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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

#921

Post by account42 »

alex1138 wrote: post #355
dylan604 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> not leaving It's hard to leave a monopoly, and you can't contact your friends any other way https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 Anecdotally, someone I know deleted their account, had it reactivated (the site did this) and now they show up on People You May Know. Plenty of other people have tried deleting it and found it nigh impossible

I think its more accurate to say that it seems hard, which admittedly is likely enough to get a lot of people to not try.

Friends you can only contract through Facebook are not very deep friends.

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

#922

Post by account42 »

insin wrote: post #562
SCLeo wrote: post #377

As much as I understand their decision, I hope they didn't stop. I don't use Facebook myself but now I am worried YouTube now knows that if they try a bit harder uBO would just give up.

Given that YouTube already has a suite of anti-adblocking checks in their UI code [1] (e.g. submit a fake request to the /player endpoint and see if anything removed the ads from it - which also tells you exactly which fields you need to remove from which request, lol), I don't know why they don't have someone looking at the latest filters and reacting to them. Twitch did that a while back and uBlock Origin was ineff…

YouTube could also only let you download the main video after you downloaded the ads AND waited however long the minimum ad time is. They don't really need to play games with ad blockers if they want to get serious.

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

#923

Post by account42 »

kotaKat wrote: post #272
MrDrMcCoy wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your country has sold your safety to private interests. Demand better from them.

I can't. They spent hours listening to the citizens tell them not to enter a 187(g) with ICE and then they spun around and immediately voted to approve the 187(g). Citizens are powerless, period here, and they keep voting in the worst possible interests because the leopards haven't ate their face yet.

You can always demand.

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

#924

Post by account42 »

Marsymars wrote: post #151
sleepybrett wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the immediate fix to this is to stop using facebook. If your local government are using it to publish whatever useful infromation, it may be possible to sue them on the grounds that publishing their public 'good' on a private platform exclusively is against some kind of public records law. Alternatively, eventually they will publish where the audience is, if the audience is not on facebook then they will publish some…

> the immediate fix to this is to stop using facebook. Sure, but that relegates my old but perfectly functional macbook to the trash. There's literally no functional alternative to fb marketplace for getting used goods re-used at any kind of scale.

Give it away to an acquaintance? Find a physical store that will take it? List it on another platform (yes they exist)? Put up a flyer at your nearest university? So many options besides "trash it".

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

#925

Post by ndriscoll »

miki123211 wrote: post #915
ndriscoll wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Not at scale" is kind of the point; there's no need for one company to host everything. If I were so inclined I could host Netflix quality streaming off my home Internet connection to my entire neighborhood with a selection of thousands of movies for about the capital cost of a new iphone.

Centralized services aren't going to make intermittent cellular connections somehow work for video chat. You need reliable bandwidth to the endpoints for that. AFAIK cellular devices are almost all ipv6 already.

I brought up p2p in that context, but if one wanted to also do movies, my understanding is three's already software you can put on a raspberry pi/SBC/spare computer to act as a torrent->stream relay.

The fact is "implement everything yourself" is already done. There's already off the shelf free software for this stuff.

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

#926

Post by baking »

ssernikk wrote: post #526
askvictor wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exists for facebook.

Can you give us a link or something?

I just installed Facebook Feed Filter on Firefox. Seems to do the trick. It hides recommendations and sponsored content.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-feed...

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

#927

Post by germandiago »

account42 wrote: post #899
germandiago wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those apps where you share pics or whatever would not exist without ads if people had to pay for them. So I am not sure if all is bad in that sense. Bc it lets the apps for sharing without people having to pay to exist in the first place. I am not doing any assessment regarding to the toxicity of ads. I am just trying to objectively say that this also spreads "horizontally" software for free in some sense.

> Those apps where you share pics or whatever would not exist without ads if people had to pay for them. This is a wild assertion. Were we not able to build roads before billboards were invented? Does your telephone company interrupt your call with ads? Does the postal service open your letters to insert a leaflet with promotional offers? What alternate universe do people who claim this live in???

They would exist, but would be less spread. I am not saying it is good or bad. I am saying that if the barrier to entry is lowest, more people can reach it.

This is a fact with almost anything that you look at around you, not only software. Any incentives in general.

Also, people prefer to have ads than to pay for something. You will say ads are worse or whatever, and you can be right. But the fact is that people that do not pay for software have no problem in being monetized. Otherwise free apps would not have users and paying apps would have a lot. But the reality is that paid apps have a higher barrier to entry from the point of view of users reached.

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

#929

Post by RestlessMind »

account42 wrote: post #888
RestlessMind wrote: post #800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The market would also value sacrificing children to moloch if that were allowed.

your comment is irrelevant and in fact contradictory in the context of the parent comment I was replying to: "if people don’t want to pay for a thing, it’s probably not worth a whole lot "

What is "worth" is ultimately decided by the market.

What should be allowed, like sacrificing children, is decided by the society. Two very separate topics.

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

#930

Post by RestlessMind »

ndriscoll wrote: post #866
RestlessMind wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

> The underlying technology enablers are from companies like Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, TSMC, Micron, all sorts of ISP/cell providers, etc

And they exist because of demand from the consumers. All those providers have no incentive to invest and upgrade their offerings if there is no demand. Said otherwise, without the likes of YouTube and Whatsapp video chat (and many other ad-funded social media apps), we would be stuck in 2010-era infrastructure.

> You don't need a centralized service for video calls.

Need is a funny word. You need a centralized effort to enhance the user experience of video calls which is very expensive. And very companies have resources to pull that off and offer a great experience for free. Only 3 I can think of - Google, Facebook, Apple (via Facetime). Only Apple is not ad-funded and they keep it to their devices only which is for rich people. Ad-funded products at least made it available to the entire populace.

> The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.

I gave you a counter-example to your thesis about Youtube Premium which was offered at a reasonable price. Its failure shows that predatory pricing is an excuse - real reason is that people simply prefer to not pay.

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