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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

#861

Post by lrvick »

dofm wrote: post #779
lrvick wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/hand…

No Hypothesis needed. I lived it. I have at various points made a living with various combinations of PC repair, electronics recycling, museum displays, day labor, retail, trucking, telemarketing, street and restaurant entertainment, food service, mailroom work, vending machines, factory assembly lines, craft sales, construction, home AV, and I have probably forgotten a few. And those are just the low-tech gigs.

I called people, met people in person, sought out classified ads, made sure I was in the right parking lot at the right time to run into the right people.

I hustled to survive for most of my life, and I sure as hell did not need Zucks help to do it. In fact my web design clients were mostly small businesses that wanted to host their own websites to get them SEO and visibility that Facebook pages could not offer.

Again, everyone loves to make excuses for their dependence. I prefer independence.

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

#862

Post by EA-3167 »

WarmWash wrote: post #809
EA-3167 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I keep waiting for people to understand that algorithmic social media communities that serve ads and harvest info are pure poison. The problem is that everyone thinks they've got it under control, for them it isn't a problem or it's a manageable one. My personal view is that if you take a personal, not a preaching stand early and often people just learn that's who you are. I've never had a Myspace or FB or IG, or any…

>social media communities that serve ads and harvest info are pure poison. The biggest problem is that we have virtually zero cases of anyone dying from this poison after 25 years of it. When people step back and look at the lives of people who never spent the time to block everything, they see what 25 years of ingesting this poison looks like and...there is virtually no difference. If anything it's those types who s…

We have plenty of cases of people dying as a result of their social media use or someone else's, both in a somewhat direct sense (sextortion, other crimes that put the victim under immense pressure), or indirect sense (Mobs being whipped up online that riot and kill people, something not at all uncommon in parts of Africa and SEA).

You're also ignoring the enormous role that social media played in the rise of ISIS, and their ongoing recruitment and terror efforts. The "mommy bloggers" who share terrible, unmoderated advice ranging from somewhat harmful to downright lethal.

How many kids killed themselves as a result of bullying that followed them every waking moment through the net, almost always via social media?

You don't need a time machine to see the harm, if what you need to see is actually a body count. For the rest of us the psychological and behavioral impact is negative enough without needing to taking 'pure poison' overly literally.

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

#863

Post by RestlessMind »

ndriscoll wrote: post #822
RestlessMind wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 conne…

My point here is that the reason any of this stuff is possible is because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap. It's not ads that make it so anyone on Asia can have a video chat on a cheap phone; it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful and bandwidth is plentiful. Signaling a p2p call is cheap, and phone companies already do it for voice calls. Wasn't WhatsApp the one that had something like 10…

> because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap

underlying technology doesn't materialize out of thin air though. Google and Facebook have invested lots of dollars and engineering hours into making Youtube or Whatsapp video a seamless smooth experience for billions of users. That's why the technology seems cheap now. Early on, there were big concerns about Youtube profitability.

> it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful

Again, thanks to Android which was funded indirectly by ads.

> c.f. bittorrent

That is plain old theft.

> And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.

Curating partners have economies of scale. That's how you get Youtube. And for self publishing, you can see that most of the "self publishers" on internet are at the mercy of adtech giants (Google and Facebook) for distribution.

> destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service

That's why I cite Youtube premium. Google offered an ad-free option at a fair price and yet hardly anyone wants to pay for that.

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

#864

Post by Terr_ »

inigyou wrote: post #608
Terr_ wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should be careful to distinguish between "everything goes back to normal" versus "they you move your money to some other bank." Anywho, you're right that the final example is more-likely to be resolved, thanks to a formal customer relationship backed up by decades of law plus physical locations... but what about Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. where they sometimes don't even have any remotely responsive sup…

> what about Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Google Just quit them. They're all garbage anyway.

I kinda want my phone to keep working and stuff.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26390833

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

#865

Post by Retric »

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.

Go to a better movie theater and they don’t do that. Alamo Drafthouse movies have the old please keep quiet message, but if you show up 5 minutes late you’re missing part of the movie if they even let you in.

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

#866

Post by ndriscoll »

RestlessMind wrote: post #863
ndriscoll wrote: post #822

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point here is that the reason any of this stuff is possible is because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap. It's not ads that make it so anyone on Asia can have a video chat on a cheap phone; it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful and bandwidth is plentiful. Signaling a p2p call is cheap, and phone companies already do it for voice calls. Wasn't WhatsApp the one that had something like 10…

> because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap underlying technology doesn't materialize out of thin air though. Google and Facebook have invested lots of dollars and engineering hours into making Youtube or Whatsapp video a seamless smooth experience for billions of users. That's why the technology seems cheap now. Early on, there were big concerns about Youtube profitability. > it's that even cheap ph…

The underlying technology enablers are from companies like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, TSMC, Micron, all sorts of ISP/cell providers, etc. They're the reason why computers are over 10x faster than they were 10-15 years ago, storage is 1000x faster, networks are 100x faster, etc. The technology is cheap because of actual technology companies. You don't need a centralized service for video calls. You need lots of bandwidth between endpoints and some relatively modest signaling servers (similar to voice calling, which already existed).

Bittorrent does not equate to theft, and the point is it demonstrates that actually distribution costs nothing. The production of most media was paid for generations ago. It can be free or extremely cheap because it's literally free on the provider side. The thing that costs money is monetization.

The fact that self-publishers are at the mercy of ad companies is the point. The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.

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

#867

Post by Terr_ »

plutokras wrote: post #534
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 would be a killer feature for AR glasses. Imagine no billboards, no political posters, no neon storefront clutter.

> Imagine no billboards

Washington State has a ~1960s law which I think was pretty clever: Highway advertisements can only be for things someone driving by can actually on the premises under the sign.

That prevents the typical chains of billboards while making it pretty straightforward for actual stores. The law will probably need revision if/when someone tries to skirt it by putting in billboards with an attached symbolic vending-machine.

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

#869

Post by MetroWind »

All over the internet I saw this news title "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook".

Shouldn't the title be something like "Trillion dollar corporation forces small opensource project from blocking their attack against users' browser"?

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

#870

Post by TranquilMarmot »

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…

Deleting Facebook, Instagram, X (Formerly Twitter), and TikTok was the best decision I have ever made. I thought that I would really miss them but I just don't.
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