They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of ` ` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.
Who would file an ADA suit for a screen reader being unable to correctly read an ad?
The same ambulance-chasing lawyers who are already filing spurious ADA suits today.
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…
Out of curiosity, what sort of conversations on Facebook are still happening? I used to be informed about events, announcements from organizations (including government ones, which is absolutely ridiculous) and extremely rare updates from real people I know. And that would sort of reel me in. Now whenever I log in, the feed is mostly some sort of rage-bait adjacent slop. The useful stuff simply stopped breaking through. When I go to the pages directly, there are some news, but my feed didn't show them. So when I realized, that there is no salami left in this turd sandwich I simply stopped checking in.
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.
Yes and no. It's hard to escape ads even by paying for things, with cable TV being a common (though increasingly outdated) example.
What you pay(paid) for cable TV was never enough to actually cover the total cost of the service you were receiving.
You were splitting that cost with the advertisers.
This is not a defence of advertising, just a reality check on this bad example.
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.
Yes and no. It's hard to escape ads even by paying for things, with cable TV being a common (though increasingly outdated) example.
In European countries websites (various, mostly news), I'm seeing more of "Accept all cookies and ads" OR "sign up and pay".
They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of ` ` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.
Last I tried writing custom rules for Facebook was years ago, but they did have proper aria attributes, and uBlock origin does have selectors for text content. These are from 2020: facebook.com##span:has-text(Suggested for You):xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..) facebook.com##div[aria-label="Sponsored"] span[aria-label="Sponsored"]:xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../…
you can use upward. For example
facebook.com##span:has-text(Suggested for You):upward(8)
You don't actually need to click on an ad or purchase something from an ad site in order for Facebook to make money selling ad space. The moment these ads are loaded on the page, real time auction occurs, where advertisers place bids algorithmically and automatically, based on your profile. Facebook makes it's money by selling this ad space. It doesn't particularly care whether you click on them or not. But if they d…
That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them. If ads are loaded or not is also often verified by independent third party trackers that you have to embed on your page next to the ad. There's whole industries built on this stuff and it's not as simple as "we sell the slot and don't care if people see it or click on it".
> That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them.
You'd be surprised at how opaque and complex ad attribution and ROAS calculation has become for the average business, and how many marketing departments are operating on high-level metrics without having an intuitive understanding of how their ads are performing. Many of them rely on the ad networks' own metrics to determine ad performance, and don't even have their own internal attribution models.
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…
> Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain. Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer. The fact that some of the richest companies in the world are the criminals does not make it less of a crime. The propaganda part is, of course, also totally…
> Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer.
The ads themselves don’t do that. Some networks running those ads might.
They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of ` ` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.
> so it's very hard to write selectors against This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?
It keeps changing all of the time, so it might be easier to have Facebook load up in a headless browser, that takes a screenshot and sends it to an LLM and uses that to convert into a standard JSON document that can be rendered nicely. Or something like that.
We should also normalize paying for content at the same time then.
All that achieves is companies introducing ads to boost revenue for next quarter's earnings. For a concrete example: LINE (most widely-used messaging app in Japan) has paid subscriptions, and even the highest tier subscription doesn't reduce ads. Other services (e.g. YouTube Premium) reduce ads, but do not eliminate them, no matter how much you pay.
> Other services (e.g. YouTube Premium) reduce ads, but do not eliminate them, no matter how much you pay.
Hmm curious to know where you live that you still get Youtube-supplied ads with YT Premium?
Because "ad-free" is literally the headline feature.
Unless you're talking about in-video ads and sponsorships added in by the video creators themselves, and then that's not something in YT's control (although they provide the "skip commonly skipped sections" feature in Premium that helps with this).