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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

#841

Post by mrguyorama »

mrngld wrote: post #673
dghughes wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mode…

>Traditional TV was ~40 minutes of content with 20 minutes of ads.

No! This is utterly false! TV for much of American history was about 9 minutes of advertising per hour of content. Then Cable came out with no ads at all. The US does not have a legal limit, so as our culture got more and more hyped about squeezing every single dime out of counterparties, companies have been increasing advertising.

In the 60s, companies were willingly leaving money on the table.

In the UK, you are still limited to only 9 minutes per hour of advertising.

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

#842

Post by mrguyorama »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #831
TheDong wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only alternative to ads isn't people directly paying cash to evil private companies. Like, the fact that instagram's average revenue per user is around $25 means that instagram ads are, on average, tricking people into buying 100s of dollars of crap they don't need. If the ads weren't successfully brainwashing people, eventually people would stop buying ads presumably. ... But yes, I agree people will generally c…

To add to this, government-run services can't absolve themselves of all wrongdoing with Terms of Service they can change on a whim. Censorship within government-run social media is subject to the restrictions placed on the government's control of speech. (Technically, the terms are still there but they're called Titles and Statutes and other things that require a bunch of ceremony and agreement to change, not just an…

It is funny to think about how a government run social network would look far more like 4chan than linkedin

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

#843

Post by ericmay »

okamiueru wrote: post #839
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use of non-sequitur doesn't apply It does, in precisely the way I described. Your comment was not engaging with the point they brought up. > The flaw in the premise is that you need Facebook or a government fun Facebook to do any of the things the OP suggested. This is not in their premise. Nobody "needs" it for those things, I will grant and have granted. Regardless, some still "use" it for those things. OP never…

If it is of any consolation. You are spot on, and saved me the effort (which had run out). I'd recommend to leave it alone as well, as it isn't worth it to try and explain logical fallacies. Or, heck, you do you. I'm just too old for it

Just saying "that's a logical fallacy" doesn't make it so. Running away from challenges to your stated opinions or arguments doesn't make them correct either.

If you really want to play this whole "logical fallacy" game, then I can start demanding sources and specific definitions of words used too and you can spend hundreds of characters defining specific terms so that your own discussion points aren't themselves some variation of a "logical fallacy".

Folks who toss those things around usually don't know how to use them correctly (as we see here with you and others) or they hide behind them when their various points are met with challenges they can't overcome.

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

#844

Post by underlines »

wvenable wrote: post #267

I wonder if it's time to step it up a little bit. We have all the LLMs that are great at looking at code and processing it so perhaps the future of ad blocking is letting the LLM handle it. Has anyone thought about building something like this?

Hyperpersonalized code to its rescue. With the qwen3.8-27b release tomorrow and the advent of vibe coding and the improvements into proper agentic engineering we are moving towards hyperpersonalized software. This means we don't need a centralized maintainer for smaller tools. the facebook ad blocking cat and mouse game is something I cna very well imagine to just be something my computer would solve in real time, updating the uBlock filter/userscript to adapt to any fb changes in near real-time.

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

#845

Post by mrguyorama »

tredre3 wrote: post #487
ProAm wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a small understanding as to how ads work and what they know.

Blocking ads is intended to prevent the ad network from tracking you. But: 1. Facebook already knows everything you see and do on facebook 2. Facebook is the ad network and serves its own ads. Therefore blocking ads on facebook won't prevent facebook from knowing everything you do. GP seems to have a fair understanding of the situation, care to explain why you think it's wrong?

>1. Facebook already knows everything you see and do on facebook

What you're missing is that, without good adblockers and possibly other tools, facebook also knows everything you do everywhere else on the internet.

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

#846

Post by samspot »

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…

Your comment is also an attack aimed to manipulate my worldview and actions. The only difference is the corporate ad is more sophisticated.

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

#847

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

okamiueru wrote: post #839
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Use of non-sequitur doesn't apply It does, in precisely the way I described. Your comment was not engaging with the point they brought up. > The flaw in the premise is that you need Facebook or a government fun Facebook to do any of the things the OP suggested. This is not in their premise. Nobody "needs" it for those things, I will grant and have granted. Regardless, some still "use" it for those things. OP never…

If it is of any consolation. You are spot on, and saved me the effort (which had run out). I'd recommend to leave it alone as well, as it isn't worth it to try and explain logical fallacies. Or, heck, you do you. I'm just too old for it

Yeah, I get it but always prefer to give it a shot. I know the person I'm replying to is not the only one who will read my comments. Cheers.

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

#848

Post by sterlind »

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…

alternatively, keep using ad blockers.

Facebook may have won this round, but AI tilts the balance overwhelming in favor of ad blockers.

consider: you can (in principle) scrape the entire screen, find the ads with machine vision and paste black rectangles over them. or simply have an AI use playwright to scrape the page and rerender it for you. these are excellent, pro-user use cases for AI.

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

#849

Post by zelphirkalt »

CrendKing wrote: post #298
thewebguyd wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Online advertising is less and less about forcing a pitch to conversion in the moment its viewed. Even if someone with an ad blocker would never click on the ad anyway, repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure. Six months or even a year from then, when that user is looking for a specific SaaS tool, for example, the brand they saw 40 times already is the one that feels established and safe, and…

But how to you quantify the effect of the exposure? How do you know a particular sale is converted through some impressions you put on Facebook six months ago, and not from a highway billboard one week earlier? If you can't accurate quantify the effect of each ad campaign with their conversion rate, you have no reason to put more funds into this particular Facebook campaign. So naturally it falls on Facebook to prove…

I think it's all a huge make-believe. They have a big name and marketing falls for it. If push comes to shove, they can just simulate click through and views and such, to "convince" people that it all works. They have all the user agent details of a user from years of browser-rape.

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

#850

Post by sicktriple »

lurk2 wrote: post #274
sicktriple wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> It probably would have been more helpful if you took the time to quote the particular part of my comment which you believe to be untrue. He did.

He literally didn't, but ok
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