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Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

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Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#81

Post by ethbro »

badgers wrote: post #22
locklock wrote: post #11

I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.

That reminds me of a quote about dentistry: "You're in a career where nobody wants to see you and you're the last place they want to come back to and it's depressing." ( https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/5344jz/are-dentists-rea... )

One of my father's quips, "There are only two kinds of jobs: those where everyone is happy to see you, and those where everyone is mad to see you. Be the UPS delivery person, not the process server."

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#82

Post by eropple »

matz1 wrote: post #59
armandososa wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on something like this (but at a very much lower scale, of course) and it's fun at first but then I realized that my whole job was making users experience worst and I was miserable for as long as I had that job. I swore not to work on anything advertising-related ever again.

Yea of course it's not for everyone, everyone have different concern, but I could see myself work on this if it paid well.

Perhaps reconsider.

"If it paid well" externalizes the ills it inflicts on other people. And they matter, too.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#83

Post by duxup »

locklock wrote: post #11

I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.

It sounds like a fun challenge.

It's just ads. If we're talking about some ad for a coffee maker, whatever.

Now their whole selling data to unscrupulous folks, taking money from parents via their kids, selling fake news that makes people hate other people (now that gets into the ad space...) ....

That's where I'd want to nope out.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#84

Post by tvanantwerp »

minimaxir wrote: post #50

This example is likely not specifically targeting ad blockers, but ad scrapers for transparency: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp... > Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” That article also links to this tweet in that paragraph.

> We have collected more than 100,000 political ads in this way. But Facebook’s latest update blocks tools like ours from clicking on the “Why Am I Seeing This” menu.

> The company added code that prevents clicks generated by computers — including browser extensions — on just that one button. Web browsers make a distinction between a click generated by the computer and one generated by your mouse. Clicks from your mouse are marked “isTrusted“ and those generated by computer code are not.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#85

Post by osrec »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #76
jordan801 wrote: post #12

Anyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is. Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my "for fun" scraper. It's also really not that difficult to write a smart scraper that you say, "Look for these things in this post. However you find them, replicate it for the others". Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp scraper do. If there's a pattern, I wi…

That works for a single iteration, but if there are multiple implementations that are randomly chosen when rendered it's a lot harder. Pretty easy to build a randomizing span algo that you can't hardcode.

Not really. We have scraped many sites successfully that try this randomisation logic. There is always a pattern, which often can be determined via heuristics. It does make things trickier, but not impossible or especially difficult.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#86

Post by plussed_reader »

spyspy wrote: post #35
locklock wrote: post #11

I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.

Ethics aside, this actually sounds kind of fun to me. It's the kind of clever puzzle solving many of us love about programming - it's basically a cat and mouse game.

Just like training AI!

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#87

Post by IronWolve »

I use mobile version in a browser. Its faster and less fluff. I should have did this years ago. Facebook tries to make you use the mobile client for msg'ing, I just hit desktop view, and use the webpage, but really, I hardly ever use FB messenger anymore since they forced the requirement.

I was tempted to just use RSS feeds of groups I like, I dont like how FB reorders the feed for their purposes either.

Make your site crap, and I'll just strip it and view it the way I want.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#88

Post by chucksmash »

peterangular wrote: post #68
jordan801 wrote: post #12

Anyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is. Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my "for fun" scraper. It's also really not that difficult to write a smart scraper that you say, "Look for these things in this post. However you find them, replicate it for the others". Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp scraper do. If there's a pattern, I wi…

100% true. Have written PLENTY of scrapers and methods like this are ultimately ineffective. Even if you absolutely mangled the HTML/selectors/DOM/etc. I feel you could always have it process screenshots of the interfaces to rip text/figure out how to interact etc. If it's human readable, it's bot readable imo. (but in years of botting it's never came to this - I've always been able to figure out how to use the exist…

+1. At a previous employer we fed images of interest from the web into Google's OCR API to see what we could see. In addition to scene descriptions, the API will transcribe any text it detects.

With all the easy to use tools available to programmers today, it would not be terribly hard to use OCR on a screenshot to find the text of interest and derive the scraping code by searching for the OCR'd text in the markup.

If none of your extant parsers can extract the info you want from the page, send it to OCR pipeline (or, hell, Mechanical Turk) and generate a new one.

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#89

Post by nickv »

packetslave wrote: post #80
driverdan wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't figure out what team you'd be working with until after you are hired That sounds like hell. I need to meet the team I'll be working with before accepting an offer. It's the only way to know if they're competent, can communicate, and are not assholes.

> I need to meet the team I'll be working with before accepting an offer. It's the only way to know if they're competent, can communicate, and are not assholes. This is exactly how Facebook's onboarding process works (at least in engineering). You spend 3-4 weeks in "bootcamp" classes (React 101, IOS 101, etc.). After that, you spend another 3-4 weeks auditioning teams -- you sit with teams that have open headcount f…

Is this process for new college grads or senior engineers? I can't imagine principals go through this process, do they?

Re: Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

#90

Post by moojd »

ahoy wrote: post #40
ceejayoz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do when regulators come calling with significant penalties.

There are no significant penalties at this time.

No, but there more and more lawsuits filed every year over website accessibility issues.

https://www.adatitleiii.com/2019/01/number-of-federal-websit...

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