Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain. They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions.
That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies.
Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'. But we shouldn't accept being under constant attack of brain worms.
I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site.
> I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site.
But this very site has lots of ads on it. Up until a few days ago, there was an "Apply to YC Fall 2026" link at the bottom of every page, and the front page usually has ads on it too [0]. So it seems tricky to strictly follow your proposed rule while simultaneously posting here.
I draw a line on advertising for myself: if it's just letting me know a service or product exists, it's fine. It's a business necessity. If I ever start a business, I need a way to communicate to potential customers that my business exists, that's fair use.
When the ads start being misleading, manipulative, emotional, irrational - then we're out of the fair use field and into the "this should be a crime" field.
ads like whats on facebook have no such accountability, and facebook doesnt take accountability for what its algorithm pushes in the name of getting a higher click through rate.
The difficult thing is people don't want to pay for things. Ads are a way to mitigate that so that people/companies can capture some value that they create.
Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer. The fact that some of the richest companies in the world are the criminals does not make it less of a crime.
The propaganda part is, of course, also totally true. Lies, manipulation, etc. has been normalized when a few years back will have been considered a crime.
> Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer.
The ads themselves don’t do that. Some networks running those ads might.
There is some utility to ads. Knowing that my favorite shop has a promotion, that a movie, game or book I've been waiting for is out, or something other that might interest me has some usefulness. The problem isn't the ad per se, it's optimization through A/B-tests and the like, mass psychological experiments with all the rigor of scientific studies and none of the academic ethical safeguards for human subject experimentation.
I agree with this take. Sites used to sell banner space, negotiate a price and place the ad themselves. There was human review of what was being placed. Now apps and sites just let ad providers inject whatever they want, seemingly without oversight from the app owner and different ~~ads~~ payload depending on who's viewing. I have no issue with the tech blog I'm reading advertising the web host they use and support, or a wiki site advertising merch for the subject of the wiki. I'd bet those kind of ads get better returns on their investment too. What I find unconscionable is when my kids are playing some kids game on a tablet and they're bombarded with ads for GTA-like games idealizing violence and meaningless chaos interspersed with overly sexualized dress-up games or even political advertisements depending on your geolocation. Totally outrageous and I am eternally grateful for people like R. Gorhil (uBO) and Steven Black (for his curated hosts lists) that at least help me mitigate as much as I can, knowing that without 100% standing over the shoulder of my kids at all times when they touch a device it's almost impossible to otherwise avoid.
All those cases can be served you you voluntarily signing up to relevant notifications. The problem is the push model that incentivizes companies to show you things that will serve them and not you.
Nah. We should normalize public services and resources to develop knowledge and tools, that are made freely available. Provide incentive programs and reward those that take on such initiatives.
There are many such services where I'm from. And the feeling when using them is refreshing. You're not looking for an ulterior motive to be misinformed. They're responsive as they don't load a 10 MiB JavaScript blob to track your interactions "for marketing".
The software solution and hosting is not remotely as expensive as the lab work needed to gather the nutritional information.
If this was made by a private company, it would be a subscription service, without a doubt. You'd find certain brands but not others because of deals under the table. It would have user profiles for collecting and selling data, not to mention integration with fitness and weight loss services. You might also wonder if part of the data is incorrect because of all that darn expensive lab analysis. Heck, maybe some CTO figured they could "predict" this information with an LLM.
Here, it is covered by taxes, benefit all, full page load in about 0.2 seconds (or 0.5 seconds for nutritional value). This is how the internet could be.
All that achieves is companies introducing ads to boost revenue for next quarter's earnings.
For a concrete example: LINE (most widely-used messaging app in Japan) has paid subscriptions, and even the highest tier subscription doesn't reduce ads. Other services (e.g. YouTube Premium) reduce ads, but do not eliminate them, no matter how much you pay.
I pay for content: gig and cinema tickets, merch and digital albums from artists I like or know. I buy loads of books, magazines, digital and physical games, art I can hang on my wall. I've even started a bit of a CD collection.
At times I've had Spotify, Netflix and Mubi subscriptions. As a UK-resident with a TV, I pay for the BBC.
I feel I more than adequately contribute to cultural production.
In some ways, the current situation suits me fine. I take the free stuff where I'm technically capable. I'll block the ads, pirate to my hearts content, use yt-dlp, BPC, userscripts.
I'm not not paying for stuff, but I've enough financial pressures already, thank you very much. I don't see why I should send all my money to (mostly) US corporations, who've farmed and resold user-generated content.
> Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'.
also wait, we're talking about a US company, should we be paying a US company, for "content"? Is all "content" produced by these US megacorps, I don't think so, they're purely extractive
what are you gonna do, make more Marvel movies? lol
We are already paying for the externalities from ad tech. We’ve got entire worlds of predatory information behavior and near zero defenses for humans.
If you are on HN, you hopefully know enough to keep yourself clean and safe, but the rest of humanity is essentially getting mugged, defrauded and addicted 24/7.
You think Meta would spy less on us and show us less ads if we payed to access their services ? They would just keep doing what they've been doing for ages and they would have even more money to keep their enshitification going.
We are already paying too much for all the services with subscription. Like Spotify, Netflix and others...
I for one pay for content I enjoy, when it's reasonably priced and available to pay for. Two sources of print journalism, a few dozen patreons, paid youtube, etc - not to mention one-off purchases like books. [1]
And I'd encourage other people who can afford to, to do the same.
I'm not sure how scalable my approach is within the status quo, though - I've never seen a subscribers-only article go viral on social media, and almost all of my subscriptions began with me enjoying a generous free tier. And I've tried a number of micropayment systems but none of them seem poised to take off for various reasons.
Only if we can also normalize not double-dipping via payment and ads. Too often, paying money to avoid "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" just turns it into "You're paying for the product and you're still the product".
How can we normalise it even MORE? We are paying for digital products MONTHLY and they get more expensive and lose features AND we have to watch the ads too.
What does "normalize" mean here? I don't think consumers have to do anything in this situation. If a business model isn't making enough money, it's on the business to change.
If someday Google puts Youtube behind a hard paywall, no more "free with ads," I'd pay for it. I already pay for Nebula. But if I can get around the ads with uBlock, why wouldn't I? Just on principle? Because it's not fair that their business model doesn't make the revenue they want?
There is a large cohort of people who will complain about ads but also don't want to pay. My little microSaaS is monetised with ads but I offer option to pay if you don't like the ads. Still get plenty of complaints about the ads.
> if you see an ad somewhere [...] close the tab immediately and never return to that site
I would even extend this: if you are bugged by an ad, avoid the product, the vendor and tell everyone why you do so. Also tell it to the vendor, why you avoid their product (aggressive, non blockable ads at facebook for example).
This doesn’t just apply to ads. It’s been a single piece of a larger systematic attack on your thinking.
Have people become more or less free over time as technology and progress came to help improve our lives and make things easier or more efficient? The average person, the same one most exposed to ad propaganda, are also exposed to propaganda in various forms in other areas of life. Even tv and music serve as propaganda for thinking malware and “worms”.
Spend a moment analyzing some popular mainstream music from the last decade for themes of culture, worldviews and others.
The big gotcha here is this: many people think OTHERS are under propaganda; and you yourself are not. And now you can get censored for pointing things out about this on social media.
In Covid I posted a nazi scientists quote on propaganda and got censored. Try it yourself.
> They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions.
Isn't your comment an attack as well by that line of thinking? Am I attacking you by arguing that people nowadays are way to quick to consider something "damaging" "attacks".
It's way worse than that, it's an attack to the entire society.
The vast majority of ads lie; therefore, they are actively harmful. They create a situation where being surrounded by false things is normal. They promote the improvement of tools to make deception and tracking better and better.
On top of that, they install evil incentives for the medias, the news, and business models, influencing consumption, public options and opinions.
Finally, they concentrate power in those who already have enough money to pay for ads. You may have the better product, but a big player with better PR will win.
Ads are one of our most destructive creations. It's much, much more dangerous than it looks.
This. At least you can switch them off on the web but now big-ad is putting bright flickering digital billboards in sight of every public place. Politicians won't do a thing because they're some of the biggest customers. Obey.
It's insane to think how much brain power, computing power, electricity and component lifecycle wear have been wasted through the years, yelling random stuff at me; or even worse than random; often stuff that is directly harmful to me.
As somebody who – not entirely willingly – is working mostly remote, the only interruption in the day I have from the outside world is the sudden loud inane noises of commercials.
I hate how normal ads seem to be to young people (under age 30). Just seeing TikTok videos secondhand on YouTube the videos seems stuffed with people pushing crap. YouTube channels none are without ads either by YouTube or by the channel owners.
Plus the "oh you have an add blocker!!" whining if you dare try to slow the firehose of ads coming at you. Yes I do have an ad blocker because it seems my entire existence is fodder for your website or app's ad machine to capture and use.
Lets be fair, here. Traditional TV was ~40 minutes of content with 20 minutes of ads. I still remember televised holiday movies "presented with limited commercial breaks by Folgers, where the best part of waking up..." or whoever was sponsoring it. Radio stations had to power their transmitters and pay their staff, so they had ads. Newspapers use ads to keep themselves affordable. This has always been a business model.
Facebook may have won this round, but AI tilts the balance overwhelming in favor of ad blockers.
consider: you can (in principle) scrape the entire screen, find the ads with machine vision and paste black rectangles over them. or simply have an AI use playwright to scrape the page and rerender it for you. these are excellent, pro-user use cases for AI.
Your first line is just as true of every single internet comment you have ever read, including your own.
> I propose a sane rule
You know this is untenable. You would be unable to use search engines for over a decade, or walk into a Target, or a gas station, or almost any public square if you truly believed this. You don't believe it. You're being hopelessly histrionic and that's not productive for anyone.
my least favorite part of flying is the part where i'm strapped to a chair during taxi with a screen and speaker inches from my face and they use that moment to force a few ads into my eye socket. it feels very Citizen Kane.
pumping gas is another one that takes advantage of captivity to force ads. i hate it.
I just can't take this seriously. I grew up with TV being literally 1/3 ads and there was absolutely no way to skip them. People complained idly, but nobody really had a problem with it because we knew that TV isn't free. Nothing on the internet comes close to that level of ad intrusiveness, but I often hear unhinged statements like "They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions. That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies."
Just because some people are more resilient to opium, and some people can have a good time on it, doesn't mean you should get an opium injection when you're going for a regularly scheduled doctor's appointment.
Ads are being forced on you when you're trying to do something else, like you go to facebook to see your actual friend's pictures of their kids, you're not looking for ads, and yet you get some micro-brainwashing on the side.
The true "skill issue" is that governments are too unskilled to prevent these mass mental attacks to prey upon their citizens, and haven't gotten off their ass enough to make advertisement even more illegal than other similarly harmful substances like opium, tobacco, and online gambling (both sports gambling and gacha games).
This reminds me of how Scientology reportedly targets intelligent people because those people think they are too smart to be sucked in.
The advertising industry has hired some of the world's best talent (tech, psychology, legal) to make you more susceptible to it. They probably love those who AstroTurf thinking they are "less vulnerable" and "ads are useful actually"
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
If a computer vision model can identify ads and draw a rectangle over them, it can identify the DOM elements rendered inside that rectangle. Thus, the HTML, JS, and network calls of those ads can be detected. This data can then be used to train an ad detector model based on the DOM and network examples. The computer vision model essentially trains the DOM/network blocker, acting as a fallback mechanism when the blocker fails and continuously retraining the ad detector model.
Use a comprehensive set of cookie blocking rules to avoid personalized ads. This sometimes means that facebook ad cookies and user profile cookies are indistinguishable. Use clear on exit in such cases. Or block third party cookies.
I dont mind ads that are native to the page. I mind adnets.
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.
counterpoint: The "adblocker" AdNauseam. not only does it fetch every ad, it clicks them. every single ad is clicked. It keeps a running tally of how much money it's cost advertisers.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on an add on purpose on a website (I’ve definitely click on one or two a month because of dark patterns). I’m always perplexed as to who is clicking on them because like you they’re just noise I don’t pay attention to.
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.
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.
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!
> I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be.
I don't have a problem with ads entirely, as long as they aren't egregious (things popping up or otherwise moving around while I'm reading, flashy animation, unexpected audio) and the things that are egregious I can just nope out of by leaving a site when they happen and never going back (if I really want the content then archive.today is usually an option).
The reason I block ads is that it indirectly blocks the stalking, at least a bit, that is inherent in modern ad-tech. Adverts based on what I'm currently looking at are fine, much like I might see demonstrations of other TVs while looking at a TV in a TV shop, as are ads targetted at the local area or even more generally (ala billboards). But ads based on where I've been before are not: I don't want someone from Tesco following me into the pub to ask if I've considered any further that Anusol I looked at in their pharmacy isle the other day, or someone from Boots following me in to see if I want to buy some from them because someone saw me in Tesco and told them what I was looking at.
> 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 would be a killer feature for AR glasses. Imagine no billboards, no political posters, no neon storefront clutter.
Washington State has a ~1960s law which I think was pretty clever: Highway advertisements can only be for things someone driving by can actually on the premises under the sign.
That prevents the typical chains of billboards while making it pretty straightforward for actual stores. The law will probably need revision if/when someone tries to skirt it by putting in billboards with an attached symbolic vending-machine.
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.
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.
> 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 seems possible that ads will get even more insidious.
People you follow will post an image, and it could be edited to include a product placement.
People who make a post which incidentally mentions a product or organisation will see that their posts get slightly more viewers. This might be innocent at first but soon people will notice the pattern and start name dropping brands in posts intentionally for the view boost.
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.
“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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
> 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
Yeah we've got two years tops before local LLMs are proficient at this and ads are dead. Google, Apple et al. will drag their feet but they won't be able to stop it.
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?
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.
I've been saying this for a while: the ad-based business model is dying. It is only a matter of time until local AI models can "see" your screen and identify any sort of ads and remove/hide them. This also includes messages in "sponsored content", paid articles, etc.
There's trillions on the line. So you can be sure this will lead to trusted computing widewine style for ads till the pixels are lit up and the audio waves hit the speaker.
Pessimism wins when capital is opposite individual interest.
Wouldn't the next step of the arms race just be bots who are sufficiently able to weave ads into content that it's unrecognizable? Casually talking about things we use is completely normal and unavoidable, but a huge target for advertising
Surely it ends with alternative clients? Seems much easier and more efficient. Facebook UI is crap anyway, just have something scrape the data and present it in a format that's not optimized for whatever KPI FB cares about and without ads.
The problem is extracting the data from Facebook. They do a lot of work to obfuscate their markup. You'd probably be best loading the whole thing in a headless browser, taking screenshots, running that through an LLM and getting the data.
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.
This is an ugly half-solution. I want a vision model that only rips out the significant text content and related images from the page and displays them in a lovingly typeset emacs org-mode buffer.
Out of curiosity, what sort of conversations on Facebook are still happening? I used to be informed about events, announcements from organizations (including government ones, which is absolutely ridiculous) and extremely rare updates from real people I know. And that would sort of reel me in. Now whenever I log in, the feed is mostly some sort of rage-bait adjacent slop. The useful stuff simply stopped breaking through. When I go to the pages directly, there are some news, but my feed didn't show them. So when I realized, that there is no salami left in this turd sandwich I simply stopped checking in.
> 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.
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...)
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.
> 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.
>social media communities that serve ads and harvest info are pure poison.
The biggest problem is that we have virtually zero cases of anyone dying from this poison after 25 years of it.
When people step back and look at the lives of people who never spent the time to block everything, they see what 25 years of ingesting this poison looks like and...there is virtually no difference. If anything it's those types who spend less time online - all the better.
I'm not saying there won't be a reckoning in the future, but for right now, the evidence it's "poison" is pretty thin.
Unfortunately it’s hard to replace local groups for me. It’s mostly crap but there is very useful updates there as well and I live in a small enough community there’s no alternative. I’ve used them to get rides, forest fire info, community event info etc.
I used to use marketplace as well but they’ve completely ruined it with shipped products and ads and stuff from too far away. They’d rather show me pages upon pages of shit I’ll never buy because it’s shipped or three hours away than show me just the five results for “dresser” within 20 miles of me. So now i only interact with marketplace through buy/sell groups. God I miss Craigslist.
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
You're probably right when it comes to benefiting the company, but technically - at least for me - using only https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr means no ads/sponsored/whatever. Only the posts I actually want to see, and chronologically so easy to continue where you left off. I don't understand why this isn't more common knowledge but have been using this for years and it makes the whole platform usable exactly for what I want to use it for: tracking things which haven't moved on from it yet without being forced to consume anything else.
I dont know what they changed but they kept forcing obvious bot troll political posts on my feed and that’s when I finally deleted my account. They were blatantly trying to enrage me with things I don’t follow. Up to that point I wasn’t bothered and could block whatever and just see friends posts.
> 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.
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.
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.
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]
It stops their most direct way of influencing you. There are always others (e.g. they can lobby politicians) but that is irrelevant to the question of you should let them into your home voluntarily.
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.
> People should get out of there and enjoy more of their free time!
I think that would be a net negative for me. Instead of posting questions on the local facebook group or selling something on marketplace I would have to print it out and hang it up on the local grocery shop wall. Or go door to door.
Or sit around on the flee market.
Just posting "Selling 4 chairs at Waynstreet 4" in the local group is more time efficient.
This is the way! And I wish I could be part of it.
Sadly, FB Marketplace is the only platform I that seems to be decent for random sales os stuff I no longer need.
Please, tell me there is this better option called X/Y, and I’ll happily switch. I just haven’t found it.
Such a shame that some afterthought Meta accidentally implemented is better than the rest of their entire platform.
I'm finally reading "Careless People." If I hadn't deleted my FB account back in 2023, I definitely would've done it five chapters into reading this hit piece.
Deleting Facebook, Instagram, X (Formerly Twitter), and TikTok was the best decision I have ever made. I thought that I would really miss them but I just don't.
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.
I had a period before I dropped Facebook where I actually manually removed every add from the timeline with the added option of "I don't want to see ads from this company ever again", and frankly it worked.
After a period of a doing this I started to get new ads only periodically, and after a couple of sessions of removing every one of them, the rest of the month was quiet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)
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.)
It keeps changing all of the time, so it might be easier to have Facebook load up in a headless browser, that takes a screenshot and sends it to an LLM and uses that to convert into a standard JSON document that can be rendered nicely. Or something like that.
In a few years, I don't think we'll be navigating to Facebook.com. We'll be asking our LLM: "what are my friends up to?" And it will provide a nice UI to browse interesting updates, collated from any open source, including Facebook. No ads, no influencers, no dark patterns, just what the user asks. And it won't require APIs. It will just browse the site itself as an agent and pick out the parts the user cares about.
I really think the new internet is going to be a radically different experience soon.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I have ad blockers everywhere apart from the instagram app. I have bought a ton of stuff off the ads on there. I'm not proud, but have to admit I am powerless against them. Underwear, t-shirts, soap, online courses I have never used, I am a sucker, which is why I need these ad blockers.
>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.
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.
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.)
Swing as in the political term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(politics) because the team wouldn't be the right place in the management structure to alter the rest of the page other than the ad units.
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.
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?
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.
> 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?
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.
> I think people need to understand what the purpose of Facebook is in terms of its function and constituent parts
Given how many people do not yet use adblockers, I don't have much reason to believe that this will lead to significant amounts of people suddenly seeing this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
As much as I understand their decision, I hope they didn't stop. I don't use Facebook myself but now I am worried YouTube now knows that if they try a bit harder uBO would just give up.
Given that YouTube already has a suite of anti-adblocking checks in their UI code [1] (e.g. submit a fake request to the /player endpoint and see if anything removed the ads from it - which also tells you exactly which fields you need to remove from which request, lol), I don't know why they don't have someone looking at the latest filters and reacting to them.
Twitch did that a while back and uBlock Origin was ineffective against their video ads within a few months.
YouTube could also only let you download the main video after you downloaded the ads AND waited however long the minimum ad time is. They don't really need to play games with ad blockers if they want to get serious.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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)
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.
It is like prohibiting LLM consumption by putting a small reminder -- never works if done without using weird tricks (like mentioning nuclear weapon)
also if they are forging new DOM structure they are NOT using the filter itself
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.
I'm with the developer here. At some point the effort is just not worth it anymore.
Facebook, as a platform, has long since lost the relevance as a social network, it is basically just an ad platform these days. So why keep wasting resources on trying to block ads from an ad platform? A user who does not want to see ads on Facebook probably should just stop using Facebook altogether.
I get the appeal for staying on Instagram, Youtube, Reddit and other platforms despite the ads: these provide some sort of - maybe controversial - value for the user, even if it's just cat videos or whatever. Facebook has lost its value proposition so long ago it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day.
uBlock's resources are much better allocated into other initiatives: like Chrome .
At some point facebook has switched gears to be more about public/semipublic forums and marketplace. If you wanted the old facebook that was for your immediate family/friends/acquaintances then it isnt really relevant anymore compared to group texts.
I just gave FB a few screenlengths of scrolling. There was one post from a family member and about 20 from people I am not friends with and groups I do not follow. I used to use an extension to get rid of that extra stuff (Purity) but at some point I stopped fighting it and stopped visiting too.
> it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day
Apparently, they have 3B MAUs and 2B DAUs. So you are in some real bubble. While I don't use it, my parents and all their friends use Facebook to share pictures and exchange messages.
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
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.
Unfortunately with agents Meta can easily run hundreds of automated experiments on real browsers with each commit in the uBlock Origin's repo and each change in various filter lists to find clean workarounds and submit PRs with patches. You can try fighting this on the other side with similar approach, but why waste time and tokens, just stop using Facebook.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
But that means wasting CPU cycles that adds to what was consumed to render the ads in the first place. Compounding all of that produces a slower browser/device experience, making the user hate ads even more.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Are you proposing banning advertising on Facebook? You know this will effectively destroy Facebook, Google, every free ad supported website on the internet?
I think there are a variety of potential solutions, but one where the public marketplace is taxed/polluted by a private entity in a way that can't be avoided isn't an acceptable status quo.
Requiring FB to provide a paid ad-free option with a price commensurate with their cost of providing service would be one approach. Prohibiting them from actively breaking adblockers would be another. I wouldn't wholesale ban ads, but banning them on FB marketplace would be reasonable - either we get an ad-free marketplace, or FB abandons the product and we get alternatives.
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.
> 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.
I've just let Claude analyze an HAR file containing XHR traffic on the Facebook timeline. It happily wrote a script for extracting contents, fetch images and videos, and rebuilt the timeline into a single HTML -- highly responsive, with ZERO ads.
uBlock team is the modern times heroes fighting the good fight for us. Thanks to them I've been navigating the web with peace of mind for a long time.
Sometimes I find myself thinking how our lives would be if couple of guys didn't build shitty tech startups. We've gone from creative advertising to these manipulative online marketing scams, that attack our brains, especially targeting young generation, which effects how our societies, behaviours, art and culture develop.
Recommend watching:
"We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response."
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.
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?
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.
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.
Hyperpersonalized code to its rescue. With the qwen3.8-27b release tomorrow and the advent of vibe coding and the improvements into proper agentic engineering we are moving towards hyperpersonalized software.
This means we don't need a centralized maintainer for smaller tools. the facebook ad blocking cat and mouse game is something I cna very well imagine to just be something my computer would solve in real time, updating the uBlock filter/userscript to adapt to any fb changes in near real-time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I still use it because over the years, all my IRL clubs and hobbies moved away from forums and sites to it.
Using it has very little impact on me, and allows to continue participating in IRL activities and clubs I’ve been a member of for years.
If they all pack up and move somewhere else, I’ll move as well, if not, I won’t.
I don’t use it for any purpose outside of engaging with those communities and I’m not going to give up my social life to make a statement, I don’t care enough.
I check it once a month or three. Boomer relatives still use it and so it's nice to see their updates once in a while. I've also heard good things about Marketplace, but don't use it myself because I fear my lame would-be for sale posts would end up on friends' feeds and it would be mortifying if people I know in real life thought I used Facebook.
I've been thinking about extensions designed for specific sites. Imagine a version of Facebook from the good old days that only showed you posts from your friends and put them in reverse chronological order, also known as a timeline.
I would also like a version of LinkedIn that shows me what I click on without loading whatever extraneous stuff it is that's crashing my laptop if I open too many LinkedIn tabs.
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.
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.)
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.
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)
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
For the GUI one, I'm focusing on privacy and reliability, and I was wondering if having a built-in ad blocker would be a good feature.
Why don't the major browsers have one? Have they had legal problems with ad blocking, or do they simply not want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?
There are many browsers which come with native ad-blocking. See Brave, Vivaldi, Opera.
Most browsers are built on Chromium, and that has certain ad-block limitations now. See Manifest V3.
Many people care a lot about ad-blocking, but still, most of the world does not use an ad-blockers. So it's a cost/market reach equation. What's your target demo? If it's tech enthusiasts, we'll appreciate the ad-blocking built in, but we can also easily install one ourselves if it's built on Chromium.
You are unlikely to face legal issues. There have been a few test cases around the world, with most siding with the user. The argument is usually that no one should be forced to download or render something they do not wish to download or render.
Chrome is made by an advertising company that also fund almost entirely the budget of Firefox. Even Safari is made by an advertising company. FWIW most of them have some blocking for egregious ads, so they will happily kill someone's else goose.
Personally I think the easiest would be to support uBO or at least have a built-in engine that can load filters written for uBO. Anything else is just wasting development time.
Google builds the biggest browser.
Mozilla receives most of its funding through Google (though they have mobile browsers with a default ad-blocker).
Microsoft is in the ad business too.
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.
Hyperpersonalized code to its rescue. With the qwen3.8-27b release tomorrow and the advent of vibe coding and the improvements into proper agentic engineering we are moving towards hyperpersonalized software.
This means we don't need a centralized maintainer for smaller tools. the facebook ad blocking cat and mouse game is something I cna very well imagine to just be something my computer would solve in real time, updating the uBlock filter/userscript to adapt to any fb changes in near real-time.
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.
A lot of people are saying to stop using facebook as if its such a simple, catch-all answer. For a lot of people, and a lot of countries, facebook (whatsapp, too) is still the primary(only) way of communication. If not with your friends, then with your family. There's a big demand from those people to have a way of interacting with this pseudo-essential service without having to oblige to complete data rape.
Thanks. I think it still could be fine ? I don't use Facebook - but I was able to download any video from Youtube, see no ads till adblockers and youtube-dl - and that's the race making things harder and unaccessible (yes, custom - but excesive DIY URL filtering rules only, same since ~2 years, are still enough to see no ads on YT, hope, that on Facebook too, and I can live with that).
This is probably a good decision, because it will free up time and resources to do more productive things than saving the lost souls, that are still on Facebook. Maybe this will contribute to the downfall of Facebook, due to more people seeing how toxic the place has become, when they can no longer block those ads.
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.
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.
They want it to go back to how it was circa the late 90's.
In a lot of ways they're going to get their wish. LLM's via endless spam and replacing google search have basically made monetizing legit and useful content impossible, so I imagine nobody will upload it anymore (except for on youtube which is still monetizable in a meaningful way)
Compared to the past there's basically no incentive to put useful info on the web any more, so it's just not going to happen.
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.
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.
The last time I went on Facebook, the ads were so similar to posts it was near impossible to tell one from the other. The problem is compounded by elderly relatives liking or sharing weird AI posts, and an algorithm that seems to be random and non deterministic
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.
If ads on these sites irritate people, why don't they just stop using them? Feels like that's long term a more likely avenue to get these sites to adjust how they monetise rather than papering over the problem with a blocker.
It's actually pretty trivial to block all FB ads -- but a browser plug-in alone won't cut it. FB does a bunch of really annoying break the internet patterns like rotating your session and VIP every 30 seconds -- or less.
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.
This actually means it will become easier to block ads on Fakebook, because they won't be trying as hard. You'll just have to find custom filters people have shared to a smaller audience.
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.
the answer to facebook being bad is obviously not block-listing but allow-listing content. we had the same learning in security years ago. what this might look like is ai assisted desired data extraction and using clients tailored to user needs and user agency to use that data. Unfortunately alternative platforms that are user aligned are not the solution as you cannot force your whole cities groups or old family members to move which is the main pain point for people who use adblockers and still also on facebook.
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.
since the leadership change, youtube has been on a similar crusade against adblocking. however, despite all the things that happened, ublock, even in the lite version, is able to work on the website. this has been quite well-covered and even discussed here.
however, found it interesting that fb was able to quietly win the battle. however, it is a shame that nothing can be done on the mobile front, at least inside the apps. it is insane how sometimes every other thing you see is a sponsored post or an ad.
Why not just set up a build pipeline to have AI view the page, check for ads, then do the whack a mole until it removes them, or have I missed something that needs human in the loop?
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.
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.
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.
If you're an engineer and your job is to defeat ublock origin, your work is not ethical. You're a facebook engineer-- you'll do just fine working elsewhere.
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.
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.
my solution to nasty websites with js ridden everything is to scrape and remake the entirely new dom populate it with only content you verify, sure you might lose some detail but its easy to copy website ui if you desire. can be done with something like tamperminkey or a browser ext
This is literally true. I've heard their AI scrapers are especially vicious. I can imagine (I don't know this for sure, it's just what I assume) Gemini (or others, idk) kind of are classy about it. When Google pre-LLM was scraping the internet, I don't remember too many complaints about "Google is pinging my server so often it's a strain on resources"
Facebook? They've always been the worst at this. By "this" I guess I mean the internet
feel like we’re close to a customized compute era where ads get filtered out by default via something like a diffusion browser or diffusion based Mixed Reality. Feels like it’s already possible with LLMs with enough test time compute to RE endpoints users want to keep and exclude those they don’t.
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.
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.
I get their reasoning, but it still saddens me to see them surrender like that.
Pretty much every site that lives off of ads nowadays is "disgustingly anti-user" the same degree that Facebook is. The main difference being that Facebook had the capacity and confidence to wage a full-on war on ad blocking like this.
Now, with this method proven by Facebook, it's likely that more websites will follow suit.
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.
Moral arguments about "blaming users" do not overcome the fact that the incentive structures driving these problems absolutely do emerge from the choices and behaviors of low-information users.
Viable solutions can only come from informing and persuading users to use alternative options, which relies in part on demonstrating the actual risks and consequences of the choices they've previously made (i.e. "blaming users") and simultaneously developing an ecosystem of alternative options that's sufficiently accessible to them (which already proliferate).
Lots of "normal" users have already migrated away from Twitter to e.g. Mastodon, so it's not clear why this isn't reasonable for Facebook.
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.
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).
Let the butter churn! This is exciting. Someone will step up and build a superior tool with GenAI. Maybe we can just say, "Hey Claude, write me an adblock solution to replace ublock origin!." Claude responds with, "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." UH OH HERE WE GO AGAIN!
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
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.”
I hate ads as much as anyone, but I find it hardly surprising that devs at companies playing cat and mouse with ad blockers read the ad blocker source code.
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.
The futility of getting your loved ones off facebook's feed toxicity became apparent to me in my face, years ago, when I tried for a week on my dad's iPad(perfect delivery system for this drug cause if allows no extensions on browsers) to "cleanup" his feed be following and liking a bunch of sane content and actively down voting really shitty content with ads. I tried turning off politically sensitive content and trying to tell the ad engine what ads were scammy or I did not like.
Within a few days it was undone. Soft porn(ish) mixed with violent videos and of course all the scam like ads resurfaced. Part of it is the person who is addicted to this stuff and part of it is this shitty product called Facebook that loves to show horrible things to my dad.
I asked why he watches all of it, "Masala"(hindi for spice) is the word he uses to describe his addiction.
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.
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.
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."
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
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 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.
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.
Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain. They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions.
That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies.
Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'. But we shouldn't accept being under constant attack of brain worms.
I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site.
> I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site.
But this very site has lots of ads on it. Up until a few days ago, there was an "Apply to YC Fall 2026" link at the bottom of every page, and the front page usually has ads on it too [0]. So it seems tricky to strictly follow your proposed rule while simultaneously posting here.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Another%20...
I draw a line on advertising for myself: if it's just letting me know a service or product exists, it's fine. It's a business necessity. If I ever start a business, I need a way to communicate to potential customers that my business exists, that's fair use.
When the ads start being misleading, manipulative, emotional, irrational - then we're out of the fair use field and into the "this should be a crime" field.
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That ad has somebody accountable for it.
ads like whats on facebook have no such accountability, and facebook doesnt take accountability for what its algorithm pushes in the name of getting a higher click through rate.
That assumes there's no such thing as nuance.
The difficult thing is people don't want to pay for things. Ads are a way to mitigate that so that people/companies can capture some value that they create.
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> Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain.
Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer. The fact that some of the richest companies in the world are the criminals does not make it less of a crime.
The propaganda part is, of course, also totally true. Lies, manipulation, etc. has been normalized when a few years back will have been considered a crime.
On your resources too! Your electricity, processing power and network bandwidth are all being abused without any incentives to cover the costs.
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> Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer.
The ads themselves don’t do that. Some networks running those ads might.
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There is some utility to ads. Knowing that my favorite shop has a promotion, that a movie, game or book I've been waiting for is out, or something other that might interest me has some usefulness. The problem isn't the ad per se, it's optimization through A/B-tests and the like, mass psychological experiments with all the rigor of scientific studies and none of the academic ethical safeguards for human subject experimentation.
I agree with this take. Sites used to sell banner space, negotiate a price and place the ad themselves. There was human review of what was being placed. Now apps and sites just let ad providers inject whatever they want, seemingly without oversight from the app owner and different ~~ads~~ payload depending on who's viewing. I have no issue with the tech blog I'm reading advertising the web host they use and support, or a wiki site advertising merch for the subject of the wiki. I'd bet those kind of ads get better returns on their investment too. What I find unconscionable is when my kids are playing some kids game on a tablet and they're bombarded with ads for GTA-like games idealizing violence and meaningless chaos interspersed with overly sexualized dress-up games or even political advertisements depending on your geolocation. Totally outrageous and I am eternally grateful for people like R. Gorhil (uBO) and Steven Black (for his curated hosts lists) that at least help me mitigate as much as I can, knowing that without 100% standing over the shoulder of my kids at all times when they touch a device it's almost impossible to otherwise avoid.
All those cases can be served you you voluntarily signing up to relevant notifications. The problem is the push model that incentivizes companies to show you things that will serve them and not you.
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We should also normalize paying for content at the same time then.
Nah. We should normalize public services and resources to develop knowledge and tools, that are made freely available. Provide incentive programs and reward those that take on such initiatives.
There are many such services where I'm from. And the feeling when using them is refreshing. You're not looking for an ulterior motive to be misinformed. They're responsive as they don't load a 10 MiB JavaScript blob to track your interactions "for marketing".
As an example, consider a service that gives you nutritional information of food. https://www.matvaretabellen.no/en/
The software solution and hosting is not remotely as expensive as the lab work needed to gather the nutritional information.
If this was made by a private company, it would be a subscription service, without a doubt. You'd find certain brands but not others because of deals under the table. It would have user profiles for collecting and selling data, not to mention integration with fitness and weight loss services. You might also wonder if part of the data is incorrect because of all that darn expensive lab analysis. Heck, maybe some CTO figured they could "predict" this information with an LLM.
Here, it is covered by taxes, benefit all, full page load in about 0.2 seconds (or 0.5 seconds for nutritional value). This is how the internet could be.
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All that achieves is companies introducing ads to boost revenue for next quarter's earnings.
For a concrete example: LINE (most widely-used messaging app in Japan) has paid subscriptions, and even the highest tier subscription doesn't reduce ads. Other services (e.g. YouTube Premium) reduce ads, but do not eliminate them, no matter how much you pay.
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I pay for content: gig and cinema tickets, merch and digital albums from artists I like or know. I buy loads of books, magazines, digital and physical games, art I can hang on my wall. I've even started a bit of a CD collection.
At times I've had Spotify, Netflix and Mubi subscriptions. As a UK-resident with a TV, I pay for the BBC.
I feel I more than adequately contribute to cultural production.
In some ways, the current situation suits me fine. I take the free stuff where I'm technically capable. I'll block the ads, pirate to my hearts content, use yt-dlp, BPC, userscripts.
I'm not not paying for stuff, but I've enough financial pressures already, thank you very much. I don't see why I should send all my money to (mostly) US corporations, who've farmed and resold user-generated content.
Paying for quality content has been normalized, the price floor for payment is way above what Facebook and the vast majority of Web content offers.
That’s why movies and AAA games can clear a billion dollars, but the internet is still dependent on people failing to install ad blockers.
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You must have grown up on the Internet during the
> Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'.
also wait, we're talking about a US company, should we be paying a US company, for "content"? Is all "content" produced by these US megacorps, I don't think so, they're purely extractive
what are you gonna do, make more Marvel movies? lol
Sure - why not ?
We are already paying for the externalities from ad tech. We’ve got entire worlds of predatory information behavior and near zero defenses for humans.
If you are on HN, you hopefully know enough to keep yourself clean and safe, but the rest of humanity is essentially getting mugged, defrauded and addicted 24/7.
You think Meta would spy less on us and show us less ads if we payed to access their services ? They would just keep doing what they've been doing for ages and they would have even more money to keep their enshitification going.
We are already paying too much for all the services with subscription. Like Spotify, Netflix and others...
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I for one pay for content I enjoy, when it's reasonably priced and available to pay for. Two sources of print journalism, a few dozen patreons, paid youtube, etc - not to mention one-off purchases like books. [1]
And I'd encourage other people who can afford to, to do the same.
I'm not sure how scalable my approach is within the status quo, though - I've never seen a subscribers-only article go viral on social media, and almost all of my subscriptions began with me enjoying a generous free tier. And I've tried a number of micropayment systems but none of them seem poised to take off for various reasons.
[1] I don't pay for facebook, because fuck 'em
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Only if we can also normalize not double-dipping via payment and ads. Too often, paying money to avoid "If you're not paying for the product, you are the product" just turns it into "You're paying for the product and you're still the product".
How can we normalise it even MORE? We are paying for digital products MONTHLY and they get more expensive and lose features AND we have to watch the ads too.
What more do you want??
What does "normalize" mean here? I don't think consumers have to do anything in this situation. If a business model isn't making enough money, it's on the business to change.
If someday Google puts Youtube behind a hard paywall, no more "free with ads," I'd pay for it. I already pay for Nebula. But if I can get around the ads with uBlock, why wouldn't I? Just on principle? Because it's not fair that their business model doesn't make the revenue they want?
There is a large cohort of people who will complain about ads but also don't want to pay. My little microSaaS is monetised with ads but I offer option to pay if you don't like the ads. Still get plenty of complaints about the ads.
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> if you see an ad somewhere [...] close the tab immediately and never return to that site
I would even extend this: if you are bugged by an ad, avoid the product, the vendor and tell everyone why you do so. Also tell it to the vendor, why you avoid their product (aggressive, non blockable ads at facebook for example).
This doesn’t just apply to ads. It’s been a single piece of a larger systematic attack on your thinking.
Have people become more or less free over time as technology and progress came to help improve our lives and make things easier or more efficient? The average person, the same one most exposed to ad propaganda, are also exposed to propaganda in various forms in other areas of life. Even tv and music serve as propaganda for thinking malware and “worms”.
Spend a moment analyzing some popular mainstream music from the last decade for themes of culture, worldviews and others.
The big gotcha here is this: many people think OTHERS are under propaganda; and you yourself are not. And now you can get censored for pointing things out about this on social media.
In Covid I posted a nazi scientists quote on propaganda and got censored. Try it yourself.
> They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions.
Isn't your comment an attack as well by that line of thinking? Am I attacking you by arguing that people nowadays are way to quick to consider something "damaging" "attacks".
Then by OP's suggestion, you should close this page.
Wording aside, once you feel the other party is trying to force a certain line of thinking in you for their gain you should close the tool.
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It's way worse than that, it's an attack to the entire society.
The vast majority of ads lie; therefore, they are actively harmful. They create a situation where being surrounded by false things is normal. They promote the improvement of tools to make deception and tracking better and better.
On top of that, they install evil incentives for the medias, the news, and business models, influencing consumption, public options and opinions.
Finally, they concentrate power in those who already have enough money to pay for ads. You may have the better product, but a big player with better PR will win.
Ads are one of our most destructive creations. It's much, much more dangerous than it looks.
This. At least you can switch them off on the web but now big-ad is putting bright flickering digital billboards in sight of every public place. Politicians won't do a thing because they're some of the biggest customers. Obey.
> Obey.
We do have the technology to make those glasses now.
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It's insane to think how much brain power, computing power, electricity and component lifecycle wear have been wasted through the years, yelling random stuff at me; or even worse than random; often stuff that is directly harmful to me.
As somebody who – not entirely willingly – is working mostly remote, the only interruption in the day I have from the outside world is the sudden loud inane noises of commercials.
See also:
What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org)
1975 points by smnrg on April 5, 2025 | 1409 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
I hate how normal ads seem to be to young people (under age 30). Just seeing TikTok videos secondhand on YouTube the videos seems stuffed with people pushing crap. YouTube channels none are without ads either by YouTube or by the channel owners.
Plus the "oh you have an add blocker!!" whining if you dare try to slow the firehose of ads coming at you. Yes I do have an ad blocker because it seems my entire existence is fodder for your website or app's ad machine to capture and use.
Lets be fair, here. Traditional TV was ~40 minutes of content with 20 minutes of ads. I still remember televised holiday movies "presented with limited commercial breaks by Folgers, where the best part of waking up..." or whoever was sponsoring it. Radio stations had to power their transmitters and pay their staff, so they had ads. Newspapers use ads to keep themselves affordable. This has always been a business model.
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Bill Hicks on Marketing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
alternatively, keep using ad blockers.
Facebook may have won this round, but AI tilts the balance overwhelming in favor of ad blockers.
consider: you can (in principle) scrape the entire screen, find the ads with machine vision and paste black rectangles over them. or simply have an AI use playwright to scrape the page and rerender it for you. these are excellent, pro-user use cases for AI.
Your first line is just as true of every single internet comment you have ever read, including your own.
> I propose a sane rule
You know this is untenable. You would be unable to use search engines for over a decade, or walk into a Target, or a gas station, or almost any public square if you truly believed this. You don't believe it. You're being hopelessly histrionic and that's not productive for anyone.
my least favorite part of flying is the part where i'm strapped to a chair during taxi with a screen and speaker inches from my face and they use that moment to force a few ads into my eye socket. it feels very Citizen Kane.
pumping gas is another one that takes advantage of captivity to force ads. i hate it.
Your comment is also an attack aimed to manipulate my worldview and actions. The only difference is the corporate ad is more sophisticated.
I just can't take this seriously. I grew up with TV being literally 1/3 ads and there was absolutely no way to skip them. People complained idly, but nobody really had a problem with it because we knew that TV isn't free. Nothing on the internet comes close to that level of ad intrusiveness, but I often hear unhinged statements like "They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions. That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies."
Ads are mind rape.
[dead]
That's quite paranoid, they surely are annoying, but certain ads can be relevant.
Actually, from what I've noticed X/Twitter ads are way worse than the ones on Meta platforms.
And I completely hate seeing ads on YouTube or when browsing random websites in general.
[dead]
Skill issue? Some people are clearly more vulnerable than others. You can occasionally get useful information from ads.
Just because some people are more resilient to opium, and some people can have a good time on it, doesn't mean you should get an opium injection when you're going for a regularly scheduled doctor's appointment.
Ads are being forced on you when you're trying to do something else, like you go to facebook to see your actual friend's pictures of their kids, you're not looking for ads, and yet you get some micro-brainwashing on the side.
The true "skill issue" is that governments are too unskilled to prevent these mass mental attacks to prey upon their citizens, and haven't gotten off their ass enough to make advertisement even more illegal than other similarly harmful substances like opium, tobacco, and online gambling (both sports gambling and gacha games).
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This reminds me of how Scientology reportedly targets intelligent people because those people think they are too smart to be sucked in.
The advertising industry has hired some of the world's best talent (tech, psychology, legal) to make you more susceptible to it. They probably love those who AstroTurf thinking they are "less vulnerable" and "ads are useful actually"
You are not immune to propaganda.
Give me 1-2 examples of useful info we can get from ads?
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> You can occasionally get useful information from ads.
And flies eat horse shit because they occasionally get nutrients from it
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?
> 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.
> less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it
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.
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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.
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If a computer vision model can identify ads and draw a rectangle over them, it can identify the DOM elements rendered inside that rectangle. Thus, the HTML, JS, and network calls of those ads can be detected. This data can then be used to train an ad detector model based on the DOM and network examples. The computer vision model essentially trains the DOM/network blocker, acting as a fallback mechanism when the blocker fails and continuously retraining the ad detector model.
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Facebook is the ad network for Facebook. Will not fetching ads from Facebook really stop Facebook from knowing your age and location?
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Use a comprehensive set of cookie blocking rules to avoid personalized ads. This sometimes means that facebook ad cookies and user profile cookies are indistinguishable. Use clear on exit in such cases. Or block third party cookies.
I dont mind ads that are native to the page. I mind adnets.
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.
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counterpoint: The "adblocker" AdNauseam. not only does it fetch every ad, it clicks them. every single ad is clicked. It keeps a running tally of how much money it's cost advertisers.
So, it is war, then.
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.
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.
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> 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.
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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.
> 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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness
The term is 28 years old.
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.
I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on an add on purpose on a website (I’ve definitely click on one or two a month because of dark patterns). I’m always perplexed as to who is clicking on them because like you they’re just noise I don’t pay attention to.
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>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.
Why put up with that? Is Kagi too expensive for you?
This browser extension is so inimical to online advertising Google (world's largest advertising corporation) banned it from the Chrome web store.
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.
I feel that could easily backfire if your account or IP gets marked as an agent for malicious click-fraud.
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Are we sure it actually works? That the ad networks think it's a real click?
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is it available on Safari? If not, why?
Yes, 100%. I played around with building this last year and even a simple version was already fairly effective: https://notes.npilk.com/experiments-with-ai-adblock
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.
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.
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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!
almost guaranteed that those ad blocking glasses would be DRM-ed out of being able to read anything
> I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be.
I don't have a problem with ads entirely, as long as they aren't egregious (things popping up or otherwise moving around while I'm reading, flashy animation, unexpected audio) and the things that are egregious I can just nope out of by leaving a site when they happen and never going back (if I really want the content then archive.today is usually an option).
The reason I block ads is that it indirectly blocks the stalking, at least a bit, that is inherent in modern ad-tech. Adverts based on what I'm currently looking at are fine, much like I might see demonstrations of other TVs while looking at a TV in a TV shop, as are ads targetted at the local area or even more generally (ala billboards). But ads based on where I've been before are not: I don't want someone from Tesco following me into the pub to ask if I've considered any further that Anusol I looked at in their pharmacy isle the other day, or someone from Boots following me in to see if I want to buy some from them because someone saw me in Tesco and told them what I was looking at.
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?
- Every ad-supported service must also be provided ad-free at a price no higher than the ad revenue would be.
Ad enthusiasts are always quick to defend how useful ads actually are so let them put their money where their mouth is and have the market decide.
> 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 would be a killer feature for AR glasses. Imagine no billboards, no political posters, no neon storefront clutter.
> Imagine no billboards
Washington State has a ~1960s law which I think was pretty clever: Highway advertisements can only be for things someone driving by can actually on the premises under the sign.
That prevents the typical chains of billboards while making it pretty straightforward for actual stores. The law will probably need revision if/when someone tries to skirt it by putting in billboards with an attached symbolic vending-machine.
That’s mostly what Vermont is like
And some people appearing like flesh exposed monsters with ping pong balls for eyes
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And you can get all that for the low price of just $199/mon on your new glasses subscription!
They Live (1988)
> That would be a killer feature for AR glasses. Imagine no billboards, no political posters, no neon storefront clutter.
...people invisible to you by wrapping themselves in a banner-ad cape...
(Actual plot device in a science fiction book.)
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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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
Should add https://breezewiki.com to my StopTheMadness URL redirects
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It seems possible that ads will get even more insidious.
People you follow will post an image, and it could be edited to include a product placement.
People who make a post which incidentally mentions a product or organisation will see that their posts get slightly more viewers. This might be innocent at first but soon people will notice the pattern and start name dropping brands in posts intentionally for the view boost.
bigger influencers can pay money to get a list of companies that will drive more engagement when mentioned in a video, as the list is updated!
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.
“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
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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.
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Who's we? Politicians?
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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.
I just pay them a pittance in exchange for no ads for the whole family across all devices.
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No the arms race ends with everything on meta being an ad and computer models inserting ads into every piece of content.
Eg A bottle of Coca Cola subtly inserted on the countertop, a video where someone in the background is wearing a particular watch.
Sites will start streaming in the whole webpage using DRM so the only thing that can actually see the ad is your monitor.
> 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.
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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.)
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.
> 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
Yeah we've got two years tops before local LLMs are proficient at this and ads are dead. Google, Apple et al. will drag their feet but they won't be able to stop it.
Traditional internet banner style ads are dead. "Paid promotion" influencer ads are going to take over (they already are).
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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?
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.
it’s disgusting how many have done it. Just 60% of the screen is ads even on mobile.
Same. Every time I see an ad I feel like I've been dosed with a small amount of poison.
Nice idea, but unless you sandbox the page until you've done that, you risk loading the malware also, as well as the tracking the ads ship.
I've been saying this for a while: the ad-based business model is dying. It is only a matter of time until local AI models can "see" your screen and identify any sort of ads and remove/hide them. This also includes messages in "sponsored content", paid articles, etc.
There's trillions on the line. So you can be sure this will lead to trusted computing widewine style for ads till the pixels are lit up and the audio waves hit the speaker.
Pessimism wins when capital is opposite individual interest.
Most people don't run adblockers, even though they're pretty effective against 98% of ads. I doubt they're all going to rush for a local AI model.
Wouldn't the next step of the arms race just be bots who are sufficiently able to weave ads into content that it's unrecognizable? Casually talking about things we use is completely normal and unavoidable, but a huge target for advertising
Surely it ends with alternative clients? Seems much easier and more efficient. Facebook UI is crap anyway, just have something scrape the data and present it in a format that's not optimized for whatever KPI FB cares about and without ads.
Or with just not using these services.
The problem is extracting the data from Facebook. They do a lot of work to obfuscate their markup. You'd probably be best loading the whole thing in a headless browser, taking screenshots, running that through an LLM and getting the data.
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.
This is an ugly half-solution. I want a vision model that only rips out the significant text content and related images from the page and displays them in a lovingly typeset emacs org-mode buffer.
Whatever cognitive damage I've suffered since joining Facebook early on seems to have had the effect of erasing my awareness of the damage.
- there is also a 3rd option
- its called 9$ a month with a blue check mark on all facebook groups and pages
- you gotta wonder why zuck hasnt done that
Every social media site that has tried a paid option has given up or vanished because nobody pays, full stop.
Whatsapp is popular because it's free and no other reason.
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This is an interesting direction. I wonder if Open LLM models can help with this sort of thing.
Nah, we will find a way to scrape those conversations and distribute elsewhere.
In my experience, conversations on Facebook also cause cognitive damage.
There's a better solution and that is to just not go on Facebook
Out of curiosity, what sort of conversations on Facebook are still happening? I used to be informed about events, announcements from organizations (including government ones, which is absolutely ridiculous) and extremely rare updates from real people I know. And that would sort of reel me in. Now whenever I log in, the feed is mostly some sort of rage-bait adjacent slop. The useful stuff simply stopped breaking through. When I go to the pages directly, there are some news, but my feed didn't show them. So when I realized, that there is no salami left in this turd sandwich I simply stopped checking in.
Are they cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realise, or are you just uniquely cognitively damaged by them?
> 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.
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.
you mean a rectangle over the entire page?
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
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.
> 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.
>social media communities that serve ads and harvest info are pure poison.
The biggest problem is that we have virtually zero cases of anyone dying from this poison after 25 years of it.
When people step back and look at the lives of people who never spent the time to block everything, they see what 25 years of ingesting this poison looks like and...there is virtually no difference. If anything it's those types who spend less time online - all the better.
I'm not saying there won't be a reckoning in the future, but for right now, the evidence it's "poison" is pretty thin.
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Unfortunately it’s hard to replace local groups for me. It’s mostly crap but there is very useful updates there as well and I live in a small enough community there’s no alternative. I’ve used them to get rides, forest fire info, community event info etc.
I used to use marketplace as well but they’ve completely ruined it with shipped products and ads and stuff from too far away. They’d rather show me pages upon pages of shit I’ll never buy because it’s shipped or three hours away than show me just the five results for “dresser” within 20 miles of me. So now i only interact with marketplace through buy/sell groups. God I miss Craigslist.
> it’s hard to replace local groups for me.
Once you stop using them for a few months you wont miss them. Its all part of the game to keep you sucked in.
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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
You're probably right when it comes to benefiting the company, but technically - at least for me - using only https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr means no ads/sponsored/whatever. Only the posts I actually want to see, and chronologically so easy to continue where you left off. I don't understand why this isn't more common knowledge but have been using this for years and it makes the whole platform usable exactly for what I want to use it for: tracking things which haven't moved on from it yet without being forced to consume anything else.
Btw there's also https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following which does something similar on Instagram.
Do you have something else going on perhaps? The very top item on that FB link was an ad, followed by 2 posts, then another ad
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What does `?sk=h_chr` in the URL mean?
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I dont know what they changed but they kept forcing obvious bot troll political posts on my feed and that’s when I finally deleted my account. They were blatantly trying to enrage me with things I don’t follow. Up to that point I wasn’t bothered and could block whatever and just see friends posts.
> 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.
Telegram is much worse for privacy than WhatsApp. Signal is better.
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.
Your family members don't have a phone number you can call?
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They couldnt drop you a text or give you a call?
> 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.
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]
It stops their most direct way of influencing you. There are always others (e.g. they can lobby politicians) but that is irrelevant to the question of you should let them into your home voluntarily.
Gold advice. People should get out of there and enjoy more of their free time!
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.
> People should get out of there and enjoy more of their free time!
I think that would be a net negative for me. Instead of posting questions on the local facebook group or selling something on marketplace I would have to print it out and hang it up on the local grocery shop wall. Or go door to door.
Or sit around on the flee market.
Just posting "Selling 4 chairs at Waynstreet 4" in the local group is more time efficient.
I disabled YouTube app on my phone for the same reason. The shorts stole my time too easily.
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This is the way! And I wish I could be part of it. Sadly, FB Marketplace is the only platform I that seems to be decent for random sales os stuff I no longer need.
Please, tell me there is this better option called X/Y, and I’ll happily switch. I just haven’t found it.
Such a shame that some afterthought Meta accidentally implemented is better than the rest of their entire platform.
I'm finally reading "Careless People." If I hadn't deleted my FB account back in 2023, I definitely would've done it five chapters into reading this hit piece.
Deleting Facebook, Instagram, X (Formerly Twitter), and TikTok was the best decision I have ever made. I thought that I would really miss them but I just don't.
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.
I had a period before I dropped Facebook where I actually manually removed every add from the timeline with the added option of "I don't want to see ads from this company ever again", and frankly it worked.
After a period of a doing this I started to get new ads only periodically, and after a couple of sessions of removing every one of them, the rest of the month was quiet.
I fucking beat the Facebook ad department.
In general the internet has become shit so I try to just use it less.
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.
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.
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.
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Best move you could have possibly done.
> Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.
The real fix!
> Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.
The best solution. Highly recommended.
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.
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“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
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:
you can use upward. For example
That then goes up elements in the dom.
What's with the xpath selector? Is that just matching deeply nested elements?
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Read up on XPath axes:)
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.)
The word sponsored in inside an SVG element with a linked `use` tag, so it's not that simple.
> so it's very hard to write selectors against
This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?
The power cost of doing this widely would be staggering, surely?
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It keeps changing all of the time, so it might be easier to have Facebook load up in a headless browser, that takes a screenshot and sends it to an LLM and uses that to convert into a standard JSON document that can be rendered nicely. Or something like that.
Maybe reverse tactics and block/hide anything that isn't something you want to see.
In a few years, I don't think we'll be navigating to Facebook.com. We'll be asking our LLM: "what are my friends up to?" And it will provide a nice UI to browse interesting updates, collated from any open source, including Facebook. No ads, no influencers, no dark patterns, just what the user asks. And it won't require APIs. It will just browse the site itself as an agent and pick out the parts the user cares about.
I really think the new internet is going to be a radically different experience soon.
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> 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!!!
Could you not just go after the deeply nested spans? I assume they aren't messing up everything else like that.
Based on inspect element on their homepage, they probably are.
Who would file an ADA suit for a screen reader being unable to correctly read an ad?
The same ambulance-chasing lawyers who are already filing spurious ADA suits today.
Those who want to do it in spite.
> 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.
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.
We need to figure out how this is actually DMCA circumvention. That one seems to have teeth.
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.
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.
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".
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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.
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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.
and thats why you lock down your privacy, so they get nothing other than "generic privacy enthusiast #1000101010101"
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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.
> 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
Facebook does that, even when you aren't seeing an ad.
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.
Ads are for surveillance as much if not more than they are for money
Presumable the ads on Facebook are served by Facebook and they know who you are and what you are doing on Facebook.
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I believe that, as long as you add that the surveillance is also for money.
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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.
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.
Story time? I want to know about the useless items.
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Aren’t ads payed also via „impressions“, like 10k people saw your advertisement so please pay x money?
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
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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.
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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.
First it's literally how they make money. Selling ads. Meta doesn't have any other real source of income. (RayBan glasses don't count.)
If they don't show you ads, they lose money. (Because they need to pay for the servers, traffic.)
Second. Lots of people say "I don't look at ads, I don't care, they don't work on me", but actual behaviour says otherwise.
Third some people just install uBlock to their families and they don't even know they have it.
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.
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
They are no longer handling Facebook in the ad blocker. Installing an ad blocker won't help.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
I have ad blockers everywhere apart from the instagram app. I have bought a ton of stuff off the ads on there. I'm not proud, but have to admit I am powerless against them. Underwear, t-shirts, soap, online courses I have never used, I am a sucker, which is why I need these ad blockers.
If you have android phone, you could try Instander, even though the last update was ~3 years ago, works like a charm for me
>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.
100% higher up decision, I bet they loose more on this than the powerpoint slide says they are earning.
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.
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.)
>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
Swing as in the political term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(politics) because the team wouldn't be the right place in the management structure to alter the rest of the page other than the ad units.
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.
Can't they mimic the structure of legit content to get passed on the whitelist?
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.
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?
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.
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Reddit recently blocked access to anything marked NSFW on old.reddit.com unless you upload your ID to Persona (Thiel's company).
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> 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?
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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.
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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.
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I'm honestly surprised that there isn't a successor platform to Reddit overtaking yet considering how far they have gone with the enshittification.
> I think people need to understand what the purpose of Facebook is in terms of its function and constituent parts
Given how many people do not yet use adblockers, I don't have much reason to believe that this will lead to significant amounts of people suddenly seeing this.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Blacklisting facebook.com at the DNS level has worked pretty well for me.
That works, but is not really blocking the ads.
I agree. We should call that "blocking the bads" since the overwhelming majority of things served from that domain are bad.
facebook ads are indeed blocked.
Don't forget .fbcdn.net and .fbcdn.com.
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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)
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.
>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.
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> it will kill them in the long run...
Now, that's something I would love to see in my lifetime.
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.
As much as I understand their decision, I hope they didn't stop. I don't use Facebook myself but now I am worried YouTube now knows that if they try a bit harder uBO would just give up.
Given that YouTube already has a suite of anti-adblocking checks in their UI code [1] (e.g. submit a fake request to the /player endpoint and see if anything removed the ads from it - which also tells you exactly which fields you need to remove from which request, lol), I don't know why they don't have someone looking at the latest filters and reacting to them.
Twitch did that a while back and uBlock Origin was ineffective against their video ads within a few months.
[1] https://bsky.app/profile/soitis.dev/post/3lvk7przgus2u
YouTube could also only let you download the main video after you downloaded the ads AND waited however long the minimum ad time is. They don't really need to play games with ad blockers if they want to get serious.
Youtube offers a fairly reasonable subscription to remove ads. As far as I'm aware FB doesn't offer the same.
€5.99, EU/UK only: https://facebook.com/help/262038446684066
(7.99 if subscribed via Appstore/Google Play, Apple/Google is getting €2 of your ad-free subscription there, too)
They probably gave up in part because Facebook provides very little value...
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.
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.
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?
The only way to keep ads off Facebook is to stop using Facebook.
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:
I also don't have any friends on it.
Marketplace has video ads that play with sound as you scroll by now. It's incredible
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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.
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.
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.
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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)
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.
Could you publish it with a license saying it shall not be used by any Facebook employee or something?
It is like prohibiting LLM consumption by putting a small reminder -- never works if done without using weird tricks (like mentioning nuclear weapon) also if they are forging new DOM structure they are NOT using the filter itself
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.
How would you comment or watch a video if you did that?
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I use a browser extension called F.B. Purity. It's worked across multiple browsers for years.
https://www.fbpurity.com/
There's a concern that the developer of FB-purity passed away: https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1tw2sf9/real_conc...
Oh dear. Hope he's ok. I got a lot of value out of FB-purity.
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
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.
I'm with the developer here. At some point the effort is just not worth it anymore.
Facebook, as a platform, has long since lost the relevance as a social network, it is basically just an ad platform these days. So why keep wasting resources on trying to block ads from an ad platform? A user who does not want to see ads on Facebook probably should just stop using Facebook altogether.
I get the appeal for staying on Instagram, Youtube, Reddit and other platforms despite the ads: these provide some sort of - maybe controversial - value for the user, even if it's just cat videos or whatever. Facebook has lost its value proposition so long ago it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day.
uBlock's resources are much better allocated into other initiatives: like Chrome .
> Facebook, as a platform, has long since lost the relevance as a social network
I don’t understand how this is determined.
At some point facebook has switched gears to be more about public/semipublic forums and marketplace. If you wanted the old facebook that was for your immediate family/friends/acquaintances then it isnt really relevant anymore compared to group texts.
I just gave FB a few screenlengths of scrolling. There was one post from a family member and about 20 from people I am not friends with and groups I do not follow. I used to use an extension to get rid of that extra stuff (Purity) but at some point I stopped fighting it and stopped visiting too.
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> it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day
Apparently, they have 3B MAUs and 2B DAUs. So you are in some real bubble. While I don't use it, my parents and all their friends use Facebook to share pictures and exchange messages.
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
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.
Appel has, and it can be used. Apfel[0] has exposed it as a CLI:
[0] https://apfel.franzai.com/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271126
More discussion here
With 104 comments at the moment, that’s where the bulk of the discussion is happening.
well this post was like one hour earlier, they should have merged it earlier when there were zero posts in both
Unfortunately with agents Meta can easily run hundreds of automated experiments on real browsers with each commit in the uBlock Origin's repo and each change in various filter lists to find clean workarounds and submit PRs with patches. You can try fighting this on the other side with similar approach, but why waste time and tokens, just stop using Facebook.
There's too much money in it for Meta to not throw a serious budget at it that will outweigh any effort the community can make.
Like you said, we shall all just stop using it.
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.
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.
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.
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Makes me even more excited for Ladybird to be released.
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.
It's a scam. Do not redeem (your money for a crippled device).
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.
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.
I wonder what percentage of images even has meaningful alt-text.
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Safari was the first to cripple adblockers and went further than ManifestV3, but it seems their reputation will never catch up to that.
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.
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.
I was under the impression that America had very few legal restrictions on ads at all.
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.
Apple sells ads too; increasingly across its surfaces.
This is the first and only use-case for LLMs that I am genuinely excited about.
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".
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You anticipate a large language model to understand visual queues for an advertisement?
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.
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.
Cues, not queues. And yes that sounds workable.
But that means wasting CPU cycles that adds to what was consumed to render the ads in the first place. Compounding all of that produces a slower browser/device experience, making the user hate ads even more.
The hard bit isn't killing ads. The hard bit is doing whatever will replace ads to pay for sites.
apple has ads in the os. that seems deeply anticompetitive
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.
Best solution is to never use any of those useless apps ever again.
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.
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.
> 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.
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Are you proposing banning advertising on Facebook? You know this will effectively destroy Facebook, Google, every free ad supported website on the internet?
I think there are a variety of potential solutions, but one where the public marketplace is taxed/polluted by a private entity in a way that can't be avoided isn't an acceptable status quo.
Requiring FB to provide a paid ad-free option with a price commensurate with their cost of providing service would be one approach. Prohibiting them from actively breaking adblockers would be another. I wouldn't wholesale ban ads, but banning them on FB marketplace would be reasonable - either we get an ad-free marketplace, or FB abandons the product and we get alternatives.
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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.
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.
> 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.
I've just let Claude analyze an HAR file containing XHR traffic on the Facebook timeline. It happily wrote a script for extracting contents, fetch images and videos, and rebuilt the timeline into a single HTML -- highly responsive, with ZERO ads.
Now, parry this.
Doesn’t your HAR file have everything an agent would need to send requests to FB as if it was you? I hope it was an aged one.
Yes, but the token expires upon logout, and, after reading your comment, I just double-checked the expiry (got 400 from all related endpoints).
uBlock team is the modern times heroes fighting the good fight for us. Thanks to them I've been navigating the web with peace of mind for a long time.
Sometimes I find myself thinking how our lives would be if couple of guys didn't build shitty tech startups. We've gone from creative advertising to these manipulative online marketing scams, that attack our brains, especially targeting young generation, which effects how our societies, behaviours, art and culture develop.
Recommend watching:
"We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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.
Hyperpersonalized code to its rescue. With the qwen3.8-27b release tomorrow and the advent of vibe coding and the improvements into proper agentic engineering we are moving towards hyperpersonalized software. This means we don't need a centralized maintainer for smaller tools. the facebook ad blocking cat and mouse game is something I cna very well imagine to just be something my computer would solve in real time, updating the uBlock filter/userscript to adapt to any fb changes in near real-time.
Man, am I happy that I deleted my Facebook. No regrets.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Shitter? Edit: Ah, I assume you're referring to X (previously Twitter -> shitter taunt)
Xitter.
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.
ruthless pragmatism.
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. :)
Your country has sold your safety to private interests. Demand better from them.
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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.
It's where the GenX-ers and boomers are at who have money to spend
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.
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.
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All over the internet I saw this news title "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook".
Shouldn't the title be something like "Trillion dollar corporation forces small opensource project from blocking their attack against users' browser"?
Why are we still using Facebook? That's the real question here.
I still use it because over the years, all my IRL clubs and hobbies moved away from forums and sites to it.
Using it has very little impact on me, and allows to continue participating in IRL activities and clubs I’ve been a member of for years.
If they all pack up and move somewhere else, I’ll move as well, if not, I won’t.
I don’t use it for any purpose outside of engaging with those communities and I’m not going to give up my social life to make a statement, I don’t care enough.
I check it once a month or three. Boomer relatives still use it and so it's nice to see their updates once in a while. I've also heard good things about Marketplace, but don't use it myself because I fear my lame would-be for sale posts would end up on friends' feeds and it would be mortifying if people I know in real life thought I used Facebook.
ok thanking the team for this work over the years. i hope yt will stay ad-free :-)
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.
Well clearly you'll need to stop using Google search too
We've been circling that since "thing reddit" became the most optimum search.
Kagi search allows you to block whole domains, which is pretty great.
Isn't there a browser plugin to do that for Google too?
Oh the irony: https://ibb.co/NnxGJyr1
that's not irony.
I've been thinking about extensions designed for specific sites. Imagine a version of Facebook from the good old days that only showed you posts from your friends and put them in reverse chronological order, also known as a timeline.
I would also like a version of LinkedIn that shows me what I click on without loading whatever extraneous stuff it is that's crashing my laptop if I open too many LinkedIn tabs.
This exists for facebook.
Can you give us a link or something?
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Mark Zuckerberg is the ultimate mendacious prick
We know they want to be a monopoly. See: https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1c0xfdz/messenger... (or any thread about this)
He doesn't see human beings as people
This does seem like an area where AI could help respond to changes quickly.
This doesn't set a good precedent unfortunately... Hello to that Google guy that just got tasked to do the same with Youtube.
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.
I kind of hope it pushes people to use alternatives, because allowing your work to be violated by ads seems insane.
But probably not.
Not sure detailing how Facebook demoralized them is the best idea.
Well, uBlock is entirely open source so...
I don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.
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.
It's ironic how trust would solve the issue and ads would become impossible to remove. Trust comes at a huge premium of course.
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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.)
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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.
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)
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).
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.
> 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.
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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.
Seems like this is a market gap that can be solved by LLMs. Do offline analysis of the traffic of a page and make adds completely opaque to tracking.
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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
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.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about...
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.
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.
All the more reason to block Facebook completely.
Question for everyone: I'm building two browsers: a terminal browser (https://github.com/meerita/puma-browser) and a new GUI browser.
For the GUI one, I'm focusing on privacy and reliability, and I was wondering if having a built-in ad blocker would be a good feature.
Why don't the major browsers have one? Have they had legal problems with ad blocking, or do they simply not want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?
Should I build a native ad blocker?
There are many browsers which come with native ad-blocking. See Brave, Vivaldi, Opera.
Most browsers are built on Chromium, and that has certain ad-block limitations now. See Manifest V3.
Many people care a lot about ad-blocking, but still, most of the world does not use an ad-blockers. So it's a cost/market reach equation. What's your target demo? If it's tech enthusiasts, we'll appreciate the ad-blocking built in, but we can also easily install one ourselves if it's built on Chromium.
You are unlikely to face legal issues. There have been a few test cases around the world, with most siding with the user. The argument is usually that no one should be forced to download or render something they do not wish to download or render.
Chrome is made by an advertising company that also fund almost entirely the budget of Firefox. Even Safari is made by an advertising company. FWIW most of them have some blocking for egregious ads, so they will happily kill someone's else goose.
Personally I think the easiest would be to support uBO or at least have a built-in engine that can load filters written for uBO. Anything else is just wasting development time.
Google builds the biggest browser. Mozilla receives most of its funding through Google (though they have mobile browsers with a default ad-blocker). Microsoft is in the ad business too.
I'm not surprised, why are you?
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.
You have missed nothing.
Hyperpersonalized code to its rescue. With the qwen3.8-27b release tomorrow and the advent of vibe coding and the improvements into proper agentic engineering we are moving towards hyperpersonalized software.
This means we don't need a centralized maintainer for smaller tools. the facebook ad blocking cat and mouse game is something I cna very well imagine to just be something my computer would solve in real time, updating the uBlock filter/userscript to adapt to any fb changes in near real-time.
https://socialfixer.com/ will fix it for you. It is amazing, what you can take out.
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.
> 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.
The app is a back door to your phone. It will vacuum all the data of it if allowed.
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.
A lot of people are saying to stop using facebook as if its such a simple, catch-all answer. For a lot of people, and a lot of countries, facebook (whatsapp, too) is still the primary(only) way of communication. If not with your friends, then with your family. There's a big demand from those people to have a way of interacting with this pseudo-essential service without having to oblige to complete data rape.
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.
Thanks. I think it still could be fine ? I don't use Facebook - but I was able to download any video from Youtube, see no ads till adblockers and youtube-dl - and that's the race making things harder and unaccessible (yes, custom - but excesive DIY URL filtering rules only, same since ~2 years, are still enough to see no ads on YT, hope, that on Facebook too, and I can live with that).
I'm amazed that people are still on Facebook in 2026. Deleted my account after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There really is nothing I miss.
uBlock hit them where it hurts. Facebook's entire existence hinges on serving ads.
The best way to do this is block Facebook entirely.
This is probably a good decision, because it will free up time and resources to do more productive things than saving the lost souls, that are still on Facebook. Maybe this will contribute to the downfall of Facebook, due to more people seeing how toxic the place has become, when they can no longer block those ads.
Why not just use Fluff Busting Purity?
https://www.fbpurity.com/
One of four extensions I run, I hope they never give up. A while back they mentioned it being harder and harder to maintain.
Controversial but honest question: How do anti-ads people propose the free open internet monetizes itself?
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.
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.
That doesn’t answer their question, like at all.
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They don't want it monetized.
They want it to go back to how it was circa the late 90's.
In a lot of ways they're going to get their wish. LLM's via endless spam and replacing google search have basically made monetizing legit and useful content impossible, so I imagine nobody will upload it anymore (except for on youtube which is still monetizable in a meaningful way)
Compared to the past there's basically no incentive to put useful info on the web any more, so it's just not going to happen.
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.
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.
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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.
You make things that cost money cost money? I don't think I really understand the premise of the question.
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.
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from people without ad blockers, but honestly facebook is not the free open internet.
government subsidy
The internet, its forums, chats, and rings were just fine until techbros came into the picture
They don't. Trying to monetize it was mistake #1.
Mistake #2 was letting the tech bros anywhere near it.
The last time I went on Facebook, the ads were so similar to posts it was near impossible to tell one from the other. The problem is compounded by elderly relatives liking or sharing weird AI posts, and an algorithm that seems to be random and non deterministic
I want to take the opportunity to thank the maintainers of uBlock Origin for their outstanding work. The internet would be hell without you.
And Facebook just showed (again) they are willing to go the extra mile to be as contemptible and repugnant as possible.
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.
video autoplay can be blocked in firefox with a builtin feature, though i can't test if it works for facebook
If ads on these sites irritate people, why don't they just stop using them? Feels like that's long term a more likely avenue to get these sites to adjust how they monetise rather than papering over the problem with a blocker.
It's actually pretty trivial to block all FB ads -- but a browser plug-in alone won't cut it. FB does a bunch of really annoying break the internet patterns like rotating your session and VIP every 30 seconds -- or less.
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.
This actually means it will become easier to block ads on Fakebook, because they won't be trying as hard. You'll just have to find custom filters people have shared to a smaller audience.
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.
the answer to facebook being bad is obviously not block-listing but allow-listing content. we had the same learning in security years ago. what this might look like is ai assisted desired data extraction and using clients tailored to user needs and user agency to use that data. Unfortunately alternative platforms that are user aligned are not the solution as you cannot force your whole cities groups or old family members to move which is the main pain point for people who use adblockers and still also on facebook.
For those ok purging the whole newsfeed: https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator
Oh! The Irony! This page doesn't load when your ad blocker is turned on.
Not for me (Wipr2 on Safari), loads fine without ADS.
It works here.
Are you not using uBlock Origin?
works fine for me with Vivaldi+uBlock Origin
try loading it with JS off
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.
https://search.worldcat.org/title/57068812
Anyone, including me, gets what they deserve when loading Facebook.
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
It's easy, just block every Facebook owned domain there is. Works for me.
Where do you get the list of "every Facebook owned domain"? Can you share?
A quick search on Kagi turns up a ton of them. Here you go: https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...
since the leadership change, youtube has been on a similar crusade against adblocking. however, despite all the things that happened, ublock, even in the lite version, is able to work on the website. this has been quite well-covered and even discussed here.
however, found it interesting that fb was able to quietly win the battle. however, it is a shame that nothing can be done on the mobile front, at least inside the apps. it is insane how sometimes every other thing you see is a sponsored post or an ad.
> however, found it interesting that fb was able to quietly win the battle.
I think it's just because nobody actually cares. Too much effort for marginal gains. Who even uses Facebook in 2026? Instagram I get it, but Facebook?
YouTube is a completely different matter.
> Who even uses Facebook in 2026? Instagram I get it, but Facebook?
i don't think non-fb apps are only running the meta's ad revenue, which is meant to overtake google's.
while i personally don't use it, does not mean they are not getting enough eyeballs.
Why not just set up a build pipeline to have AI view the page, check for ads, then do the whack a mole until it removes them, or have I missed something that needs human in the loop?
Most people aren't going to pay for an AdBlocker.
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.
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)
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.
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.
If you're an engineer and your job is to defeat ublock origin, your work is not ethical. You're a facebook engineer-- you'll do just fine working elsewhere.
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.
I'm keen to see this simple script, and to understand why it's simple given that ublock origin finds it hard.
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.
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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.
Here's the source:
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/
Meta is one of the worst corporations in the world. Nothing they do benefits the society. Stop using their products.
Guessing the AI written article doesn't add much that the title doesn't already reveal. Read the first few paragraphs and closed it
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
Some of us plan events / engage socially.
What's your favorite type of event to plan on Facebook?
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my solution to nasty websites with js ridden everything is to scrape and remake the entirely new dom populate it with only content you verify, sure you might lose some detail but its easy to copy website ui if you desire. can be done with something like tamperminkey or a browser ext
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.
This is literally true. I've heard their AI scrapers are especially vicious. I can imagine (I don't know this for sure, it's just what I assume) Gemini (or others, idk) kind of are classy about it. When Google pre-LLM was scraping the internet, I don't remember too many complaints about "Google is pinging my server so often it's a strain on resources"
Facebook? They've always been the worst at this. By "this" I guess I mean the internet
Well, I guess I'm giving up the fight to keep paying any attention to Facebook, then. It was only tolerable with an adblocker.
feel like we’re close to a customized compute era where ads get filtered out by default via something like a diffusion browser or diffusion based Mixed Reality. Feels like it’s already possible with LLMs with enough test time compute to RE endpoints users want to keep and exclude those they don’t.
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.
So basically Facebook ads won and we are doomed
>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.
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.
Nah. I never see Facebook ads. Easy peasy.
Original reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about...
Wait, but 95% of "content" on Facebook is an ad. So what would be left if you blocked all ads? :)
What about using AI to detect and remove ads? For all we know they might be using AI to get past the uBlock filters.
The obvious solution is to not use Facebook.
I stopped trying to block it ages ago, since it was reacted* horribly anytime I tried to block ads... :(
(pun fully intended)
My setup: separate profile for Facebook. Targeted advertising turned off. FB domains blocked on main profile.
Not perfect, but it works.
Good news!!
Don't spend massive amount of time in sth that doesn't deserve to exist.
Do something useful with your time instead!
The fact that Instagram ads are so good and Facebook ads are so bad should tell us something.
Out of spite they should have a block list, blocking every meta related service, disabled by default... for now
Facebook deleted my 20yo account for "being a bot suddenly". Let them rot.
Another reminder that facebook is abhorrent and not worth your time.
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.
I get their reasoning, but it still saddens me to see them surrender like that.
Pretty much every site that lives off of ads nowadays is "disgustingly anti-user" the same degree that Facebook is. The main difference being that Facebook had the capacity and confidence to wage a full-on war on ad blocking like this. Now, with this method proven by Facebook, it's likely that more websites will follow suit.
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)
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.
But the filterlist does not come from uBo, it comes from Easylist?
Can't wait for an ad blocking AI model to show up.
They should tell their users to get off of Facebook.
At every FB developer working on that:
You are definitely the baddies.
I'm not saying this is a rallying call to help but...
Does Fluff Busting Purity still remove Facebook ads?
I use the “natural” method for blocking Facebook ads.
Even my parents don’t use facebook anymore…
If you're on Facebook, you deserve the ads
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.
Moral arguments about "blaming users" do not overcome the fact that the incentive structures driving these problems absolutely do emerge from the choices and behaviors of low-information users.
Viable solutions can only come from informing and persuading users to use alternative options, which relies in part on demonstrating the actual risks and consequences of the choices they've previously made (i.e. "blaming users") and simultaneously developing an ecosystem of alternative options that's sufficiently accessible to them (which already proliferate).
Lots of "normal" users have already migrated away from Twitter to e.g. Mastodon, so it's not clear why this isn't reasonable for Facebook.
People are on Facebook to scroll. For connection you have phones, email, text message, and others.
But there are people who keep using FB?
To those that use facebook in 2026, why?
Is this article written by AI?
This is a perfect use case for AI, no?
Facebook is in terminal decline - I don’t know any young people who use it. Even I don’t use it - and I’m not even young.
Meta's revenue is over $220B/yr and growing. Try to avoid saying complete nonsense
Blocking ads sounds like a job for AI
Or stop using Facebook. It is called CIAbook for a reason anyway, run by the ultimate diva Suckerberg.
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.
Does pihole still work?
why not just run a 24/7 agent to do the work for them?
why not "just" do it for them?
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).
Let the butter churn! This is exciting. Someone will step up and build a superior tool with GenAI. Maybe we can just say, "Hey Claude, write me an adblock solution to replace ublock origin!." Claude responds with, "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." UH OH HERE WE GO AGAIN!
a killer use case of ai would be an AI adblocker !!
I'm more surprised by the fact that people still use Facebook
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.”
That's an underrated season, imo. Keith David is fantastic.
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
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.”
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"What do you do for work?"
"I find ways to defeat adblockers"
Actually, 10 years ago, I knew someone with roughly that job description (neither Google nor Facebook).
Be evil.
I hate ads as much as anyone, but I find it hardly surprising that devs at companies playing cat and mouse with ad blockers read the ad blocker source code.
Since when is this considered cheating?
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.
I mean this is literally a task in which AIs excel - figure out how to filter this thing from this code.
I mean who gives a shit, I just hope this doesnt encourage Youtube to fight for thee same outcome.
I purchased StopTheMadness purely to stop autoplaying videos in Facebook marketplace
Honestly who still uses Facebook ?
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.
Would probably need a full userscript at this point?
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The futility of getting your loved ones off facebook's feed toxicity became apparent to me in my face, years ago, when I tried for a week on my dad's iPad(perfect delivery system for this drug cause if allows no extensions on browsers) to "cleanup" his feed be following and liking a bunch of sane content and actively down voting really shitty content with ads. I tried turning off politically sensitive content and trying to tell the ad engine what ads were scammy or I did not like.
Within a few days it was undone. Soft porn(ish) mixed with violent videos and of course all the scam like ads resurfaced. Part of it is the person who is addicted to this stuff and part of it is this shitty product called Facebook that loves to show horrible things to my dad.
I asked why he watches all of it, "Masala"(hindi for spice) is the word he uses to describe his addiction.
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.
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.
cheap bait
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
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.
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."
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
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 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.
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.
I have YouTube Premium, so I don't see ads on YouTube.