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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

#911

Post by wolvoleo »

dwedge wrote: post #674
wolvoleo wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They stop showing ads if you pay for Instagram in the EU. However they do not stop tracking you.

If you turn off personalised ads in the EU for insta they hijack your scrolling to give you "ad breaks" which is actually a really neat feature because it reminds me I've started doom scrolling and I close the app

Yep indeed.

I just wish I had the option they have in the Netherlands. Where you can set the "Following" tab as the primary and it doesn't constanly revert back.

A judge decreed that that must be done for users in the Netherlands but it's not available anywhere else.

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

#912

Post by account42 »

Mashimo wrote: post #693
alt227 wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s hard to replace local groups for me. Once you stop using them for a few months you wont miss them. Its all part of the game to keep you sucked in.

We just had 3 ladders stolen from our house. After a few days of wondering we posted in the local facebook group and got a respons after 5 minutes. Now we have them back. I do wish there was a valid electronic alternativ. Hosted in our own country. But here we are. Also nice for events.

I'd rather accept the ladder shrinkage than be subject to Facebook.

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

#913

Post by account42 »

ProAm wrote: post #483
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…

> Delete your account, get off that blasted site, This doesnt stop it. That what a lot of people dont understand. If you never had a FB, Insta, Whatsapp, etc... account, you STILL have a FB ad profile. It's worse than what people think.

It stops their most direct way of influencing you. There are always others (e.g. they can lobby politicians) but that is irrelevant to the question of you should let them into your home voluntarily.

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

#914

Post by account42 »

brulx126 wrote: post #907
account42 wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> their quality is much higher Hard disagree. At least commercial entertainment providers have to work to retain their customers, unlike public broadcasters where they get funded (either via taxes or forced licenses) no matter how many people dislike them.

It sounds like you are speaking from a theoretical perspective. In practice, there is not enough money in radio ads to put any effort in producing material of decent quality. As an objective metric, I found in Germany that the private stations literally broadcast at half the bitrate of the public stations where I tested it.

No I speak from a practical perspective. Publicly funded radio and televisions is pure cancer. I don't care about the bitrate they use to encode their crap when it's crap in the first place.

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

#915

Post by miki123211 »

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…

Video isn't free to host, not at scale. Look at how much providers charge for "video on your own site" services. Sure, you can bypass these providers and implement everything yourself, but that isn't going to be much cheaper. Storage, transcoding and egress just cost what they cost.

Movies and TV are video, hence they couldn't be free and without ads, just like they aren't on YT. Music seems much more believable.

P2P technology assumes no firewalls, plenty of IP addresses (and no CGNAT), no intermittent connectivity and no energy saving measures. P2p works well if you have a desktop connected directly to the internet via a dial-up modem with its own IP address, it works decently on an always on ADSL connection behind a router, on a cellular connection which mostly stays powered down to save battery life, it doesn't work at all.

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

#916

Post by dofm »

lrvick wrote: post #861
dofm wrote: post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

And things have changed.

People don't answer cold calls! They increasingly don't read emails. There are no classified ads worth a damn. They work from home! They ask AI more than they google.

The remaining stuff is on Facebook.

It is pointless arguing people shouldn't look to Facebook to find these kinds of jobs and get those recommendations, and preaching the morality of independence to, say, a gel nail technician who makes all her money from friends recommending her and social media photos of her work, is nonsense.

I hope you're not the guy who tell people who are on the breadline that Facebook is bad and they should use classified ads. Because that guy sounds old and out of touch.

It doesn't matter what we think of Facebook (and instagram, and to a smaller extent other social media); it is crucial to networking.

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

#917

Post by account42 »

Gareth321 wrote: post #590
KennyBlanken wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly? Reddit is a massive public manipulation platform. Consider that the daughter of the guy who purposefully weakened his product's encryption on behalf of Mossad (and was considered a hero of the state), the same daughter who was rubbing elbows with the world's richest and most powerful people, was a reddit powermod with moderation power on a huge number of major subreddits . Anyone who thinks that the ~500 mo…

I couldn't agree more. I suspect 80%+ of all comments now are bots. Paid for by the highest bidder. The entire front page is undoubtedly bought and paid for, as well. Subreddits are only allowed to survive if they don't threaten the paid for messaging and advertising.

But that makes the login requirement just odd. You'd think they want to push their manipulation to as many people as possible.

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

#918

Post by account42 »

beloch wrote: post #335
dofm wrote: post #310

This is the correct decision, IMO. I only use Facebook in a limited capacity (one phenomenal private group whose usefulness is unfortunately simply unmatched elsewhere, one infrequently updated page and a very locked-down, minimal personal profile). I think people need to understand what the purpose of Facebook is in terms of its function and constituent parts, in the Stafford Beer sense, and I think if enough people…

Where Facebook has gone, I fear other U.S. social media is headed. Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in, which suggests they're doubling down on user tracking. On top of that are the increasing privacy, censorship, and disinformation concerns that come with using any U.S.-based social media. There is clearly a need for facebook/reddit alternatives for useful groups like the…

I'm honestly surprised that there isn't a successor platform to Reddit overtaking yet considering how far they have gone with the enshittification.

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

#919

Post by account42 »

Gigachad wrote: post #493
beloch wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where Facebook has gone, I fear other U.S. social media is headed. Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in, which suggests they're doubling down on user tracking. On top of that are the increasing privacy, censorship, and disinformation concerns that come with using any U.S.-based social media. There is clearly a need for facebook/reddit alternatives for useful groups like the…

Social media in general is doomed. Adverts, invasive tracking, and AI slop have killed it. Rather than creating tiktok but open source, we should just dump the idea entirely. Social media was a net negative to society.

It all depends on what you count as social media. We had platforms before "social media" was a term that would now fall under it for many people and I am not eager to get rid of all of those. Sure, burn the algorithm, the centralization, etc. but I will keep talking to people online both privately and semi-publicly.

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

#920

Post by globalnode »

gh02t wrote: post #239
globalnode wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and thats why you lock down your privacy, so they get nothing other than "generic privacy enthusiast #1000101010101"

Good luck. I'd wager that most methods to protect your privacy aren't nearly as effective as we think they are. While I don't think it means that you shouldn't try to protect your information, I typically assume that anything short of very extreme measures is only mildly effective.

im constanty being asked to fill out captchas (which i close) and am accused of being a bot by many of the sites i visit, so i guess im doing something right?
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