywhywhywhy »

doodlebugging wrote: post #101
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #77

The approach they should have taken is to start whitelisting the components that are not ads. Think of how the structure of Meta is gonna work, there's some team in charge of ads who has a sub team now in charge of messing with the ads to stop them being blocked. If you start whitelisting everything that isn't an ad you move the problem into an area the team in charge of blocking the ads don't have control over. High…

>Highly unlikely the team in charge of stopping ad blocking has swing... OT but I think I learned a new term today. Swing. In oil and gas we would call that suction so for future reference: Swing = Suction

Swing as in the political term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(politics) because the team wouldn't be the right place in the management structure to alter the rest of the page other than the ad units.

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

#797

Post by RestlessMind »

ndriscoll wrote: post #774
miki123211 wrote: post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 call…

> by now we'd probably have widespread p2p video chat

we still have it. WhatsApp video chat is the most widely used video chat app.

> we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area

Skype was barely present on mobile and got acquired by Microsoft before Mobile took off. Then it was as good as dead. So we have in fact progressed massively that anyone in Asia with a crappy handset and a decent connection can still have a video chat with anyone else in the world.

> Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period

And world would be so much better if no one was greedy. The fact is that we have not retained original copyright period and the reasons are beyond adtech, so what are you gonna do about it? Also, that doesn't solve the problem of long-tail content which is massively entertaining.

> The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology

Lol wut? Try running your own Youtube and you will discover massive technical problems (storage, network bandwidth, content moderation, discovery etc).

> Ads enable market capture

Google tried YT premium and look at its adoption numbers. It starts at 89 INR in India (less than a USD) and yet its adoption is minimal. 89 INR is cheap for at least a few hundred million Indians. People simply prefer ads over paying up.

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

#798

Post by mannanj »

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…

This doesn’t just apply to ads. It’s been a single piece of a larger systematic attack on your thinking.

Have people become more or less free over time as technology and progress came to help improve our lives and make things easier or more efficient? The average person, the same one most exposed to ad propaganda, are also exposed to propaganda in various forms in other areas of life. Even tv and music serve as propaganda for thinking malware and “worms”.

Spend a moment analyzing some popular mainstream music from the last decade for themes of culture, worldviews and others.

The big gotcha here is this: many people think OTHERS are under propaganda; and you yourself are not. And now you can get censored for pointing things out about this on social media.

In Covid I posted a nazi scientists quote on propaganda and got censored. Try it yourself.

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

#799

Post by genewitch »

everyday7732 wrote: post #667
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 b…

bigger influencers can pay money to get a list of companies that will drive more engagement when mentioned in a video, as the list is updated!

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

#800

Post by RestlessMind »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #746
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.

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.

That's for people and businesses to decide. Market clearly values Facebook a lot, over a trillion dollars in fact.
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