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jimrandomh 8 hours ago [-]
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 ads or leave Facebook, I'll leave. But there are conversations people have there that I'd rather not lose access to, so... I guess I'd have to partially stick around and campaign for others to leave as well?
Sophira 4 hours ago [-]
> 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 isn't enough for me. I don't just want to not see the ads, I want to stop them being fetched entirely.
There are two big problems with ads.
* The ad network can build up a very complete profile of what you like, dislike, and generally what you're looking at on the web. Yes, that profile is "anonymised" so far as it goes, but in reality, that doesn't really matter. If you know what you're looking for, there would be enough tells in the data that can de-anonymise you. Covering up the ads doesn't stop this data being collected; it merely stops you wanting to click on the ad.
* Ads are a very common malware delivery system, and although nowadays it's probably less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it, there are instances of it happening in the past. Stopping ads from being fetched entirely would obviously prevent this.
nerdsniper 4 hours ago [-]
> less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it
This one replaced users clipboard contents with a particular bitcoin wallet address. So a few people who happened to be on their way to send some crypto pasted the malicious wallet address instead of the one they actually copied to their clipboard. This has stolen at least $100k so far.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
Facebook is the ad network for Facebook. Will not fetching ads from Facebook really stop Facebook from knowing your age and location?
ProAm 37 minutes ago [-]
You have a small understanding as to how ads work and what they know.
tredre3 22 minutes ago [-]
Blocking ads is intended to prevent the ad network from tracking you. But:
1. Facebook already knows everything you see and do on facebook
2. Facebook is the ad network and serves its own ads.
Therefore blocking ads on facebook won't prevent facebook from knowing everything you do.
GP seems to have a fair understanding of the situation, care to explain why you think it's wrong?
smegger001 44 minutes ago [-]
Layers of defense, whats needed is the vision model detection, then those elements need to be uploaded to a crowd sourced blocklist so they can be prevented from loading to begin with.
ButlerianJihad 4 hours ago [-]
Furthermore, ads are a resource drain that should not be taking over our personal systems.
The web started as this proposition: you send a request to remote computer. Request says "Hey... can I read a document named this?" and the computer shows you the document. Now this may have included images and external links and sound, and whatnot.
But today, the web is more of an application delivery system too. So many requests go "Hey... can I have a resource by this name?" and the remote computer may send you a lot of source code that basically demands to run on your machine in order to get that resource.
And advertisements are piggybacking on those resources. They are a "package deal" where they are saying "you wanna read this text? you gotta take all this extra stuff with it."
And is it any surprise that coinminers are unleashed and other unpleasant things come down the pipe? Big fat videos and huge images are hogging resources.
So here's the bottom line: I don't need to use the web for free. I don't intend to freeload anyone's site or resources. But I also don't want them freeloading on me. I'm not going to download their crap; I'm not going to run their programs; I'm not going to occupy my own system's resources to display their ads when I don't want them.
So it seems fair to block "ads" that are asking to use my resources without paying for them. So I would prefer not to transact--at all--with any remote system that wanted to freeload on my resources in exchange for worthless information, like news, or forums.
chongli 58 minutes ago [-]
But today, the web is more of an application delivery system … I would prefer not to transact--at all--with any remote system that wanted to freeload on my resources
What I really want is a non-executable web. I first started using the web in the mid-90s and most websites were like that. HTML, images, colours, fonts (but only from a pre-defined short list), and the occasional sound. If a site used JavaScript at all, it was for trivial stuff such as rollovers (which can now be done using CSS only).
I’d like to go back to that situation, maybe not exclusively but as a separate option. Give me a non-executable web of text, hyperlinks, images, videos and sounds (but no auto-play), CSS, forms, and web components (that can be targeted by links and fetched without refreshing the entire page) so we can do really nice discussion forums, web mail, multimedia encyclopedias (think Encarta) and other server-rendered resources, all without client-side scripting.
It doesn’t even need to be a different protocol or anything like that. It would be enough to have an otherwise modern browser but with no JS engine and a search engine that only indexes pages that lack JavaScript so that they render and function correctly on that JS-free browser.
Naturally, the search engine would miss a lot of the spam sites out there because they all rely on JavaScript. It would also miss many legitimate sites that rely on JavaScript but that’s okay.
It would create a space for JavaScript-free sites to get attention and develop a community. It would of course allow commercial sites, but they’d have to rely on display advertising and traditional marketing (targeted audiences based on subject matter) rather than behavioural tracking. This was the kind of advertising used in magazines and newspapers. It was far less obnoxious but still quite effective when the audience was large enough. It also demanded a lot more creativity from the ad industry, as documented in the show Mad Men.
bitpush 3 hours ago [-]
> Request says "Hey... can I read a document named this?" and the computer shows you the document.
Did you not skip over a lot of steps in between?
User: Hey can I read a document named this?
Server: Sure, let me spend resources and spin harddisk and lookup the thing you wanted. Oh hey, I found it .. here ya go
User: Great.
----
You've conviently ignored the resources the "old" web had to spend to serve you. Nothing has really changed it. Also the thing you wanted, that was "source code". We just called it html. It is no different than javascript+css+html5.
ooterness 3 hours ago [-]
This argument makes no sense, because the CPU and disk resources required to serve up a modern ad (and the megabytes of JavaScript that come with it) are 100-1000x more expensive than just serving up the content.
ButlerianJihad 3 hours ago [-]
I did not intend to omit that, but the origin of the web was in a peer-to-peer, collaborative Internet that no longer exists.
Yes, the server resources that were necessary to serve web pages are the origin of advertising, because the admins somehow had to keep the lights on and their bills paid. I don't fault them for this. I don't begrudge them for being, basically, forced into carrying advertising because the freeloading users wouldn't settle for any other way. Advertising allowed a "free web" to continue unabated for a long time.
But advertisements don't need to be resource-intensive on the client side. They don't need to eat gobs of bandwidth, CPU, memory, or our eyeballs. But the fact that they do chew up these resources is partly for why they need to die now.
Server admins can pay for their resources however, and offset their costs however they please. I'm fine with subscription or pay-per-use models or whatever. I honestly have very little use for ad-supported models, and my daily web habits are such that I really don't visit ad-supported websites at all, except for YouTube, where I normally pay for a Premium subscription to completely eliminate all formal ads, anyway. And that's the way it should be.
titzer 8 hours ago [-]
I think my brain developed that as a defense mechanism. The web cultivated a certain kind of blindness where I literally don't look at certain parts of pages because my brain has learned that there is never anything useful there. Sometimes I just cannot see things unless I force my eyes to move across the page linearly, top to bottom.
This is pathological. Like I find myself not ever looking at the top result in a search, because that is where Google has been putting ads.
Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it.
magicalhippo 4 hours ago [-]
I was asked to test the redesigned web page of a large bank. They had eye tracking cameras and such hooked up to study how I used the web page.
They ran through some scenarios, and one was how to get a car loan. I studied the homepage and found nothing, then clicked the menu and found loans, but no car loan on the loans page. I ended up searching and found it.
After each scenario they asked me some questions, and the first question I got for the car loan scenario was why I hadn't clicked on the link on the front page. There was no link, I replied puzzled. There was a large image they said. I stared in disbelief.
The person running the scripts navigated to the homepage, and pointed at the screen. There, at the bottom, a blinking banner about car loans.
I replied that it must have triggered my mental ad blocker, since ads are typically banners, frequently near the edges and animated somehow, so I never even registered the banner.
They looked genuinely puzzled at my response.
This was 25 years ago. My mental ad blocker is still active, though uBlock Origin on Firefox takes care of most of them.
For me physical ad blocking is more about a first-line defense against malware and such than it is about getting rid of obnoxious ads. The latter my mental blocker does fine enough, though it can be annoying.
rescbr 3 hours ago [-]
I guess it’s ages of fake download button ads in download pages.
My instinct is “if it is an ad, then whatever it is offering is a scam”.
TeMPOraL 7 hours ago [-]
> Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it.
It's not computers that are the problem, it's people.
We've normalized (and even embraced) the situation where relationship between businesses and customers is adversarial. The phenomenon you're describing, known as "banner blindness", is just brain filtering out noise, but the thing is, that noise didn't get there by accident.
What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.
zero_shift 6 hours ago [-]
> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings
This is a thought I want to pull on
I have a view that organisations, with their network of misaligned incentives, mean that companies act something like an alien lifeform. Something with a decentralised brain, unable to plan beyond immediate stimuli
Companies consume and self-cannibalise. They are both aggressively rational in pursuit of profit but irrational when it comes to preserving their ecosystems
Many companies look like groups of people where nobody has total control. Everyone is reacting to some stakeholder, even the CEO is terrified of "the shareholders". So these organisations cut off healthy limbs (layoffs), engage in lurid rituals (AI), and wastefully destroy the natural resources of the humans who work for them
I first heard this idea in a James Bridle lecture, where he suggested that the strange behaviour of companies was a good starting point for understanding what an alien lifeform might behave like. And he observed the ways that humans and machines now mirror each other.
Inside our society, controlled by these aliens, humans act like machines (Taylorism at work, self-censorship for algorithms at play). Machines act like humans (AI, spam, computer programs mediating relationships).
Underneath it is a frantic need to quantize everything so it can be dominated
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
I remember recently they polled workers about AI pressure: "the AI doesn't work very well, but my boss wants to see me using it." They polled the boss: "I didn't say they had to use it, they're choosing to use it and this'll look good to the executive". The executive: "well this costs a bunch but it'll look good to shareholders and we should encourage more use so it'll look even better." The shareholders: "do we look like we give a shit?"
k1m 4 hours ago [-]
This reminded me of an old documentary about corporations: "If we look at the corporation as a legal person, it exhibits all the characteristics of a psychopath" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5hEiANG4Uk
The relationship was always adversarial for all history. Bakers used to mix sawdust with flour to profit more. The only counter has been regulation and oversight.
titzer 3 hours ago [-]
> all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.
Local incentives. Every single person and entity is just maximizing their gain against the rules and rewards. The way you become really powerful and rich is to create an organization where all the local incentives keep funneling to you, sitting at the top.
bitpush 6 hours ago [-]
> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.
This is a simplistic way to think about it. Even the most altruistic physician needs to advertise their services if they hope to make a living out of it. Even the best film maker, the best actor needs to "hit the circuits" to promote their movie.
"Make and they'll come" is only possible if you're already successful. Apple can chose not to advertise, since they are Apple (although they do plenty of advertising themselves).
kcexn 7 hours ago [-]
I mean. That's how profiteering works for the most part. Extracting wealth from people who don't know better is many times easier than creating more wealth for everyone.
Gigachad 29 minutes ago [-]
These days ads are woven in to content itself. It's most obvious on youtube where youtubers are paid to talk about products and disguise it as reviews or informative. Or other content creators happening to show something mixed in with the normal content.
Soon they will be woven in to LLMs where they suggest the things they are paid to suggest.
xattt 4 hours ago [-]
> I think my brain developed that as a defense mechanism. The web cultivated a certain kind of blindness where I literally don't look at certain parts of pages because my brain has learned that there is never anything useful there.
I’ve fallen victim to this when I was doing coursework in the last decade.
Either a moodle module or a block of text in box in a textbook had something important to the concept I was learning, but I subconsciously ignored it because it had a format similar to an internet ad.
cptskippy 7 hours ago [-]
I have this same affliction and have used ad-blockers for as long as I can remember. People seem to associate importance or quality with clutter. The more there is going on, the better it must be. My brain has just learned that certain page elements are never going to bring value and therefore don't exist.
Very rarely I'll come across a page where valuable information is hidden in those areas and it takes someone else showing me to actually see it.
It loads every ad, and clicks them without display them. So the advertiser still pays for the click but the user never sees ads.
Terr_ 5 hours ago [-]
I feel that could easily backfire if your account or IP gets marked as an agent for malicious click-fraud.
devilsdata 4 hours ago [-]
Don't threaten me with a good time.
Terr_ 4 hours ago [-]
The problem is the creepy big-data-advert-ocracy might propagate that scarlet-letter in ways that are unfair an unpredictable.
So a throwaway account for reading Reddit (even as it decays) might lead to an totally unrelated account you do care about getting unfairly suspended, or the MonopolyCloudFlareBot "helping" your bank starts rejecting your IP/browser-fingerprint, etc.
This would worry me less if we had laws that make it easy to demand accountability and fixes, but we don't. (Not much in the US, and in the EU efficacy is still questionable.)
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
Go to your bank branch and say I can't access my bank account.
Terr_ 39 minutes ago [-]
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 support system or nearby physical branch?
Basically I'm saying we have some Kafkaesque stuff out there, it isn't sensible or fair, and if someone wants to tweak the nose of the beast they should at least consider the range of what could go wrong.
ethimalw 7 minutes ago [-]
Oh cool, one more feature for the "Malware that quietly launches a copilot image query every 10 seconds in the background" idea bank. It can quietly click every ad too!
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
Are we sure it actually works? That the ad networks think it's a real click?
One interesting thing is that it also removed some "internal CTAs" to engage (like "Start your day with our podcast!"). These aren't technically ads, so something like uBlock doesn't remove them. But honestly, I don't really mind having those filtered out too.
stubish 4 hours ago [-]
I'm hoping those NP chips ending up in some new computers will be able to run something like this. Thanks for your work!
A general purpose system, especially if trained by the users, would be more than just an adblocker. It could be trained to block out spiders or other phobia triggers for instance. Even regenerate the photo but with a kitten. Blur our tabloid clickbait 'in other news' links.
The killer app for AR glasses will be blocking out billboards and logos.
neves 1 hours ago [-]
This arms race ends with regulations preventing big tech practices that are nocive for human beings:
- no disguised ads. They must be clearly marked
-limit screen real state dedicated to ads
- what the user didn't explicitly asked for, is an ad
We can't wait for companies to "do no evil". What would you ad to the list?
pbhjpbhj 7 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile, aren't companies already making screen captures to check for presentation (on 'smart' TV at least)? The presence of the output can be required, and it can be tested by hashing or some such (within the monitor, signed by TPU) without need of privacy violations.
We'll have to have an overlay screen that is a separate device. Then your meta-glasses will be snitching on you ...
Mind you some glasses with a built in ML module could block all ads, not just on-screen ones. Rich people will see the World as green and pleasant and make gestured enquiries as to why we don't want to eat brioche!
8note 7 hours ago [-]
almost guaranteed that those ad blocking glasses would be DRM-ed out of being able to read anything
safety1st 57 minutes ago [-]
> If my choices are to look at ads or leave Facebook, I'll leave
I'm reminded of a simple observation about negotiations: the one who's willing to walk away is usually the one with the upper hand in the negotiation.
I think this is a choice we need to be considering on every level right now. What technology are you willing to walk away from? Fundamentally from my perspective the operating system and browser are *user agents,* they are pieces of software I permit to exist on the device I own because they do my bidding. The major manufacturers have perverted these user agents to a previously unfathomable degree under the presumption that you won't walk away and they can just keep on boiling the frog.
I'll walk away, in fact I feel like the more I walk away the better my life becomes. Switching to Linux a decade ago was more than worth the headaches considering what colleagues using Windows now have to put up with. Staying on Firefox + uBlock has been worth the headache vs. what people without a reliable ad blocker have had to put up with. Turning off my phone completely for a growing portion of the day has totally been worth it for peace of mind and freedom of distraction.
At this stage my relationship with technology seems to revolve heavily around the principle "how do I minimize exposure to technology produced by the largest American crime syndicates (Google, Microsoft, Meta etc)." This may be a radical or absolutist view but frankly my life is way better for it
adam_arthur 7 hours ago [-]
You can already do this with smaller LLMs, like 10B range. The computer vision/image interpretation has been sufficient at this magnitude for a few months now.
Can run on most decently powered consumer devices.
Latency not great vs ad block though, of course.
Perhaps a fine tuned model explicit to this purpose could be even more compact.
k1m 4 hours ago [-]
That's an interesting idea to try as a browser extension. I think Facebook is particularly egregious here, so I doubt you'd need to run something like this on other sites. But if it worked fast enough on just Facebook, it would be useful.
frollogaston 3 hours ago [-]
I'm like this with YouTube. It's fair that they don't want me blocking ads and will try their best to prevent it. If they ever succeed, I'll leave without complaint. Already never use it on my phone cause adblocking is annoying on there.
phoghed 2 hours ago [-]
I just pay them a pittance in exchange for no ads for the whole family across all devices.
2 hours ago [-]
platevoltage 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah. It's the only streaming service other than Nebula that I pay for, and I use it enough that they're probably paying out more to creators than they're getting from me.
zero_shift 6 hours ago [-]
> I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be.
I don't know if I am the same. But I do find it very difficult to use an internet browser with no adblocker.
Perhaps it's because I have now spent more time using browsers with blockers, than without
denismi 2 hours ago [-]
I have not used an adblocker for many years.
Ad servers seem to generally just nope out of serving me ads on their own when I have Firefox's tracking protection cranked up.
Between that and Kagi down-ranking shitty ad-infested domains, it just ... isn't really a problem for me.
wildzzz 7 hours ago [-]
Sites will start streaming in the whole webpage using DRM so the only thing that can actually see the ad is your monitor.
TeMPOraL 7 hours ago [-]
We'll definitely need open models here, because proprietary AI services can (and I imagine will) be set to detect invisible watermarks in the ads and refuse to filter them out.
(It's almost obvious extension of current AI image fingerprinting efforts. If a robust invisible watermark can be used to tell the image was AI generated, the same scheme can also be used for general DRM.)
asadotzler 3 hours ago [-]
That's far more costly, requires an entirely new setup, and a whole different set of expertise from what most companies have today. It won't happen because the cost benefit analysis just doesn't work out.
TacticalCoder 5 hours ago [-]
> Sites will start streaming in the whole webpage using DRM so the only thing that can actually see the ad is your monitor.
If it comes that, I'll put my real monitor in front of that DRMed monitor (doable with flat screens) and I'll have a private LLM, in real-time, pushing on the real monitor (the one I look at), an ad-free version of the DRM'ed monitor.
DRM is nasty but private AI models are already more powerful and they'll only ever got better. And those open-weights are never ever going back in the box.
lovich 25 minutes ago [-]
> 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 think fandom wikis appear to have surpassed even this level of bad which I thought was the floor.
I’ll look up a character or lore and fandom has managed to SEO their way to the top of search. I’ll click on the link because I haven’t trained myself to avoid them immediately yet. I’ll then have a site load that immediately makes my pc fans take off like a vtol engine or make my phone start overheating to the point that it dims like the luminosity to protect itself as it reloads ads over and over and even reloads the page.
If I am willing to abuse myself enough to stay on the page to scroll down it then waits until I go to click on a link to immediately load an ad where I clicked and treat it like a real ad click.
At this point with the modern internet I do not know why any marketing department trusts the metrics they are getting from websites for click thrus. Every ad I’ve clicked on in the past year has been a trick on me and not a real click thru and has made me hate the company paying for the ad.
It feels like it’s nearing 100% fraud.
Wolfenstein98k 1 hours ago [-]
Are they cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realise, or are you just uniquely cognitively damaged by them?
ajkjk 7 hours ago [-]
I'm hoping we can mostly ban ads in my lifetime (on the basis that companies should not be allowed to freely try to manipulate unconsenting strangers. and that it makes the world suck to live in and we don't have to put up with that). Nothing would make me happier honestly.
geye1234 3 hours ago [-]
“If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behaviour in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction.”
― Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
joshuat 3 hours ago [-]
This would also mean a lot of currently "free" services becoming paid in some other fashion, which I think people would be equally up-in-arms about.
I'm no fan of ads and I am willing to pay for services I use to avoid seeing them - but I've learned over recent years that most people simply do not agree with that premise.
Gigachad 21 minutes ago [-]
I'm fine with that. The revenue per user per month from ads is so small that the fee to use services wouldn't have to be that large.
And overall society would get cheaper and more efficient since all that budget allocated to advertising would vanish with no consequences. Advertising is mostly a zero sum game where you have to advertise to get ahead of the other businesses advertisements. If companies stopped getting in to bidding wars for the top place on google, all of that money could be freed up for something useful.
ajkjk 1 hours ago [-]
Sounds great. Ideally things are beholden to the value the process for the customer rather than to their ability to trick people into clicking on them (SEO optimization etc) in order to get money indirectly via ads. Some form of micropayments will be necessary to support independent sites, but that sounds great also. Anything to get rid of the perverse incentivizes of advertising.
I'd also like to see astroturfing / promoting things for money without disclosing it explicitly illegal. Again, anything to stop systematic manipulation.
Yaa101 3 hours ago [-]
And the paid services that at some point do show ads?
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
Who's we? Politicians?
ajkjk 3 hours ago [-]
Well, the populace. But yeah presumably via politicians. It certainly might require winning a few elections.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Does that system actually work?
ajkjk 1 hours ago [-]
Yes.
teravor 7 hours ago [-]
I expect the end to be a custom client for an in-demand site such as facebook. when you visit it your custom browser (or code injected into google chrome) will pull all the actual content from the site page you are on and display it with its own template.
Escapade5160 4 hours ago [-]
Nah, we will find a way to scrape those conversations and distribute elsewhere.
bookofjoe 7 hours ago [-]
Whatever cognitive damage I've suffered since joining Facebook early on seems to have had the effect of erasing my awareness of the damage.
tshaddox 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Surely a better way to think of this is that a person's AI agent will simply find, via whatever means necessary, the information that the person is interested in. It's hard to imagine the person will still be operating on the old "pull" model where they deliberately visit a specific website or open a specific app.
RajT88 2 hours ago [-]
Hate all you want. This is the level of Microsoft Scout at the moment.
I tell it what sites to go to, and the information I am interested it, and it grabs it using Playwright.
I am hoping I can get a self-host option working as well as this.
polski-g 5 hours ago [-]
I want to support things that are useful. So I whitelist Fandom wiki in my ad blocker... Good God it's like an infected IE browser from the early 2000s with 8 toolbars.
How do people use the Internet like this? Why isn't there just a single banner ad at the top, like how Altavista used to look?
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
Fandom isn't a good thing that is useful. It's internet pollution for money, it's just another SEO slop site wit slightly more useful content. Most of the wikis with actual content moved away years ago, of course Fandom keeps presenting their last versions to try and squeeze some more traffic out of Google.
modzu 3 hours ago [-]
you mean a rectangle over the entire page?
aanet 12 hours ago [-]
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 not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely. Delete your account, get off that blasted site, and enjoy some moments of peace IRL.
Having been a very early adopter of FB (since ~2004), I deleted my account and am clean + sober + much happier since 2016.
(Not to say that I'm completely out of the FB ecosystem. Unfortunately, my fam is still on WhatsApp... and I've been trying to convince them to migrate to Signal...)
YMMV
deepsun 6 hours ago [-]
I've migrated my fam by just refusing to use it at some point "sorry folks no facebook apps on my phone". It was kinda hard when I needed something from them, but once they needed something from me they had to install my preferred communications channel.
Gigachad 20 minutes ago [-]
Your family members don't have a phone number you can call?
frollogaston 2 hours ago [-]
I like FB Messenger because all the state is stored on there instead of being annoying about E2EE. My group chats aren't important enough to need security, but I still don't want them getting randomly nuked like has happened on Signal and Whatsapp.
ProAm 34 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
aanet 21 minutes ago [-]
Yes, I am very aware of FB shadow profiles and such. And believe me, it troubles me more than I can say. [This was known in 2015-2017 timeframe, afaik.] That, and the fact that one can't do much about that.
What one can control is not paying attention to the damned site. [Many more added to that list, btw]
EA-3167 6 hours ago [-]
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 other sort of account like that. To all of the people who say they can only stay in touch that way I just said, "I'm available via text, phone, chat group, Discord, email, Signal, and half a dozen more ways. If that isn't easy enough then maybe we don't need to keep in touch."
The only reason I can imagine seriously engaging with those things is as a business owner who watched FB railroad them into advertising there or being screwed, and happily I've never been in that position.
So yeah... at some point you have to accept that most people will happily dig in, and even most people who have qualms will find ways to justify why it's ok FOR THEM. You just have to make your own choice and stick with it, firmly and politely.
aanet 15 minutes ago [-]
> You just have to make your own choice and stick with it, firmly and politely.
100%
That's the way to go.
And tbh, not being on FB hasn't affected my social life. I'm in touch with people {friends | family | colleagues | etc} the way I want. And if I miss any social events, that's Ok. No FOMO here. Mostly JOMO.
2 hours ago [-]
TacticalCoder 5 hours ago [-]
> At some point, you realize that the only way to not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely. Delete your account, get off that blasted site, and enjoy some moments of peace IRL.
Exactly. Not only do I blocklist every known Meta domain at my DNS (I run the unbound DNS server at home) I also took all the IP blocks from Meta's ASNs and have automatically blocked them at the firewall level.
And I did that before doing so was, like now, just one LLM prompt away.
1 billion people are on Telegram: they may not be much better than WhatsApp but Telegram does not have Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and is not worth 1.5 trillion.
Really: just fuck the Zuck and his PHP/JavaScript ecosystem. Just get off, entirely off, that crappy abusive ad-ridden, surveillance ecosystem.
Delete your accounts today.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
Telegram is much worse for privacy than WhatsApp. Signal is better.
liendolucas 12 hours ago [-]
Gold advice. People should get out of there and enjoy more of their free time!
aanet 12 hours ago [-]
Indeed.
It saved me net an hour or more or mindless scrolling every day. Every single day. Not to mention the benefits of no more FOMO, better mental health, etc. AND left me with more time to actually accomplish things I wanted to do but somehow thought I never had the time.
The thing is: you have to find + allocate time and attention (= your most precious resource) to the things that matter most to you.
Since then I've been working on my online learning (30+ courses done, including several DL/ML certifications), read more books, and most importantly, focused on my health by working out nearly every day.
Small wins individually, but they have compounded greatly over time.
anal_reactor 1 hours ago [-]
In general the internet has become shit so I try to just use it less.
akersten 16 hours ago [-]
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 `<div>` 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.
neuralkoi 16 hours ago [-]
I recently found this out the hard way. Instagram’s web app has a super annoying popup. To click the comments button for a post, your cursor has to pass over the username, which just happens to launch a profile preview with the “follow” button exactly where the comments button was, causing you to unintentionally follow the account.
I tried to block this popup with uBlock Origin to no avail. No matter what element I selected, it was still there. Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.
zenoprax 15 hours ago [-]
A counter example: I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday but it turns out uBlock can filter out the ads, boilerplate, sidebars, join/login buttons etc on the main site. It's actually faster and more usable than the old site now.
Small win.
m348e912 15 hours ago [-]
>I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday
It appears to still be up for me. ??
spidercat 13 hours ago [-]
"anonymous" is the key word. old.reddit still works (though it seems to get progressively jankier), but it's now requiring a login.
chokma 13 hours ago [-]
It was activated for my region yesterday and it did wonders for breaking my reddit addiction.
Then I tried the normal view and ... wow, so many auto-playing video ads disguised as regular posts.
KennyBlanken 2 hours ago [-]
Reading the claim that they're requiring login to old.reddit.com "for safety" made me laugh out loud.
When are they going to admit that the redesign sucks and there's a reason everyone keeps loading the old reddit interface? Who has the ego that can't handle the truth, that their UI/UX design is garbage and loathed?
The random phrases turned into links that are never helpful means I can't trust any link in comments now, there's that stupid AI box that never has useful or helpful info, conversations are a nightmare to try and read through.
I will never understand how it is that a site which exists almost entirely for conversations, made a new UI that severely fucks with "read the conversation."
shawn_w 13 hours ago [-]
You now have to be logged in to reddit to use it.
kotaKat 14 hours ago [-]
It's A/B tested across IP ranges, geolocated regions, etc. I got it super early and it sucks being locked out for the past 2-3 weeks now.
esseph 14 hours ago [-]
Not sure there's been a hard date publicly set but they are sunsetting it
8note 7 hours ago [-]
nah, now it loads maybe 3 posts at a time and the latency is really slow to pull up those 3
dayone1 15 hours ago [-]
How do you filter it out? Do you select each element individually?
greenleafone7 15 hours ago [-]
Best move you could have possibly done.
titzer 8 hours ago [-]
> Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.
The real fix!
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
Never delete your account. That account has a bunch of associated signals that scream "real user". Therefore you should sell it on an account marketplace to a spammer, if you really hate the platform.
cindyllm 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
srcnkcl 15 hours ago [-]
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
c-hendricks 16 hours ago [-]
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(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)
facebook.com##div[aria-label="Sponsored"]:xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)
pimlottc 13 hours ago [-]
What's with the xpath selector? Is that just matching deeply nested elements?
c-hendricks 10 hours ago [-]
Going from memory, but that's how many elements are in the tree between what I wanted to be hidden and where the matching text/elements actually lived.
pimlottc 5 hours ago [-]
Oh jeez, I hadn’t thought about the blocked element being different than the aria-tagged one. What a nightmare
acabal 15 hours ago [-]
But can't they just use an xpath expression to test the computed text content of a node, like `/path/to/ad/div[contains(., 'sponsored')]`? In that expression, there could be any number of nested elements inside the terminal `<div>` and it wouldn't matter. (And you'd probably have to use a regex test to account for tricky white space.)
JumpCrisscross 16 hours ago [-]
> so it's very hard to write selectors against
This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?
pjc50 15 hours ago [-]
The power cost of doing this widely would be staggering, surely?
Terretta 15 hours ago [-]
Worth a white paper to see which costs less energy, using Apple's built in LLM, or downloading and displaying all the FB ads using radio, playback, and screen animation energy.
StableAlkyne 15 hours ago [-]
Local models are not the same as the giant ones in data centers. They're in about the about the same ballpark as running a AAA game on max settings.
Sure, it's more computationally-expensive than running an HTML selection, but it's also not "staggering" by any reasonable stretch.
rmwaite 14 hours ago [-]
I think “staggering” is a pretty accurate way of putting it if blocking ads is in the same ballpark as running a AAA game on max settings.
StableAlkyne 14 hours ago [-]
If the computational requirement is within the realm of another normal day to day task, and if it cannot generally achieved with another cheaper approach, it would be contradictory to say it is staggering.
I would agree if this was an easily solvable problem with classical approaches. Clearly it is not, since even uBlock is giving up.
At any rate, "staggering" is relative. White-labeled web browsers becoming the most common GUI engine would have made an engineer's eyes water 20 years ago.
frandroid 14 hours ago [-]
Blocking ads should not make my fans spin at full blast.
StableAlkyne 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it's pretty awful that Facebook has made it such a demanding task.
ASalazarMX 10 hours ago [-]
"Honey, I want to buy a gamer PC. This one is too slow to block Facebook ads."
mkeedlinger 15 hours ago [-]
Depending on the model, I’m guessing it’s dwarfed by just about any electron app
toomuchtodo 15 hours ago [-]
Apple Intelligence? I mean, you're only processing for the time your "AI|browser|agent" is acting as a firewall between you and Meta. Cache locally after processing and filtering. Use alongside the accessibility API. LLMs can, in many cases, reliably solve CAPTCHAs. I find it difficult to imagine they cannot defeat Meta ad blocking countermeasures.
Who would file an ADA suit for a screen reader being unable to correctly read an ad?
timbit42 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe reverse tactics and block/hide anything that isn't something you want to see.
A1kmm 7 hours ago [-]
Or an unauthorised access / exceeds access to a computer system prosecution in at least one jurisdiction somewhere around the world.
If the owner of the system has a 'no ads' policy and a security mechanism to prevent ad servers from accessing their display without their authorisation, it is one thing if a company accidentally circumvents that by changing their page in a way that breaks detection (and unless there are records it was deliberate) they probably get the benefit of doubt from authorities.
But if they are blatantly going to quite great effort to circumvent the adblock security system to exceed their unauthorised access without the consent of and against the wishes of the owner of the client system, surely that's a clear-cut criminal case?
Of course, prosecutions of these types of things in many countries unfortunately tend to go after individuals who target big companies, but almost never the other way around.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
We need to figure out how this is actually DMCA circumvention. That one seems to have teeth.
kazinator 8 hours ago [-]
> very hard to write selectors against.
Or was hard to write selectors against before, you know, AI.
It seems ironic to give up now. You can probably rig up an agent to automatically look for new div labyrinths and write selectors for them.
You can bet Facebook are using AI to generate these labyrinths!!!
15 hours ago [-]
benj111 15 hours ago [-]
Could you not just go after the deeply nested spans? I assume they aren't messing up everything else like that.
mcintyre1994 15 hours ago [-]
Based on inspect element on their homepage, they probably are.
esseph 14 hours ago [-]
> I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.
So what you're saying is: you want Facebook to pay out something like $200M which is such a small amount it won't even realize, $170M will go to lawyers, everybody else gets $1.30.
That seems like how it might pan out.
wkjagt 13 hours ago [-]
I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the money that's put into circumventing ad blockers isn't really generating more sales.
It's like a door to door sales person thinking that if only they could find a way to unlock my door I would buy their stuff.
sicktriple 12 hours ago [-]
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 don't load in the first place, there's nothing for Facebook to sell.
The real insideous part is that advertisers don't need to actually bid on the auction to participate, and anyone participating gets to havest your ad profile. This is one of the big ways data brokers are able to build profiles on you. They can then do whatever they want with this info, and you'd probably never know.
dewey 12 hours ago [-]
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".
enragedcacti 7 hours ago [-]
Ad placements can still appear to perform if the targeted user was already planning to buy the product and Google/Meta attribute the sale to the ad impression they shove in at the last minute. FortNine (a Canadian motorcycle gear retailer) published an expose and seem quite convinced that this is an extremely common occurrence. It would also justify why Meta would be so aggressive about showing ads even to an unreceptive audience.
I mean you are both right, it's been a few years since I have been in adtech, and it isn't black and white. There are few places that will pay for stuff that isn't clicked through, but there are places that are willing to pay on an impression basis for things like video or images. It's just like not worth it to most places to throw those ads on their property since it's fairly low quality advertisers.
More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.
tomnipotent 11 hours ago [-]
The teams spending the kind of money these ad networks care about are doing a lot of upper funnel brand marketing where exposure is more important than clicks and where conversions are expected to be much lower for this segment of spend.
rented_mule 10 hours ago [-]
The largest brands (Walmart, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, etc.) put a lot of analytics into their ad spend. I worked on an ad platform with a large audience that these kinds of brands wanted to get their name in front of, but the audience was exceedingly unlikely to click on big-brand ads on our platform. The brands figured this out quickly and pushed hard for cost-per-click rather than cost-per-impression because cost-per-click was essentially free brand marketing for them, even if they were paying $100 per click.
The next tier down was kind of the opposite. They weren't big enough to surface things like this, and they hired agencies for most of their ad spend. When focusing on the top of the funnel, there's this strange incentive with agencies where they often get more budget to spend if they can connect that directly to eye balls. Agencies are incentivized to throw the ads up everywhere and pay well to do so. They love cost-per-impression because we could deliver a large, predictable number of eye balls in a hurry.
All that said, we put no effort into getting around ad blockers as we were serving these ads on our own site/app and we viewed fighting ad blockers as fighting our users. Our ads were served inline in HTML, but clearly identified in the HTML of the page. It took blockers a while to catch on and block them, but they eventually did.
tomnipotent 7 hours ago [-]
The further away you get from direct marketing where you can track conversions, and the further up the funnel you go, the less and less analytics help. Another way to think of it is that there are tranches of spend - the central tranche is easily attributable direct marketing but there's a limit to how much you can efficiently spend, but the further from the center you go the less effectively you can measure the efficacy of the spend but there are more options to absorb ad dollars.
Maybe 15 years ago multi-touch attribution was the big push but even that only adds minimal insights into how ad spend affects the behavior you're trying to measure. It helps with high-level channel attribution but it's still at best directional.
So once you reach a point when increasing spend at Meta/Google results in superlinear increases in CAC vs. spend, you eventually end up having to move those ad dollars elsewhere and over time (and a lot of money) you get an intuitive understanding of how these other mediums trickle down to the metrics that matter.
You're totally right about agencies and their perverse incentives and how that leads to sub-optimal spend allocation.
kazinator 8 hours ago [-]
They will not book them once they learn they have been defrauded for a while.
sicktriple 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lurk2 9 hours ago [-]
> It probably would have been more helpful if you took the time to quote the particular part of my comment which you believe to be untrue.
He did.
cryzinger 7 hours ago [-]
> If youre referring to whether or not Meta "cares" of you click and ad or not, then fair play. I'd argue that's more or less semantics, but ok, they do care and there is indeed an entire industry built on them caring.
This also depends on whether ads are being sold as "pay-per-click" or "pay-per-view" (although in the biz they say "impression" rather than "view"). For the latter, websites like Meta who sell ad space only get paid when people actually click on them.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
An AI wrote this comment.
Barrin92 9 hours ago [-]
>whether you click or not doesn't change the fact that there is still ad sales happening in the background
if nobody clicks on the ads nobody's going to buy ad space because people who place ads care about whether their ads translate into sales. So of course Facebook cares, and ultimately only cares about how many people respond to them because how much money they'll make depend on how much money the ads make.
That's why FB has invested ungodly sums into trying to figure out the preferences of their users.
kazinator 8 hours ago [-]
I would say, then, that Facebook is perpetrating fraud. They are knowingly defeating ad blockers to sell ad space that they know will not lead to any click-throughs and conversions.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
They don't know that, and it probably isn't true.
tristor 12 hours ago [-]
This is correct, and the extra insidious part is that folks who are tech-savvy and privacy-conscious are more valuable profiles than normies, because we generally work in higher income jobs/industries. So whether we click or not is irrelevant, Facebook gets paid more for showing us ads than they do for typical normies.
globalnode 12 hours ago [-]
and thats why you lock down your privacy, so they get nothing other than "generic privacy enthusiast #1000101010101"
gh02t 12 hours ago [-]
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.
gopher_space 10 hours ago [-]
One of the biggest problems in software development is that our graph of authoritative personal data is cyclical. You might have heard about how difficult it was for someone erroneously declared dead to change the record, and I'm sure most of us have experienced problems with changing an address. A friend recently went through two name changes and one phone number change, and it took like eight months for the bottom-feeders to realign.
We are now in an adversarial situation regarding our personal information, but our adversaries depend on sources we have a modicum of control over. If I signed my dog up for a physical mailer, I wonder how long would it take for a portion of the internet to consider Doctor-Professor Kensington a legal individual.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
I've tried signing up for bank accounts with deliberate typoes in my name. It worked. Name didn't match the ID they had me scan. The Revolut sign-up form randomly ignores keypresses so that's my plausible deniability. I just intentionally didn't correct them.
7 hours ago [-]
thewebguyd 12 hours ago [-]
Online advertising is less and less about forcing a pitch to conversion in the moment its viewed. Even if someone with an ad blocker would never click on the ad anyway, repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure. Six months or even a year from then, when that user is looking for a specific SaaS tool, for example, the brand they saw 40 times already is the one that feels established and safe, and it's more likely to lead to a conversion without ever clicking the original ad.
The second part of putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers is tracking & fingerprinting, especially across devices.
In general, ads work by anchoring a brand name in your memory for when you eventually are looking for said product or service, the goal isn't always to force a conversion on the spot.
titzer 8 hours ago [-]
> repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure.
This is exactly why I don't want to see their shit, ever. It just doubles my resolve to not see it. They are targeting my underbrain, my subconscious, and do not want it.
There's one particular insurance company that continued to evade my ad blocking attempts for literally years. I will never buy from them. My current insurance is fine and the ad-mongers can get bent until their business dies.
Gigachad 11 minutes ago [-]
That's logical, but the parent comment "I'm immune to ads, I won't click them" falls flat because no one is immune to ads. That's why it's such a big industry.
CrendKing 7 hours ago [-]
But how to you quantify the effect of the exposure? How do you know a particular sale is converted through some impressions you put on Facebook six months ago, and not from a highway billboard one week earlier? If you can't accurate quantify the effect of each ad campaign with their conversion rate, you have no reason to put more funds into this particular Facebook campaign. So naturally it falls on Facebook to prove to you that their ad socket is actually generating conversion, by not showing the ads to people who is least likely to click through ads when shown.
consp 11 hours ago [-]
What if the conversation is negative? I have very little patience for halfbaked ads disguised as posts. Some companies just show what they are and sell, but too often these days it's a memey post-like advertisement which will be a negative the next conversation "ah, yes that company with those annoyingly fake ads, just like their [product]". But I do not rule out I'm the odd one out and the people deciding the tools to for upon people fall for those ads.
tomnipotent 11 hours ago [-]
It doesn't matter if your personal interaction is negative if on the whole it's positive across a larger corpus of users. By and large this exposure tactic works more than not.
allthetime 11 hours ago [-]
Ads do a lot more than advertise. They track and collect data about you without you interacting at all. I don’t use an adblocker to not see ads, i use an ad blocker to not load ads or interact with their providers servers at all.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
Facebook does that, even when you aren't seeing an ad.
Terr_ 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I'm less-concerned about seeing an ad than I am about the spyware/surveillance networks behind them.
If some magic-genie offered the tradeoff of "You can't install third-party adblockers, but your privacy will be magically guaranteed", that would be really appealing.
__MatrixMan__ 8 hours ago [-]
Ads are a type of malware, they're often used to bootstrap more aggressive types of malware.
The door to door sales person wants to unlock your door so they can sell the info to somebody else who shows up and steals your TV.
tshaddox 7 hours ago [-]
Advertising is and always has been a fundamentally adversarial relationship between the consumer and the publisher. Everyone knows that, with few exceptions, no one ever wants to see ads. So I guess I'm not sure why you're surprised that advertisers still want to show ads to people who would rather not see them. That's everyone.
Lammy 13 hours ago [-]
Ads are for surveillance as much if not more than they are for money
criddell 13 hours ago [-]
Presumable the ads on Facebook are served by Facebook and they know who you are and what you are doing on Facebook.
darig 13 hours ago [-]
[dead]
axus 12 hours ago [-]
I believe that, as long as you add that the surveillance is also for money.
dfee 12 hours ago [-]
in that money is the atomic unit of economic control, sure.
government's don't surveil for money, unless you bend the argument a bit to say the government has finite resources and is run off money itself. which is kinda true, but also kinda fuzzy (the Fed).
axus 9 hours ago [-]
I don't think governments are the majority buyers of the surveillance, no doubt they buy a little bit.
rchaud 9 hours ago [-]
The biggest buyers of ads are not promoting products, they're shilling for politicians. The same way junk mail props up the postal service, political ads keep the lights on at local TV channels. They are unwatchable during election season, and there's some election campaign happening all the time. Mayors, governors, senators, congress.
Facebook and Youtube are just the newest battlefields. If it's not politician ads, it's military ads, partisan "nonprofit" ads, or ads for podcasts. I don't need to see any of them.
That said, as long as UBO keeps up the good fight on the open web, I'm good. Facebook is basically a memory now, and there are other ways to access Youtube that are actually less taxing on their bandwidth because they don't have auto-play enabled and don't show a 45-minute podcast episode as a pre-roll.
SvenL 13 hours ago [-]
Aren’t ads payed also via „impressions“, like 10k people saw your advertisement so please pay x money?
teshaq 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, but if a user doesn’t convert the advertiser will see worse performance metrics as cost per click/conversion/install is higher. That isn’t a good long term outcome for the platform, since advertisers can switch their budgets elsewhere (to Google/Youtube)
There’s a delicate balance, more impressions isn’t always a good outcome. Id assume here given the battle against ad blockers that the platforms do believe the aggregate impression mix leads to good performance for advertisers though
13 hours ago [-]
seattle_spring 13 hours ago [-]
Partially, yes. Ads are also psychological, and tracked cross-platform. If you see a BMW ad on Facebook, drive by a BMW billboard on the highway, search BMW on Google, and then go buy a BMW, they have ways of fractionally allocating the conversion to the different impressions. It's pretty crazy.
StilesCrisis 11 hours ago [-]
I always thought last-click attribution was generally used even though partial attribution was technically possible. But my info is a few years stale.
GuB-42 7 hours ago [-]
First thing is that Facebook makes money by showing ads, not by selling the product shown on the ad.
Second thing is that besides a small minority of people who refuse to buy advertised products out of spite, some would be blockers still do if the ad get shown. Maybe less than those without ad blockers, but still more than zero.
Third thing is that the point of advertising is not just direct sales. Some companies put up ads just to "take space", to establish themselves as leaders in their sector and not let others in. That's why you see som much advertisement for Coca-Cola. They don't expect you to buy a can of Coke just after you have seen the ad, you probably already have some in your fridge anyways. But by doing that, they make sure that when you want a drink, you think about Coca-Cola and not something else.
sodapopcan 12 hours ago [-]
I don't like ads and don't want to buy random stuff, but they totally work me sometimes, and I'm sure there has got to be many like me. It's one of the big reasons I don't go on social media really anymore. I mostly have willpower, but in moments of weakness I'll see a perfectly targeted ad, it'll be for something affordable, and I'll but it. It was never a big problem for me as it's only happened a handful of times, but everything I've bought this way has been useless and I've gotten rid of it all.
StilesCrisis 11 hours ago [-]
Story time? I want to know about the useless items.
sodapopcan 11 hours ago [-]
lol, no, it's mostly embarrassing :P Well, they included a silicone sponge and a massive blanket.
robocat 8 hours ago [-]
Did you notice any change in the adverts targeting you after an impulse purchase?
sodapopcan 4 hours ago [-]
Good question but I honestly can't remember, even though it wasn't even that long ago. I've given up services slowly over the past few years, but since I used all the big stuff: Google search/email, instagram, and facebook, and am (still) addicted to YouTube that the ads were already soooooo specific to me that I doubt they got any more specific. I would assume that after I bought that stupid sponge that didn't work I probably got more cooking ads, but I honestly can't remember.
I've mostly ditched everything but YouTube now. Honestly, just not using Google seach and gmail makes a HUGE difference in how targeted ads get. I still have an instagram account that a very rarely check, but since I'm not a big cookie blocker, I'll see ads for stuff I was recently searching for. Oh! And I feel like one of those "I don't have a TV" people from the 90s, but I no longer carry a smartphone either. I haven't bought anything from an ad in a few years at this point. It likely still counts but the closest is buying something a YouTuber has recommended from a video I sought out for an interest I already had.
nemomarx 12 hours ago [-]
Do we no longer habitually install an ad block for friends and family? There's gotta be some naive users with an ad blocker that way, or default within brave or whatever
StilesCrisis 11 hours ago [-]
They are no longer handling Facebook in the ad blocker. Installing an ad blocker won't help.
hn_submit 12 hours ago [-]
I believe tracking and privacy invasions cannot be solved through technological means, it needs to be solved through laws and regulations.
We need to prod our representatives to ban the selling of our private information. Websites themselves can use the information but they're prohibited from selling it to anyone else. Why? Because the data changes hands and borders several times after which we lose all control over it.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
It can be solved through technological means, but these ones aren't sufficient. I remember how that Luigi guy tried to solve a different problem by technological means and it worked for a few months.
creatonez 12 hours ago [-]
> is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway
Even cringy ads that digust or anger users in the moment have a subtle effect of making them more likely to buy or recommend that brand in the future. The name recognition is what advertisers are buying, it doesn't have to immediately persuade the user to click for them to get what they want.
kakacik 13 hours ago [-]
I go a bit further - if something penetrates firefox + ublock origin combo, I'll go out of my way to make sure I'll never, ever buy such product or service if I can avoid that (not always possible but reasonably frequent).
Its quichotesque effort but the only thing that can move the needle a bit since everybody involved cares only about money here - waiting for some toothless legislation is useless when harm is happening now.
kevin_thibedeau 11 hours ago [-]
There is a ton of shady stuff that UBO let's through. Some of it can be filtered with the optional lists but not all. You really need NoScript and LocalCDN in the arsenal to pare back the invasive abuse of privacy.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
Literally nothing works through NoScript any more since all the bootcamps started teaching React.
jaharios 11 hours ago [-]
100% higher up decision, I bet they loose more on this than the powerpoint slide says they are earning.
charcircuit 7 hours ago [-]
>someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway
This is not true. Most people with ad blockers are everyday people. And even for people who are hardcore against ads, they may find a useful product or see something that they will think of again in the future.
thrownaway561 12 hours ago [-]
ads are like billboards. the company doesn't make money by making sure your buy the product, it make money by getting the product in front of you. You might not buy the product today, but there is a chance that since you've seen the product, you might buy it in the future.
many of times, i have looked to purchase a product or service and remember an ad that i saw that has alter my decision.
stubish 4 hours ago [-]
And by raising awareness, they cannibalize sales from their competitors. So their competitors have to buy ads to compete. And everyone ends up spending lots of money, which consumers pay for. And that is why I gravitate to cheaper, unknown brands when the market allows it.
dofm 7 hours ago [-]
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 simply can't avoid that truth, it will eventually shrink.
Adblocking lets some people pretend Facebook isn't a privacy hellhole for everyone they talk to. There is essentially no way to use it that doesn't abuse your data privacy, for one thing, but prolonging the impression that it can be ameliorated is a mistake.
beloch 6 hours ago [-]
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 one you describe. There are things like Mastodon out there, but they haven't gained much traction. What will it take to get people off of platforms that are actively hostile to their users? What is keeping existing alternatives from being used?
joshuat 3 hours ago [-]
I find the fall of Reddit to be particularly upsetting. In its prime it was one of the best social networks I'd ever used and I found incredible value in it - but after having my app blown up by their API changes and the continued (unsurprising) push away from their old open platform to a more "curated" experience, it doesn't feel like the same place anymore.
alex1138 3 hours ago [-]
I want someone to actually smack Steve Huffman. Not hard, but enough to get through the veneer of We Take Your Feedback Very Seriously And-
No. Enough. The community is fucking screaming at you
Someone that loves their users does not fire the mods in response to API change protest. And censorship galore, and too much power concentrated in the mods and site
KennyBlanken 1 hours ago [-]
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 most popular subreddits are anything but government/corporate manipulators is deluding themselves.
Gigachad 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
Reddit recently blocked access to anything marked NSFW on old.reddit.com unless you upload your ID to Persona (Thiel's company).
eszed 6 hours ago [-]
> Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in
They haven't for me (just tested before posting this comment), which I realize might be temporary. Have they published a policy, or did you get caught in A/B testing hell?
rootusrootus 5 hours ago [-]
They did publish a policy and announced it a month or so back. Phased rollout, it took a while before it started applying to me. But now I am unable to use old.reddit at all, and I can only use new reddit on a desktop browser - and only for a little while until it covers the content and tells me I have to login to continue.
I know why they did this, I get it, but they did me a favor by severely curbing the time I might otherwise waste on their web site. For that I thank them.
Scaled 4 hours ago [-]
My phone is blocked but not my desktop (yet).
I guess the upside of reddit selling all that post data to AI firms is I'm not sure I'll really need to use reddit anymore. Which means I'll never login to post since I won't be seeing other threads to distract myself with. Which seems like long term will hurt reddit's future data.
anvuong 6 hours ago [-]
I was blocked as well, so did my wife.
A quick google search shows thousands of complaints on, ironically, Reddit itself. So it's probably not just an A/B test, more likely a gradual rollout.
Eueudhsbsj32 4 hours ago [-]
I think it's a staged rollout. People were complaining about it a few days, but I didn't get blocked until this morning.
johnnyanmac 6 hours ago [-]
Probably a phased rollout based on region. I was blocked almost a month ago and never got back in.
lrvick 5 hours ago [-]
I abandoned my 5k follower Twitter account for Mastodon a few years ago and 1700 people followed me there. I expect out of the 5k Twitter followers most of them are bots, so I probably lost nothing.
The secret to making alternative platforms work, is actually engaging with them and pretending the toxic platforms you hate no longer exist.
I am a bay area serial founder, with no Twitter, Meta, Google, Apple, or any such other centralized surveillance capitalism bullshit. I do not even have a Signal account as centralization is fundamentally incompatible with freedom and privacy in my eyes. Never gets in my way of doing anything I want to do or talking to anyone I want to talk to.
People sure do like to make excuses on why they still -must- use those platforms even though they do not -want- to. Absolutely never let a platform hold you hostage. Let no one own you if you want freedom.
The smartest people I have ever interacted with are on platforms like IRC, Matrix, and Mastodon. I would rather build a social graph of thousands of people that also really value freedom over thousands of people that make excuses to stay trapped in walled gardens any day.
stubish 4 hours ago [-]
> and pretending the toxic platforms you hate no longer exist
Thank you. One reason I spend more time on my Mastodon feed than my Bluesky feed is there are fewer people there complaining about Twitter. Less rage and complaining in general.
oblio 5 hours ago [-]
I'm 99.99% sure your audience is tech people.
lrvick 2 hours ago [-]
Tech, privacy, law, activism, authors, artists. All types on these platforms.
2 hours ago [-]
burnte 7 hours ago [-]
I only use FB for the occasional Marketplace sale/purchase because the rest of the site is a cesspool of nonsense and toxic ragebait. It's impossible to only see your friends updates now, so it's lost 99% of it's utility. Letting people see how awful it is will force folks to either leave or Facebook to fix itself, which will never happen. It seems like execs prefer to drive companies into the ground and bankruptcy court rather than change them to be more user friendly.
dylan604 7 hours ago [-]
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.
stubish 4 hours ago [-]
And thus the social media addiction lawsuits and age gating are gaining traction. It seems clear the problem isn't going to solve itself, so society is turning to regulation.
bennettnate5 6 hours ago [-]
Most people I've talked to actually use the "friends feed" in the menu that shows literally only what your friends have posted and nothing else; that could be my friend bias though
dofm 7 hours ago [-]
I mean, obviously Facebook is not in financial difficulty.
But it is, at some level, culturally dying. It is very evident.
It would not be loss of revenue that troubled Facebook, for years at least — it would be slowing engagement and lower demand for reach.
freehorse 4 hours ago [-]
> yet they are not leaving
Are you so sure? Anecdotally, I know increasingly more people who either left the platform or stopped using it last years, and this seems to be a pattern if we believe online sources [0]. Of course many stay, but the platform gets worse and worse ime.
I visit facebook only for events and some groups that I cannot avoid, so I just enter specific pages there than navigating feeds. But looking at the normal feed, it is just so bad. Complete nonsense, irrelevant stuff and more and more AI generated slop. If we exclude some groups, no real, organic people actually post (except some influencers). For those who stay, assuming they do not get the "friends feed", I am really unsure how they can tolerate that.
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
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
Really? You don't have their phone numbers?
not_a_bot_4sho 3 hours ago [-]
I don't mean personal offense to you but I find the heavily qualified "I don't support this person/organization but I support this person/organization" doublespeak to be frustrating.
Not just your comment. It's all over the place here.
But maybe I shouldn't be throwing stones in my glass house. I smoked cigarettes for a few years on college, knew they were terrible for me and for those around me, but continued for too long because I frankly enjoyed the pleasure.
dofm 3 hours ago [-]
It’s not doublespeak, just context. I am saying: I alas use it like almost everyone else, because I more or less have to. It would be a lie if I said I don’t, and my critique would be of little value if i didn’t. I do use it minimally and locked down, as I say; three family members as friends, an old page I need to manage, and a doodle for a profile photo. But I am seeing all the problems I am talking about.
I don’t think people need to leave, necessarily, and I cannot urge them to do so. But I do think people should shrink their engagement with it, use it as little as is feasible, shrink their footprint, allow it less, so Facebook changes. Unfortunately it is a big part of life on the internet, it’s often people’s literal job to be there, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.
whywhywhywhy 15 hours ago [-]
The approach they should have taken is to start whitelisting the components that are not ads.
Think of how the structure of Meta is gonna work, there's some team in charge of ads who has a sub team now in charge of messing with the ads to stop them being blocked.
If you start whitelisting everything that isn't an ad you move the problem into an area the team in charge of blocking the ads don't have control over.
Highly unlikely the team in charge of stopping ad blocking has swing to then start changing the code of every other element on the page to break your non-ad white listing.
Terretta 15 hours ago [-]
Over a decade ago, web framework and web site generation tooling had already ruined any kind of automated anything, as the frameworks and tools started using what amount to GUIDs for identifiers. I suppose the charitable take on why is as only machines needed to read it, and css styles and div IDs had become token gibberish anyway, so semantics were irrelevant.
Whether selecting for ads or content, one had to figure different ways of getting after it, whitelisting was already off the table.
We'd found "structure" could work, but had to be fuzzy and adaptive as marketing shuffles pages around constantly, not just on the whole, but for A/B runs and personalized "experiences".
So that seems back to, hey, models could help.
(Though none of them, to date, attain as high success as latest hand coded "reader" tools, worth inspecting for how this could be generalized.)
doodlebugging 15 hours ago [-]
>Highly unlikely the team in charge of stopping ad blocking has swing...
OT but I think I learned a new term today.
Swing. In oil and gas we would call that suction so for future reference:
Swing = Suction
danillonunes 15 hours ago [-]
Can't they mimic the structure of legit content to get passed on the whitelist?
HDThoreaun 13 hours ago [-]
The ad team runs the whole business at meta. If theres an issue they dont have control over theyll just take control of that part of the code.
SCLeo 5 hours ago [-]
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.
echelon 5 hours ago [-]
Let's just build a new Facebook.
We have the tools to make this orders of magnitude easier. We can do this to all of social media.
Big tech gave us the magic space runes (LLMs) we can use to undo them. They have no idea what they've done. All of their value distilled into powerful exoskeletons we can run from home.
Already, it's become apparent that the world is distancing itself from American Big Tech, and they're using the tools we built to pull away. It's so ironic, but frankly justified since we've impinged upon their sovereignty.
We used to say that Google "hired everyone" to keep the smart people from building alternatives. To take all their free hours, keep them busy, keep them from becoming threats.
Now every single one of our spare hours is a salient of attack. I have never felt so empowered to raise an army against the powers that be. They are all mortal.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
The problem with building a new Facebook is, what is a Facebook, actually? Like, can you even write down a list of things that make up a Facebook?
ajsnigrutin 4 hours ago [-]
Building a facebook is easy, getting people there and hosting it is expensive, and to get that money, you need ads, and to keep getting money for those ads, you have to obfuscate your code so ublock doesn't work anymore, and you're back at the beginning.
drnick1 16 hours ago [-]
Blacklisting facebook.com at the DNS level has worked pretty well for me.
amazingamazing 16 hours ago [-]
That works, but is not really blocking the ads.
snapplebobapple 16 hours ago [-]
I agree. We should call that "blocking the bads" since the overwhelming majority of things served from that domain are bad.
prmoustache 15 hours ago [-]
facebook ads are indeed blocked.
wompapumpum 16 hours ago [-]
you sure about that?
pavel_lishin 15 hours ago [-]
I've tried to write a tampermonkey script to at least block the Reels, but even that's hella difficult.
The solution is truly to just never be on Facebook, but - our local PTA only distributes news via Facebook. (There may be a Whatsapp group I don't know about, which isn't better.) So does the local library. If the township publishes things elsewhere, I don't know about it.
I use a service to convert some pages' feeds to RSS, which is semi-reliable, but doesn't work well and is a paid service if you want more than two feeds - I wish I could hand-roll something myself.
hn_submit 13 hours ago [-]
The only way to keep ads off Facebook is to stop using Facebook.
sodapopcan 12 hours ago [-]
I got a facebook account because I wanted to use marketplace. I just use one of those CSS browser plugins to hide the newsfeed which is where all the ads pop up. The following does the trick for me:
[role=main] {
display: none;
}
I also don't have any friends on it.
hatsunearu 12 hours ago [-]
Marketplace has video ads that play with sound as you scroll by now. It's incredible
sodapopcan 12 hours ago [-]
Ah, well I guess I'll be seeing those soon then? I don't use Marketplace too much (and just got burned recently so I've soured on it).
CivBase 13 hours ago [-]
If you're still using Facebook, it's because you're required to or you're the kind of person who won't be fazed by this.
corndoge 12 hours ago [-]
Correct, for better or worse facebook is the meeting ground for many communities and if you are in those communities you have to use it.
celestialcheese 12 hours ago [-]
Marketplace. It's horrible, but the area I live in has mostly abandoned craigslist and if you want to buy/sell used stuff, marketplace is where you have to be.
BuyMyBitcoins 11 hours ago [-]
I feel like Craigslist squandered its effective monopoly with online classifieds.
While I do not think that the company needed to modernize the site’s UI, it baffles me that their anti-spam tools are so rudimentary. Most searches yield irrelevant keyword-bombed results, and, such results tend to be nearly identical listings.
I had yearned for a viable Craigslist alternative for years. Sadly, Facebook Marketplace won. I don’t feel comfortable searching for anything due to the fact that Facebook will inevitably use my queries to further profile me.
istjohn 11 hours ago [-]
I recently perused Marketplace, and it appears to be so thoroughly infested with barely disguised scams, bogus prices and other garbage as to be usable by only the most intrepid and determined shoppers.
celestialcheese 9 hours ago [-]
Marketplace aggressively curates to your searches and interactions. So much so you have to be careful with your browsing otherwise your recommendations get off.
My guess is that the default state is the scam garbage. It quickly learns your preferences. Which I hate. I miss having my 5 sections of craigslist I could browse over my morning coffee and not feel like I'm missing a deal.
glitchcrab 10 hours ago [-]
It really depends on what you're looking for, there's a lot of great stuff in my local area, but there's also a lot of shit too
Markoff 12 hours ago [-]
you could use NoBook or MaterialBook, both on Github, personally I don't have FB account 10+ years and not missing it (besides marketplace, though don't see even there better deals than local classifieds website)
VCFundedGenYer 15 hours ago [-]
Facebook is trying so hard to defeat adblockers that the actual website is borderilne unusable. I have found in the past year or so that pages just get hung on "loading" transitional screens way more often, even in normal circumstances.
They need to surrender this whole anti-adblocker crusade because it will kill them in the long run (along with the billion other problems FB has)
RiverCrochet 15 hours ago [-]
Most activity on Facebook is via phone. I bet Facebook would prefer to get rid of the website entirely; the age of adding Facebook like buttons and comment sections to websites is long past. I can't think of anything that works on the website better than the phone app.
encom 13 hours ago [-]
>I bet Facebook would prefer to get rid of the website entirely
For some parts they did. I tried Facebook Dating, and it's only available on phones.
Also, to save you the trouble, don't use Facebook Dating. It is, to use a technical term, a fermented shitpile.
Sylamore 4 minutes ago [-]
Open the developer console and change your device mode to a mobile one, worked the last time I tried it.
liendolucas 13 hours ago [-]
> it will kill them in the long run...
Now, that's something I would love to see in my lifetime.
qbane 14 hours ago [-]
I wrote and shared uBlock Origin filters for Facebook, shared on Reddit and up to a week later they changed the DOM structure bypassed the filters. After some attempts I no longer publish the filters.
hatsunearu 12 hours ago [-]
Could you publish it with a license saying it shall not be used by any Facebook employee or something?
amelius 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe a better approach is to convert the page to an image, run OCR over it, use an LLM to remove the ads, present the result to the user.
ImJamal 14 hours ago [-]
How would you comment or watch a video if you did that?
ceejayoz 12 hours ago [-]
That sounds like an upside.
amelius 13 hours ago [-]
You can still do that.
The only thing I'm proposing is to do the filtering on graphical data (what the user actually sees) rather than on the DOM (which can be obfuscated; and which may change every week).
dudhsudhd 12 hours ago [-]
I don’t see how presenting an image would allow you to interact with the page, especially if all you are doing is modify the image you’re presenting, not the page itself.
amelius 8 hours ago [-]
Think of it as looking at your screen through AR goggles, where the goggles modify the image before it reaches your eyes.
Everything happens at the image level so there's no way Meta can obfuscate the DOM to make ads pass through.
kdksjxjwjd 3 hours ago [-]
So the ads are still served, just… hidden. Self-defeating, no?
ImJamal 12 hours ago [-]
Are you saying you would get the image, detect the ad in the image, then regenerate the HTML without the ad based on where it was located in the image?
lokar 12 hours ago [-]
You don’t need to regenerate, insert a DOM element to obscure it.
socalgal2 3 hours ago [-]
Wishing that Apple would add OS level AI so I could use it to hide ads in apps. It doesn't need to manipulate the app. It just needs to recognize them and black them out. Apple doesn't have to block anything directly, they can leave it to users to do so they are just respecting the user.
As a simple one, the Facebook has this dark pattern where they put an unread count marker on Loops to try to get you to click it. It works, I click it by accident quite often even though I have zero interest in loops. There's no way to turn it off. But an OS Level AI could cover it with a black square
Yes, I get I could just not use the app. I still want to see what friends and family are up to so I launch the app -> menu -> feeds. This mostly removes everything I hate. But, that unread (1) marker on the loops icon gets me
figmert 1 hours ago [-]
Appel has, and it can be used. Apfel[0] has exposed it as a CLI:
$ apfel "What is the capital of Austria?"
The capital of Austria is Vienna.
Apple will never, ever add anything even close to that kind of functionality. This is a company which took SEVENTEEN YEARS before it allowed iPhone users to have gaps between app icons on their home screens.
If you have ANY hope of Apple letting you have enough control over your device to visually block ads in apps then you are stratospherically shit outta luck.
The-Old-Hacker 16 hours ago [-]
I use a browser extension called F.B. Purity. It's worked across multiple browsers for years.
Oh dear. Hope he's ok. I got a lot of value out of FB-purity.
damidekronik 16 hours ago [-]
I was gonna say that uBlock still works for me on facebook, but yea I forgot I had purity quietly working for me for all those years
VCFundedGenYer 15 hours ago [-]
Same. FBP has been effectively perfect for over a decade now. I don't understand how uBlock Origin can't just take what FBP is doing and apply it there.
juiceland 6 hours ago [-]
Dozens to hundreds of smart people spent many waking hours making sure that a person can't control what gets displayed on their personal devices when they visit Facebook.com.
With 104 comments at the moment, that’s where the bulk of the discussion is happening.
Markoff 12 hours ago [-]
well this post was like one hour earlier, they should have merged it earlier when there were zero posts in both
jcfrei 16 hours ago [-]
Once LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.
monooso 16 hours ago [-]
Given that Safari doesn't even have a built-in ad-blocker, I doubt Apple will be leading the charge on this.
Such a move would also presumably be incompatible with Apple's highly lucrative search engine deal with Google.
65 13 hours ago [-]
Makes me even more excited for Ladybird to be released.
gdulli 16 hours ago [-]
It's amazing how people think Apple has a clean reputation because they've added a thin layer of indirection to their participation in the surveillance ecosystem.
robocat 4 hours ago [-]
They copied what our government does: deception about the causes of everything.
For business, our purchases clearly reveal self-deceptive practices, and dark marketing patterns certainly take advantage of that.
For government, our voting preferences reveal that we want to be deceived. Although we often say good things that our social group memes us.
I'm not sure when I learnt to be so cynical.
pllbnk 16 hours ago [-]
The race of ending personal computing is there. I am sure big players want to control entire stack and users just sitting in front of dumb monitors consuming their ads.
inigyou 3 hours ago [-]
It's a scam. Do not redeem (your money for a crippled device).
threetonesun 15 hours ago [-]
If we're just talking about image based ads it would be easier to simply denylist every image on a page and only render alt-text until the user clicks to reveal it.
Worth noting though that Apple injects ads into the News app, which is just a webview, so it's certainly not them that will do this.
whywhywhywhy 15 hours ago [-]
You're trying to stop ads because they're malicious but you think they'd be honest with their alt text?
Ignoring that users care deeply about images so a browser that did this would be considered broken from the get go.
pavel_lishin 15 hours ago [-]
I wonder what percentage of images even has meaningful alt-text.
nemomarx 15 hours ago [-]
If it doesn't have alt text it can't have been that important as an image, I guess.
concinds 16 hours ago [-]
Safari was the first to cripple adblockers and went further than ManifestV3, but it seems their reputation will never catch up to that.
musictubes 4 hours ago [-]
Ad blockers work fine for me in Safari. They may not have the flexibility of manifest v2 but they are hardly crippled. Their reputation will continue to be what it is as long as they keep making things that people like.
vintermann 16 hours ago [-]
Yes, it's a near-universal legal requirement that humans be able to tell if something is an ad or not. So once they sabotage that, they're in hot water.
pjc50 15 hours ago [-]
I was under the impression that America had very few legal restrictions on ads at all.
AlexandrB 15 hours ago [-]
Is there any enforcement of this? Like at all? All the review bots and bots promoting random crap on reddit say otherwise. Traditional media still pays lip-service to this, but only barely.
metahost 16 hours ago [-]
Apple sells ads too; increasingly across its surfaces.
sentrysapper 15 hours ago [-]
You anticipate a large language model to understand visual queues for an advertisement?
preg_match 8 hours ago [-]
On the big platforms, the ads actually have “ad” written on them somewhere or “sponsored”.
It will be harder on other sites, but not that hard. There’s an unbreakable ceiling for the ads here - they need to be readable trivially by human eyes, or they don’t work as ads.
So, you can hide or obfuscate the ad… but then it’s not a very good ad.
whywhywhywhy 15 hours ago [-]
Cost issues aside yeah image embedding tech is really good and can already do tasks like this, LLMs with native image understanding are even better at it.
Reasons this wouldn't work are you'd really need to get it to a good enough and small enough model to run low energy use and very fast to not impact browsing. The other issue is it'll be a fixed target for a period of time so the ads could be tweaked to find how to get them through it.
triceratops 15 hours ago [-]
Cues, not queues. And yes that sounds workable.
Eddy_Viscosity2 16 hours ago [-]
This is the first and only use-case for LLMs that I am genuinely excited about.
AlexandrB 15 hours ago [-]
Such naïveté. The much more likely scenario is that AI is used to add or replace ads in a website in a way that's now impossible to remove. Running your own AI on the browser will be disallowed to "ensure a safe browsing experience".
Eddy_Viscosity2 14 hours ago [-]
I wonder how far we are away from AI being required to link to the TPM in a way that the OS and hardware people can have full authority on what you can use.
debazel 12 hours ago [-]
We're not that far off. But it will not just be for AI, but all software. Mobile OSes has already normalized the expectation that you don't control what can run on your own devices.
wvenable 10 hours ago [-]
I wonder if it's time to step it up a little bit. We have all the LLMs that are great at looking at code and processing it so perhaps the future of ad blocking is letting the LLM handle it.
Has anyone thought about building something like this?
seanw444 9 hours ago [-]
So you'd have a low-memory-usage super high latency ad blocker with a monthly bill, or an ad blocker that uses up several gigabytes of RAM/VRAM for slightly less high latency. Compelling.
TaLiTr 9 hours ago [-]
I think GP is talking about using an LLM to write filters for the constantly changing Facebook ad serving code, which would be distributed to users.
seanw444 8 hours ago [-]
Ah. I was envisioning the LLM handling requests as they come in lol
dreamcompiler 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, exactly this. The best way to fight AI is with your own AI, running locally on your own machine and loyal only to you. Also note that a highly-specialized ad-blocker agent wouldn't need a trillion parameters. It probably wouldn't even need a billion.
greenleafone7 15 hours ago [-]
Best solution is to never use any of those useless apps ever again.
usui 12 hours ago [-]
How long until someone invents a fully-integrated local video and audio adblock filter running on a passthrough VR headset or smart glasses? The progress on this front is taking a while. I wouldn't mind if the audio filter is white noise and a portion of what I see is blurred out. Maybe to make it more efficient, only scan near the places I'm looking at via foveated rendering.
throwuxiytayq 12 hours ago [-]
How about we just get on with it and delegalize ads already? They’re a net negative in every form, subsidizing disgusting companies that shouldn’t exist, infringing on everyone’s privacy (including your children! think of the children!!!!!), and making us jump through all kinds of ridiculous hoops to minimize our exposure to them. I don’t think the solution is more hoops.
usui 12 hours ago [-]
I don't think ads should be illegal because companies have a right to try to send me information or inform me of their products, but I also have a right to block them. The problem is that client-side computing seems to be lagging behind. Once an effective local video+audio filter is invented, it's either game over for adware or another arms race will begin where humans and classifiers can't tell what an ad is anymore (this has already run to completion on many platforms like Reddit, Amazon, and Google Maps anyway).
Criminalizing information flow is a non-trivial problem that I wouldn't want governments to be in control of.
ndriscoll 11 hours ago [-]
Ads and the surveillance ecosystem are more than just a company sending you information. They're paying another company, which that other company uses to provide services below cost (often free, and often creating network lock-in effects), which is clearly an anti-competitive business practice. Ads completely destroy markets they operate in.
politician 11 hours ago [-]
"companies have a right to try to send me information"
The problem isn't one company sending information unsolicited, it's when hundreds of thousands of companies flood every communication channel with their own unsolicited advertising.
Email, phone have become unusable channels, not to mention much of the web.
infinite_spin 5 hours ago [-]
One of the earliest ad blockers I used would just replace ads with artwork. I'm not the author, but I found something similar here: https://github.com/jfonsecarivera/artblock
lucrbvi 16 hours ago [-]
It would be fun to train a small vision neural network to recognize ads instead of relying on HTML or network requests. I don't know if anyone has done this yet.
dzonga 14 hours ago [-]
the tragedy is 'mainstreet' runs on Facebook.
not shitter, google but fb. some local business don't even have their own sites but maintain an insta / fb page.
zamadatix 14 hours ago [-]
Shitter? Edit: Ah, I assume you're referring to X (previously Twitter -> shitter taunt)
Finnucane 13 hours ago [-]
Xitter.
jm4 12 hours ago [-]
100%. Personally, I hate Meta and I don't use their apps. There's so much bullshit and fake news on there it's not even funny. But my business uses FB and Insta because they deliver results.
I can get my content in front of tons of people for a pittance. I can upload a list of my best customers and run a lookalike campaign. I can run a re-targeting campaign on lapsed regulars. I can spend $16 to generate $1000. It's like fishing with dynamite.
Think about the type of person who uses FB. They don't care about ads. They don't care that it's fake content. They don't care that at least half the feed is AI slop. They just keep scrolling, clicking and buying.
Meta didn't create these people. They only got them all to gather in one place and then started selling access. There's a sucker born every minute and they grow up and join FB. This isn't a defense of Meta by any means. They are a horrible company and the world would be better off if business models like theirs were outlawed. The point is nothing is going to change with them unless there's legislative action.
dzonga 8 hours ago [-]
ruthless pragmatism.
kotaKat 13 hours ago [-]
the ONLY way my county communicates emergency alerts is facebook. it's absolutely wild. how do I know if I'm in a state of emergency? facebook. :)
MrDrMcCoy 13 hours ago [-]
Your country has sold your safety to private interests. Demand better from them.
kotaKat 9 hours ago [-]
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.
OkayPhysicist 5 hours ago [-]
The really cool thing about local politicians is that unlike higher levels of government, they tend to actually live locally. Means you can pretty easily coordinate things like pleasant sit-down conversations, or shouting obscenities at them while they're trying to do their grocery shopping.
MrDrMcCoy 6 hours ago [-]
Sure you can. Make calls. Send letters. Get petitions signed. Start a fundraiser to run local TV and radio ads. Lease a billboard. Be a pest. Don't stop.
bothers 10 hours ago [-]
I can't imagine how pissed I would be if my local government told me I need to use and thereby support a website that is fine with showing users ads with AI-generated CSAM.
ravetcofx 13 hours ago [-]
It's where the GenX-ers and boomers are at who have money to spend
makerofthings 13 hours ago [-]
What's with this current trend of grouping GenX with Boomers? I am GenX and the difference between us and Boomers is wild. My GenX friends are on here. Boomers I know are afraid of self-checkout machines.
pessimizer 11 hours ago [-]
Zoomers don't know the difference. They don't know much (because we destroyed the schools and the media right before whey were born.) They have no idea if there's any difference between the 70s and the 40s.
But to be fair, when I was 19 everybody over 30 was basically the same kind of old to me. Also boomers are the most childish generation in history, and attempt to hide amongst Xers.
The weird thing is that they think that Millennials created their culture. Xers created their culture. Millennials were raised on Disney and N'SYNC.
otterley 8 hours ago [-]
> we destroyed the schools and the media right before whey were born
Hey, leave me out of this!
SV_BubbleTime 13 hours ago [-]
I love how Facebook has one reputation, an Instagram has another and they often don’t match at all even though we all know it’s the exact fucking service with a different skin and theme.
nticompass 16 hours ago [-]
Man, am I happy that I deleted my Facebook. No regrets.
la_fayette 14 hours ago [-]
ok thanking the team for this work over the years. i hope yt will stay ad-free :-)
walrus01 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder if instead of blocking the facebook ads, in a continual game of whack-a-mole with facebook changing things, there would be a way to accept the ads and then generate a white opaque box overlay where the ad is rendered in the page.
From the point of view of the ad server the ad has been successfully loaded and displayed, the overlay would occur exclusively in the browser rendering engine client side with no communication back to the ad server.
This does seem like an area where AI could help respond to changes quickly.
yaportmax 5 hours ago [-]
Controversial but honest question: How do anti-ads people propose the free open internet monetizes itself?
devilsdata 4 hours ago [-]
Easy. No corporate social media networks. Hobbyists run local light social networks (such as forums) again (like they do currently; see Mastodon, Lemmy), with super efficient SSR HTML that is cheap to host.
colesantiago 3 hours ago [-]
That doesn’t answer their question, like at all.
BenjiWiebe 52 minutes ago [-]
Yes it does. Hobbyists are willing to spend their own money, hence their blog doesn't need ads.
Businesses make money by selling products/services, so they don't need money.
Wikipedia is donation supported.
GP is pretty much saying - if it can only survive by running ads, let's do without it.
boneskull 4 hours ago [-]
I don’t have any proposal because it’s not my problem to solve. I’m no businessman or economist.
The free, open internet keeps chugging along (for better or worse) regardless of how many ads I block. Especially those companies who run ad networks.
Feel free to make a moral judgement on those who block ads, because most everyone who is blocking ads has already made a judgement about online advertising and its surveilling bedfellows.
nemomarx 5 hours ago [-]
Volunteer basis or charge users. Optional subscriptions keep small webforums alive, like HN would probably be fine with some kind of 10/mo thing. Maybe charge a small fee for new accounts?
For things that need to scale past that like very large social media, the question is if that's worth those sites existing.
yaportmax 5 hours ago [-]
First, regarding the idea of charging people to access websites:
This notion is a very Silicon Valley / coastal elite mentality IMO. A significant majority of people on the internet do not and will not pay for anything - largely because most people around the world just don't have the money for stuff like that.
The data on this is pretty consistent - take Netflix for example. A majority of Netflix users choose the cheaper ad supported tier, even though it is very easy and only marginally more expensive to switch to the non-ad supported tier. And this is already filtering to the subset of people who are willing and able to pay for a streaming subscription to begin with. The same case exists for Reddit -> you can pay to have ads removed, but only 1% of users do.
I see what you mean by Hacker News, but it's not a great example, since there are currently no ads and it's free. It's provided by Y Combinator, which monetizes via investing in startups (not something all internet businesses can reliably just start doing). For example - how would Reddit monetize? You cannot really expect people on Reddit all to be willing to pay to use it. And if some were - the whole value of a network is its scale -> so the drop in users would effectively kill the site. That's why there are no subscription only forums out there (at least none that I know of).
With regards to your second point of if these social media sites should even exist in the first place -> that's where you the consumer get to decide. If you don't get value from it, just don't use it. People who do get value from it -> use it. If enough people collectively decide it's not valuable, then the website becomes irrelevant (see Google+ and MySpace).
This is where I get very confused by anti ads people - show me a reliable alternative that is proven to work. Show me that people across the world, not just in San Francisco or London, can and will pay to access these websites/apps. And I'm not just talking about Meta - what about every random small website you have ever accessed that is ad supported? What about news websites like BBC? Or independent content creators who monetize via Instagram / YouTube ads? What about that wiki for that favorite video game of yours? Or that cooking blog? Don't get me wrong - I hate seeing ads as much as the next guy - but I can't really picture a realistic alternative.
nemomarx 5 hours ago [-]
I do some volunteer time on a small web forum, and we have subscription options on there. It pays for server costs reasonably fine, if not dev time for new features or anything. Users come from lots of places around the world, although the discussion is still mostly in English. It is optional, but the number of power users willing to pay for it covers the rest. You could also look at SomethingAwful as a reasonable strategy?
If people love a community and like spending time on it, they'll be willing to help keep it running and avoid shutting down. You don't get any real profit, but do you need that to run a website? And if people don't love it enough to pay for it, you do have to wonder if it really needs to exist.
I think Reddit could get away with their reddit pro and paying for awards deal, honestly. They would need to rely more on volunteer labor and volunteer development, but a site could exist like that. I assume it's how Lemmy and Lobsters run?
yaportmax 5 hours ago [-]
This sounds great, but can you lay out for me how people on Facebook and Instagram are going to volunteer to get access to it for free? What are the mechanics of this?
nemomarx 5 hours ago [-]
What I mean is something like those sites could be developed and moderated by volunteers, to be clear, to cut down on operating costs. The users would be a good pool to draw from for this and if you like, the site can dole out subscription features to them in exchange for that?
In my view the problems are that we scale past the point of volunteer moderation being practical, we want to pay for full time devs and so on for the sites, and we want the operation to somehow also make a profit. If you view it more as a hobby that you sink some money into to keep it alive, the economics on a small site can be much more reasonable. Think of an individual blogger and their comment section - the blogger might naturally pay some hundreds a year for hosting on their own, as part of that hobby impulse.
Waterluvian 5 hours ago [-]
You make things that cost money cost money? I don't think I really understand the premise of the question.
yaportmax 5 hours ago [-]
See my response to the other guy who replied -> remove the free ad supported tier and people will not pay and the network will cease to exist.
Waterluvian 5 hours ago [-]
Thats pretty silly. It existed before ads.
I think at best your perspective is “threatening me with a good time.” There’s really nothing online I value that can only exist because of millions of free users.
throwaway_95283 5 hours ago [-]
from people without ad blockers, but honestly facebook is not the free open internet.
colesantiago 3 hours ago [-]
The real answer, like with any service in the real world is to charge for it.
That is the only way to keep any service online sustainable without ads.
There are also donations, but that can only take you so far.
Things cost money, server costs and domain costs rise, bandwidth gets expensive as bots and AI agents surge and scrape websites.
It is the only way, without having ads all over the place.
slim 5 hours ago [-]
government subsidy
sparcpile 3 hours ago [-]
They don't. Trying to monetize it was mistake #1.
Mistake #2 was letting the tech bros anywhere near it.
stevenicr 6 hours ago [-]
Can you (ublock, privacy badger, etc) at least block the videos / animations auto-playing all over the screen to give me some control over which ads steal my focus and time?
Stopping the movement of all things unless click / tap to play would be a huge adblock win in my book.
conradfr 14 hours ago [-]
Not sure detailing how Facebook demoralized them is the best idea.
mattrighetti 13 hours ago [-]
Well, uBlock is entirely open source so...
hollow-moe 15 hours ago [-]
This doesn't set a good precedent unfortunately... Hello to that Google guy that just got tasked to do the same with Youtube.
Good4boothee 13 hours ago [-]
I dread the day YT finally decides it is cost effective to embed ads directly in video stream. I think Twitch is/was experimenting with it.
shiandow 7 hours ago [-]
I kind of hope it pushes people to use alternatives, because allowing your work to be violated by ads seems insane.
But probably not.
Marsymars 15 hours ago [-]
The immediate fix to this is regulatory action.
Facebook has made itself indispensable in a number of areas that are in the public interest and should be treated as a public good for these purposes.
Ads are pollution, and Facebook is forcing people to choose between ingesting pollution and using facebook marketplace, or throwing their used but functional goods in the garbage.
yaportmax 5 hours ago [-]
Are you proposing banning advertising on Facebook? You know this will effectively destroy Facebook, Google, every free ad supported website on the internet?
asadotzler 3 hours ago [-]
We were fine before any of that. The web in 2007 was fantastic. Then Google bought DoubleClick, consolidated web advertising and Facebook opened itself to not-edu addresses. Those events were the beginning of the end. Everything that sucks about the web today can be traced back to those two events. I say fuck 'em, roll the clock back to 2007 and let the chips fall where they may. I don't care if that means a Facebook doesn't exist or that Google is just a search engine and not the web's majority shareholder.
sleepybrett 13 hours ago [-]
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 somewhere else.
Marsymars 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jonesy827 13 hours ago [-]
Craigslist?
Marsymars 7 hours ago [-]
Effectively non-existent in Canada. Kijiji nominally exists, but I dual list everything I'm trying to get rid of on both kijiji/facebook out of principle and get like 20x more interest on facebook.
qup 15 hours ago [-]
IMO you shouldn't get to be in charge of a company just because it became successful.
Facebook is allowed to make ads show on their own product.
I hate their product, but it's theirs.
Marsymars 15 hours ago [-]
> IMO you shouldn't get to be in charge of a company just because it became successful.
In a macro sense, the prerogative there is really up to the public. Companies only exist in the first place because the public has granted them the legal and social framework to exist, and the public can adjust that framework as they so choose.
In a more specific sense, the math there changes once a company makes itself indispensable to the public good. There are any number of analogies I could run with, but I'll go with the analogy of a landfill. Suppose all the landfills in your city have been privatized, have a habit of burning garbage, and employ armed thugs to prevent any visitors to the landfill from wearing masks. If you've got a truckload of garbage to dispose of, you can either ingest burning garbage fumes, or dump it on the side of the road somewhere. It's absolutely in the public's interest to regulate the landfills' behaviour to prevent them from both burning garbage and from stopping people from wearing masks when they visit the landfill.
beej71 14 hours ago [-]
I haven't used fb for years, but yesterday I was considering going there to only repost anti-meta news stories to try to get as many of my followers to quit as possible.
But I'm not convinced it will have an effect. And I'd have to use fb.
iugtmkbdfil834 14 hours ago [-]
It is an interesting experiment. Ads on my network are mostly blocked, but wife did notice a spike on her FB stuff. Now that she knows how nice ( edit: well, not automatically awful ) net is without ads, lets see if accepts the trade off.
bmurphy1976 14 hours ago [-]
All the more reason to block Facebook completely.
Glyptodon 7 hours ago [-]
TBH Facebook makes it so you can't even copy and open links or highlight text properly - it's 100% hostile and keeping up with that is a lot of effort that could be put to better use.
fsuts 13 hours ago [-]
Facebook and instagram constantly email me trying to entice me to use the app. As I haven’t used it for years.
I think it’s purely to massage their Active Monthly User numbers to show growth.
zuhsetaqi 13 hours ago [-]
> I think it’s purely to massage their Active Monthly User numbers to show growth.
I don't think so. They want you to use the App because through the they have way more ways to track you.
nothercastle 12 hours ago [-]
The app is a back door to your phone. It will vacuum all the data of it if allowed.
OroPla 15 hours ago [-]
I have to admit that I never got to visit facebook in all my life, since my browser add-ons made it so the site would never properly load. I'm not sure whether I've been missing out or dodging a bullet.
beardyw 14 hours ago [-]
You have missed nothing.
molticrystal 15 hours ago [-]
If anybody want to take a crack at fixing and maintaining the issue, while the team has been worn out to the treads, they are still open to pull requests [0], here is the statement that is alluded to in the article:
>paintboth1234 uBO Team wrote:
>The project is FOSS. Anyone else who wants to deal with this disgusting site is free to make pull requests with working solutions themselves.
One of four extensions I run, I hope they never give up. A while back they mentioned it being harder and harder to maintain.
TrinaryWorksToo 3 hours ago [-]
Does Fluff Busting Purity still remove Facebook ads?
A1kmm 7 hours ago [-]
Ironically given the purported theme of the 'digitalescapetools.com' site, it's behind Cloudflare, and with settings that initially blocked my from accessing it with latest Firefox on Linux (in i3 with a vertically split screen, with the browser taking up part of the screen). It was consistently giving a Cloudflare error that my browser is not supported.
In case anyone else faces the same: it worked when I resized the browser window and reloaded.
IcyFoxe 7 hours ago [-]
What about using AI to detect and remove ads? For all we know they might be using AI to get past the uBlock filters.
I was wondering why I suddenly started seeing these in my feed, I figured I would have to write my own extension to fix it.
Oh well, I cant be mad at the uBO team. Much appreciation for all they have given me over the years
xnx 13 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, adblocking may need to move up one level to visual perception of renderee html or client-side AI heuristics about what is probably an ad. Removal may not be possible, but a masking overlay should still be.
15 hours ago [-]
bpatch 13 hours ago [-]
Also good to note that even if you were somehow able to block ads on Facebook, that only stops the visible output. The aggressive data collection continues as you scroll and interact with content.
maxwellito 15 hours ago [-]
Hot take: uBlock origin could insert even MORE ads into Facebook? Discouraging people to use Facebook, and also make some money on the side.
(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
doodlebugging 14 hours ago [-]
Maintain a list of recent ads blocked in that browsing session and redirect all the ads blocked during that session from previous sites visited, especially autoplaying videos, every time someone clicks on a Facebook link.
That would be funny.
brcmthrowaway 2 hours ago [-]
Does pihole still work?
marssaxman 11 hours ago [-]
Well, I guess I'm giving up the fight to keep paying any attention to Facebook, then. It was only tolerable with an adblocker.
Yeah because how dare people actually connect with family and friends and "just get phone numbers/emails" or "just build their own"
Stop. Blaming. Users.
nelsonic 15 hours ago [-]
Very simple: just block all Meta domains at your local DNS. Nobody needs Meta. And if there is something you desperately need to see on one of their platforms temporarily switch your DNS.
metabagel 12 hours ago [-]
The obvious solution is to not use Facebook.
8 hours ago [-]
dabber21 14 hours ago [-]
Out of spite they should have a block list, blocking every meta related service, disabled by default... for now
gregoriol 15 hours ago [-]
So basically Facebook ads won and we are doomed
nater5000 13 hours ago [-]
>and we are doomed
Only if you're so hopelessly addicted to Facebook that you just have to roll over and take this. You always have the option to just not use Facebook.
asadotzler 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe you are doomed, but lots of others will simply walk away from it. FB may have won the battle, but that doesn't mean we have lost the war.
amanaplanacanal 13 hours ago [-]
Nah. I never see Facebook ads. Easy peasy.
RajT88 2 hours ago [-]
I still do not see ads on Facebook. But it also does not work most of the time with all the adblockers on.
I hate that so many people I know use it for things.
XorNot 16 hours ago [-]
My solution to this was just to stop using Facebook.
Though evidently someone's cut a deal because Facebook groups is all over Google search results these days.
ufmace 16 hours ago [-]
Well clearly you'll need to stop using Google search too
amanaplanacanal 13 hours ago [-]
Kagi search allows you to block whole domains, which is pretty great.
Isn't there a browser plugin to do that for Google too?
XorNot 15 hours ago [-]
We've been circling that since "thing reddit" became the most optimum search.
red_admiral 15 hours ago [-]
My setup: separate profile for Facebook. Targeted advertising turned off. FB domains blocked on main profile.
But the filterlist does not come from uBo, it comes from Easylist?
zeafoamrun 14 hours ago [-]
I misread the domain as "digital cesspools" and that is indeed what Facebook is. If you're still on there you're going to get subjected to their abusive practices.
maxwellito 14 hours ago [-]
Hot take: uBlock origin could insert even MORE ads into Facebook? Discouraging people to use Facebook, and also make some money on the side.
(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
Rebelgecko 14 hours ago [-]
Other adblock tools have gone the route of allowing "good" ads through and only blocking "bad" ads. Of course the definition of good vs bad might depend on who sponsors the dev.
OhMeadhbh 16 hours ago [-]
Oh! The Irony! This page doesn't load when your ad blocker is turned on.
delduca 14 hours ago [-]
Not for me (Wipr2 on Safari), loads fine without ADS.
Pooge 13 hours ago [-]
Are you not using uBlock Origin?
squigz 14 hours ago [-]
It works here.
usern20260720 14 hours ago [-]
try loading it with JS off
Markoff 12 hours ago [-]
works fine for me with Vivaldi+uBlock Origin
OhMeadhbh 16 hours ago [-]
Apropos of nothing, I noted @markoff said they liked John Markoff in the 80s. As a complete aside, may I recommend to readers Markoff's book "What the Dormouse Said." From 2005, it's a deep-dive into the relationship between 60s counter-culture and 70s / 80s era microcomputer movers and shakers. Want to read about Doug Engelbart tripping balls in the Santa Cruz Mountains? It's in there. Or maybe I just made that up in a LSD fueled trip to the center of my mind. But that KIND of thing is in there. Abbie Hoffman somehow influenced Steve Jobs fascination with PARC derived WIMP systems. An image of Richard Nixon getting his face punched was burned into the original PC BIOS ROMs. Tim O'Leary developed software in the 80s. One of these is not true, but you have to read the book to find out which.
I'm not saying this is a rallying call to help but...
nojito 5 hours ago [-]
Not that difficult to defeat. A local llm can just update the blocking rules dynamically.
I made my own extension by essentially prompting to create a version of ublock origin with a button that uses a local llm to dynamically generate block lists and update them.
partloyaldemon 15 hours ago [-]
I use the “natural” method for blocking Facebook ads.
mohamedkoubaa 5 hours ago [-]
To those that use facebook in 2026, why?
infl8ed 3 hours ago [-]
I purchased StopTheMadness purely to stop autoplaying videos in Facebook marketplace
If you're on facebook, I don't take you're need for privacy or security seriously. I'm fine with this. Stop giving Zuckerberg more money and power.
surgical_fire 14 hours ago [-]
The best way to do this is block Facebook entirely.
ImHereToVote 16 hours ago [-]
I don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.
inigyou 16 hours ago [-]
Because the ad ecosystem has two sides. I used to think my ISP could just magically support IPv6 and didn't need routing protocols or peering agreements, too. (They support it now)
Websites with ads need to satisfy the ad buyers. This means running a bunch of JavaScript that's adversarial to the website and fingerprints both the website and the browser to determine where and to whom the ad is actually shown. It's like a cloudflare bot challenge is happening behind the scenes. Of course all this stuff doesn't happen on the website's own domain, or the website could manipulate it.
And the ad that's originally delivered might not actually be the ad, but might be a script that fetches the real ad from a different server, if the incentives line up that way. Imagine you have a contract to advertise on a site, but someone else wants to advertise on the same site and pays you to forward their ad. Ad margins are razor thin, you'll do this for $0.00001 profit per impression. And your buyer might be doing the same thing to their customer. It's all a huge mess.
gwbas1c 15 hours ago [-]
I think that just goes to prove that content providers and ad providers could defeat ad blockers if they worked together. (And perhaps made the ads less offensive so people don't have motivation to block them.)
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
Ad networks hate content providers. I guess it comes with the territory when you're trying to operate a money printer - you hate anyone who poses an obstacle to your money printing.
HDThoreaun 13 hours ago [-]
Well facebook just beat the ad blockers without working together with their ad customers
ImHereToVote 16 hours ago [-]
It's ironic how trust would solve the issue and ads would become impossible to remove. Trust comes at a huge premium of course.
inigyou 16 hours ago [-]
Really shows how shady the whole industry is, even to itself.
stochastic-parr 16 hours ago [-]
uBlock can filter arbitrary elements from a website, no chance that every company spends as much as facebook on making writing rules hard
account42 15 hours ago [-]
uBlock filter list authors are however also not going to spend as much effort as they have been spending on Facebook on every random site that is currently covered by generic rules that catch entire ad networks.
benj111 15 hours ago [-]
Trust?
In ye old days, you had newspapers who sold ads, and had to at least satisfy their customers. What the newspaper advertised reflected on the newspaper, and where the advertiser advertised, reflected on the advertiser. Now we have a situation where no one is accountable. Spammy ad sites are a thing, because there isn't that direct relationship between advertiser and website.
jefftk 15 hours ago [-]
Advertisers don't trust websites to display their ads. If a site takes full control of their ads experience and hosts everything first-party I agree it's hard to block (site can keep changing things to thwart the ad blocker), but then it's also hard for the advertisers to see whether they're being ripped off. Which means most won't advertise on the site, and the site makes much less money than if they remain in the current ad ecosystem (even counting that some ads will be blocked).
(I used to work in this area, but my knowledge is ~4y out of date)
Ekaros 16 hours ago [-]
Most sites are not in business of running ad marketplace. They are in content production and SEO(as in pulling views). I don't think at scale they could operate it would be worth to be ad marketplace. Or would they get the customers(advertisers).
nemomarx 15 hours ago [-]
Content based ads work fine for this. If you have a site about some topic, advertisers for that audience can just pay you some amount to put their ad in your posts or embed an image.
Networks are only necessary if you want to run new ads for every year or tie into their browsing history or other algorithmic stuff. But if someone wants to pay you 3k to run a banner ad for a few weeks that would be pretty easy to just embed.
cookiengineer 16 hours ago [-]
> Most sites are not in business of running ad marketplace.
You don't have to run a marketplace. Back then, people were calling via phone to put an ad into the newspaper. The same concept can still apply today.
You can just place an ad _where you actually want it_ instead of having a shitty decision engine decide it for you. Marketing budgets are messed up all over the place since social media, because they're really inefficient in finding the customers that actually wants to buy their stuff.
If you don't believe me, just take a look at facebook, they're trying to shove ads up your feed 99% of the time. It's a feed of ads, not a feed of "friends" anymore. Good luck trying to catch the 1% of posts that were actually the reason why you used the platform in the first place.
dspillett 14 hours ago [-]
This is to an extent why facebook can make the ads harder to block, they control the ad infrastructure (or at least some of it) as well as the app infrastructure.
For many sites that is not the case, running adtech infrastructure is not even close to their primary business and taking the task on individually isn't worth the admin cost. Companies wanting to advertise don't just come along and say “my product is aligned with your content, could I pay for one of your advert slots?” because they don't want to just target the people who are actively looking at relevant content. They want to follow people who look at relevant content around like little stalkers, so the adverts can be put in front of you even when you've moved on to looking at less relevant content - and that requires tracking between sites which a smaller individual site can not do on its own or have the clout to negotiate a good exchange with other sites with.
16 hours ago [-]
drcongo 16 hours ago [-]
It's easy, just block every Facebook owned domain there is. Works for me.
1over137 15 hours ago [-]
Where do you get the list of "every Facebook owned domain"? Can you share?
why not just run a 24/7 agent to do the work for them?
seritools 14 hours ago [-]
why not "just" do it for them?
SoftTalker 12 hours ago [-]
either the agents are not good enough to do it, or they cost too much, or perhaps they refuse (i.e. seeing it as trying to subvert the intended function of the site or something).
sciencesama 13 hours ago [-]
a killer use case of ai would be an AI adblocker !!
mattrighetti 13 hours ago [-]
I'm more surprised by the fact that people still use Facebook
skeeter2020 13 hours ago [-]
remember the amazing show "community"?
Elroy: “I got a job through LinkedIn.”
Annie: “What? That’s crazy! People use LinkedIn?”
Elroy: “No, LinkedIn hired me to help figure out why people don’t use it.”
Capricorn2481 13 hours ago [-]
That's an underrated season, imo. Keith David is fantastic.
HackerThemAll 13 hours ago [-]
Those childish comments are so funny. 3 billion people use Facebook regularly, and there are folks that deem themselves superior to all others who claim "I know nobody who uses Facebook". XD
dudhsudhd 12 hours ago [-]
Christ, pipe down little buddy. These “aha gotcha!” responses belong on reddit—but since you’re craving for one too, I’ll bite:
“It’s not a childish comment in the slightest, and most definitely not a claim of superiority in any way either. It’s simply a fact. I, too, know a grand total of 0 persons who use Facebook. Three billion people may use it regularly but all the people I know are in the other, let’s say >vast majority<, of FIVE billion people who don’t even care about Zuckerberg’s billboard.”
curt15 13 hours ago [-]
"What do you do for work?"
"I find ways to defeat adblockers"
arendtio 12 hours ago [-]
Actually, 10 years ago, I knew someone with roughly that job description (neither Google nor Facebook).
devilll 12 hours ago [-]
Be evil.
ck2 12 hours ago [-]
I haven't been on Facebook for years
Why are people on anything meta or musk?
Then again I figured we'd be back to personal blogs by now since "AI" can set one up in seconds
DJBunnies 12 hours ago [-]
Some of us plan events / engage socially.
Dwedit 6 hours ago [-]
Would probably need a full userscript at this point?
classified 15 hours ago [-]
This barf bag of a company is making the internet a war zone. If at all possible, the best you can do is to never touch their toxic mess.
j45 15 hours ago [-]
Blocking ads sounds like a job for AI
sleepybrett 13 hours ago [-]
Another reminder that facebook is abhorrent and not worth your time.
amazingamazing 16 hours ago [-]
Assuming you insist on using facebook you can proxy it, using a simple script that removes all ads prior to serving. The problem of course is that this is not cheap. Easier to just not use facebook.
psd1 14 hours ago [-]
I'm keen to see this simple script, and to understand why it's simple given that ublock origin finds it hard.
amazingamazing 12 hours ago [-]
Ublock origin doesnt use javascript. The script just involves a tree traversal of the dom and removal of any node that says ad.
The issue is facebook obfuscates selectors so you cant easily do it the way ublock prefers.
psd1 9 hours ago [-]
Sorry, still don't understand. The dom is not complete until JavaScript has run, no? So the ublock extension can do dom traversal on the rendered page, but the proxy can only operate at the request level. I assume your not running a headless browser on your squid box, lol. I'm aware that a proxy can tweak html and js, but the js will be challenging to analyse statically. If you're only blocking requests to ad domains, then presumably most people would just block them in DNS. So i still don't understand what the proxy gains you.
amazingamazing 9 hours ago [-]
No, not a traditional one. You would render the entire page in your server, remove the ads, copy the modified html and your client would get ad free copy. You are not blocking anything in the traditional sense. Ask claude to do it, it works.
psd1 6 hours ago [-]
Thanks, now i understand you. I didn't think of that because it's insane, but maybe i am just old.
16 hours ago [-]
bloqs 7 hours ago [-]
Ublock Origin's creators are absolute god-kings for their consistent work to help me (for free) not be forced to engage in psychological conditioning all day via my eyeballs. I never used to have an issue with ads, but because of capitalism, they simply cannot exist without cancerously taking over everything. They start as a banner, then before you know it, you have full screen unskippable paywalls to the content, with extreme discomfort placed on the user with deliberately engaging bright colours and sudden sounds played without my consent. Sure, if I like the product such as facebook as a free platform I might consider a premium licence for some conveniences, but adverts are simply the direct representation of societal rot for profit. I paid for netflix, then eventually they started showing me ads on netflix. It never ever stops.
tamimio 15 hours ago [-]
I mean the ultimate solution is block fecebook entirely and any and all its other companies/domains, but I think the best approach is not to block ads, but to block everything and only let the text and other useable html code out, that can’t be countered as your filter is not going after specific match they try to hide behind some long tags, rather than blocking all and just pass the readable useful buttons.
throwyonion 16 hours ago [-]
[dead]
harlanji 11 hours ago [-]
Using ad blockers is of poor character anyway. That's their chosen business model and if we don't accept their terms then we don't need to use their service.
I am happy to pay for an Ad Free experience on services that offer it. We should all send letters to companies who we want to pay to give us an ad free experience. "I don't want to pay" is an indefensible position because everything is an energy exchange. "There is no free lunch." If we don't want to pay with money then we can pay with attention to ads, and hacking the display to take without giving in return is corrupt.
Buttons840 11 hours ago [-]
I think my computer should display information the way I want it to, and that's okay!
I do pay for the energy that powers my monitor and CPU after all.
tonyhart7 13 hours ago [-]
I know this is gonna be unpopular take
but for modern social media to function, they need showing ads to pay creator
many people livelihood depends on it, creator make content in turn of revenue sharing that user get for free
SoftTalker 12 hours ago [-]
Nobody owes creators a dime. Creators need to earn their income by producing something worth consuming, and being on a platform that is acceptable to the consumer.
And the world was better off before "modern social media."
wing-_-nuts 12 hours ago [-]
I get what you're saying, and in the beginning days of the internet, I hoped that people would adopt a payment system where a user could distribute a pool of money to the pages that they visited, in order to pay for server uptime, content creation, etc.
Of course, companies took the easy way out. Just serve ads. Until that got absolutely obnoxious and downright dangerous, then users started blocking them enmass.
Well of course, we're now in a place where the internet is mostly paid for with ads, and the content creators that want to get paid up front (substack, WSJ, FT, etc) want crazy high amounts for subscription fees. I'm not a trader, so I do not get enough benefit to make it worth while to sub to those sites.
So I guess I'll keep blocking ads for my own security, and bypass paywalls with archiver sites. Shame. It could have been different, but this is the bed they made, and they can lay in it.
zetanor 12 hours ago [-]
I'd pay a few dollars a month to use a service without ads and without surveillance. Services don't offer this and creators are staying on those services, so fuck them.
metabagel 12 hours ago [-]
I have YouTube Premium, so I don't see ads on YouTube.
kakacik 12 hours ago [-]
AFAIK creators these days earn via additional channels like merch, tiktok etc. Direct views of some videos aren't prime for quite some time.
People dont have issue with creators getting paid, they have issue with absolutely evil platforms that host that and scoop up most of the value between creators and consumers. Platforms that willingly promote ie racist content because it simply drives more views/clicks.
Markoff 11 hours ago [-]
TIL there are creators on FB, I thought it's social network for people to meet friends or for companies/restaurants to present themselves, but creators? that sounds more like Youtube
sumtechguy 11 hours ago [-]
There are. Several model maker communities use it to put stuff up for sale. It is a nice way to find other model makers.
The reason I joined FB no longer exists for me. I remember why I stopped talking to many of the 'friends' I had. I silenced all of them and only join interesting groups now. Even then I only log in once or twice a year.
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 ads or leave Facebook, I'll leave. But there are conversations people have there that I'd rather not lose access to, so... I guess I'd have to partially stick around and campaign for others to leave as well?
That isn't enough for me. I don't just want to not see the ads, I want to stop them being fetched entirely.
There are two big problems with ads.
* The ad network can build up a very complete profile of what you like, dislike, and generally what you're looking at on the web. Yes, that profile is "anonymised" so far as it goes, but in reality, that doesn't really matter. If you know what you're looking for, there would be enough tells in the data that can de-anonymise you. Covering up the ads doesn't stop this data being collected; it merely stops you wanting to click on the ad.
* Ads are a very common malware delivery system, and although nowadays it's probably less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it, there are instances of it happening in the past. Stopping ads from being fetched entirely would obviously prevent this.
Less common but we just saw a week ago that malware-via-ads is definitely still happening today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170001
This one replaced users clipboard contents with a particular bitcoin wallet address. So a few people who happened to be on their way to send some crypto pasted the malicious wallet address instead of the one they actually copied to their clipboard. This has stolen at least $100k so far.
1. Facebook already knows everything you see and do on facebook
2. Facebook is the ad network and serves its own ads.
Therefore blocking ads on facebook won't prevent facebook from knowing everything you do.
GP seems to have a fair understanding of the situation, care to explain why you think it's wrong?
The web started as this proposition: you send a request to remote computer. Request says "Hey... can I read a document named this?" and the computer shows you the document. Now this may have included images and external links and sound, and whatnot.
But today, the web is more of an application delivery system too. So many requests go "Hey... can I have a resource by this name?" and the remote computer may send you a lot of source code that basically demands to run on your machine in order to get that resource.
And advertisements are piggybacking on those resources. They are a "package deal" where they are saying "you wanna read this text? you gotta take all this extra stuff with it."
And is it any surprise that coinminers are unleashed and other unpleasant things come down the pipe? Big fat videos and huge images are hogging resources.
So here's the bottom line: I don't need to use the web for free. I don't intend to freeload anyone's site or resources. But I also don't want them freeloading on me. I'm not going to download their crap; I'm not going to run their programs; I'm not going to occupy my own system's resources to display their ads when I don't want them.
So it seems fair to block "ads" that are asking to use my resources without paying for them. So I would prefer not to transact--at all--with any remote system that wanted to freeload on my resources in exchange for worthless information, like news, or forums.
What I really want is a non-executable web. I first started using the web in the mid-90s and most websites were like that. HTML, images, colours, fonts (but only from a pre-defined short list), and the occasional sound. If a site used JavaScript at all, it was for trivial stuff such as rollovers (which can now be done using CSS only).
I’d like to go back to that situation, maybe not exclusively but as a separate option. Give me a non-executable web of text, hyperlinks, images, videos and sounds (but no auto-play), CSS, forms, and web components (that can be targeted by links and fetched without refreshing the entire page) so we can do really nice discussion forums, web mail, multimedia encyclopedias (think Encarta) and other server-rendered resources, all without client-side scripting.
It doesn’t even need to be a different protocol or anything like that. It would be enough to have an otherwise modern browser but with no JS engine and a search engine that only indexes pages that lack JavaScript so that they render and function correctly on that JS-free browser.
Naturally, the search engine would miss a lot of the spam sites out there because they all rely on JavaScript. It would also miss many legitimate sites that rely on JavaScript but that’s okay.
It would create a space for JavaScript-free sites to get attention and develop a community. It would of course allow commercial sites, but they’d have to rely on display advertising and traditional marketing (targeted audiences based on subject matter) rather than behavioural tracking. This was the kind of advertising used in magazines and newspapers. It was far less obnoxious but still quite effective when the audience was large enough. It also demanded a lot more creativity from the ad industry, as documented in the show Mad Men.
Did you not skip over a lot of steps in between?
User: Hey can I read a document named this?
Server: Sure, let me spend resources and spin harddisk and lookup the thing you wanted. Oh hey, I found it .. here ya go
User: Great.
----
You've conviently ignored the resources the "old" web had to spend to serve you. Nothing has really changed it. Also the thing you wanted, that was "source code". We just called it html. It is no different than javascript+css+html5.
Yes, the server resources that were necessary to serve web pages are the origin of advertising, because the admins somehow had to keep the lights on and their bills paid. I don't fault them for this. I don't begrudge them for being, basically, forced into carrying advertising because the freeloading users wouldn't settle for any other way. Advertising allowed a "free web" to continue unabated for a long time.
But advertisements don't need to be resource-intensive on the client side. They don't need to eat gobs of bandwidth, CPU, memory, or our eyeballs. But the fact that they do chew up these resources is partly for why they need to die now.
Server admins can pay for their resources however, and offset their costs however they please. I'm fine with subscription or pay-per-use models or whatever. I honestly have very little use for ad-supported models, and my daily web habits are such that I really don't visit ad-supported websites at all, except for YouTube, where I normally pay for a Premium subscription to completely eliminate all formal ads, anyway. And that's the way it should be.
This is pathological. Like I find myself not ever looking at the top result in a search, because that is where Google has been putting ads.
Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it.
They ran through some scenarios, and one was how to get a car loan. I studied the homepage and found nothing, then clicked the menu and found loans, but no car loan on the loans page. I ended up searching and found it.
After each scenario they asked me some questions, and the first question I got for the car loan scenario was why I hadn't clicked on the link on the front page. There was no link, I replied puzzled. There was a large image they said. I stared in disbelief.
The person running the scripts navigated to the homepage, and pointed at the screen. There, at the bottom, a blinking banner about car loans.
I replied that it must have triggered my mental ad blocker, since ads are typically banners, frequently near the edges and animated somehow, so I never even registered the banner.
They looked genuinely puzzled at my response.
This was 25 years ago. My mental ad blocker is still active, though uBlock Origin on Firefox takes care of most of them.
For me physical ad blocking is more about a first-line defense against malware and such than it is about getting rid of obnoxious ads. The latter my mental blocker does fine enough, though it can be annoying.
My instinct is “if it is an ad, then whatever it is offering is a scam”.
It's not computers that are the problem, it's people.
We've normalized (and even embraced) the situation where relationship between businesses and customers is adversarial. The phenomenon you're describing, known as "banner blindness", is just brain filtering out noise, but the thing is, that noise didn't get there by accident.
What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.
This is a thought I want to pull on
I have a view that organisations, with their network of misaligned incentives, mean that companies act something like an alien lifeform. Something with a decentralised brain, unable to plan beyond immediate stimuli
Companies consume and self-cannibalise. They are both aggressively rational in pursuit of profit but irrational when it comes to preserving their ecosystems
Many companies look like groups of people where nobody has total control. Everyone is reacting to some stakeholder, even the CEO is terrified of "the shareholders". So these organisations cut off healthy limbs (layoffs), engage in lurid rituals (AI), and wastefully destroy the natural resources of the humans who work for them
I first heard this idea in a James Bridle lecture, where he suggested that the strange behaviour of companies was a good starting point for understanding what an alien lifeform might behave like. And he observed the ways that humans and machines now mirror each other.
Inside our society, controlled by these aliens, humans act like machines (Taylorism at work, self-censorship for algorithms at play). Machines act like humans (AI, spam, computer programs mediating relationships).
Underneath it is a frantic need to quantize everything so it can be dominated
Corporations were the first paperclip maximizers.
Local incentives. Every single person and entity is just maximizing their gain against the rules and rewards. The way you become really powerful and rich is to create an organization where all the local incentives keep funneling to you, sitting at the top.
This is a simplistic way to think about it. Even the most altruistic physician needs to advertise their services if they hope to make a living out of it. Even the best film maker, the best actor needs to "hit the circuits" to promote their movie.
"Make and they'll come" is only possible if you're already successful. Apple can chose not to advertise, since they are Apple (although they do plenty of advertising themselves).
Soon they will be woven in to LLMs where they suggest the things they are paid to suggest.
I’ve fallen victim to this when I was doing coursework in the last decade.
Either a moodle module or a block of text in box in a textbook had something important to the concept I was learning, but I subconsciously ignored it because it had a format similar to an internet ad.
Very rarely I'll come across a page where valuable information is hidden in those areas and it takes someone else showing me to actually see it.
The term is 28 years old.
Why put up with that? Is Kagi too expensive for you?
https://adnauseam.io/
It loads every ad, and clicks them without display them. So the advertiser still pays for the click but the user never sees ads.
So a throwaway account for reading Reddit (even as it decays) might lead to an totally unrelated account you do care about getting unfairly suspended, or the MonopolyCloudFlareBot "helping" your bank starts rejecting your IP/browser-fingerprint, etc.
This would worry me less if we had laws that make it easy to demand accountability and fixes, but we don't. (Not much in the US, and in the EU efficacy is still questionable.)
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 support system or nearby physical branch?
Basically I'm saying we have some Kafkaesque stuff out there, it isn't sensible or fair, and if someone wants to tweak the nose of the beast they should at least consider the range of what could go wrong.
One interesting thing is that it also removed some "internal CTAs" to engage (like "Start your day with our podcast!"). These aren't technically ads, so something like uBlock doesn't remove them. But honestly, I don't really mind having those filtered out too.
A general purpose system, especially if trained by the users, would be more than just an adblocker. It could be trained to block out spiders or other phobia triggers for instance. Even regenerate the photo but with a kitten. Blur our tabloid clickbait 'in other news' links.
The killer app for AR glasses will be blocking out billboards and logos.
- no disguised ads. They must be clearly marked -limit screen real state dedicated to ads - what the user didn't explicitly asked for, is an ad
We can't wait for companies to "do no evil". What would you ad to the list?
We'll have to have an overlay screen that is a separate device. Then your meta-glasses will be snitching on you ...
Mind you some glasses with a built in ML module could block all ads, not just on-screen ones. Rich people will see the World as green and pleasant and make gestured enquiries as to why we don't want to eat brioche!
I'm reminded of a simple observation about negotiations: the one who's willing to walk away is usually the one with the upper hand in the negotiation.
I think this is a choice we need to be considering on every level right now. What technology are you willing to walk away from? Fundamentally from my perspective the operating system and browser are *user agents,* they are pieces of software I permit to exist on the device I own because they do my bidding. The major manufacturers have perverted these user agents to a previously unfathomable degree under the presumption that you won't walk away and they can just keep on boiling the frog.
I'll walk away, in fact I feel like the more I walk away the better my life becomes. Switching to Linux a decade ago was more than worth the headaches considering what colleagues using Windows now have to put up with. Staying on Firefox + uBlock has been worth the headache vs. what people without a reliable ad blocker have had to put up with. Turning off my phone completely for a growing portion of the day has totally been worth it for peace of mind and freedom of distraction.
At this stage my relationship with technology seems to revolve heavily around the principle "how do I minimize exposure to technology produced by the largest American crime syndicates (Google, Microsoft, Meta etc)." This may be a radical or absolutist view but frankly my life is way better for it
Can run on most decently powered consumer devices.
Latency not great vs ad block though, of course.
Perhaps a fine tuned model explicit to this purpose could be even more compact.
I don't know if I am the same. But I do find it very difficult to use an internet browser with no adblocker.
Perhaps it's because I have now spent more time using browsers with blockers, than without
Ad servers seem to generally just nope out of serving me ads on their own when I have Firefox's tracking protection cranked up.
Between that and Kagi down-ranking shitty ad-infested domains, it just ... isn't really a problem for me.
(It's almost obvious extension of current AI image fingerprinting efforts. If a robust invisible watermark can be used to tell the image was AI generated, the same scheme can also be used for general DRM.)
If it comes that, I'll put my real monitor in front of that DRMed monitor (doable with flat screens) and I'll have a private LLM, in real-time, pushing on the real monitor (the one I look at), an ad-free version of the DRM'ed monitor.
DRM is nasty but private AI models are already more powerful and they'll only ever got better. And those open-weights are never ever going back in the box.
I think fandom wikis appear to have surpassed even this level of bad which I thought was the floor.
I’ll look up a character or lore and fandom has managed to SEO their way to the top of search. I’ll click on the link because I haven’t trained myself to avoid them immediately yet. I’ll then have a site load that immediately makes my pc fans take off like a vtol engine or make my phone start overheating to the point that it dims like the luminosity to protect itself as it reloads ads over and over and even reloads the page.
If I am willing to abuse myself enough to stay on the page to scroll down it then waits until I go to click on a link to immediately load an ad where I clicked and treat it like a real ad click.
At this point with the modern internet I do not know why any marketing department trusts the metrics they are getting from websites for click thrus. Every ad I’ve clicked on in the past year has been a trick on me and not a real click thru and has made me hate the company paying for the ad.
It feels like it’s nearing 100% fraud.
I'm no fan of ads and I am willing to pay for services I use to avoid seeing them - but I've learned over recent years that most people simply do not agree with that premise.
And overall society would get cheaper and more efficient since all that budget allocated to advertising would vanish with no consequences. Advertising is mostly a zero sum game where you have to advertise to get ahead of the other businesses advertisements. If companies stopped getting in to bidding wars for the top place on google, all of that money could be freed up for something useful.
I'd also like to see astroturfing / promoting things for money without disclosing it explicitly illegal. Again, anything to stop systematic manipulation.
Surely a better way to think of this is that a person's AI agent will simply find, via whatever means necessary, the information that the person is interested in. It's hard to imagine the person will still be operating on the old "pull" model where they deliberately visit a specific website or open a specific app.
I tell it what sites to go to, and the information I am interested it, and it grabs it using Playwright.
I am hoping I can get a self-host option working as well as this.
How do people use the Internet like this? Why isn't there just a single banner ad at the top, like how Altavista used to look?
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 not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely. Delete your account, get off that blasted site, and enjoy some moments of peace IRL.
Having been a very early adopter of FB (since ~2004), I deleted my account and am clean + sober + much happier since 2016.
(Not to say that I'm completely out of the FB ecosystem. Unfortunately, my fam is still on WhatsApp... and I've been trying to convince them to migrate to Signal...)
YMMV
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.
What one can control is not paying attention to the damned site. [Many more added to that list, btw]
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 other sort of account like that. To all of the people who say they can only stay in touch that way I just said, "I'm available via text, phone, chat group, Discord, email, Signal, and half a dozen more ways. If that isn't easy enough then maybe we don't need to keep in touch."
The only reason I can imagine seriously engaging with those things is as a business owner who watched FB railroad them into advertising there or being screwed, and happily I've never been in that position.
So yeah... at some point you have to accept that most people will happily dig in, and even most people who have qualms will find ways to justify why it's ok FOR THEM. You just have to make your own choice and stick with it, firmly and politely.
100%
That's the way to go.
And tbh, not being on FB hasn't affected my social life. I'm in touch with people {friends | family | colleagues | etc} the way I want. And if I miss any social events, that's Ok. No FOMO here. Mostly JOMO.
Exactly. Not only do I blocklist every known Meta domain at my DNS (I run the unbound DNS server at home) I also took all the IP blocks from Meta's ASNs and have automatically blocked them at the firewall level.
And I did that before doing so was, like now, just one LLM prompt away.
1 billion people are on Telegram: they may not be much better than WhatsApp but Telegram does not have Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and is not worth 1.5 trillion.
Really: just fuck the Zuck and his PHP/JavaScript ecosystem. Just get off, entirely off, that crappy abusive ad-ridden, surveillance ecosystem.
Delete your accounts today.
It saved me net an hour or more or mindless scrolling every day. Every single day. Not to mention the benefits of no more FOMO, better mental health, etc. AND left me with more time to actually accomplish things I wanted to do but somehow thought I never had the time.
The thing is: you have to find + allocate time and attention (= your most precious resource) to the things that matter most to you.
Since then I've been working on my online learning (30+ courses done, including several DL/ML certifications), read more books, and most importantly, focused on my health by working out nearly every day.
Small wins individually, but they have compounded greatly over time.
I tried to block this popup with uBlock Origin to no avail. No matter what element I selected, it was still there. Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.
Small win.
It appears to still be up for me. ??
Then I tried the normal view and ... wow, so many auto-playing video ads disguised as regular posts.
When are they going to admit that the redesign sucks and there's a reason everyone keeps loading the old reddit interface? Who has the ego that can't handle the truth, that their UI/UX design is garbage and loathed?
The random phrases turned into links that are never helpful means I can't trust any link in comments now, there's that stupid AI box that never has useful or helpful info, conversations are a nightmare to try and read through.
I will never understand how it is that a site which exists almost entirely for conversations, made a new UI that severely fucks with "read the conversation."
The real fix!
This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?
Sure, it's more computationally-expensive than running an HTML selection, but it's also not "staggering" by any reasonable stretch.
I would agree if this was an easily solvable problem with classical approaches. Clearly it is not, since even uBlock is giving up.
At any rate, "staggering" is relative. White-labeled web browsers becoming the most common GUI engine would have made an engineer's eyes water 20 years ago.
EFF: Adversarial Interoperability - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
If the owner of the system has a 'no ads' policy and a security mechanism to prevent ad servers from accessing their display without their authorisation, it is one thing if a company accidentally circumvents that by changing their page in a way that breaks detection (and unless there are records it was deliberate) they probably get the benefit of doubt from authorities.
But if they are blatantly going to quite great effort to circumvent the adblock security system to exceed their unauthorised access without the consent of and against the wishes of the owner of the client system, surely that's a clear-cut criminal case?
Of course, prosecutions of these types of things in many countries unfortunately tend to go after individuals who target big companies, but almost never the other way around.
Or was hard to write selectors against before, you know, AI.
It seems ironic to give up now. You can probably rig up an agent to automatically look for new div labyrinths and write selectors for them.
You can bet Facebook are using AI to generate these labyrinths!!!
So what you're saying is: you want Facebook to pay out something like $200M which is such a small amount it won't even realize, $170M will go to lawyers, everybody else gets $1.30.
That seems like how it might pan out.
It's like a door to door sales person thinking that if only they could find a way to unlock my door I would buy their stuff.
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 don't load in the first place, there's nothing for Facebook to sell.
The real insideous part is that advertisers don't need to actually bid on the auction to participate, and anyone participating gets to havest your ad profile. This is one of the big ways data brokers are able to build profiles on you. They can then do whatever they want with this info, and you'd probably never know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNIRyPi5QA
More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.
The next tier down was kind of the opposite. They weren't big enough to surface things like this, and they hired agencies for most of their ad spend. When focusing on the top of the funnel, there's this strange incentive with agencies where they often get more budget to spend if they can connect that directly to eye balls. Agencies are incentivized to throw the ads up everywhere and pay well to do so. They love cost-per-impression because we could deliver a large, predictable number of eye balls in a hurry.
All that said, we put no effort into getting around ad blockers as we were serving these ads on our own site/app and we viewed fighting ad blockers as fighting our users. Our ads were served inline in HTML, but clearly identified in the HTML of the page. It took blockers a while to catch on and block them, but they eventually did.
Maybe 15 years ago multi-touch attribution was the big push but even that only adds minimal insights into how ad spend affects the behavior you're trying to measure. It helps with high-level channel attribution but it's still at best directional.
So once you reach a point when increasing spend at Meta/Google results in superlinear increases in CAC vs. spend, you eventually end up having to move those ad dollars elsewhere and over time (and a lot of money) you get an intuitive understanding of how these other mediums trickle down to the metrics that matter.
You're totally right about agencies and their perverse incentives and how that leads to sub-optimal spend allocation.
He did.
This also depends on whether ads are being sold as "pay-per-click" or "pay-per-view" (although in the biz they say "impression" rather than "view"). For the latter, websites like Meta who sell ad space only get paid when people actually click on them.
if nobody clicks on the ads nobody's going to buy ad space because people who place ads care about whether their ads translate into sales. So of course Facebook cares, and ultimately only cares about how many people respond to them because how much money they'll make depend on how much money the ads make.
That's why FB has invested ungodly sums into trying to figure out the preferences of their users.
We are now in an adversarial situation regarding our personal information, but our adversaries depend on sources we have a modicum of control over. If I signed my dog up for a physical mailer, I wonder how long would it take for a portion of the internet to consider Doctor-Professor Kensington a legal individual.
The second part of putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers is tracking & fingerprinting, especially across devices.
In general, ads work by anchoring a brand name in your memory for when you eventually are looking for said product or service, the goal isn't always to force a conversion on the spot.
This is exactly why I don't want to see their shit, ever. It just doubles my resolve to not see it. They are targeting my underbrain, my subconscious, and do not want it.
There's one particular insurance company that continued to evade my ad blocking attempts for literally years. I will never buy from them. My current insurance is fine and the ad-mongers can get bent until their business dies.
If some magic-genie offered the tradeoff of "You can't install third-party adblockers, but your privacy will be magically guaranteed", that would be really appealing.
The door to door sales person wants to unlock your door so they can sell the info to somebody else who shows up and steals your TV.
government's don't surveil for money, unless you bend the argument a bit to say the government has finite resources and is run off money itself. which is kinda true, but also kinda fuzzy (the Fed).
Facebook and Youtube are just the newest battlefields. If it's not politician ads, it's military ads, partisan "nonprofit" ads, or ads for podcasts. I don't need to see any of them.
That said, as long as UBO keeps up the good fight on the open web, I'm good. Facebook is basically a memory now, and there are other ways to access Youtube that are actually less taxing on their bandwidth because they don't have auto-play enabled and don't show a 45-minute podcast episode as a pre-roll.
There’s a delicate balance, more impressions isn’t always a good outcome. Id assume here given the battle against ad blockers that the platforms do believe the aggregate impression mix leads to good performance for advertisers though
Second thing is that besides a small minority of people who refuse to buy advertised products out of spite, some would be blockers still do if the ad get shown. Maybe less than those without ad blockers, but still more than zero.
Third thing is that the point of advertising is not just direct sales. Some companies put up ads just to "take space", to establish themselves as leaders in their sector and not let others in. That's why you see som much advertisement for Coca-Cola. They don't expect you to buy a can of Coke just after you have seen the ad, you probably already have some in your fridge anyways. But by doing that, they make sure that when you want a drink, you think about Coca-Cola and not something else.
I've mostly ditched everything but YouTube now. Honestly, just not using Google seach and gmail makes a HUGE difference in how targeted ads get. I still have an instagram account that a very rarely check, but since I'm not a big cookie blocker, I'll see ads for stuff I was recently searching for. Oh! And I feel like one of those "I don't have a TV" people from the 90s, but I no longer carry a smartphone either. I haven't bought anything from an ad in a few years at this point. It likely still counts but the closest is buying something a YouTuber has recommended from a video I sought out for an interest I already had.
We need to prod our representatives to ban the selling of our private information. Websites themselves can use the information but they're prohibited from selling it to anyone else. Why? Because the data changes hands and borders several times after which we lose all control over it.
Even cringy ads that digust or anger users in the moment have a subtle effect of making them more likely to buy or recommend that brand in the future. The name recognition is what advertisers are buying, it doesn't have to immediately persuade the user to click for them to get what they want.
Its quichotesque effort but the only thing that can move the needle a bit since everybody involved cares only about money here - waiting for some toothless legislation is useless when harm is happening now.
This is not true. Most people with ad blockers are everyday people. And even for people who are hardcore against ads, they may find a useful product or see something that they will think of again in the future.
many of times, i have looked to purchase a product or service and remember an ad that i saw that has alter my decision.
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 simply can't avoid that truth, it will eventually shrink.
Adblocking lets some people pretend Facebook isn't a privacy hellhole for everyone they talk to. There is essentially no way to use it that doesn't abuse your data privacy, for one thing, but prolonging the impression that it can be ameliorated is a mistake.
There is clearly a need for facebook/reddit alternatives for useful groups like the one you describe. There are things like Mastodon out there, but they haven't gained much traction. What will it take to get people off of platforms that are actively hostile to their users? What is keeping existing alternatives from being used?
No. Enough. The community is fucking screaming at you
Someone that loves their users does not fire the mods in response to API change protest. And censorship galore, and too much power concentrated in the mods and site
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 most popular subreddits are anything but government/corporate manipulators is deluding themselves.
Rather than creating tiktok but open source, we should just dump the idea entirely. Social media was a net negative to society.
They haven't for me (just tested before posting this comment), which I realize might be temporary. Have they published a policy, or did you get caught in A/B testing hell?
I know why they did this, I get it, but they did me a favor by severely curbing the time I might otherwise waste on their web site. For that I thank them.
I guess the upside of reddit selling all that post data to AI firms is I'm not sure I'll really need to use reddit anymore. Which means I'll never login to post since I won't be seeing other threads to distract myself with. Which seems like long term will hurt reddit's future data.
A quick google search shows thousands of complaints on, ironically, Reddit itself. So it's probably not just an A/B test, more likely a gradual rollout.
The secret to making alternative platforms work, is actually engaging with them and pretending the toxic platforms you hate no longer exist.
I am a bay area serial founder, with no Twitter, Meta, Google, Apple, or any such other centralized surveillance capitalism bullshit. I do not even have a Signal account as centralization is fundamentally incompatible with freedom and privacy in my eyes. Never gets in my way of doing anything I want to do or talking to anyone I want to talk to.
People sure do like to make excuses on why they still -must- use those platforms even though they do not -want- to. Absolutely never let a platform hold you hostage. Let no one own you if you want freedom.
The smartest people I have ever interacted with are on platforms like IRC, Matrix, and Mastodon. I would rather build a social graph of thousands of people that also really value freedom over thousands of people that make excuses to stay trapped in walled gardens any day.
Thank you. One reason I spend more time on my Mastodon feed than my Bluesky feed is there are fewer people there complaining about Twitter. Less rage and complaining in general.
But it is, at some level, culturally dying. It is very evident.
It would not be loss of revenue that troubled Facebook, for years at least — it would be slowing engagement and lower demand for reach.
Are you so sure? Anecdotally, I know increasingly more people who either left the platform or stopped using it last years, and this seems to be a pattern if we believe online sources [0]. Of course many stay, but the platform gets worse and worse ime.
I visit facebook only for events and some groups that I cannot avoid, so I just enter specific pages there than navigating feeds. But looking at the normal feed, it is just so bad. Complete nonsense, irrelevant stuff and more and more AI generated slop. If we exclude some groups, no real, organic people actually post (except some influencers). For those who stay, assuming they do not get the "friends feed", I am really unsure how they can tolerate that.
[0] https://policy.economy.ac/news/2026/05/202605289098
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
Not just your comment. It's all over the place here.
But maybe I shouldn't be throwing stones in my glass house. I smoked cigarettes for a few years on college, knew they were terrible for me and for those around me, but continued for too long because I frankly enjoyed the pleasure.
I don’t think people need to leave, necessarily, and I cannot urge them to do so. But I do think people should shrink their engagement with it, use it as little as is feasible, shrink their footprint, allow it less, so Facebook changes. Unfortunately it is a big part of life on the internet, it’s often people’s literal job to be there, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.
Think of how the structure of Meta is gonna work, there's some team in charge of ads who has a sub team now in charge of messing with the ads to stop them being blocked.
If you start whitelisting everything that isn't an ad you move the problem into an area the team in charge of blocking the ads don't have control over.
Highly unlikely the team in charge of stopping ad blocking has swing to then start changing the code of every other element on the page to break your non-ad white listing.
Whether selecting for ads or content, one had to figure different ways of getting after it, whitelisting was already off the table.
We'd found "structure" could work, but had to be fuzzy and adaptive as marketing shuffles pages around constantly, not just on the whole, but for A/B runs and personalized "experiences".
So that seems back to, hey, models could help.
(Though none of them, to date, attain as high success as latest hand coded "reader" tools, worth inspecting for how this could be generalized.)
OT but I think I learned a new term today.
Swing. In oil and gas we would call that suction so for future reference:
Swing = Suction
We have the tools to make this orders of magnitude easier. We can do this to all of social media.
Big tech gave us the magic space runes (LLMs) we can use to undo them. They have no idea what they've done. All of their value distilled into powerful exoskeletons we can run from home.
Already, it's become apparent that the world is distancing itself from American Big Tech, and they're using the tools we built to pull away. It's so ironic, but frankly justified since we've impinged upon their sovereignty.
We used to say that Google "hired everyone" to keep the smart people from building alternatives. To take all their free hours, keep them busy, keep them from becoming threats.
Now every single one of our spare hours is a salient of attack. I have never felt so empowered to raise an army against the powers that be. They are all mortal.
The solution is truly to just never be on Facebook, but - our local PTA only distributes news via Facebook. (There may be a Whatsapp group I don't know about, which isn't better.) So does the local library. If the township publishes things elsewhere, I don't know about it.
I use a service to convert some pages' feeds to RSS, which is semi-reliable, but doesn't work well and is a paid service if you want more than two feeds - I wish I could hand-roll something myself.
While I do not think that the company needed to modernize the site’s UI, it baffles me that their anti-spam tools are so rudimentary. Most searches yield irrelevant keyword-bombed results, and, such results tend to be nearly identical listings.
I had yearned for a viable Craigslist alternative for years. Sadly, Facebook Marketplace won. I don’t feel comfortable searching for anything due to the fact that Facebook will inevitably use my queries to further profile me.
My guess is that the default state is the scam garbage. It quickly learns your preferences. Which I hate. I miss having my 5 sections of craigslist I could browse over my morning coffee and not feel like I'm missing a deal.
They need to surrender this whole anti-adblocker crusade because it will kill them in the long run (along with the billion other problems FB has)
For some parts they did. I tried Facebook Dating, and it's only available on phones.
Also, to save you the trouble, don't use Facebook Dating. It is, to use a technical term, a fermented shitpile.
Now, that's something I would love to see in my lifetime.
The only thing I'm proposing is to do the filtering on graphical data (what the user actually sees) rather than on the DOM (which can be obfuscated; and which may change every week).
Everything happens at the image level so there's no way Meta can obfuscate the DOM to make ads pass through.
As a simple one, the Facebook has this dark pattern where they put an unread count marker on Loops to try to get you to click it. It works, I click it by accident quite often even though I have zero interest in loops. There's no way to turn it off. But an OS Level AI could cover it with a black square
Yes, I get I could just not use the app. I still want to see what friends and family are up to so I launch the app -> menu -> feeds. This mostly removes everything I hate. But, that unread (1) marker on the loops icon gets me
If you have ANY hope of Apple letting you have enough control over your device to visually block ads in apps then you are stratospherically shit outta luck.
https://www.fbpurity.com/
More discussion here
Such a move would also presumably be incompatible with Apple's highly lucrative search engine deal with Google.
For business, our purchases clearly reveal self-deceptive practices, and dark marketing patterns certainly take advantage of that.
For government, our voting preferences reveal that we want to be deceived. Although we often say good things that our social group memes us.
I'm not sure when I learnt to be so cynical.
Worth noting though that Apple injects ads into the News app, which is just a webview, so it's certainly not them that will do this.
Ignoring that users care deeply about images so a browser that did this would be considered broken from the get go.
It will be harder on other sites, but not that hard. There’s an unbreakable ceiling for the ads here - they need to be readable trivially by human eyes, or they don’t work as ads.
So, you can hide or obfuscate the ad… but then it’s not a very good ad.
Reasons this wouldn't work are you'd really need to get it to a good enough and small enough model to run low energy use and very fast to not impact browsing. The other issue is it'll be a fixed target for a period of time so the ads could be tweaked to find how to get them through it.
Has anyone thought about building something like this?
Criminalizing information flow is a non-trivial problem that I wouldn't want governments to be in control of.
The problem isn't one company sending information unsolicited, it's when hundreds of thousands of companies flood every communication channel with their own unsolicited advertising.
Email, phone have become unusable channels, not to mention much of the web.
not shitter, google but fb. some local business don't even have their own sites but maintain an insta / fb page.
I can get my content in front of tons of people for a pittance. I can upload a list of my best customers and run a lookalike campaign. I can run a re-targeting campaign on lapsed regulars. I can spend $16 to generate $1000. It's like fishing with dynamite.
Think about the type of person who uses FB. They don't care about ads. They don't care that it's fake content. They don't care that at least half the feed is AI slop. They just keep scrolling, clicking and buying.
Meta didn't create these people. They only got them all to gather in one place and then started selling access. There's a sucker born every minute and they grow up and join FB. This isn't a defense of Meta by any means. They are a horrible company and the world would be better off if business models like theirs were outlawed. The point is nothing is going to change with them unless there's legislative action.
But to be fair, when I was 19 everybody over 30 was basically the same kind of old to me. Also boomers are the most childish generation in history, and attempt to hide amongst Xers.
The weird thing is that they think that Millennials created their culture. Xers created their culture. Millennials were raised on Disney and N'SYNC.
Hey, leave me out of this!
From the point of view of the ad server the ad has been successfully loaded and displayed, the overlay would occur exclusively in the browser rendering engine client side with no communication back to the ad server.
Businesses make money by selling products/services, so they don't need money.
Wikipedia is donation supported.
GP is pretty much saying - if it can only survive by running ads, let's do without it.
The free, open internet keeps chugging along (for better or worse) regardless of how many ads I block. Especially those companies who run ad networks.
Feel free to make a moral judgement on those who block ads, because most everyone who is blocking ads has already made a judgement about online advertising and its surveilling bedfellows.
For things that need to scale past that like very large social media, the question is if that's worth those sites existing.
This notion is a very Silicon Valley / coastal elite mentality IMO. A significant majority of people on the internet do not and will not pay for anything - largely because most people around the world just don't have the money for stuff like that.
The data on this is pretty consistent - take Netflix for example. A majority of Netflix users choose the cheaper ad supported tier, even though it is very easy and only marginally more expensive to switch to the non-ad supported tier. And this is already filtering to the subset of people who are willing and able to pay for a streaming subscription to begin with. The same case exists for Reddit -> you can pay to have ads removed, but only 1% of users do.
I see what you mean by Hacker News, but it's not a great example, since there are currently no ads and it's free. It's provided by Y Combinator, which monetizes via investing in startups (not something all internet businesses can reliably just start doing). For example - how would Reddit monetize? You cannot really expect people on Reddit all to be willing to pay to use it. And if some were - the whole value of a network is its scale -> so the drop in users would effectively kill the site. That's why there are no subscription only forums out there (at least none that I know of).
With regards to your second point of if these social media sites should even exist in the first place -> that's where you the consumer get to decide. If you don't get value from it, just don't use it. People who do get value from it -> use it. If enough people collectively decide it's not valuable, then the website becomes irrelevant (see Google+ and MySpace).
This is where I get very confused by anti ads people - show me a reliable alternative that is proven to work. Show me that people across the world, not just in San Francisco or London, can and will pay to access these websites/apps. And I'm not just talking about Meta - what about every random small website you have ever accessed that is ad supported? What about news websites like BBC? Or independent content creators who monetize via Instagram / YouTube ads? What about that wiki for that favorite video game of yours? Or that cooking blog? Don't get me wrong - I hate seeing ads as much as the next guy - but I can't really picture a realistic alternative.
If people love a community and like spending time on it, they'll be willing to help keep it running and avoid shutting down. You don't get any real profit, but do you need that to run a website? And if people don't love it enough to pay for it, you do have to wonder if it really needs to exist.
I think Reddit could get away with their reddit pro and paying for awards deal, honestly. They would need to rely more on volunteer labor and volunteer development, but a site could exist like that. I assume it's how Lemmy and Lobsters run?
In my view the problems are that we scale past the point of volunteer moderation being practical, we want to pay for full time devs and so on for the sites, and we want the operation to somehow also make a profit. If you view it more as a hobby that you sink some money into to keep it alive, the economics on a small site can be much more reasonable. Think of an individual blogger and their comment section - the blogger might naturally pay some hundreds a year for hosting on their own, as part of that hobby impulse.
I think at best your perspective is “threatening me with a good time.” There’s really nothing online I value that can only exist because of millions of free users.
That is the only way to keep any service online sustainable without ads.
There are also donations, but that can only take you so far.
Things cost money, server costs and domain costs rise, bandwidth gets expensive as bots and AI agents surge and scrape websites.
It is the only way, without having ads all over the place.
Mistake #2 was letting the tech bros anywhere near it.
Stopping the movement of all things unless click / tap to play would be a huge adblock win in my book.
But probably not.
Facebook has made itself indispensable in a number of areas that are in the public interest and should be treated as a public good for these purposes.
Ads are pollution, and Facebook is forcing people to choose between ingesting pollution and using facebook marketplace, or throwing their used but functional goods in the garbage.
Alternatively, eventually they will publish where the audience is, if the audience is not on facebook then they will publish somewhere else.
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.
Facebook is allowed to make ads show on their own product.
I hate their product, but it's theirs.
In a macro sense, the prerogative there is really up to the public. Companies only exist in the first place because the public has granted them the legal and social framework to exist, and the public can adjust that framework as they so choose.
In a more specific sense, the math there changes once a company makes itself indispensable to the public good. There are any number of analogies I could run with, but I'll go with the analogy of a landfill. Suppose all the landfills in your city have been privatized, have a habit of burning garbage, and employ armed thugs to prevent any visitors to the landfill from wearing masks. If you've got a truckload of garbage to dispose of, you can either ingest burning garbage fumes, or dump it on the side of the road somewhere. It's absolutely in the public's interest to regulate the landfills' behaviour to prevent them from both burning garbage and from stopping people from wearing masks when they visit the landfill.
But I'm not convinced it will have an effect. And I'd have to use fb.
I think it’s purely to massage their Active Monthly User numbers to show growth.
I don't think so. They want you to use the App because through the they have way more ways to track you.
>paintboth1234 uBO Team wrote:
>The project is FOSS. Anyone else who wants to deal with this disgusting site is free to make pull requests with working solutions themselves.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about...
https://www.fbpurity.com/
In case anyone else faces the same: it worked when I resized the browser window and reloaded.
Oh well, I cant be mad at the uBO team. Much appreciation for all they have given me over the years
(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
That would be funny.
https://reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5
https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/
Archived comments / VPN: https://photon-reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/
Stop. Blaming. Users.
Only if you're so hopelessly addicted to Facebook that you just have to roll over and take this. You always have the option to just not use Facebook.
I hate that so many people I know use it for things.
Though evidently someone's cut a deal because Facebook groups is all over Google search results these days.
Isn't there a browser plugin to do that for Google too?
Not perfect, but it works.
(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
https://search.worldcat.org/title/57068812
I made my own extension by essentially prompting to create a version of ublock origin with a button that uses a local llm to dynamically generate block lists and update them.
We know they want to be a monopoly. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
Site doesn't work. Posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 Messages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712 https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1c0xfdz/messenger... (or any thread about this)
He doesn't see human beings as people
Websites with ads need to satisfy the ad buyers. This means running a bunch of JavaScript that's adversarial to the website and fingerprints both the website and the browser to determine where and to whom the ad is actually shown. It's like a cloudflare bot challenge is happening behind the scenes. Of course all this stuff doesn't happen on the website's own domain, or the website could manipulate it.
And the ad that's originally delivered might not actually be the ad, but might be a script that fetches the real ad from a different server, if the incentives line up that way. Imagine you have a contract to advertise on a site, but someone else wants to advertise on the same site and pays you to forward their ad. Ad margins are razor thin, you'll do this for $0.00001 profit per impression. And your buyer might be doing the same thing to their customer. It's all a huge mess.
In ye old days, you had newspapers who sold ads, and had to at least satisfy their customers. What the newspaper advertised reflected on the newspaper, and where the advertiser advertised, reflected on the advertiser. Now we have a situation where no one is accountable. Spammy ad sites are a thing, because there isn't that direct relationship between advertiser and website.
(I used to work in this area, but my knowledge is ~4y out of date)
Networks are only necessary if you want to run new ads for every year or tie into their browsing history or other algorithmic stuff. But if someone wants to pay you 3k to run a banner ad for a few weeks that would be pretty easy to just embed.
You don't have to run a marketplace. Back then, people were calling via phone to put an ad into the newspaper. The same concept can still apply today.
You can just place an ad _where you actually want it_ instead of having a shitty decision engine decide it for you. Marketing budgets are messed up all over the place since social media, because they're really inefficient in finding the customers that actually wants to buy their stuff.
If you don't believe me, just take a look at facebook, they're trying to shove ads up your feed 99% of the time. It's a feed of ads, not a feed of "friends" anymore. Good luck trying to catch the 1% of posts that were actually the reason why you used the platform in the first place.
For many sites that is not the case, running adtech infrastructure is not even close to their primary business and taking the task on individually isn't worth the admin cost. Companies wanting to advertise don't just come along and say “my product is aligned with your content, could I pay for one of your advert slots?” because they don't want to just target the people who are actively looking at relevant content. They want to follow people who look at relevant content around like little stalkers, so the adverts can be put in front of you even when you've moved on to looking at less relevant content - and that requires tracking between sites which a smaller individual site can not do on its own or have the clout to negotiate a good exchange with other sites with.
Elroy: “I got a job through LinkedIn.”
Annie: “What? That’s crazy! People use LinkedIn?”
Elroy: “No, LinkedIn hired me to help figure out why people don’t use it.”
“It’s not a childish comment in the slightest, and most definitely not a claim of superiority in any way either. It’s simply a fact. I, too, know a grand total of 0 persons who use Facebook. Three billion people may use it regularly but all the people I know are in the other, let’s say >vast majority<, of FIVE billion people who don’t even care about Zuckerberg’s billboard.”
"I find ways to defeat adblockers"
Why are people on anything meta or musk?
Then again I figured we'd be back to personal blogs by now since "AI" can set one up in seconds
The issue is facebook obfuscates selectors so you cant easily do it the way ublock prefers.
I am happy to pay for an Ad Free experience on services that offer it. We should all send letters to companies who we want to pay to give us an ad free experience. "I don't want to pay" is an indefensible position because everything is an energy exchange. "There is no free lunch." If we don't want to pay with money then we can pay with attention to ads, and hacking the display to take without giving in return is corrupt.
I do pay for the energy that powers my monitor and CPU after all.
but for modern social media to function, they need showing ads to pay creator
many people livelihood depends on it, creator make content in turn of revenue sharing that user get for free
And the world was better off before "modern social media."
Of course, companies took the easy way out. Just serve ads. Until that got absolutely obnoxious and downright dangerous, then users started blocking them enmass.
Well of course, we're now in a place where the internet is mostly paid for with ads, and the content creators that want to get paid up front (substack, WSJ, FT, etc) want crazy high amounts for subscription fees. I'm not a trader, so I do not get enough benefit to make it worth while to sub to those sites.
So I guess I'll keep blocking ads for my own security, and bypass paywalls with archiver sites. Shame. It could have been different, but this is the bed they made, and they can lay in it.
People dont have issue with creators getting paid, they have issue with absolutely evil platforms that host that and scoop up most of the value between creators and consumers. Platforms that willingly promote ie racist content because it simply drives more views/clicks.
The reason I joined FB no longer exists for me. I remember why I stopped talking to many of the 'friends' I had. I silenced all of them and only join interesting groups now. Even then I only log in once or twice a year.