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snickerer 15 hours ago [-]
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.
gucci-on-fleek 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
fsckboy 6 hours ago [-]
usage:
>I draw a line on advertising for myself
the typical phrase in English, "I draw the line at advertising for myself" would mean that is the thing that has gone too far, something you will not accept. you used a slightly different phrase, but it is still where I draw the line.
8note 7 hours ago [-]
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.
abirch 10 hours ago [-]
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.
MSFT_Edging 8 hours ago [-]
Even when you want to pay for things, the companies will find ways to extract more money from you.
Plex lifetime pass is now over $700 dollars
My dashcam that used to let me use the app to locally pull down videos now requires an account to view the files on my camera that is putting out it's own password protected wifi network, just so the company can harvest more data and track me easier. This device cost several hundred dollars.
Streaming services introduce ads anyway and increase the cost.
You used to be able to buy complete functional software like Microsoft Office and the Adobe suite.
All this is because companies cannot be statically profitable unless they're entirely privately owned. All companies need to constantly increase profit, which means even if you're happy to pay for something, eventually the company will squeeze you hard enough that you no longer want to pay for it anymore.
elzbardico 8 hours ago [-]
Plex is just a nice UI and a DB wrapping lots of open source libraries and tools, you could replace it with a few days of AI assisted coding.
swat535 8 hours ago [-]
You can replace Plex with all its features and polish in a couple of days with AI?..
MSFT_Edging 7 hours ago [-]
I run both Plex and Jellyfin. The joy of Plex is I can log in on my work machine to listen to my music without having to install and client-side software, running personal VPNs, worrying about the security merit of the Jellyfin log in screen on a public facing service running on my home server, etc.
On my home network? Jellyfin all day except for random encoding issues.
mistyvales 7 hours ago [-]
Or just use Jellyfin
MSFT_Edging 7 hours ago [-]
I use both.
7 hours ago [-]
jccc 8 hours ago [-]
I don’t think this is right. There are plenty examples of people happy to pay for things online.
But people also really like to get things for free. And there’s plenty of interest in exploiting this fact to get something out of those people without them knowing it.
miki123211 9 hours ago [-]
Ads are progressive taxes in disguise.
If you make the kind of content that costs a lot to create but almost nothing to copy, you have a dilemma: Set the price too high, and you aren't getting any money from the poor at all at all, even though they're willing to pay far above your copying costs. Set the price too low, and you aren't extracting as much profit from the rich as you could be.
Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income, because they pay for the product indirectly, by buying the advertised products. Rich people have more money and buy more products, so they, in effect, pay more for the same content. poor people pay less.
I think this is a beautiful system in many ways. Ads give us access to all the world's music, plenty of educational content (on Youtube), including from the world's topmost universities, international texting, picture messaging, phone and video calls of unlimited duration, even some movies and TV. And it's all free, which it wouldn't be if not for ads.
If we banned ads, many people just wouldn't be able to afford to talk to their family or listen to their favorite artists every day.
ndriscoll 8 hours ago [-]
The world's topmost universities (e.g. Yale, MIT) publish those same lectures on their own websites along with other course materials. We could demand public universities do the same for all courses. If they weren't part of monopolized platforms already, by now we'd probably have widespread p2p video chat (we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area), and it'd be unmetered just like phone calls. Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period, making everything up to 1998 available, or we could even shorten it to 10-15 years.
The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology. It's not ads that make it possible. Ads enable market capture that prevents other low-cost alternatives from proliferating. They raise costs to society.
RestlessMind 7 hours ago [-]
> by now we'd probably have widespread p2p video chat
we still have it. WhatsApp video chat is the most widely used video chat app.
> we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area
Skype was barely present on mobile and got acquired by Microsoft before Mobile took off. Then it was as good as dead. So we have in fact progressed massively that anyone in Asia with a crappy handset and a decent connection can still have a video chat with anyone else in the world.
> Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period
And world would be so much better if no one was greedy. The fact is that we have not retained original copyright period and the reasons are beyond adtech, so what are you gonna do about it? Also, that doesn't solve the problem of long-tail content which is massively entertaining.
> The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology
Lol wut? Try running your own Youtube and you will discover massive technical problems (storage, network bandwidth, content moderation, discovery etc).
> Ads enable market capture
Google tried YT premium and look at its adoption numbers. It starts at 89 INR in India (less than a USD) and yet its adoption is minimal. 89 INR is cheap for at least a few hundred million Indians. People simply prefer ads over paying up.
ndriscoll 7 hours ago [-]
My point here is that the reason any of this stuff is possible is because the underlying technology makes it extremely cheap. It's not ads that make it so anyone on Asia can have a video chat on a cheap phone; it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful and bandwidth is plentiful. Signaling a p2p call is cheap, and phone companies already do it for voice calls. Wasn't WhatsApp the one that had something like 100M-1B MAU charging $1/year on hardware from a decade ago? The actual cost of these things is trivial.
Ads don't make it possible for people to have cheap access to movies. The fact that it costs literally nothing (c.f. bittorrent) to distribute them does. Especially for older recordings that were already paid for generations ago. It actually costs more resources to centralize distribution to serve ads.
Yes it is expensive to run a giant worldwide monopoly on video distribution. But that's not necessary. And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.
People taking ads over paying is exactly why they are anticompetitive. They allow below cost services, destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service, leading to everything having ads and surveillance, eventually driving up costs of everything.
NoMoreNicksLeft 9 hours ago [-]
>Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income,
It may be true that if they just put a little bit of fecal matter in the soup that they could give the soup away for free... but why would I want to eat shit soup? Even if you were to tell me that rationally there's so little shit in the soup that I couldn't notice the taste, and that there'd be no statistically significant health risks from it, why would I eat it? "Both rich and poor pay the same amount for this soup" doesn't sway me either.
And never mind that me, looking from the outside inward, I see them cranking up the shit percentage constantly.
If banning fecal matter in soup means the world has less soup, I've already made peace with that consequence.
>phone and video calls of unlimited duration,
Perhaps I'm so old now that I've lost the plot, but my phone calls (what few I make) are paid for explicitly and directly. Them being unmetered has nothing to do with advertisement revenue. Care to explain?
nathan_compton 8 hours ago [-]
I think you mean progressive pricing in disguise. The problem is that they are also a psychological attack.
I believe that we should, generally, as a society, discourage communication in bad faith, and ads very, very easily fall into that category. So perhaps in a local sense it is worth it for the reasons you suggest, but I think the mass dependence of our society on advertising makes our lives worse.
techdmn 9 hours ago [-]
Yes and no. It's hard to escape ads even by paying for things, with cable TV being a common (though increasingly outdated) example.
ptaffs 8 hours ago [-]
the example is good and those ads are less awful because the same ad it sent to a demographic, rather than an individual, eg everyone in Michigan get the same ad or everyone watching Friends at 8pm in Cincinnati gets the same ad. Facebook's specialty is targeting a user with an ad. And a side effect or bonus is that few others see it to talk about how inaccurate it might be.
sbarre 9 hours ago [-]
What you pay(paid) for cable TV was never enough to actually cover the total cost of the service you were receiving.
You were splitting that cost with the advertisers.
This is not a defence of advertising, just a reality check on this bad example.
fn-mote 9 hours ago [-]
This might be true if cable companies did not make a profit.
In the US, at least, I think the lack of competition (almost monopoly pricing in most areas) has led to exactly the opposite situation - plenty of profits for the cable providers.
Do you have evidence for the claim that the monthly fees are not enough to cover the cost of providing the service?
I tried to find numbers but couldn’t, so I’m left with a macroeconomic argument. Better details would be welcome.
nekusar 9 hours ago [-]
In European countries websites (various, mostly news), I'm seeing more of "Accept all cookies and ads" OR "sign up and pay".
yoyohello13 9 hours ago [-]
Unpopular opinion but if people don’t want to pay for a thing, it’s probably not worth a whole lot to n the first place.
RestlessMind 7 hours ago [-]
That's for people and businesses to decide. Market clearly values Facebook a lot, over a trillion dollars in fact.
stronglikedan 7 hours ago [-]
That assumes there's no such thing as nuance.
Frieren 14 hours ago [-]
> 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.
x______________ 14 hours ago [-]
On your resources too! Your electricity, processing power and network bandwidth are all being abused without any incentives to cover the costs.
conmod278 11 hours ago [-]
But Zuck has to put high-quality beef on his table which involves raising Wagyu and Angus cattle on a diet of macadamia nut meal and local beer. Zuck is not gonna do charity.
podocarp 7 hours ago [-]
Do they actually raise cows on beer? I will believe the macadamia part.
spider-mario 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jdiff 9 hours ago [-]
The ads themselves have been known to do that on many an occasion.
c7b 9 hours ago [-]
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.
bkaae 15 hours ago [-]
We should also normalize paying for content at the same time then.
okamiueru 11 hours ago [-]
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.
mrngld 10 hours ago [-]
So, steal from everyone (taxation) whether they want to support or use government-run Facebook, give the money to government-run Facebook, and everything will be great because Government?
What incentive does that mechanism have to spur innovation for government-run Facebook? Does the government fund two Facebooks and scale funding based on market share? Or, like what virtually always happens in government, does it metastasize, realize it's actual "customer" isn't its "users" but is actually the government itself, and act accordingly to protect and grow its own budget?
Everything about a subscription model is better. If it sucks, don't pay for it, and if no one thinks its a worthwhile bargain then they run out of money and it dies. Efficient. If people do like it, then great.
okamiueru 10 hours ago [-]
Not sure to what extend, if at all, I should engage here, as you do have some strong preconceptions that probably makes it less likely productive.
> Steal from everyone (taxation) [...] give the money to government-run Facebook, and everything will be great because Government
Not touching this. As an exercise, take it upon yourself to figure out how much it cost per meter (or, I assume more familiar to you -- football field) for the road you last used, and where that money came from.
> government-run Facebook?
Yes. But, it depends what you think Facebook is, which I'm assuming isn't what Meta does with Facebook. They are in the business of collecting, profiling, and selling to data brokers, and influence to foreign countries or private interests. All of this is of negative value to both end user and society. In a world with a "government run Facebook", it wouldn't exist.
So what is the service Facebook actually provides then? A way to manage communities and events. A way to find, connect, and communicate with others. And it would absolutely be a good case for something that could easily surpass the value of services provided by "facebook", if done right, without incentive beyond making good services.
Not sure if you've noticed or paid much attention. None of the most important services do product development guided by <improving the service>. Google wouldn't have replaced Play Music. Your search result might be immediately useful but that would make you move on. I'd also wager that your YouTube client doesn't automatically skip the sponsor segments.
ericmay 9 hours ago [-]
> So what is the service Facebook actually provides then? A way to manage communities and events. A way to find, connect, and communicate with others.
I don’t have Facebook or use any social media (except LinkedIn) and yet I still plan events, connect, and communicate with others. I have not touched a mainstream social media site since probably 2013.
We don't need Facebook, and we especially don’t need to spend a bunch of money on a poorly run government Facebook either.
okamiueru 9 hours ago [-]
HN sure has a different type of crowd compared to ten years ago.
Out of curiosity, what brings you here? Also, what is your favorite AI model?
ericmay 9 hours ago [-]
I just like to read articles and debate things.
I use Claude but don’t have too strong of an opinion on any specific model provider.
okamiueru 9 hours ago [-]
Debating requires that one engages with the premise. Making up a different one, and then share your thoughts on it, is something different.
ericmay 9 hours ago [-]
Saying twice now “you didn’t engage with my premise” when someone points out a flaw in your premise or otherwise exposes the weakness in your premise.
okamiueru 8 hours ago [-]
Edit: removed. Wasn't worth it.
ericmay 8 hours ago [-]
Well, in this case I will "leave it" as a clear refutation of all your previous points. :)
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 7 hours ago [-]
The point you are raising is a non sequitur to theirs. The fact that you can do these things without Facebook is not mutually exclusive with others using Facebook with the same intentions.
ericmay 7 hours ago [-]
Use of non-sequitur doesn't apply to me here.
The OP was responding to "government run Facebook?" and the premise is "we need Facebook-style technology to do XYZ things like plan events" but for-profit Facebook fills that need with these negative repercussions: "collecting, profiling, and selling to data brokers, and influence to foreign countries or private interests." and then argues that it follows that a government run Facebook should exist to handle the things that the OP is asserting are necessary without any of the identified downside.
The flaw in the premise is that you need Facebook or a government fun Facebook to do any of the things the OP suggested. You don't. And I'd argue not only should we not have a government fun Facebook, we shouldn't have Facebook or other social media to begin with.
I'm sure the OP is going to come in now and say that wasn't their premise. I'm simply responding to the words that they wrote. No matter how it is framed or how the goalposts are moved, you simply do not need Facebook nor do you need a government run Facebook.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 6 hours ago [-]
> Use of non-sequitur doesn't apply
It does, in precisely the way I described. Your comment was not engaging with the point they brought up.
> The flaw in the premise is that you need Facebook or a government fun Facebook to do any of the things the OP suggested.
This is not in their premise. Nobody "needs" it for those things, I will grant and have granted. Regardless, some still "use" it for those things. OP never said people can't replace it with other means to do what Facebook currently does for them, just that they apparently don't want to, as revealed by their use of Facebook for the doings in question. If you still think that's wrong, please point me to the passage in their comment which contradicts it, because I am failing to find it.
> I'm sure the OP is going to come in now and say that wasn't their premise.
Funny. I now wonder if I'm going to be dismissed as a sock puppet.
ericmay 6 hours ago [-]
> It does, in precisely the way I described. Your comment was not engaging with the point they brought up.
Ok that's incorrect because I did engage with the point they brought up in that comment, and then even quoted it specifically.
> This is not in their premise. Nobody "needs" it for those things, I will grant and have granted. Regardless, some still "use" it for those things. OP never said people can't replace it with other means to do what Facebook currently does for them, just that they apparently don't want to, as revealed by their use of Facebook for the doings in question. If you still think that's wrong, please point me to the passage in their comment which contradicts it, because I am failing to find it.
If that was their premise I would just reject it off-hand as the equivalent of just saying stuff. People use Facebook. Cows moo. Sometimes it rains on Tuesday. Who cares?
The point isn't whether or not people use or need Facebook, what was in question and being discussed was the negative aspects and whether some other version of a Facebook could be swapped in to have the "good" parts of Facebook without the "bad".
For example:
> government-run Facebook?
> Yes. But, it depends what you think Facebook is, which I'm assuming isn't what Meta does with Facebook. They are in the business of collecting, profiling, and selling to data brokers, and influence to foreign countries or private interests. All of this is of negative value to both end user and society. In a world with a "government run Facebook", it wouldn't exist.
Underlying this is the presumption that we should have a service like Facebook, and the question is who should run it and what the effects might be. You can see the OP outlining these negative effect here for yourself.
My point is I disagree with the need to solve this problem by creating what will inevitably by giant software conflagrations that ultimately, in my view, do not serve any real purpose because not only does the government version serve no purpose, the private market version doesn't either.
If you want to actually challenge my point instead of engaging in "nuh uh that wasn't the premise" you could just say well other people think they need it or really want it and you're just stating an opinion, or something along those lines.
okamiueru 6 hours ago [-]
If it is of any consolation. You are spot on, and saved me the effort (which had run out). I'd recommend to leave it alone as well, as it isn't worth it to try and explain logical fallacies. Or, heck, you do you. I'm just too old for it
ericmay 6 hours ago [-]
Just saying "that's a logical fallacy" doesn't make it so. Running away from challenges to your stated opinions or arguments doesn't make them correct either.
If you really want to play this whole "logical fallacy" game, then I can start demanding sources and specific definitions of words used too and you can spend hundreds of characters defining specific terms so that your own discussion points aren't themselves some variation of a "logical fallacy".
Folks who toss those things around usually don't know how to use them correctly (as we see here with you and others) or they hide behind them when their various points are met with challenges they can't overcome.
okamiueru 4 hours ago [-]
It's more that you are being too obtuse to be worth the engagement. You see it as running away from a challenge. I see it as leaving an area because it's become unpleasant. I already told you that you're here for an argument, and I'm not interested. Define the situation however you want, and feel good about it, for all I care.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I get it but always prefer to give it a shot. I know the person I'm replying to is not the only one who will read my comments. Cheers.
docjay 7 hours ago [-]
The earlier link you provided is indeed refreshingly quick to navigate. What a joy that’s unnecessarily rare. It renders like trash and is unusable on my intentionally-not-updated iPhone, but still. Yay.
“Provide incentive programs and reward those that take on such initiatives.”
We have that too, we call it capitalism. It’s not very unique, but we heavily market it under the “land of opportunity” moniker. Do a thing of value and your reward is the lion’s share of that value. “You get what you’re given” seems to make some countries happy, but I’m sure you can understand the appeal of “you get what you earn”, even if neither of them matches the brochure. The scholars can debate the pros and cons of it, and where it goes wrong, but you’re talking about investment reward structures like it’s a fresh concept coming out of Scandinavia.
On that note, let’s set aside the endless conversation around “government Facebook” and talk foundational: Size, diversity, and population. It’s funny when I see comments from micro->small nation states with relatively homogeneous citizens throwing up their hands like “Everyone should just agree on what to have for dinner, like we do.” Oh I’m sure you’re aware that ‘America be big’, maybe even visited New York and were impressed by all those not-tall non-blonde people waking around, but perhaps without fully appreciating that it alone has a 50% higher population than your whole country. Something more your speed would be the Atlanta metro area, which still has a ~10% higher population. Getting everyone to happily chip in a few bucks on a half pepperoni/vegetarian pizza (or, I assume more familiar to you — “Grøt med smør eller rørte bær”) is a lot easier when everyone can be fed by that pizza.
But that leads to the larger point: we don’t have as much of a problem getting our Norway sized cities to provide various communal welfare services to the local residents, the problem is in scaling that up to 65 Norways.
8note 7 hours ago [-]
the dearth of monopolies in america suggests that yes, you can all align om what to eat for dinner, and its that you get what you are given by Sysco
docjay 1 hours ago [-]
You got it. A company with 15% of the foodservice market somehow supplies 100% of the food in 100% of restaurants and 100% of Americans eat at them 100% of the time. We should probably just pay a tax and have the government take it over so your imagination becomes our reality.
ericmay 7 hours ago [-]
Can you? Ok you're right. We've all agreed Canada should be the 51st State [1].
Or did you have a different menu in mind?
[1] I don't like this talk, I'm just using it as an example.
godwinson__4-8 9 hours ago [-]
> As an exercise, take it upon yourself to figure out how much it cost per meter (or, I assume more familiar to you -- football fields) for the road you last used, and where that money came from.
Nothing can be more irritating than hearing from naive Europeans about the virtue of government while they live in a cradle state, after having demolished their own continent in two world wars and essentially entering into a kind of receivership with the United States. Yes the government paves roads. It also raises armies. Nothing a European would know about. Your continent is under Russian invasion and your leaders are forced to grovel at America's feet, constantly prostrating themselves to a President you clearly despise. It must be nice having such a naive view of government, when your own have been so thoroughly neutered as to be scarcely recognizable as such. It is no wonder you speak of "government-run Facebook" with a lack of irony that in the United States could be mistaken for sarcasm.
Let us see how your faith in government progresses as your society is no longer given the unfettered benefit of American generosity. Let us see as Europe is made to stand on its own two feet if your governments retain their docile nature. But I have faith in you yet. Government may not be your foe. But anyone with any sense of history knows it is not your friend either. Treating government as a self evident solution to every problem is the sort of fantasy only a modern European could conjure.
okamiueru 9 hours ago [-]
Cool. Aside from all that. Roads are neat, right?
PS: It is pretty darn cozy in the cradle.
spaqin 9 hours ago [-]
I'll grab onto the very first thing you've said as it seems to be a basis for the rest - taxation isn't fun, but low taxes don't guarantee anything. Look at Hong Kong - one of the lowest tax rates in the world, but it doesn't really mean the citizens have more free income. The government still needs money to function, and the main source is land sales instead. The landlords have taken over instead and insane rent for smallest places is now the actual tax. And then it's reflected further in the price of the food or products, where rent is the biggest business expense.
The money just goes into private hands instead. Is that really the better option here? Innovation isn't necessary if you have a de facto monopoly - and frankly, Facebook is a good example; nothing it has done in 10 years was actually an improvement to the service or humanity.
It would be alright to socialize the good parts and get rid of the bad ones.
elzbardico 8 hours ago [-]
Yes. We should stop listening to idiots that say taxation is theft.
tiznow 8 hours ago [-]
Taxation isn't theft but poor fiscal policy is larceny.
koito17 14 hours ago [-]
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.
dspillett 11 hours ago [-]
Also, they still do the stalky part. Even if the paid service does remove the manifestation of ads on that site/service, chances are the tracking still happens so they can immediately target if you stop paying (instead of resuming collection at that point) and so the information can potentially be sold to 3rd parties or new owners (if the site/service itself is sold) or accidentally leaked (directly due to dumb decisions like sending the wrong data somewhere or indirectly due to dumb decisions resulting in poor security a black-hat can exploit).
sbarre 9 hours ago [-]
> Other services (e.g. YouTube Premium) reduce ads, but do not eliminate them, no matter how much you pay.
Hmm curious to know where you live that you still get Youtube-supplied ads with YT Premium?
Because "ad-free" is literally the headline feature.
Unless you're talking about in-video ads and sponsorships added in by the video creators themselves, and then that's not something in YT's control (although they provide the "skip commonly skipped sections" feature in Premium that helps with this).
8note 7 hours ago [-]
it is something in YTs control
they can require ad and sponsor-free copies of videos to be uploaded in order to get YT premium revenue.
they control the platform. that they choose not to make the premium experience ad free is up to them
sbarre 5 hours ago [-]
This would not be enforceable. Do you understand the scale of Youtube?
Also why would YT get involved in the content of videos themselves, beyond legal moderation requirements?
That's a slippery slope in itself, and it would just lead to a cat-and-mouse game where creators try to incorporate sponsorships in less obvious/visible ways, which is a net bad thing for the audience.
Now at least creators are required to disclose when their videos contain sponsored segments or paid advertisements. What you propose would take away that accountability.
As it stands, you can see when a video includes ads, and you can choose to not watch it. That's your choice.
everyday7732 11 hours ago [-]
Exactly this. The people willing to pay a subscription are also the most valuable to advertisers.
specproc 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Retric 13 hours ago [-]
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.
bialpio 10 hours ago [-]
> That’s why movies (...) can clear a billion dollars,
And yet somehow I still get 30 minutes of ads before a watching a goddamn movie in a cinema.
tiznow 8 hours ago [-]
Part of this is baked into the experience though, if "ads" here are trailers for upcoming films. I don't know if theaters are now showing ads for products, I haven't been in forever.
GlumWoodpecker 10 hours ago [-]
Theatres need a piece of the pie too :^)
bialpio 9 hours ago [-]
I'm already buying their overpriced popcorn and soda!
andsoitis 10 hours ago [-]
Just take your seat 30mins later.
bialpio 9 hours ago [-]
Just tell me when the movie starts, not when the ads start.
Retric 8 hours ago [-]
There’s movie theaters that do that, Alimo is the chain near me which does.
andsoitis 9 hours ago [-]
by your account roughly 20-30mins in. You could also just sit there and read a book while you wait.
BobBagwill 9 hours ago [-]
That's what I do! I wear a 10K lumen headlamp and read my elephant folio of Finnegan's Wake aloud, so everyone can enjoy it!
tripzilch 12 hours ago [-]
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
Parae 14 hours ago [-]
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...
zelphirkalt 12 hours ago [-]
It could be made a question of legislation. If it was forbidden, and the "cost of business" too high for them to dare, then it can work. We would need to do more than touch them with the satin gloves we are using now though.
wolvoleo 12 hours ago [-]
They stop showing ads if you pay for Instagram in the EU.
However they do not stop tracking you.
dwedge 10 hours ago [-]
If you turn off personalised ads in the EU for insta they hijack your scrolling to give you "ad breaks" which is actually a really neat feature because it reminds me I've started doom scrolling and I close the app
crummy 14 hours ago [-]
Plenty of other services (like Spotify) stop showing you ads if you pay them enough money.
tripzilch 11 hours ago [-]
I don't think that actually counts as "paying for content". The musicians make the "content", and Spotify pays all but the biggest ones a pittance.
That's more like "paying to not see ads" than "paying for content".
lostdog 14 hours ago [-]
Spotify shoves podcast ads in your face.
Amazon does the same with product ads.
fsflover 14 hours ago [-]
Until they decide that ads can give some profit on top of your payment. See: youtube [0], Windows, Apple [1].
What do you think the constant reminders of "hey hey hey, use these autogenerated vibes based playlists that are more profitable to us because we filled them with AI generated fake artists" are?
Meanwhile spotify also has at least two autogenerated playlists of the songs you have chosen to play more than a few times. Literally "Here's the songs you recently took an interest in", and they do not fill your front page with that autogenerated playlist!
Because that copy they are shoving in your face is not Informing you of useful Features or Inviting you to try something we made, but is instead managed by the marketing department.
intended 14 hours ago [-]
If we say ads are an attack on our attention, time and money - then it’s a different ball game entirely.
Their incentives would be aligned to users, not advertisers.
The ideological changes alone would be like living in a different world entirely.
Heck, maybe micropayments would become viable at that point.
michaelt 14 hours ago [-]
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
zelphirkalt 12 hours ago [-]
Same here.
I will add though, that the freemium model does not necessarily have to cease existing. Some platform for written articles can have articles available at no cost, and then put a paywall in front of other articles. I don't see the problem with that. It will be a careful balancing act of content creators, how much is in the freemium section, so that they attract a sufficient number of readers/fans/supporters.
dolphenstein 11 hours ago [-]
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.
mh- 11 hours ago [-]
Yes. Anyone who has ever shipped a free mobile app can tell you that a $1 "remove all ads for life" offer will convert very poorly, even on sticky apps that people use every day.
(Disclosure: my employer owns an ad network. Opinions my own.)
urbnspacecowboy 11 hours ago [-]
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".
engeljohnb 11 hours ago [-]
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?
Krasnol 3 hours ago [-]
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??
intended 13 hours ago [-]
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.
simonsarris 7 hours ago [-]
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.
micw 12 hours ago [-]
> 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).
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.
samspot 5 hours ago [-]
Your comment is also an attack aimed to manipulate my worldview and actions. The only difference is the corporate ad is more sophisticated.
brikym 12 hours ago [-]
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.
wvh 11 hours ago [-]
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.
dghughes 10 hours ago [-]
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.
mrngld 10 hours ago [-]
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.
m4ck_ 9 hours ago [-]
Also some TV shows had ads written in. USA network was pretty bad with this with ("White Collar" comes to mind - there are some pretty obvious Ford advertisements in a few eps, "Burn Notice" had very obvious alcohol placements.)
dghughes 6 hours ago [-]
Yes I was there it wasn't as bad as now. TV or radio it was never the same three ads over and over and over. And the media is now truncated so cram in more ads. Plus the time between ads is shorter. So it's basically ads with a brief TV show in between mostly ads.
kavok 10 hours ago [-]
I believe radio across Europe was largely ad free and had a different business model. The BBC for example.
brulx126 7 hours ago [-]
You say "was" as if it was a thing of the past. But public broadcasting still exists in many countries in Europe, including radio and TV. They have either less or no ads and their quality is much higher than that of purely ad-funded private stations that nowadays are sometimes even completely automated.
don_esteban 10 hours ago [-]
I grew up under communism. On TV, we had full movies without ads. There was 3-5min ad segment right before main evening news, that was it.
I could not understand how people can watch movie interrupted 10x by an add break.
Not wishing the return of communism, but yeah, I would simply ban all ads. No useful purpose to the society, whatsoever. Treat it like smoking and other drugs. Yes, can fill the coffers, but overall it is detrimental to the society.
If you want info about something you need, there are catalogues, consumer groups, enthusiast forums and internet search in general. Yes, the ads can be used to create new needs. Overall (if you really think what this achieves), that is a bug, not a feature.
Yes, there will be ways to sneak-in ads in a shady way, but that can be prosecuted. And the scale of exposure matters, a lot.
mrguyorama 6 hours ago [-]
>Traditional TV was ~40 minutes of content with 20 minutes of ads.
No! This is utterly false! TV for much of American history was about 9 minutes of advertising per hour of content. Then Cable came out with no ads at all. The US does not have a legal limit, so as our culture got more and more hyped about squeezing every single dime out of counterparties, companies have been increasing advertising.
In the 60s, companies were willingly leaving money on the table.
In the UK, you are still limited to only 9 minutes per hour of advertising.
streetfighter64 10 hours ago [-]
> 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".
12345ieee 10 hours ago [-]
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.
diogocp 7 hours ago [-]
So your suggestion is to be a hermit?
What is the point of communication if not to change what others think?
11 hours ago [-]
BiteCode_dev 9 hours ago [-]
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.
woodrowbarlow 9 hours ago [-]
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.
mannanj 7 hours ago [-]
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.
13 hours ago [-]
fsflover 14 hours ago [-]
See also:
What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org)
1975 points by smnrg on April 5, 2025 | 1409 comments
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."
surcap526 7 hours ago [-]
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el1s7 13 hours ago [-]
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.
surcap526 7 hours ago [-]
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matheusmoreira 12 hours ago [-]
Ads are mind rape.
skybrian 13 hours ago [-]
Skill issue? Some people are clearly more vulnerable than others. You can occasionally get useful information from ads.
TheDong 13 hours ago [-]
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).
germandiago 8 hours ago [-]
Those apps where you share pics or whatever would not exist without ads if people had to pay for them.
So I am not sure if all is bad in that sense. Bc it lets the apps for sharing without people having to pay to exist in the first place.
I am not doing any assessment regarding to the toxicity of ads. I am just trying to objectively say that this also spreads "horizontally" software for free in some sense.
TheDong 7 hours ago [-]
The only alternative to ads isn't people directly paying cash to evil private companies.
Like, the fact that instagram's average revenue per user is around $25 means that instagram ads are, on average, tricking people into buying 100s of dollars of crap they don't need.
If the ads weren't successfully brainwashing people, eventually people would stop buying ads presumably.
... But yes, I agree people will generally choose a "brainwashed consumer" tax to the tune of $300/year over paying instagram $25/year.
So, what's the solution? Advertisement should be illegal, the government should tax everyone a bit more, and taxpayer dollars should go to making ad-free social networks where people can post pictures of their dog.
Like, having highways and electricity and the internet was seen as beneficial, so the government has subsidized a huge amount of infrastructure for those things, to the benefit of all.
If being able to search the largest collection of knowledge ever created, the internet, has value to the people, the government should create or subsidize an ad-free search engine. If communicating has such value, the government should create or subsidize a messaging app that doesn't brainwash the users.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 6 hours ago [-]
To add to this, government-run services can't absolve themselves of all wrongdoing with Terms of Service they can change on a whim. Censorship within government-run social media is subject to the restrictions placed on the government's control of speech.
(Technically, the terms are still there but they're called Titles and Statutes and other things that require a bunch of ceremony and agreement to change, not just an email.)
mrguyorama 6 hours ago [-]
It is funny to think about how a government run social network would look far more like 4chan than linkedin
dwedge 10 hours ago [-]
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"
matheusmoreira 12 hours ago [-]
You are not immune to propaganda.
sevenzero 13 hours ago [-]
Give me 1-2 examples of useful info we can get from ads?
TheDong 13 hours ago [-]
There are some cases where ads are useful for sure.
For example, I found out about the local farmer's market in my city via advertisements being hung up around town, and that helped me get fresh produce and find some community. I'm not sure if I ever would have found that farmer's market otherwise.
I also found one job via a "Who's Hiring" hacker news post, and that's obviously an advertisement thread advertising open positions.
Of course, these do not balance out the negative impact of ads, such as advertising credit cards and sports gambling and gacha gambling games to get people into debt, advertising tv shows and movies to waste people's time watching garbage, and generally advertising garbage that makes people who were otherwise happy waste money and time for no real gain in life satisfaction.
carljungslabtek 12 hours ago [-]
You basically pointed this out already but there’s a big difference between something designed to notify you about something you might not have known, similar to what you’d find on a community bulletin board, and something trying to manipulate you into buying something you don’t need at all.
I think a lot of people use the term “ad” to refer solely to the latter category. This goes back to the origin of modern advertising (and even earlier with snake oil salesman and charlatans, which were scamming merchants using music and stage shows lol — sound familiar?) and using the term “public relations” as an alternative to “propaganda”.
sevenzero 13 hours ago [-]
I see, these are valid. Especially in smaller communities in rural areas ads can really help bringing people together. I live in a small village since about 2 years now and have NO idea what's going on here (as I don't watch/read ads). Sometimes thats sad, but usually I want to be left alone anyway. A farmers market sounds cool though.
I'd categorize job postings a bit differently, if Facebook was full of (legitimate) job postings I think it would be less of an issue. I agree on all the gambling stuff you wrote.
tripzilch 11 hours ago [-]
> You can occasionally get useful information from ads.
And flies eat horse shit because they occasionally get nutrients from it
jimrandomh 1 days ago [-]
Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad.
I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be. (I think average people are making a horrible mistake about this, and are badly cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realize). If my choices are to look at ads or leave Facebook, I'll leave. But there are conversations people have there that I'd rather not lose access to, so... I guess I'd have to partially stick around and campaign for others to leave as well?
Sophira 21 hours ago [-]
> Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad.
That isn't enough for me. I don't just want to not see the ads, I want to stop them being fetched entirely.
There are two big problems with ads.
* The ad network can build up a very complete profile of what you like, dislike, and generally what you're looking at on the web. Yes, that profile is "anonymised" so far as it goes, but in reality, that doesn't really matter. If you know what you're looking for, there would be enough tells in the data that can de-anonymise you. Covering up the ads doesn't stop this data being collected; it merely stops you wanting to click on the ad.
* Ads are a very common malware delivery system, and although nowadays it's probably less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it, there are instances of it happening in the past. Stopping ads from being fetched entirely would obviously prevent this.
nerdsniper 21 hours ago [-]
> less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it
This one replaced users clipboard contents with a particular bitcoin wallet address. So a few people who happened to be on their way to send some crypto pasted the malicious wallet address instead of the one they actually copied to their clipboard. This has stolen at least $100k so far.
dominicrose 8 hours ago [-]
Web browsers let web programmers do what they want. Some things should be native to the browser and not allow any tinkering, like selecting text, copying, etc.
ohyoutravel 9 hours ago [-]
Wow that’s super smart. Obviously I don’t have any sympathy for crypto bros losing money, but it’s easy to see how something like this could be applied to typing account numbers into something else. More safeguards on the latter, but essentially the crypto one is a proof of concept of something that could affect real people.
pizzly 14 hours ago [-]
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.
ruszki 6 hours ago [-]
Technically speaking, it’s possible to have the same kind of requests for legit content and ads. It’s also possible to randomize the response type (ad or content). In that case the only way to solve this before sending a request is to break their random number generator. That’s definitely not on the level of ad blockers.
However, I have no clue whether the content delivery system is already like that, and if not, then why. My domain knowledge is slim.
puttycat 10 hours ago [-]
Not sure that's correct. You're replacing a simple visual recognition problem with something similar to the halting problem (but maybe less fatalistic, depending on the formalism you're working against ie DOM vs js).
inigyou 21 hours ago [-]
Facebook is the ad network for Facebook. Will not fetching ads from Facebook really stop Facebook from knowing your age and location?
ProAm 18 hours ago [-]
You have a small understanding as to how ads work and what they know.
tredre3 17 hours ago [-]
Blocking ads is intended to prevent the ad network from tracking you. But:
1. Facebook already knows everything you see and do on facebook
2. Facebook is the ad network and serves its own ads.
Therefore blocking ads on facebook won't prevent facebook from knowing everything you do.
GP seems to have a fair understanding of the situation, care to explain why you think it's wrong?
gf000 15 hours ago [-]
> Facebook is the ad network and serves its own ads.
Well, it certainly replaces valuable data like how long have you looked at a given ad with either nothing, or random noise (e.g. if you draw a rectangle over them).
We are no longer living in 2013 where people posted about everything they do. Sure, plenty people do so still, and our interactions with that (even implicitly like how long we looked at it) is plenty of value in and of itself, but I disagree with the general notion.
The effectiveness of ads is that they can just throw stuff at you and "see" what sticks, without you ever telling a word.
smaudet 17 hours ago [-]
I think the obvious answer is, that you are the product, and you are worth $$$$, possibly $$$$$, even $$$$$$
When did you agree to be sold without representation and a contract, again? Something about malicious contracts nobody reads? Pretty sure that behavior remains...criminal.
miohtama 16 hours ago [-]
You agree when you click I accept Terms of Service
smaudet 6 hours ago [-]
Not only is this not really correct (obscuring pertinent legal information on purpose is a crime, e.g. such that it cannot be recalled), it isn't even applicable.
Its been long documented that these systems are attempting to monitor you, even if you did not sign up for the service or interact with it.
I.e., you are categorically incorrect.
shevy-java 15 hours ago [-]
I am unconvinced of that. Many ToS provisions are not valid in every country, for instance.
mrguyorama 6 hours ago [-]
>1. Facebook already knows everything you see and do on facebook
What you're missing is that, without good adblockers and possibly other tools, facebook also knows everything you do everywhere else on the internet.
tommica 15 hours ago [-]
Could you enlighten us that do not know how they work and what they know?
nashashmi 8 hours ago [-]
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.
ButlerianJihad 21 hours ago [-]
Furthermore, ads are a resource drain that should not be taking over our personal systems.
The web started as this proposition: you send a request to remote computer. Request says "Hey... can I read a document named this?" and the computer shows you the document. Now this may have included images and external links and sound, and whatnot.
But today, the web is more of an application delivery system too. So many requests go "Hey... can I have a resource by this name?" and the remote computer may send you a lot of source code that basically demands to run on your machine in order to get that resource.
And advertisements are piggybacking on those resources. They are a "package deal" where they are saying "you wanna read this text? you gotta take all this extra stuff with it."
And is it any surprise that coinminers are unleashed and other unpleasant things come down the pipe? Big fat videos and huge images are hogging resources.
So here's the bottom line: I don't need to use the web for free. I don't intend to freeload anyone's site or resources. But I also don't want them freeloading on me. I'm not going to download their crap; I'm not going to run their programs; I'm not going to occupy my own system's resources to display their ads when I don't want them.
So it seems fair to block "ads" that are asking to use my resources without paying for them. So I would prefer not to transact--at all--with any remote system that wanted to freeload on my resources in exchange for worthless information, like news, or forums.
chongli 18 hours ago [-]
But today, the web is more of an application delivery system … I would prefer not to transact--at all--with any remote system that wanted to freeload on my resources
What I really want is a non-executable web. I first started using the web in the mid-90s and most websites were like that. HTML, images, colours, fonts (but only from a pre-defined short list), and the occasional sound. If a site used JavaScript at all, it was for trivial stuff such as rollovers (which can now be done using CSS only).
I’d like to go back to that situation, maybe not exclusively but as a separate option. Give me a non-executable web of text, hyperlinks, images, videos and sounds (but no auto-play), CSS, forms, and web components (that can be targeted by links and fetched without refreshing the entire page) so we can do really nice discussion forums, web mail, multimedia encyclopedias (think Encarta) and other server-rendered resources, all without client-side scripting.
It doesn’t even need to be a different protocol or anything like that. It would be enough to have an otherwise modern browser but with no JS engine and a search engine that only indexes pages that lack JavaScript so that they render and function correctly on that JS-free browser.
Naturally, the search engine would miss a lot of the spam sites out there because they all rely on JavaScript. It would also miss many legitimate sites that rely on JavaScript but that’s okay.
It would create a space for JavaScript-free sites to get attention and develop a community. It would of course allow commercial sites, but they’d have to rely on display advertising and traditional marketing (targeted audiences based on subject matter) rather than behavioural tracking. This was the kind of advertising used in magazines and newspapers. It was far less obnoxious but still quite effective when the audience was large enough. It also demanded a lot more creativity from the ad industry, as documented in the show Mad Men.
necovek 16 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, there are already techniques that track you through static elements on a page (think tracking pixels, but any resource load is sufficient).
Considering the money in advertising on the internet, if web moved to more of a content delivery platform, we'd have both 1. content start including ads inline (you see that on Youtube already), and 2. static/server-side tracking techniques improve even further.
Even if we disallow cross-site resources, site owners will implement tracking server-side, though that obviously introduces a trust question between trackers and hosters.
With those two, an ad network with sufficient tracking support from web sites would still be able to cross-link the traffic on a single user and achieve similar results.
This does not mean we should not fight it. But this would just be a step in the cat-and-mouse game, but a very expensive and hardly achievable one too :)
chongli 10 hours ago [-]
Just put no cross-origin resources into my proposal. This eliminates ad networks entirely, including networked tracking pixels and networked ads (banners as well as text).
Yes, a site would still be able to host their own ads but advertisers wouldn’t be able to collect any analytics without implicitly trusting the host site. That really matters!
It means the advertisers need to enter a business relationship with the site directly. They can’t simply join a JavaScript ad-auction (the way nearly all ads work now). This makes them more akin to the sponsors we see now in videos. No tracking, just plain old fashioned audience targeting pertaining to the subject matter.
Or watch a video. Or do some basic editing of some kind of medium that I will only do once and would make no sense to download a whole application for?
Why throw out the baby as well? Besides, ads can be part of text content as well.
This is typically something that should be regulated by laws, not through tech.
chongli 11 hours ago [-]
Please read carefully. All of your complaints were already addressed in my original comment.
I have zero faith in government’s ability to regulate these things correctly. Viz. cookie pop ups.
bitpush 20 hours ago [-]
> Request says "Hey... can I read a document named this?" and the computer shows you the document.
Did you not skip over a lot of steps in between?
User: Hey can I read a document named this?
Server: Sure, let me spend resources and spin harddisk and lookup the thing you wanted. Oh hey, I found it .. here ya go
User: Great.
----
You've conviently ignored the resources the "old" web had to spend to serve you. Nothing has really changed it. Also the thing you wanted, that was "source code". We just called it html. It is no different than javascript+css+html5.
ooterness 20 hours ago [-]
This argument makes no sense, because the CPU and disk resources required to serve up a modern ad (and the megabytes of JavaScript that come with it) are 100-1000x more expensive than just serving up the content.
bitpush 7 hours ago [-]
You're right, but that's not the point the person is making is it? A bare modern webpage is no where comparable to the site of the past. If you take hackernews as an example with no ads, no tracking as an example, it still be orders of maginitude _costly_ than index.html in the past.
Hacker News is dynamic, a webserver has to dynamic stitch together the comments and send you an html. It has to make sure the page is always fresh with latest comments, and vote count. There's batch processing happening in the background, with multiple rounds of storage and backup.
So yes, to the user it is "Please give me the homepage" and "Here ya go" but behind the scenes it is expensive, at this scale.
ButlerianJihad 20 hours ago [-]
I did not intend to omit that, but the origin of the web was in a peer-to-peer, collaborative Internet that no longer exists.
Yes, the server resources that were necessary to serve web pages are the origin of advertising, because the admins somehow had to keep the lights on and their bills paid. I don't fault them for this. I don't begrudge them for being, basically, forced into carrying advertising because the freeloading users wouldn't settle for any other way. Advertising allowed a "free web" to continue unabated for a long time.
But advertisements don't need to be resource-intensive on the client side. They don't need to eat gobs of bandwidth, CPU, memory, or our eyeballs. But the fact that they do chew up these resources is partly for why they need to die now.
Server admins can pay for their resources however, and offset their costs however they please. I'm fine with subscription or pay-per-use models or whatever. I honestly have very little use for ad-supported models, and my daily web habits are such that I really don't visit ad-supported websites at all, except for YouTube, where I normally pay for a Premium subscription to completely eliminate all formal ads, anyway. And that's the way it should be.
genewitch 7 hours ago [-]
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.
smegger001 18 hours ago [-]
Layers of defense, whats needed is the vision model detection, then those elements need to be uploaded to a crowd sourced blocklist so they can be prevented from loading to begin with.
horacemorace 15 hours ago [-]
The mechanism would have to be peer-to-peer somehow. Blacklist hosters are always destroyed by lawfare and bots.
titzer 1 days ago [-]
I think my brain developed that as a defense mechanism. The web cultivated a certain kind of blindness where I literally don't look at certain parts of pages because my brain has learned that there is never anything useful there. Sometimes I just cannot see things unless I force my eyes to move across the page linearly, top to bottom.
This is pathological. Like I find myself not ever looking at the top result in a search, because that is where Google has been putting ads.
Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it.
magicalhippo 21 hours ago [-]
I was asked to test the redesigned web page of a large bank. They had eye tracking cameras and such hooked up to study how I used the web page.
They ran through some scenarios, and one was how to get a car loan. I studied the homepage and found nothing, then clicked the menu and found loans, but no car loan on the loans page. I ended up searching and found it.
After each scenario they asked me some questions, and the first question I got for the car loan scenario was why I hadn't clicked on the link on the front page. There was no link, I replied puzzled. There was a large image they said. I stared in disbelief.
The person running the scripts navigated to the homepage, and pointed at the screen. There, at the bottom, a blinking banner about car loans.
I replied that it must have triggered my mental ad blocker, since ads are typically banners, frequently near the edges and animated somehow, so I never even registered the banner.
They looked genuinely puzzled at my response.
This was 25 years ago. My mental ad blocker is still active, though uBlock Origin on Firefox takes care of most of them.
For me physical ad blocking is more about a first-line defense against malware and such than it is about getting rid of obnoxious ads. The latter my mental blocker does fine enough, though it can be annoying.
ygra 16 hours ago [-]
Also known as banner blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness). I'm genuinely surprised that a UX person doing usability testing (for a website!) has never heard of this. But I guess there's people missing basic knowledge in every field.
necovek 16 hours ago [-]
Let's also note that they did say "25 years ago". UX research then and now was, at the very least, different, and there was less experience with web-specific behaviour. I'd also note that it was mostly graphic designers doing web design back then, or maybe that's just me.
magicalhippo 13 hours ago [-]
To be fair it was quite a long time ago, and as I recall the person guiding and asking questions was from the market research company. The web designers and whatnot was not in the room, but viewed the session remotely and could tell the person with me what to ask and such.
rescbr 20 hours ago [-]
I guess it’s ages of fake download button ads in download pages.
My instinct is “if it is an ad, then whatever it is offering is a scam”.
TeMPOraL 24 hours ago [-]
> Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it.
It's not computers that are the problem, it's people.
We've normalized (and even embraced) the situation where relationship between businesses and customers is adversarial. The phenomenon you're describing, known as "banner blindness", is just brain filtering out noise, but the thing is, that noise didn't get there by accident.
What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.
zero_shift 22 hours ago [-]
> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings
This is a thought I want to pull on
I have a view that organisations, with their network of misaligned incentives, mean that companies act something like an alien lifeform. Something with a decentralised brain, unable to plan beyond immediate stimuli
Companies consume and self-cannibalise. They are both aggressively rational in pursuit of profit but irrational when it comes to preserving their ecosystems
Many companies look like groups of people where nobody has total control. Everyone is reacting to some stakeholder, even the CEO is terrified of "the shareholders". So these organisations cut off healthy limbs (layoffs), engage in lurid rituals (AI), and wastefully destroy the natural resources of the humans who work for them
I first heard this idea in a James Bridle lecture, where he suggested that the strange behaviour of companies was a good starting point for understanding what an alien lifeform might behave like. And he observed the ways that humans and machines now mirror each other.
Inside our society, controlled by these aliens, humans act like machines (Taylorism at work, self-censorship for algorithms at play). Machines act like humans (AI, spam, computer programs mediating relationships).
Underneath it is a frantic need to quantize everything so it can be dominated
inigyou 21 hours ago [-]
I remember recently they polled workers about AI pressure: "the AI doesn't work very well, but my boss wants to see me using it." They polled the boss: "I didn't say they had to use it, they're choosing to use it and this'll look good to the executive". The executive: "well this costs a bunch but it'll look good to shareholders and we should encourage more use so it'll look even better." The shareholders: "do we look like we give a shit?"
FeepingCreature 12 hours ago [-]
Out of all of them, I'd assume the shareholders to be wrong.
Look at the state of the world. Yes, you do look like you give a shit.
Also there's an effect here where if just 10% of shareholders care about this it still makes sense to go for it if you think you can be faster than your competition.
inigyou 7 hours ago [-]
Can you name any shareholders of Microsoft who pushed for renaming Office to Copilot?
gmueckl 17 hours ago [-]
Corporations are too complex for any single person to truly control. Attention of leadership necessarily dilutes with each additional layer of management. The result is this weird corporate chaos where nobody is completely in charge because everybody has to take charge of something, however small, to progress, or the whole could accomplish nothing at all.
The result is this flailing tentacled monster where each appendix seems to have a mind of its own and sometimes littlw regard for even the other parts of its own body.
layla5alive 21 hours ago [-]
Yes!
Corporations were the first paperclip maximizers.
k1m 21 hours ago [-]
This reminded me of an old documentary about corporations: "If we look at the corporation as a legal person, it exhibits all the characteristics of a psychopath" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5hEiANG4Uk
> all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.
Local incentives. Every single person and entity is just maximizing their gain against the rules and rewards. The way you become really powerful and rich is to create an organization where all the local incentives keep funneling to you, sitting at the top.
bitpush 23 hours ago [-]
> What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.
This is a simplistic way to think about it. Even the most altruistic physician needs to advertise their services if they hope to make a living out of it. Even the best film maker, the best actor needs to "hit the circuits" to promote their movie.
"Make and they'll come" is only possible if you're already successful. Apple can chose not to advertise, since they are Apple (although they do plenty of advertising themselves).
zx8080 14 hours ago [-]
> businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings
What they do is actually a robbery of others' time, privacy, screen space, money, and freedom. All for profit.
Gigachad 17 hours ago [-]
The relationship was always adversarial for all history. Bakers used to mix sawdust with flour to profit more. The only counter has been regulation and oversight.
kcexn 23 hours ago [-]
I mean. That's how profiteering works for the most part. Extracting wealth from people who don't know better is many times easier than creating more wealth for everyone.
xattt 21 hours ago [-]
> I think my brain developed that as a defense mechanism. The web cultivated a certain kind of blindness where I literally don't look at certain parts of pages because my brain has learned that there is never anything useful there.
I’ve fallen victim to this when I was doing coursework in the last decade.
Either a moodle module or a block of text in box in a textbook had something important to the concept I was learning, but I subconsciously ignored it because it had a format similar to an internet ad.
balderdash 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tiznow 7 hours ago [-]
The same people who still pay for cable and get roped into spending half an hour watching an infomercial at 4am.
Gigachad 17 hours ago [-]
These days ads are woven in to content itself. It's most obvious on youtube where youtubers are paid to talk about products and disguise it as reviews or informative. Or other content creators happening to show something mixed in with the normal content.
Soon they will be woven in to LLMs where they suggest the things they are paid to suggest.
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.
rcMgD2BwE72F 24 hours ago [-]
>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?
RunSet 24 hours ago [-]
This browser extension is so inimical to online advertising Google (world's largest advertising corporation) banned it from the Chrome web store.
It loads every ad, and clicks them without display them. So the advertiser still pays for the click but the user never sees ads.
Terr_ 22 hours ago [-]
I feel that could easily backfire if your account or IP gets marked as an agent for malicious click-fraud.
devilsdata 21 hours ago [-]
Don't threaten me with a good time.
Terr_ 21 hours ago [-]
The problem is the creepy big-data-advert-ocracy might propagate that scarlet-letter in ways that are unfair an unpredictable.
So a throwaway account for reading Reddit (even as it decays) might lead to an totally unrelated account you do care about getting unfairly suspended, or the MonopolyCloudFlareBot "helping" your bank starts rejecting your IP/browser-fingerprint, etc.
This would worry me less if we had laws that make it easy to demand accountability and fixes, but we don't. (Not much in the US, and in the EU efficacy is still questionable.)
inigyou 21 hours ago [-]
Go to your bank branch and say I can't access my bank account.
Terr_ 18 hours ago [-]
We should be careful to distinguish between "everything goes back to normal" versus "they you move your money to some other bank."
Anywho, you're right that the final example is more-likely to be resolved, thanks to a formal customer relationship backed up by decades of law plus physical locations... but what about Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. where they sometimes don't even have any remotely responsive support system or nearby physical branch?
Basically I'm saying we have some Kafkaesque stuff out there, it isn't sensible or fair, and if someone wants to tweak the nose of the beast they should at least consider the range of what could go wrong.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
> what about Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Google
Just quit them. They're all garbage anyway.
dns_snek 12 hours ago [-]
That doesn't mean that it will actually be resolved. And do you really want to be doing that with everyone you ever do business with for the rest of your life?
genewitch 7 hours ago [-]
I can't tell if it's adnauseam or the fact i use ipv6 that gets me to click traffic lights and busses all the time, but i don't care, click those ads!
ethimalw 17 hours ago [-]
Oh cool, one more feature for the "Malware that quietly launches a copilot image query every 10 seconds in the background" idea bank. It can quietly click every ad too!
inigyou 21 hours ago [-]
Are we sure it actually works? That the ad networks think it's a real click?
15 hours ago [-]
genewitch 7 hours ago [-]
who cares, though? they have to expend effort to filter their data if they don't want to give the wrong impression to the people giving them money. It increases friction.
One interesting thing is that it also removed some "internal CTAs" to engage (like "Start your day with our podcast!"). These aren't technically ads, so something like uBlock doesn't remove them. But honestly, I don't really mind having those filtered out too.
stubish 21 hours ago [-]
I'm hoping those NP chips ending up in some new computers will be able to run something like this. Thanks for your work!
A general purpose system, especially if trained by the users, would be more than just an adblocker. It could be trained to block out spiders or other phobia triggers for instance. Even regenerate the photo but with a kitten. Blur our tabloid clickbait 'in other news' links.
The killer app for AR glasses will be blocking out billboards and logos.
rand_flip_bit 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Sounds like the plot of a Black Mirror episode :)
dspillett 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pbhjpbhj 24 hours ago [-]
Meanwhile, aren't companies already making screen captures to check for presentation (on 'smart' TV at least)? The presence of the output can be required, and it can be tested by hashing or some such (within the monitor, signed by TPU) without need of privacy violations.
We'll have to have an overlay screen that is a separate device. Then your meta-glasses will be snitching on you ...
Mind you some glasses with a built in ML module could block all ads, not just on-screen ones. Rich people will see the World as green and pleasant and make gestured enquiries as to why we don't want to eat brioche!
8note 23 hours ago [-]
almost guaranteed that those ad blocking glasses would be DRM-ed out of being able to read anything
plutokras 15 hours ago [-]
> Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad.
That would be a killer feature for AR glasses. Imagine no billboards, no political posters, no neon storefront clutter.
pipe2devnull 12 hours ago [-]
That’s mostly what Vermont is like
cybrox 15 hours ago [-]
And you can get all that for the low price of just $199/mon on your new glasses subscription!
wildrhythms 8 hours ago [-]
They Live (1988)
JoshTriplett 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.)
grumbelbart2 11 hours ago [-]
Oh, which book if you don't mind sharing?
aembleton 11 hours ago [-]
Or even someone wearing a Nike branded baseball cap, hoodie, trousers and trainers.
kikokikokiko 15 hours ago [-]
And some people appearing like flesh exposed monsters with ping pong balls for eyes
tripzilch 11 hours ago [-]
This always happens when I'm out of gum
MagicMoonlight 15 hours ago [-]
[dead]
neves 18 hours ago [-]
This arms race ends with regulations preventing big tech practices that are nocive for human beings:
- no disguised ads. They must be clearly marked
-limit screen real state dedicated to ads
- what the user didn't explicitly asked for, is an ad
We can't wait for companies to "do no evil". What would you ad to the list?
adam_arthur 23 hours ago [-]
You can already do this with smaller LLMs, like 10B range. The computer vision/image interpretation has been sufficient at this magnitude for a few months now.
Can run on most decently powered consumer devices.
Latency not great vs ad block though, of course.
Perhaps a fine tuned model explicit to this purpose could be even more compact.
k1m 21 hours ago [-]
That's an interesting idea to try as a browser extension. I think Facebook is particularly egregious here, so I doubt you'd need to run something like this on other sites. But if it worked fast enough on just Facebook, it would be useful.
everyday7732 11 hours ago [-]
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.
genewitch 7 hours ago [-]
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!
tarr11 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Gareth321 14 hours ago [-]
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.
wildrhythms 8 hours ago [-]
Traditional internet banner style ads are dead. "Paid promotion" influencer ads are going to take over (they already are).
frollogaston 19 hours ago [-]
I'm like this with YouTube. It's fair that they don't want me blocking ads and will try their best to prevent it. If they ever succeed, I'll leave without complaint. Already never use it on my phone cause adblocking is annoying on there.
phoghed 19 hours ago [-]
I just pay them a pittance in exchange for no ads for the whole family across all devices.
Barbing 16 hours ago [-]
Not a pittance but worth it. So fast, so reliable, such incredible engineers and comedians sharing such amazing things.
19 hours ago [-]
platevoltage 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah. It's the only streaming service other than Nebula that I pay for, and I use it enough that they're probably paying out more to creators than they're getting from me.
ajkjk 24 hours ago [-]
I'm hoping we can mostly ban ads in my lifetime (on the basis that companies should not be allowed to freely try to manipulate unconsenting strangers. and that it makes the world suck to live in and we don't have to put up with that). Nothing would make me happier honestly.
geye1234 20 hours ago [-]
“If you accept the existence of advertising, you accept a system designed to persuade and to dominate minds by interfering in people's thinking patterns. You also accept that the system will be used by the sorts of people who like to influence people and are good at it. No person who did not wish to dominate others would choose to use advertising, or choosing it, succeed in it. So the basic nature of advertising and all technologies created to serve it will be consistent with this purpose, will encourage this behaviour in society, and will tend to push social evolution in this direction.”
― Jerry Mander, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
Barbing 16 hours ago [-]
Any leeway here for children’s bone cancer charities to separate them from Zuckgoogle_et.al._AdCorp?
Or OP: OP posted the link in good faith, not to interfere with my brain but to inform me. Reminder to brush your teeth = benevolent. Reminder wealthy people might be happy if they give a smidge of money this year to a good cause can be a check-in on whether we’re being holistically solid folks more than evidence of a desire for mental domination?
Maybe that thinking demands only word of mouth promotion, but not sure that roundly and uniquely beats videorecording a promotion and paying someone to play the video back for strangers.
(per my previous, zany, comment you can tell I’m on your side, as Jerry would hopefully see… he probably addressed my points above too in the full text)
JoshTriplett 15 hours ago [-]
Leeway to advertise in unrelated content? Nope.
ajkjk 6 hours ago [-]
yep, agreed. The problem is not "bone cancer charities must have a way of getting their message out!" therefore "they should be able to bug you about it while you're reading an article". The problem is that the things bugging you while reading an article is bad for your mind (and even worse if they are manipulative, which they are). If you get rid of these exploitable mediums for messaging, other mediums will appear which -- hopefully -- are more just and healthy. Particularly if they're things we value as society. And if some things we don't value die because invasive advertising was the only way they could survive? Fine.
joshuat 20 hours ago [-]
This would also mean a lot of currently "free" services becoming paid in some other fashion, which I think people would be equally up-in-arms about.
I'm no fan of ads and I am willing to pay for services I use to avoid seeing them - but I've learned over recent years that most people simply do not agree with that premise.
Gigachad 17 hours ago [-]
I'm fine with that. The revenue per user per month from ads is so small that the fee to use services wouldn't have to be that large.
And overall society would get cheaper and more efficient since all that budget allocated to advertising would vanish with no consequences. Advertising is mostly a zero sum game where you have to advertise to get ahead of the other businesses advertisements. If companies stopped getting in to bidding wars for the top place on google, all of that money could be freed up for something useful.
ajkjk 18 hours ago [-]
Sounds great. Ideally things are beholden to the value the process for the customer rather than to their ability to trick people into clicking on them (SEO optimization etc) in order to get money indirectly via ads. Some form of micropayments will be necessary to support independent sites, but that sounds great also. Anything to get rid of the perverse incentivizes of advertising.
I'd also like to see astroturfing / promoting things for money without disclosing it explicitly illegal. Again, anything to stop systematic manipulation.
Yaa101 20 hours ago [-]
And the paid services that at some point do show ads?
inigyou 21 hours ago [-]
Who's we? Politicians?
ajkjk 20 hours ago [-]
Well, the populace. But yeah presumably via politicians. It certainly might require winning a few elections.
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
Does that system actually work?
ajkjk 18 hours ago [-]
Yes.
zero_shift 23 hours ago [-]
> I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be.
I don't know if I am the same. But I do find it very difficult to use an internet browser with no adblocker.
Perhaps it's because I have now spent more time using browsers with blockers, than without
denismi 19 hours ago [-]
I have not used an adblocker for many years.
Ad servers seem to generally just nope out of serving me ads on their own when I have Firefox's tracking protection cranked up.
Between that and Kagi down-ranking shitty ad-infested domains, it just ... isn't really a problem for me.
deanc 12 hours ago [-]
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.
wildzzz 24 hours ago [-]
Sites will start streaming in the whole webpage using DRM so the only thing that can actually see the ad is your monitor.
TeMPOraL 24 hours ago [-]
We'll definitely need open models here, because proprietary AI services can (and I imagine will) be set to detect invisible watermarks in the ads and refuse to filter them out.
(It's almost obvious extension of current AI image fingerprinting efforts. If a robust invisible watermark can be used to tell the image was AI generated, the same scheme can also be used for general DRM.)
TacticalCoder 22 hours ago [-]
> Sites will start streaming in the whole webpage using DRM so the only thing that can actually see the ad is your monitor.
If it comes that, I'll put my real monitor in front of that DRMed monitor (doable with flat screens) and I'll have a private LLM, in real-time, pushing on the real monitor (the one I look at), an ad-free version of the DRM'ed monitor.
DRM is nasty but private AI models are already more powerful and they'll only ever got better. And those open-weights are never ever going back in the box.
Barbing 16 hours ago [-]
They’re really going to make us drink the verification cans :(
…require a refundable purchase of a sponsored product, maybe. Then our bot has to buy it, or in another scenario with the already-used tactic: take the quiz on which ads we saw or whatever. Then we’ll need a robot with human eyes to blink at the camera over the screen when that’s a requirement. Have to hook it up to a nervous system when the bodysensor monitor wants to make sure we did responded to the jumpscare or got emotional at the right place.
Spot checks by humans knocking on your door (lifetime ban from all ad-funded businesses if you don’t answer).
Will have to settle for friends rehashing content until encryption’s illegal and so is any retelling. Any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this xyz, without the express written consent of abcd, is prohibited.
asadotzler 20 hours ago [-]
That's far more costly, requires an entirely new setup, and a whole different set of expertise from what most companies have today. It won't happen because the cost benefit analysis just doesn't work out.
safety1st 18 hours ago [-]
> If my choices are to look at ads or leave Facebook, I'll leave
I'm reminded of a simple observation about negotiations: the one who's willing to walk away is usually the one with the upper hand in the negotiation.
I think this is a choice we need to be considering on every level right now. What technology are you willing to walk away from? Fundamentally from my perspective the operating system and browser are *user agents,* they are pieces of software I permit to exist on the device I own because they do my bidding. The major manufacturers have perverted these user agents to a previously unfathomable degree under the presumption that you won't walk away and they can just keep on boiling the frog.
I'll walk away, in fact I feel like the more I walk away the better my life becomes. Switching to Linux a decade ago was more than worth the headaches considering what colleagues using Windows now have to put up with. Staying on Firefox + uBlock has been worth the headache vs. what people without a reliable ad blocker have had to put up with. Turning off my phone completely for a growing portion of the day has totally been worth it for peace of mind and freedom of distraction.
At this stage my relationship with technology seems to revolve heavily around the principle "how do I minimize exposure to technology produced by the largest American crime syndicates (Google, Microsoft, Meta etc)." This may be a radical or absolutist view but frankly my life is way better for it
littlecranky67 12 hours ago [-]
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.
unified101 10 hours ago [-]
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.
aembleton 11 hours ago [-]
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.
doix 15 hours ago [-]
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.
aembleton 11 hours ago [-]
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.
another_twist 8 hours ago [-]
This is an interesting direction. I wonder if Open LLM models can help with this sort of thing.
xnx 15 hours ago [-]
Same. Every time I see an ad I feel like I've been dosed with a small amount of poison.
jex_the_ape 15 hours ago [-]
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.
teravor 24 hours ago [-]
I expect the end to be a custom client for an in-demand site such as facebook. when you visit it your custom browser (or code injected into google chrome) will pull all the actual content from the site page you are on and display it with its own template.
vivzkestrel 17 hours ago [-]
- 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
sire-vc 9 hours ago [-]
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.
vivzkestrel 7 hours ago [-]
working just fine for x
Cpoll 14 hours ago [-]
In my experience, conversations on Facebook also cause cognitive damage.
trencedamp 14 hours ago [-]
There's a better solution and that is to just not go on Facebook
airmastiff 9 hours ago [-]
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.
bookofjoe 24 hours ago [-]
Whatever cognitive damage I've suffered since joining Facebook early on seems to have had the effect of erasing my awareness of the damage.
Escapade5160 21 hours ago [-]
Nah, we will find a way to scrape those conversations and distribute elsewhere.
thatguy0900 6 hours ago [-]
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
Wolfenstein98k 18 hours ago [-]
Are they cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realise, or are you just uniquely cognitively damaged by them?
lovich 17 hours ago [-]
> Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad.
I 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.
Neat, this will resolve a weekly headache. Thanks for the link
tshaddox 24 hours ago [-]
> Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad.
Surely a better way to think of this is that a person's AI agent will simply find, via whatever means necessary, the information that the person is interested in. It's hard to imagine the person will still be operating on the old "pull" model where they deliberately visit a specific website or open a specific app.
RajT88 19 hours ago [-]
Hate all you want. This is the level of Microsoft Scout at the moment.
I tell it what sites to go to, and the information I am interested it, and it grabs it using Playwright.
I am hoping I can get a self-host option working as well as this.
polski-g 21 hours ago [-]
I want to support things that are useful. So I whitelist Fandom wiki in my ad blocker... Good God it's like an infected IE browser from the early 2000s with 8 toolbars.
How do people use the Internet like this? Why isn't there just a single banner ad at the top, like how Altavista used to look?
inigyou 21 hours ago [-]
Fandom isn't a good thing that is useful. It's internet pollution for money, it's just another SEO slop site wit slightly more useful content. Most of the wikis with actual content moved away years ago, of course Fandom keeps presenting their last versions to try and squeeze some more traffic out of Google.
wookmaster 8 hours ago [-]
it’s disgusting how many have done it. Just 60% of the screen is ads even on mobile.
modzu 20 hours ago [-]
you mean a rectangle over the entire page?
aanet 1 days ago [-]
Controversial opinion:
This entire thread reads like a game of cat-and-mouse. People trying to block intrusive ads, and FB reaching into the depths of code and making it nearly impossible for anyone to do so en masse.
I've been there. Tried to uncheck all the boxes on their ad platform; used all manners of ad blockers, etc; used incognito mode; used Tor; etc. etc. etc.
At some point, you realize that the only way to not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely. Delete your account, get off that blasted site, and enjoy some moments of peace IRL.
Having been a very early adopter of FB (since ~2004), I deleted my account and am clean + sober + much happier since 2016.
(Not to say that I'm completely out of the FB ecosystem. Unfortunately, my fam is still on WhatsApp... and I've been trying to convince them to migrate to Signal...)
YMMV
stinos 14 hours ago [-]
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.
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
stinos 9 hours ago [-]
Not that I know of. It is a bit weird that for me it shows the same posts in my normal container with uBO enabled, and in a new container with uBO disabled: no sponsored ones. But when visiting facebook.com straight away I do get ads/sponsored posts. Probably I did go over all FB settings once to disable everything possible. Perhaps it's that.
wodenokoto 13 hours ago [-]
What does `?sk=h_chr` in the URL mean?
srdjanr 13 hours ago [-]
Apparently it forces your feed to show posts in chronological order, not how algorithm decides
stinos 9 hours ago [-]
sk possibly means 'sort key' (makes one wonder what other keys there are) and chr = chronological There's also &filter=friends one can add to that.
wookmaster 8 hours ago [-]
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.
davkan 15 hours ago [-]
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.
alt227 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Mashimo 10 hours ago [-]
We just had 3 ladders stolen from our house. After a few days of wondering we posted in the local facebook group and got a respons after 5 minutes. Now we have them back.
I do wish there was a valid electronic alternativ. Hosted in our own country. But here we are.
Also nice for events.
davkan 15 hours ago [-]
I only care or participate insofar as they affect my real offline life.
404mm 2 hours ago [-]
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.
deepsun 23 hours ago [-]
I've migrated my fam by just refusing to use it at some point "sorry folks no facebook apps on my phone". It was kinda hard when I needed something from them, but once they needed something from me they had to install my preferred communications channel.
Gigachad 17 hours ago [-]
Your family members don't have a phone number you can call?
dspillett 11 hours ago [-]
For a lot of people these days actually calling is for emergencies or other time sensitive comms. Even sending a text is seen that way by some, who have no notifications enabled for other messaging apps & similar but do allow their device to buzz them when an SMS/equivalent arrives.
Gigachad 11 hours ago [-]
For socially anxious zoomers sure, but it's not a desirable thing. Call your parents.
dspillett 8 hours ago [-]
Back end of GenX here, I remember our first landline being installed. I hate the phone, always have. Video calls are certainly no better. I'm an "in person or in writing" person, hence I have trouble with the modem remote work environment (to the point where I was considering taking a hefty paycut to leave the dev industry even before AI, which is feeling like the final bail of hay, came along).
But I do make the time and effort to call Dad though.
No point calling Mum, dementia has done away with that being anything but stressful for her.
alt227 15 hours ago [-]
They couldnt drop you a text or give you a call?
EA-3167 23 hours ago [-]
I keep waiting for people to understand that algorithmic social media communities that serve ads and harvest info are pure poison. The problem is that everyone thinks they've got it under control, for them it isn't a problem or it's a manageable one.
My personal view is that if you take a personal, not a preaching stand early and often people just learn that's who you are. I've never had a Myspace or FB or IG, or any other sort of account like that. To all of the people who say they can only stay in touch that way I just said, "I'm available via text, phone, chat group, Discord, email, Signal, and half a dozen more ways. If that isn't easy enough then maybe we don't need to keep in touch."
The only reason I can imagine seriously engaging with those things is as a business owner who watched FB railroad them into advertising there or being screwed, and happily I've never been in that position.
So yeah... at some point you have to accept that most people will happily dig in, and even most people who have qualms will find ways to justify why it's ok FOR THEM. You just have to make your own choice and stick with it, firmly and politely.
WarmWash 7 hours ago [-]
>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.
aanet 17 hours ago [-]
> You just have to make your own choice and stick with it, firmly and politely.
100%
That's the way to go.
And tbh, not being on FB hasn't affected my social life. I'm in touch with people {friends | family | colleagues | etc} the way I want. And if I miss any social events, that's Ok. No FOMO here. Mostly JOMO.
liendolucas 1 days ago [-]
Gold advice. People should get out of there and enjoy more of their free time!
aanet 1 days ago [-]
Indeed.
It saved me net an hour or more or mindless scrolling every day. Every single day. Not to mention the benefits of no more FOMO, better mental health, etc. AND left me with more time to actually accomplish things I wanted to do but somehow thought I never had the time.
The thing is: you have to find + allocate time and attention (= your most precious resource) to the things that matter most to you.
Since then I've been working on my online learning (30+ courses done, including several DL/ML certifications), read more books, and most importantly, focused on my health by working out nearly every day.
Small wins individually, but they have compounded greatly over time.
Mashimo 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
seb1204 15 hours ago [-]
I disabled YouTube app on my phone for the same reason. The shorts stole my time too easily.
ganzsz 8 hours ago [-]
What fixed YouTube for me by disabling and removing all history. The only thing that works is the subscriptions tab and search. The only shorts I get are from subscriptions, so I'm through them in a few minutes and have to choose a real video.
frollogaston 19 hours ago [-]
I like FB Messenger because all the state is stored on there instead of being annoying about E2EE. My group chats aren't important enough to need security, but I still don't want them getting randomly nuked like has happened on Signal and Whatsapp.
19 hours ago [-]
ProAm 18 hours ago [-]
> Delete your account, get off that blasted site,
This doesnt stop it. That what a lot of people dont understand. If you never had a FB, Insta, Whatsapp, etc... account, you STILL have a FB ad profile. It's worse than what people think.
aanet 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, I am very aware of FB shadow profiles and such. And believe me, it troubles me more than I can say. [This was known in 2015-2017 timeframe, afaik.] That, and the fact that one can't do much about that.
What one can control is not paying attention to the damned site. [Many more added to that list, btw]
TacticalCoder 22 hours ago [-]
> At some point, you realize that the only way to not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely. Delete your account, get off that blasted site, and enjoy some moments of peace IRL.
Exactly. Not only do I blocklist every known Meta domain at my DNS (I run the unbound DNS server at home) I also took all the IP blocks from Meta's ASNs and have automatically blocked them at the firewall level.
And I did that before doing so was, like now, just one LLM prompt away.
1 billion people are on Telegram: they may not be much better than WhatsApp but Telegram does not have Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and is not worth 1.5 trillion.
Really: just fuck the Zuck and his PHP/JavaScript ecosystem. Just get off, entirely off, that crappy abusive ad-ridden, surveillance ecosystem.
Delete your accounts today.
inigyou 21 hours ago [-]
Telegram is much worse for privacy than WhatsApp. Signal is better.
anal_reactor 18 hours ago [-]
In general the internet has become shit so I try to just use it less.
akersten 1 days ago [-]
They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of `<div>` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.
neuralkoi 1 days ago [-]
I recently found this out the hard way. Instagram’s web app has a super annoying popup. To click the comments button for a post, your cursor has to pass over the username, which just happens to launch a profile preview with the “follow” button exactly where the comments button was, causing you to unintentionally follow the account.
I tried to block this popup with uBlock Origin to no avail. No matter what element I selected, it was still there. Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.
zenoprax 1 days ago [-]
A counter example: I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday but it turns out uBlock can filter out the ads, boilerplate, sidebars, join/login buttons etc on the main site. It's actually faster and more usable than the old site now.
Small win.
pseudalopex 10 hours ago [-]
Reddit tested login walls on the new site since months.[1]
>I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday
It appears to still be up for me. ??
spidercat 1 days ago [-]
"anonymous" is the key word. old.reddit still works (though it seems to get progressively jankier), but it's now requiring a login.
chokma 1 days ago [-]
It was activated for my region yesterday and it did wonders for breaking my reddit addiction.
Then I tried the normal view and ... wow, so many auto-playing video ads disguised as regular posts.
Gormo 9 hours ago [-]
It's using an algorithm to determine whether or not to allow anonymous access. It looks like it's considering origin IP, browser useragent, among other things. I've had login prompts show up once or twice, but when I'm using my regular browser in incognito mode and not connecting through a third-party VPN, it continues to allow logged-out access.
KennyBlanken 18 hours ago [-]
Reading the claim that they're requiring login to old.reddit.com "for safety" made me laugh out loud.
When are they going to admit that the redesign sucks and there's a reason everyone keeps loading the old reddit interface? Who has the ego that can't handle the truth, that their UI/UX design is garbage and loathed?
The random phrases turned into links that are never helpful means I can't trust any link in comments now, there's that stupid AI box that never has useful or helpful info, conversations are a nightmare to try and read through.
I will never understand how it is that a site which exists almost entirely for conversations, made a new UI that severely fucks with "read the conversation."
shawn_w 1 days ago [-]
You now have to be logged in to reddit to use it.
kotaKat 1 days ago [-]
It's A/B tested across IP ranges, geolocated regions, etc. I got it super early and it sucks being locked out for the past 2-3 weeks now.
esseph 1 days ago [-]
Not sure there's been a hard date publicly set but they are sunsetting it
8note 24 hours ago [-]
nah, now it loads maybe 3 posts at a time and the latency is really slow to pull up those 3
dayone1 1 days ago [-]
How do you filter it out? Do you select each element individually?
zenoprax 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, the Element Picker in uBlock Origin. Requires Firefox because of Web Manifest stuff in Chromium.
greenleafone7 1 days ago [-]
Best move you could have possibly done.
titzer 1 days ago [-]
> Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.
The real fix!
matheusmoreira 13 hours ago [-]
> Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.
The best solution. Highly recommended.
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
Never delete your account. That account has a bunch of associated signals that scream "real user". Therefore you should sell it on an account marketplace to a spammer, if you really hate the platform.
cindyllm 18 hours ago [-]
[dead]
srcnkcl 1 days ago [-]
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
c-hendricks 1 days ago [-]
Last I tried writing custom rules for Facebook was years ago, but they did have proper aria attributes, and uBlock origin does have selectors for text content. These are from 2020:
facebook.com##span:has-text(Suggested for You):xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)
facebook.com##div[aria-label="Sponsored"] span[aria-label="Sponsored"]:xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)
facebook.com##div[aria-label="Sponsored"]:xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)
aembleton 9 hours ago [-]
you can use upward. For example
facebook.com##span:has-text(Suggested for You):upward(8)
That then goes up elements in the dom.
pimlottc 1 days ago [-]
What's with the xpath selector? Is that just matching deeply nested elements?
c-hendricks 1 days ago [-]
Going from memory, but that's how many elements are in the tree between what I wanted to be hidden and where the matching text/elements actually lived.
pimlottc 22 hours ago [-]
Oh jeez, I hadn’t thought about the blocked element being different than the aria-tagged one. What a nightmare
ssdspoimdsjvv 15 hours ago [-]
Read up on XPath axes:)
acabal 1 days ago [-]
But can't they just use an xpath expression to test the computed text content of a node, like `/path/to/ad/div[contains(., 'sponsored')]`? In that expression, there could be any number of nested elements inside the terminal `<div>` and it wouldn't matter. (And you'd probably have to use a regex test to account for tricky white space.)
PetahNZ 10 hours ago [-]
The word sponsored in inside an SVG element with a linked `use` tag, so it's not that simple.
JumpCrisscross 1 days ago [-]
> so it's very hard to write selectors against
This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
The power cost of doing this widely would be staggering, surely?
Terretta 1 days ago [-]
Worth a white paper to see which costs less energy, using Apple's built in LLM, or downloading and displaying all the FB ads using radio, playback, and screen animation energy.
StableAlkyne 1 days ago [-]
Local models are not the same as the giant ones in data centers. They're in about the about the same ballpark as running a AAA game on max settings.
Sure, it's more computationally-expensive than running an HTML selection, but it's also not "staggering" by any reasonable stretch.
rmwaite 1 days ago [-]
I think “staggering” is a pretty accurate way of putting it if blocking ads is in the same ballpark as running a AAA game on max settings.
StableAlkyne 1 days ago [-]
If the computational requirement is within the realm of another normal day to day task, and if it cannot generally achieved with another cheaper approach, it would be contradictory to say it is staggering.
I would agree if this was an easily solvable problem with classical approaches. Clearly it is not, since even uBlock is giving up.
At any rate, "staggering" is relative. White-labeled web browsers becoming the most common GUI engine would have made an engineer's eyes water 20 years ago.
frandroid 1 days ago [-]
Blocking ads should not make my fans spin at full blast.
StableAlkyne 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, it's pretty awful that Facebook has made it such a demanding task.
ASalazarMX 1 days ago [-]
"Honey, I want to buy a gamer PC. This one is too slow to block Facebook ads."
Gormo 9 hours ago [-]
Even the data-center-grade models are less intensive than people think. We recently installed a heavy-duty AI server (Gaudi2 cluster with 768GB VRAM) to run larger models up to 400B parameters on, and at full load, its power draw is about equivalent to a consumer stove or clothes dryer.
If you're running thousands of those concentrated into a single data center, your aggregate power draw is going to be huge, but a single server is entirely reasonable for a small business, or even a home user, to operate.
NL807 16 hours ago [-]
The giant ones in data centers are models that broadly encompass a variety of data for general purpose applications. You can certainly train models specifically for processing DOM content, making them smaller and more efficient.
Gormo 9 hours ago [-]
Not really, no. LLMs get more computationally efficient and hardware gets more power efficient with each passing day. We're already at the point where reasonably competent models can be run a laptop GPU off of battery power. NPUs are even more power efficient, (though a bit slower).
toomuchtodo 1 days ago [-]
Apple Intelligence? I mean, you're only processing for the time your "AI|browser|agent" is acting as a firewall between you and Meta. Cache locally after processing and filtering. Use alongside the accessibility API. LLMs can, in many cases, reliably solve CAPTCHAs. I find it difficult to imagine they cannot defeat Meta ad blocking countermeasures.
Depending on the model, I’m guessing it’s dwarfed by just about any electron app
aembleton 9 hours ago [-]
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.
1 days ago [-]
timbit42 1 days ago [-]
Maybe reverse tactics and block/hide anything that isn't something you want to see.
Gareth321 14 hours ago [-]
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.
timbit42 9 hours ago [-]
At least there is no chance of manipulation and subliminal advertising that way. /s
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
> very hard to write selectors against.
Or was hard to write selectors against before, you know, AI.
It seems ironic to give up now. You can probably rig up an agent to automatically look for new div labyrinths and write selectors for them.
You can bet Facebook are using AI to generate these labyrinths!!!
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
Who would file an ADA suit for a screen reader being unable to correctly read an ad?
Gormo 9 hours ago [-]
The same ambulance-chasing lawyers who are already filing spurious ADA suits today.
NL807 16 hours ago [-]
Those who want to do it in spite.
A1kmm 1 days ago [-]
Or an unauthorised access / exceeds access to a computer system prosecution in at least one jurisdiction somewhere around the world.
If the owner of the system has a 'no ads' policy and a security mechanism to prevent ad servers from accessing their display without their authorisation, it is one thing if a company accidentally circumvents that by changing their page in a way that breaks detection (and unless there are records it was deliberate) they probably get the benefit of doubt from authorities.
But if they are blatantly going to quite great effort to circumvent the adblock security system to exceed their unauthorised access without the consent of and against the wishes of the owner of the client system, surely that's a clear-cut criminal case?
Of course, prosecutions of these types of things in many countries unfortunately tend to go after individuals who target big companies, but almost never the other way around.
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
We need to figure out how this is actually DMCA circumvention. That one seems to have teeth.
1 days ago [-]
benj111 1 days ago [-]
Could you not just go after the deeply nested spans? I assume they aren't messing up everything else like that.
mcintyre1994 1 days ago [-]
Based on inspect element on their homepage, they probably are.
esseph 1 days ago [-]
> I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.
So what you're saying is: you want Facebook to pay out something like $200M which is such a small amount it won't even realize, $170M will go to lawyers, everybody else gets $1.30.
That seems like how it might pan out.
wkjagt 1 days ago [-]
I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the money that's put into circumventing ad blockers isn't really generating more sales.
It's like a door to door sales person thinking that if only they could find a way to unlock my door I would buy their stuff.
sicktriple 1 days ago [-]
You don't actually need to click on an ad or purchase something from an ad site in order for Facebook to make money selling ad space.
The moment these ads are loaded on the page, real time auction occurs, where advertisers place bids algorithmically and automatically, based on your profile. Facebook makes it's money by selling this ad space. It doesn't particularly care whether you click on them or not. But if they don't load in the first place, there's nothing for Facebook to sell.
The real insideous part is that advertisers don't need to actually bid on the auction to participate, and anyone participating gets to havest your ad profile. This is one of the big ways data brokers are able to build profiles on you. They can then do whatever they want with this info, and you'd probably never know.
dewey 1 days ago [-]
That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them. If ads are loaded or not is also often verified by independent third party trackers that you have to embed on your page next to the ad. There's whole industries built on this stuff and it's not as simple as "we sell the slot and don't care if people see it or click on it".
enragedcacti 1 days ago [-]
Ad placements can still appear to perform if the targeted user was already planning to buy the product and Google/Meta attribute the sale to the ad impression they shove in at the last minute. FortNine (a Canadian motorcycle gear retailer) published an expose and seem quite convinced that this is an extremely common occurrence. It would also justify why Meta would be so aggressive about showing ads even to an unreceptive audience.
> That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them.
You'd be surprised at how opaque and complex ad attribution and ROAS calculation has become for the average business, and how many marketing departments are operating on high-level metrics without having an intuitive understanding of how their ads are performing. Many of them rely on the ad networks' own metrics to determine ad performance, and don't even have their own internal attribution models.
jpleger 1 days ago [-]
I mean you are both right, it's been a few years since I have been in adtech, and it isn't black and white. There are few places that will pay for stuff that isn't clicked through, but there are places that are willing to pay on an impression basis for things like video or images. It's just like not worth it to most places to throw those ads on their property since it's fairly low quality advertisers.
More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.
tomnipotent 1 days ago [-]
The teams spending the kind of money these ad networks care about are doing a lot of upper funnel brand marketing where exposure is more important than clicks and where conversions are expected to be much lower for this segment of spend.
rented_mule 1 days ago [-]
The largest brands (Walmart, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, etc.) put a lot of analytics into their ad spend. I worked on an ad platform with a large audience that these kinds of brands wanted to get their name in front of, but the audience was exceedingly unlikely to click on big-brand ads on our platform. The brands figured this out quickly and pushed hard for cost-per-click rather than cost-per-impression because cost-per-click was essentially free brand marketing for them, even if they were paying $100 per click.
The next tier down was kind of the opposite. They weren't big enough to surface things like this, and they hired agencies for most of their ad spend. When focusing on the top of the funnel, there's this strange incentive with agencies where they often get more budget to spend if they can connect that directly to eye balls. Agencies are incentivized to throw the ads up everywhere and pay well to do so. They love cost-per-impression because we could deliver a large, predictable number of eye balls in a hurry.
All that said, we put no effort into getting around ad blockers as we were serving these ads on our own site/app and we viewed fighting ad blockers as fighting our users. Our ads were served inline in HTML, but clearly identified in the HTML of the page. It took blockers a while to catch on and block them, but they eventually did.
tomnipotent 1 days ago [-]
The further away you get from direct marketing where you can track conversions, and the further up the funnel you go, the less and less analytics help. Another way to think of it is that there are tranches of spend - the central tranche is easily attributable direct marketing but there's a limit to how much you can efficiently spend, but the further from the center you go the less effectively you can measure the efficacy of the spend but there are more options to absorb ad dollars.
Maybe 15 years ago multi-touch attribution was the big push but even that only adds minimal insights into how ad spend affects the behavior you're trying to measure. It helps with high-level channel attribution but it's still at best directional.
So once you reach a point when increasing spend at Meta/Google results in superlinear increases in CAC vs. spend, you eventually end up having to move those ad dollars elsewhere and over time (and a lot of money) you get an intuitive understanding of how these other mediums trickle down to the metrics that matter.
You're totally right about agencies and their perverse incentives and how that leads to sub-optimal spend allocation.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
They will not book them once they learn they have been defrauded for a while.
sicktriple 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
lurk2 1 days ago [-]
> It probably would have been more helpful if you took the time to quote the particular part of my comment which you believe to be untrue.
He did.
sicktriple 5 hours ago [-]
He literally didn't, but ok
cryzinger 1 days ago [-]
> If youre referring to whether or not Meta "cares" of you click and ad or not, then fair play. I'd argue that's more or less semantics, but ok, they do care and there is indeed an entire industry built on them caring.
This also depends on whether ads are being sold as "pay-per-click" or "pay-per-view" (although in the biz they say "impression" rather than "view"). For the latter, websites like Meta who sell ad space only get paid when people actually click on them.
inigyou 21 hours ago [-]
An AI wrote this comment.
sicktriple 5 hours ago [-]
rude
Barrin92 1 days ago [-]
>whether you click or not doesn't change the fact that there is still ad sales happening in the background
if nobody clicks on the ads nobody's going to buy ad space because people who place ads care about whether their ads translate into sales. So of course Facebook cares, and ultimately only cares about how many people respond to them because how much money they'll make depend on how much money the ads make.
That's why FB has invested ungodly sums into trying to figure out the preferences of their users.
kazinator 1 days ago [-]
I would say, then, that Facebook is perpetrating fraud. They are knowingly defeating ad blockers to sell ad space that they know will not lead to any click-throughs and conversions.
inigyou 21 hours ago [-]
They don't know that, and it probably isn't true.
tristor 1 days ago [-]
This is correct, and the extra insidious part is that folks who are tech-savvy and privacy-conscious are more valuable profiles than normies, because we generally work in higher income jobs/industries. So whether we click or not is irrelevant, Facebook gets paid more for showing us ads than they do for typical normies.
globalnode 1 days ago [-]
and thats why you lock down your privacy, so they get nothing other than "generic privacy enthusiast #1000101010101"
gh02t 1 days ago [-]
Good luck. I'd wager that most methods to protect your privacy aren't nearly as effective as we think they are. While I don't think it means that you shouldn't try to protect your information, I typically assume that anything short of very extreme measures is only mildly effective.
gopher_space 1 days ago [-]
One of the biggest problems in software development is that our graph of authoritative personal data is cyclical. You might have heard about how difficult it was for someone erroneously declared dead to change the record, and I'm sure most of us have experienced problems with changing an address. A friend recently went through two name changes and one phone number change, and it took like eight months for the bottom-feeders to realign.
We are now in an adversarial situation regarding our personal information, but our adversaries depend on sources we have a modicum of control over. If I signed my dog up for a physical mailer, I wonder how long would it take for a portion of the internet to consider Doctor-Professor Kensington a legal individual.
inigyou 21 hours ago [-]
I've tried signing up for bank accounts with deliberate typoes in my name. It worked. Name didn't match the ID they had me scan. The Revolut sign-up form randomly ignores keypresses so that's my plausible deniability. I just intentionally didn't correct them.
1 days ago [-]
thewebguyd 1 days ago [-]
Online advertising is less and less about forcing a pitch to conversion in the moment its viewed. Even if someone with an ad blocker would never click on the ad anyway, repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure. Six months or even a year from then, when that user is looking for a specific SaaS tool, for example, the brand they saw 40 times already is the one that feels established and safe, and it's more likely to lead to a conversion without ever clicking the original ad.
The second part of putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers is tracking & fingerprinting, especially across devices.
In general, ads work by anchoring a brand name in your memory for when you eventually are looking for said product or service, the goal isn't always to force a conversion on the spot.
titzer 1 days ago [-]
> repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure.
This is exactly why I don't want to see their shit, ever. It just doubles my resolve to not see it. They are targeting my underbrain, my subconscious, and do not want it.
There's one particular insurance company that continued to evade my ad blocking attempts for literally years. I will never buy from them. My current insurance is fine and the ad-mongers can get bent until their business dies.
Gigachad 17 hours ago [-]
That's logical, but the parent comment "I'm immune to ads, I won't click them" falls flat because no one is immune to ads. That's why it's such a big industry.
CrendKing 1 days ago [-]
But how to you quantify the effect of the exposure? How do you know a particular sale is converted through some impressions you put on Facebook six months ago, and not from a highway billboard one week earlier? If you can't accurate quantify the effect of each ad campaign with their conversion rate, you have no reason to put more funds into this particular Facebook campaign. So naturally it falls on Facebook to prove to you that their ad socket is actually generating conversion, by not showing the ads to people who is least likely to click through ads when shown.
zelphirkalt 5 hours ago [-]
I think it's all a huge make-believe. They have a big name and marketing falls for it. If push comes to shove, they can just simulate click through and views and such, to "convince" people that it all works. They have all the user agent details of a user from years of browser-rape.
consp 1 days ago [-]
What if the conversation is negative? I have very little patience for halfbaked ads disguised as posts. Some companies just show what they are and sell, but too often these days it's a memey post-like advertisement which will be a negative the next conversation "ah, yes that company with those annoyingly fake ads, just like their [product]". But I do not rule out I'm the odd one out and the people deciding the tools to for upon people fall for those ads.
tomnipotent 1 days ago [-]
It doesn't matter if your personal interaction is negative if on the whole it's positive across a larger corpus of users. By and large this exposure tactic works more than not.
allthetime 1 days ago [-]
Ads do a lot more than advertise. They track and collect data about you without you interacting at all. I don’t use an adblocker to not see ads, i use an ad blocker to not load ads or interact with their providers servers at all.
Terr_ 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I'm less-concerned about seeing an ad than I am about the spyware/surveillance networks behind them.
If some magic-genie offered the tradeoff of "You can't install third-party adblockers, but your privacy will be magically guaranteed", that would be really appealing.
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
Facebook does that, even when you aren't seeing an ad.
rchaud 1 days ago [-]
The biggest buyers of ads are not promoting products, they're shilling for politicians. The same way junk mail props up the postal service, political ads keep the lights on at local TV channels. They are unwatchable during election season, and there's some election campaign happening all the time. Mayors, governors, senators, congress.
Facebook and Youtube are just the newest battlefields. If it's not politician ads, it's military ads, partisan "nonprofit" ads, or ads for podcasts. I don't need to see any of them.
That said, as long as UBO keeps up the good fight on the open web, I'm good. Facebook is basically a memory now, and there are other ways to access Youtube that are actually less taxing on their bandwidth because they don't have auto-play enabled and don't show a 45-minute podcast episode as a pre-roll.
Lammy 1 days ago [-]
Ads are for surveillance as much if not more than they are for money
criddell 1 days ago [-]
Presumable the ads on Facebook are served by Facebook and they know who you are and what you are doing on Facebook.
darig 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
axus 1 days ago [-]
I believe that, as long as you add that the surveillance is also for money.
dfee 1 days ago [-]
in that money is the atomic unit of economic control, sure.
government's don't surveil for money, unless you bend the argument a bit to say the government has finite resources and is run off money itself. which is kinda true, but also kinda fuzzy (the Fed).
axus 1 days ago [-]
I don't think governments are the majority buyers of the surveillance, no doubt they buy a little bit.
__MatrixMan__ 1 days ago [-]
Ads are a type of malware, they're often used to bootstrap more aggressive types of malware.
The door to door sales person wants to unlock your door so they can sell the info to somebody else who shows up and steals your TV.
tshaddox 24 hours ago [-]
Advertising is and always has been a fundamentally adversarial relationship between the consumer and the publisher. Everyone knows that, with few exceptions, no one ever wants to see ads. So I guess I'm not sure why you're surprised that advertisers still want to show ads to people who would rather not see them. That's everyone.
SvenL 1 days ago [-]
Aren’t ads payed also via „impressions“, like 10k people saw your advertisement so please pay x money?
teshaq 1 days ago [-]
Yes, but if a user doesn’t convert the advertiser will see worse performance metrics as cost per click/conversion/install is higher. That isn’t a good long term outcome for the platform, since advertisers can switch their budgets elsewhere (to Google/Youtube)
There’s a delicate balance, more impressions isn’t always a good outcome. Id assume here given the battle against ad blockers that the platforms do believe the aggregate impression mix leads to good performance for advertisers though
1 days ago [-]
seattle_spring 1 days ago [-]
Partially, yes. Ads are also psychological, and tracked cross-platform. If you see a BMW ad on Facebook, drive by a BMW billboard on the highway, search BMW on Google, and then go buy a BMW, they have ways of fractionally allocating the conversion to the different impressions. It's pretty crazy.
StilesCrisis 1 days ago [-]
I always thought last-click attribution was generally used even though partial attribution was technically possible. But my info is a few years stale.
weavie 9 hours ago [-]
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.
v17 8 hours ago [-]
If you have android phone, you could try Instander, even though the last update was ~3 years ago, works like a charm for me
sodapopcan 1 days ago [-]
I don't like ads and don't want to buy random stuff, but they totally work me sometimes, and I'm sure there has got to be many like me. It's one of the big reasons I don't go on social media really anymore. I mostly have willpower, but in moments of weakness I'll see a perfectly targeted ad, it'll be for something affordable, and I'll but it. It was never a big problem for me as it's only happened a handful of times, but everything I've bought this way has been useless and I've gotten rid of it all.
StilesCrisis 1 days ago [-]
Story time? I want to know about the useless items.
sodapopcan 1 days ago [-]
lol, no, it's mostly embarrassing :P Well, they included a silicone sponge and a massive blanket.
robocat 1 days ago [-]
Did you notice any change in the adverts targeting you after an impulse purchase?
sodapopcan 21 hours ago [-]
Good question but I honestly can't remember, even though it wasn't even that long ago. I've given up services slowly over the past few years, but since I used all the big stuff: Google search/email, instagram, and facebook, and am (still) addicted to YouTube that the ads were already soooooo specific to me that I doubt they got any more specific. I would assume that after I bought that stupid sponge that didn't work I probably got more cooking ads, but I honestly can't remember.
I've mostly ditched everything but YouTube now. Honestly, just not using Google seach and gmail makes a HUGE difference in how targeted ads get. I still have an instagram account that a very rarely check, but since I'm not a big cookie blocker, I'll see ads for stuff I was recently searching for. Oh! And I feel like one of those "I don't have a TV" people from the 90s, but I no longer carry a smartphone either. I haven't bought anything from an ad in a few years at this point. It likely still counts but the closest is buying something a YouTuber has recommended from a video I sought out for an interest I already had.
robocat 16 hours ago [-]
Cheers.
A silicone sponge seems so oxymoronical: that was my responsible impetus.
Hard to avoid commercial interests. Sell poets on the block.
sodapopcan 7 hours ago [-]
Ha, ya I'm just calling it that for eases sake. It's a "cleaning tool" sponge replacement. It did not work. The blanket was actually good quality but it turns out I did not even want a really massively huge blanket.
GuB-42 1 days ago [-]
First thing is that Facebook makes money by showing ads, not by selling the product shown on the ad.
Second thing is that besides a small minority of people who refuse to buy advertised products out of spite, some would be blockers still do if the ad get shown. Maybe less than those without ad blockers, but still more than zero.
Third thing is that the point of advertising is not just direct sales. Some companies put up ads just to "take space", to establish themselves as leaders in their sector and not let others in. That's why you see som much advertisement for Coca-Cola. They don't expect you to buy a can of Coke just after you have seen the ad, you probably already have some in your fridge anyways. But by doing that, they make sure that when you want a drink, you think about Coca-Cola and not something else.
nemomarx 1 days ago [-]
Do we no longer habitually install an ad block for friends and family? There's gotta be some naive users with an ad blocker that way, or default within brave or whatever
StilesCrisis 1 days ago [-]
They are no longer handling Facebook in the ad blocker. Installing an ad blocker won't help.
hn_submit 1 days ago [-]
I believe tracking and privacy invasions cannot be solved through technological means, it needs to be solved through laws and regulations.
We need to prod our representatives to ban the selling of our private information. Websites themselves can use the information but they're prohibited from selling it to anyone else. Why? Because the data changes hands and borders several times after which we lose all control over it.
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
It can be solved through technological means, but these ones aren't sufficient. I remember how that Luigi guy tried to solve a different problem by technological means and it worked for a few months.
hn_submit 14 hours ago [-]
No it can't. The only thing you'll end up with is an arms race. An arms race companies like Google and Facebook are destined to win because they have unlimited budgets to fight ad-blocking because it's what made them filthy rich.
uBlock Origin is one guy holding back the sea with his finger in the dike.
creatonez 1 days ago [-]
> is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway
Even cringy ads that digust or anger users in the moment have a subtle effect of making them more likely to buy or recommend that brand in the future. The name recognition is what advertisers are buying, it doesn't have to immediately persuade the user to click for them to get what they want.
kakacik 1 days ago [-]
I go a bit further - if something penetrates firefox + ublock origin combo, I'll go out of my way to make sure I'll never, ever buy such product or service if I can avoid that (not always possible but reasonably frequent).
Its quichotesque effort but the only thing that can move the needle a bit since everybody involved cares only about money here - waiting for some toothless legislation is useless when harm is happening now.
kevin_thibedeau 1 days ago [-]
There is a ton of shady stuff that UBO let's through. Some of it can be filtered with the optional lists but not all. You really need NoScript and LocalCDN in the arsenal to pare back the invasive abuse of privacy.
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
Literally nothing works through NoScript any more since all the bootcamps started teaching React.
jaharios 1 days ago [-]
100% higher up decision, I bet they loose more on this than the powerpoint slide says they are earning.
karel-3d 15 hours ago [-]
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.
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
>someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway
This is not true. Most people with ad blockers are everyday people. And even for people who are hardcore against ads, they may find a useful product or see something that they will think of again in the future.
thrownaway561 1 days ago [-]
ads are like billboards. the company doesn't make money by making sure your buy the product, it make money by getting the product in front of you. You might not buy the product today, but there is a chance that since you've seen the product, you might buy it in the future.
many of times, i have looked to purchase a product or service and remember an ad that i saw that has alter my decision.
stubish 21 hours ago [-]
And by raising awareness, they cannibalize sales from their competitors. So their competitors have to buy ads to compete. And everyone ends up spending lots of money, which consumers pay for. And that is why I gravitate to cheaper, unknown brands when the market allows it.
whywhywhywhy 1 days ago [-]
The approach they should have taken is to start whitelisting the components that are not ads.
Think of how the structure of Meta is gonna work, there's some team in charge of ads who has a sub team now in charge of messing with the ads to stop them being blocked.
If you start whitelisting everything that isn't an ad you move the problem into an area the team in charge of blocking the ads don't have control over.
Highly unlikely the team in charge of stopping ad blocking has swing to then start changing the code of every other element on the page to break your non-ad white listing.
Terretta 1 days ago [-]
Over a decade ago, web framework and web site generation tooling had already ruined any kind of automated anything, as the frameworks and tools started using what amount to GUIDs for identifiers. I suppose the charitable take on why is as only machines needed to read it, and css styles and div IDs had become token gibberish anyway, so semantics were irrelevant.
Whether selecting for ads or content, one had to figure different ways of getting after it, whitelisting was already off the table.
We'd found "structure" could work, but had to be fuzzy and adaptive as marketing shuffles pages around constantly, not just on the whole, but for A/B runs and personalized "experiences".
So that seems back to, hey, models could help.
(Though none of them, to date, attain as high success as latest hand coded "reader" tools, worth inspecting for how this could be generalized.)
doodlebugging 1 days ago [-]
>Highly unlikely the team in charge of stopping ad blocking has swing...
OT but I think I learned a new term today.
Swing. In oil and gas we would call that suction so for future reference:
Swing = Suction
whywhywhywhy 7 hours ago [-]
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.
danillonunes 1 days ago [-]
Can't they mimic the structure of legit content to get passed on the whitelist?
HDThoreaun 1 days ago [-]
The ad team runs the whole business at meta. If theres an issue they dont have control over theyll just take control of that part of the code.
dofm 1 days ago [-]
This is the correct decision, IMO.
I only use Facebook in a limited capacity (one phenomenal private group whose usefulness is unfortunately simply unmatched elsewhere, one infrequently updated page and a very locked-down, minimal personal profile).
I think people need to understand what the purpose of Facebook is in terms of its function and constituent parts, in the Stafford Beer sense, and I think if enough people simply can't avoid that truth, it will eventually shrink.
Adblocking lets some people pretend Facebook isn't a privacy hellhole for everyone they talk to. There is essentially no way to use it that doesn't abuse your data privacy, for one thing, but prolonging the impression that it can be ameliorated is a mistake.
beloch 23 hours ago [-]
Where Facebook has gone, I fear other U.S. social media is headed. Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in, which suggests they're doubling down on user tracking. On top of that are the increasing privacy, censorship, and disinformation concerns that come with using any U.S.-based social media.
There is clearly a need for facebook/reddit alternatives for useful groups like the one you describe. There are things like Mastodon out there, but they haven't gained much traction. What will it take to get people off of platforms that are actively hostile to their users? What is keeping existing alternatives from being used?
joshuat 20 hours ago [-]
I find the fall of Reddit to be particularly upsetting. In its prime it was one of the best social networks I'd ever used and I found incredible value in it - but after having my app blown up by their API changes and the continued (unsurprising) push away from their old open platform to a more "curated" experience, it doesn't feel like the same place anymore.
alex1138 20 hours ago [-]
I want someone to actually smack Steve Huffman. Not hard, but enough to get through the veneer of We Take Your Feedback Very Seriously And-
No. Enough. The community is fucking screaming at you
Someone that loves their users does not fire the mods in response to API change protest. And censorship galore, and too much power concentrated in the mods and site
tkel 13 hours ago [-]
If you want the community to be in control of the platform, you should be pursuing a community-controlled platform, not a capitalist-controlled one.
KennyBlanken 18 hours ago [-]
Honestly? Reddit is a massive public manipulation platform.
Consider that the daughter of the guy who purposefully weakened his product's encryption on behalf of Mossad (and was considered a hero of the state), the same daughter who was rubbing elbows with the world's richest and most powerful people, was a reddit powermod with moderation power on a huge number of major subreddits.
Anyone who thinks that the ~500 most popular subreddits are anything but government/corporate manipulators is deluding themselves.
Gareth321 13 hours ago [-]
I couldn't agree more. I suspect 80%+ of all comments now are bots. Paid for by the highest bidder. The entire front page is undoubtedly bought and paid for, as well. Subreddits are only allowed to survive if they don't threaten the paid for messaging and advertising.
inigyou 21 hours ago [-]
Reddit recently blocked access to anything marked NSFW on old.reddit.com unless you upload your ID to Persona (Thiel's company).
breakingcups 13 hours ago [-]
Do you have a source for that? I can still access anything nsfw on old.reddit.com from Europe.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
They're still A/B testing
eszed 23 hours ago [-]
> Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in
They haven't for me (just tested before posting this comment), which I realize might be temporary. Have they published a policy, or did you get caught in A/B testing hell?
rootusrootus 22 hours ago [-]
They did publish a policy and announced it a month or so back. Phased rollout, it took a while before it started applying to me. But now I am unable to use old.reddit at all, and I can only use new reddit on a desktop browser - and only for a little while until it covers the content and tells me I have to login to continue.
I know why they did this, I get it, but they did me a favor by severely curbing the time I might otherwise waste on their web site. For that I thank them.
anvuong 23 hours ago [-]
I was blocked as well, so did my wife.
A quick google search shows thousands of complaints on, ironically, Reddit itself. So it's probably not just an A/B test, more likely a gradual rollout.
Scaled 21 hours ago [-]
My phone is blocked but not my desktop (yet).
I guess the upside of reddit selling all that post data to AI firms is I'm not sure I'll really need to use reddit anymore. Which means I'll never login to post since I won't be seeing other threads to distract myself with. Which seems like long term will hurt reddit's future data.
Eueudhsbsj32 21 hours ago [-]
I think it's a staged rollout. People were complaining about it a few days, but I didn't get blocked until this morning.
johnnyanmac 23 hours ago [-]
Probably a phased rollout based on region. I was blocked almost a month ago and never got back in.
lrvick 22 hours ago [-]
I abandoned my 5k follower Twitter account for Mastodon a few years ago and 1700 people followed me there. I expect out of the 5k Twitter followers most of them are bots, so I probably lost nothing.
The secret to making alternative platforms work, is actually engaging with them and pretending the toxic platforms you hate no longer exist.
I am a bay area serial founder, with no Twitter, Meta, Google, Apple, or any such other centralized surveillance capitalism bullshit. I do not even have a Signal account as centralization is fundamentally incompatible with freedom and privacy in my eyes. Never gets in my way of doing anything I want to do or talking to anyone I want to talk to.
People sure do like to make excuses on why they still -must- use those platforms even though they do not -want- to. Absolutely never let a platform hold you hostage. Let no one own you if you want freedom.
The smartest people I have ever interacted with are on platforms like IRC, Matrix, and Mastodon. I would rather build a social graph of thousands of people that also really value freedom over thousands of people that make excuses to stay trapped in walled gardens any day.
dofm 11 hours ago [-]
> People sure do like to make excuses on why they still -must- use those platforms even though they do not -want- to.
They are not always excuses and you really should understand that if you have tech industry experience.
Try having a small business in some niches and doing so without Facebook.
lrvick 11 hours ago [-]
I cannot think of a niche where one could not be successful without Facebook, but by all means present a specific example.
dofm 8 hours ago [-]
You can always hypothesise success without Facebook because if it didn't exist, people would find alternatives.
But it does exist, and in any town or city there are dozens of people running microbusinesses in competitive niches that rely on word of mouth and recommendation which is largely sustained through Facebook comments, "I'll message you!" and tagging in posts and photos.
Anyone in hustle culture — odd job/handymen, mobile hairdressers/beauticians/nail technicians, day workers, gardeners, plumbers, event photographers; Facebook is unfortunately crucial to keeping the doors open.
All of these people could have websites, but people don't browse websites. They could run ads in newspapers, but people don't look at those. And google is dead for stuff like this, listings and trade directories are not much good either.
At the lowest level of freelance income, Facebook is basically indispensible because it is the only social network with a regional basis and solid local group mechanisms, and because your both your customers and competitors are there. It probably sustains tens of millions of such workers.
This is where the tension lies. For sure I wish Facebook would shrink and that the web was healthier and people would understand the damage it can do, but "just don't use it" is not advice that works for millions of people.
It is Facebook that needs to change, through slow attrition of engagement with bait content and scam ads.
stubish 21 hours ago [-]
> and pretending the toxic platforms you hate no longer exist
Thank you. One reason I spend more time on my Mastodon feed than my Bluesky feed is there are fewer people there complaining about Twitter. Less rage and complaining in general.
oblio 22 hours ago [-]
I'm 99.99% sure your audience is tech people.
lrvick 19 hours ago [-]
Tech, privacy, law, activism, authors, artists. All types on these platforms.
Gigachad 17 hours ago [-]
Social media in general is doomed. Adverts, invasive tracking, and AI slop have killed it.
Rather than creating tiktok but open source, we should just dump the idea entirely. Social media was a net negative to society.
19 hours ago [-]
Vinnl 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
burnte 24 hours ago [-]
I only use FB for the occasional Marketplace sale/purchase because the rest of the site is a cesspool of nonsense and toxic ragebait. It's impossible to only see your friends updates now, so it's lost 99% of it's utility. Letting people see how awful it is will force folks to either leave or Facebook to fix itself, which will never happen. It seems like execs prefer to drive companies into the ground and bankruptcy court rather than change them to be more user friendly.
dylan604 24 hours ago [-]
The vast majority of FB users see the unfiltered site, yet they are not leaving contrary to your theory. FB does not seem to be anywhere near the ground or bankruptcy court. These are very strange things you're commenting about one of the largest companies on the planet.
stubish 21 hours ago [-]
And thus the social media addiction lawsuits and age gating are gaining traction. It seems clear the problem isn't going to solve itself, so society is turning to regulation.
burnte 7 hours ago [-]
FB is losing users, especially amongst younger demo groups. There's a wave of AI craptent on the platform driving people away. Google also sees high profits right now but it's from squeezing, not improvement and customer happiness.
bennettnate5 23 hours ago [-]
Most people I've talked to actually use the "friends feed" in the menu that shows literally only what your friends have posted and nothing else; that could be my friend bias though
dofm 24 hours ago [-]
I mean, obviously Facebook is not in financial difficulty.
But it is, at some level, culturally dying. It is very evident.
It would not be loss of revenue that troubled Facebook, for years at least — it would be slowing engagement and lower demand for reach.
freehorse 21 hours ago [-]
> yet they are not leaving
Are you so sure? Anecdotally, I know increasingly more people who either left the platform or stopped using it last years, and this seems to be a pattern if we believe online sources [0]. Of course many stay, but the platform gets worse and worse ime.
I visit facebook only for events and some groups that I cannot avoid, so I just enter specific pages there than navigating feeds. But looking at the normal feed, it is just so bad. Complete nonsense, irrelevant stuff and more and more AI generated slop. If we exclude some groups, no real, organic people actually post (except some influencers). For those who stay, assuming they do not get the "friends feed", I am really unsure how they can tolerate that.
Anecdotally, someone I know deleted their account, had it reactivated (the site did this) and now they show up on People You May Know. Plenty of other people have tried deleting it and found it nigh impossible
inigyou 21 hours ago [-]
Really? You don't have their phone numbers?
not_a_bot_4sho 20 hours ago [-]
I don't mean personal offense to you but I find the heavily qualified "I don't support this person/organization but I support this person/organization" doublespeak to be frustrating.
Not just your comment. It's all over the place here.
But maybe I shouldn't be throwing stones in my glass house. I smoked cigarettes for a few years on college, knew they were terrible for me and for those around me, but continued for too long because I frankly enjoyed the pleasure.
dofm 20 hours ago [-]
It’s not doublespeak, just context. I am saying: I alas use it like almost everyone else, because I more or less have to. It would be a lie if I said I don’t, and my critique would be of little value if i didn’t. I do use it minimally and locked down, as I say; three family members as friends, an old page I need to manage, and a doodle for a profile photo. But I am seeing all the problems I am talking about.
I don’t think people need to leave, necessarily, and I cannot urge them to do so. But I do think people should shrink their engagement with it, use it as little as is feasible, shrink their footprint, allow it less, so Facebook changes. Unfortunately it is a big part of life on the internet, it’s often people’s literal job to be there, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.
guhcampos 8 hours ago [-]
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 .
duxup 7 hours ago [-]
> Facebook, as a platform, has long since lost the relevance as a social network
I don’t understand how this is determined.
jabroni_salad 6 hours ago [-]
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.
duxup 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t like Facebook either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant as a social network.
RestlessMind 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
drnick1 1 days ago [-]
Blacklisting facebook.com at the DNS level has worked pretty well for me.
Gormo 9 hours ago [-]
Don't forget .fbcdn.net and .fbcdn.com.
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
That works, but is not really blocking the ads.
snapplebobapple 1 days ago [-]
I agree. We should call that "blocking the bads" since the overwhelming majority of things served from that domain are bad.
prmoustache 1 days ago [-]
facebook ads are indeed blocked.
wompapumpum 1 days ago [-]
you sure about that?
SCLeo 22 hours ago [-]
As much as I understand their decision, I hope they didn't stop. I don't use Facebook myself but now I am worried YouTube now knows that if they try a bit harder uBO would just give up.
insin 14 hours ago [-]
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.
(7.99 if subscribed via Appstore/Google Play, Apple/Google is getting €2 of your ad-free subscription there, too)
qiine 10 hours ago [-]
They probably gave up in part because Facebook provides very little value...
echelon 22 hours ago [-]
Let's just build a new Facebook.
We have the tools to make this orders of magnitude easier. We can do this to all of social media.
Big tech gave us the magic space runes (LLMs) we can use to undo them. They have no idea what they've done. All of their value distilled into powerful exoskeletons we can run from home.
Already, it's become apparent that the world is distancing itself from American Big Tech, and they're using the tools we built to pull away. It's so ironic, but frankly justified since we've impinged upon their sovereignty.
We used to say that Google "hired everyone" to keep the smart people from building alternatives. To take all their free hours, keep them busy, keep them from becoming threats.
Now every single one of our spare hours is a salient of attack. I have never felt so empowered to raise an army against the powers that be. They are all mortal.
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
The problem with building a new Facebook is, what is a Facebook, actually? Like, can you even write down a list of things that make up a Facebook?
ajsnigrutin 20 hours ago [-]
Building a facebook is easy, getting people there and hosting it is expensive, and to get that money, you need ads, and to keep getting money for those ads, you have to obfuscate your code so ublock doesn't work anymore, and you're back at the beginning.
damsta 8 hours ago [-]
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.
cromka 8 hours ago [-]
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.
VCFundedGenYer 1 days ago [-]
Facebook is trying so hard to defeat adblockers that the actual website is borderilne unusable. I have found in the past year or so that pages just get hung on "loading" transitional screens way more often, even in normal circumstances.
They need to surrender this whole anti-adblocker crusade because it will kill them in the long run (along with the billion other problems FB has)
RiverCrochet 1 days ago [-]
Most activity on Facebook is via phone. I bet Facebook would prefer to get rid of the website entirely; the age of adding Facebook like buttons and comment sections to websites is long past. I can't think of anything that works on the website better than the phone app.
encom 1 days ago [-]
>I bet Facebook would prefer to get rid of the website entirely
For some parts they did. I tried Facebook Dating, and it's only available on phones.
Also, to save you the trouble, don't use Facebook Dating. It is, to use a technical term, a fermented shitpile.
Sylamore 17 hours ago [-]
Open the developer console and change your device mode to a mobile one, worked the last time I tried it.
liendolucas 1 days ago [-]
> it will kill them in the long run...
Now, that's something I would love to see in my lifetime.
pavel_lishin 1 days ago [-]
I've tried to write a tampermonkey script to at least block the Reels, but even that's hella difficult.
The solution is truly to just never be on Facebook, but - our local PTA only distributes news via Facebook. (There may be a Whatsapp group I don't know about, which isn't better.) So does the local library. If the township publishes things elsewhere, I don't know about it.
I use a service to convert some pages' feeds to RSS, which is semi-reliable, but doesn't work well and is a paid service if you want more than two feeds - I wish I could hand-roll something myself.
hn_submit 1 days ago [-]
The only way to keep ads off Facebook is to stop using Facebook.
sodapopcan 1 days ago [-]
I got a facebook account because I wanted to use marketplace. I just use one of those CSS browser plugins to hide the newsfeed which is where all the ads pop up. The following does the trick for me:
[role=main] {
display: none;
}
I also don't have any friends on it.
hatsunearu 1 days ago [-]
Marketplace has video ads that play with sound as you scroll by now. It's incredible
sodapopcan 1 days ago [-]
Ah, well I guess I'll be seeing those soon then? I don't use Marketplace too much (and just got burned recently so I've soured on it).
CivBase 1 days ago [-]
If you're still using Facebook, it's because you're required to or you're the kind of person who won't be fazed by this.
corndoge 1 days ago [-]
Correct, for better or worse facebook is the meeting ground for many communities and if you are in those communities you have to use it.
celestialcheese 1 days ago [-]
Marketplace. It's horrible, but the area I live in has mostly abandoned craigslist and if you want to buy/sell used stuff, marketplace is where you have to be.
BuyMyBitcoins 1 days ago [-]
I feel like Craigslist squandered its effective monopoly with online classifieds.
While I do not think that the company needed to modernize the site’s UI, it baffles me that their anti-spam tools are so rudimentary. Most searches yield irrelevant keyword-bombed results, and, such results tend to be nearly identical listings.
I had yearned for a viable Craigslist alternative for years. Sadly, Facebook Marketplace won. I don’t feel comfortable searching for anything due to the fact that Facebook will inevitably use my queries to further profile me.
Gigachad 17 hours ago [-]
It wouldn't have helped. In Australia we have Gumtree which has a UI that is just as modern as Facebook but it was still crushed. No one can compete in a space that lives on network effect.
istjohn 1 days ago [-]
I recently perused Marketplace, and it appears to be so thoroughly infested with barely disguised scams, bogus prices and other garbage as to be usable by only the most intrepid and determined shoppers.
celestialcheese 1 days ago [-]
Marketplace aggressively curates to your searches and interactions. So much so you have to be careful with your browsing otherwise your recommendations get off.
My guess is that the default state is the scam garbage. It quickly learns your preferences. Which I hate. I miss having my 5 sections of craigslist I could browse over my morning coffee and not feel like I'm missing a deal.
glitchcrab 1 days ago [-]
It really depends on what you're looking for, there's a lot of great stuff in my local area, but there's also a lot of shit too
g8oz 8 hours ago [-]
If the Karrot buy/sell app has launched in your area, I recommend it. Think of it as Kijiji if eBay had not stopped investing in it.
Markoff 1 days ago [-]
you could use NoBook or MaterialBook, both on Github, personally I don't have FB account 10+ years and not missing it (besides marketplace, though don't see even there better deals than local classifieds website)
qbane 1 days ago [-]
I wrote and shared uBlock Origin filters for Facebook, shared on Reddit and up to a week later they changed the DOM structure bypassed the filters. After some attempts I no longer publish the filters.
hatsunearu 1 days ago [-]
Could you publish it with a license saying it shall not be used by any Facebook employee or something?
qbane 15 hours ago [-]
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
amelius 1 days ago [-]
Maybe a better approach is to convert the page to an image, run OCR over it, use an LLM to remove the ads, present the result to the user.
ImJamal 1 days ago [-]
How would you comment or watch a video if you did that?
amelius 1 days ago [-]
You can still do that.
The only thing I'm proposing is to do the filtering on graphical data (what the user actually sees) rather than on the DOM (which can be obfuscated; and which may change every week).
dudhsudhd 1 days ago [-]
I don’t see how presenting an image would allow you to interact with the page, especially if all you are doing is modify the image you’re presenting, not the page itself.
amelius 1 days ago [-]
Think of it as looking at your screen through AR goggles, where the goggles modify the image before it reaches your eyes.
Everything happens at the image level so there's no way Meta can obfuscate the DOM to make ads pass through.
kdksjxjwjd 20 hours ago [-]
So the ads are still served, just… hidden. Self-defeating, no?
ImJamal 1 days ago [-]
Are you saying you would get the image, detect the ad in the image, then regenerate the HTML without the ad based on where it was located in the image?
lokar 1 days ago [-]
You don’t need to regenerate, insert a DOM element to obscure it.
ceejayoz 1 days ago [-]
That sounds like an upside.
socalgal2 20 hours ago [-]
Wishing that Apple would add OS level AI so I could use it to hide ads in apps. It doesn't need to manipulate the app. It just needs to recognize them and black them out. Apple doesn't have to block anything directly, they can leave it to users to do so they are just respecting the user.
As a simple one, the Facebook has this dark pattern where they put an unread count marker on Loops to try to get you to click it. It works, I click it by accident quite often even though I have zero interest in loops. There's no way to turn it off. But an OS Level AI could cover it with a black square
Yes, I get I could just not use the app. I still want to see what friends and family are up to so I launch the app -> menu -> feeds. This mostly removes everything I hate. But, that unread (1) marker on the loops icon gets me
wackget 20 hours ago [-]
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.
figmert 18 hours ago [-]
Appel has, and it can be used. Apfel[0] has exposed it as a CLI:
$ apfel "What is the capital of Austria?"
The capital of Austria is Vienna.
Oh dear. Hope he's ok. I got a lot of value out of FB-purity.
damidekronik 1 days ago [-]
I was gonna say that uBlock still works for me on facebook, but yea I forgot I had purity quietly working for me for all those years
VCFundedGenYer 1 days ago [-]
Same. FBP has been effectively perfect for over a decade now. I don't understand how uBlock Origin can't just take what FBP is doing and apply it there.
juiceland 23 hours ago [-]
Dozens to hundreds of smart people spent many waking hours making sure that a person can't control what gets displayed on their personal devices when they visit Facebook.com.
kaizenb 14 hours ago [-]
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."
With 104 comments at the moment, that’s where the bulk of the discussion is happening.
Markoff 1 days ago [-]
well this post was like one hour earlier, they should have merged it earlier when there were zero posts in both
khernandezrt 9 hours ago [-]
Why are we still using Facebook? That's the real question here.
site-packages1 7 hours ago [-]
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.
theshackleford 8 hours ago [-]
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.
esjeon 16 hours ago [-]
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.
totetsu 15 hours ago [-]
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.
esjeon 14 hours ago [-]
Yes, but the token expires upon logout, and, after reading your comment, I just double-checked the expiry (got 400 from all related endpoints).
jcfrei 1 days ago [-]
Once LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.
monooso 1 days ago [-]
Given that Safari doesn't even have a built-in ad-blocker, I doubt Apple will be leading the charge on this.
Such a move would also presumably be incompatible with Apple's highly lucrative search engine deal with Google.
gdulli 1 days ago [-]
It's amazing how people think Apple has a clean reputation because they've added a thin layer of indirection to their participation in the surveillance ecosystem.
robocat 21 hours ago [-]
They copied what our government does: deception about the causes of everything.
For business, our purchases clearly reveal self-deceptive practices, and dark marketing patterns certainly take advantage of that.
For government, our voting preferences reveal that we want to be deceived. Although we often say good things that our social group memes us.
I'm not sure when I learnt to be so cynical.
65 1 days ago [-]
Makes me even more excited for Ladybird to be released.
pllbnk 1 days ago [-]
The race of ending personal computing is there. I am sure big players want to control entire stack and users just sitting in front of dumb monitors consuming their ads.
inigyou 20 hours ago [-]
It's a scam. Do not redeem (your money for a crippled device).
threetonesun 1 days ago [-]
If we're just talking about image based ads it would be easier to simply denylist every image on a page and only render alt-text until the user clicks to reveal it.
Worth noting though that Apple injects ads into the News app, which is just a webview, so it's certainly not them that will do this.
whywhywhywhy 1 days ago [-]
You're trying to stop ads because they're malicious but you think they'd be honest with their alt text?
Ignoring that users care deeply about images so a browser that did this would be considered broken from the get go.
pavel_lishin 1 days ago [-]
I wonder what percentage of images even has meaningful alt-text.
nemomarx 1 days ago [-]
If it doesn't have alt text it can't have been that important as an image, I guess.
concinds 1 days ago [-]
Safari was the first to cripple adblockers and went further than ManifestV3, but it seems their reputation will never catch up to that.
musictubes 21 hours ago [-]
Ad blockers work fine for me in Safari. They may not have the flexibility of manifest v2 but they are hardly crippled. Their reputation will continue to be what it is as long as they keep making things that people like.
vintermann 1 days ago [-]
Yes, it's a near-universal legal requirement that humans be able to tell if something is an ad or not. So once they sabotage that, they're in hot water.
pjc50 1 days ago [-]
I was under the impression that America had very few legal restrictions on ads at all.
AlexandrB 1 days ago [-]
Is there any enforcement of this? Like at all? All the review bots and bots promoting random crap on reddit say otherwise. Traditional media still pays lip-service to this, but only barely.
metahost 1 days ago [-]
Apple sells ads too; increasingly across its surfaces.
Eddy_Viscosity2 1 days ago [-]
This is the first and only use-case for LLMs that I am genuinely excited about.
AlexandrB 1 days ago [-]
Such naïveté. The much more likely scenario is that AI is used to add or replace ads in a website in a way that's now impossible to remove. Running your own AI on the browser will be disallowed to "ensure a safe browsing experience".
Eddy_Viscosity2 1 days ago [-]
I wonder how far we are away from AI being required to link to the TPM in a way that the OS and hardware people can have full authority on what you can use.
debazel 1 days ago [-]
We're not that far off. But it will not just be for AI, but all software. Mobile OSes has already normalized the expectation that you don't control what can run on your own devices.
sentrysapper 1 days ago [-]
You anticipate a large language model to understand visual queues for an advertisement?
preg_match 1 days ago [-]
On the big platforms, the ads actually have “ad” written on them somewhere or “sponsored”.
It will be harder on other sites, but not that hard. There’s an unbreakable ceiling for the ads here - they need to be readable trivially by human eyes, or they don’t work as ads.
So, you can hide or obfuscate the ad… but then it’s not a very good ad.
whywhywhywhy 1 days ago [-]
Cost issues aside yeah image embedding tech is really good and can already do tasks like this, LLMs with native image understanding are even better at it.
Reasons this wouldn't work are you'd really need to get it to a good enough and small enough model to run low energy use and very fast to not impact browsing. The other issue is it'll be a fixed target for a period of time so the ads could be tweaked to find how to get them through it.
triceratops 1 days ago [-]
Cues, not queues. And yes that sounds workable.
philipallstar 11 hours ago [-]
The hard bit isn't killing ads. The hard bit is doing whatever will replace ads to pay for sites.
kart23 16 hours ago [-]
apple has ads in the os. that seems deeply anticompetitive
herzigma 2 hours ago [-]
The fact that Instagram ads are so good and Facebook ads are so bad should tell us something.
greenleafone7 1 days ago [-]
Best solution is to never use any of those useless apps ever again.
wvenable 1 days ago [-]
I wonder if it's time to step it up a little bit. We have all the LLMs that are great at looking at code and processing it so perhaps the future of ad blocking is letting the LLM handle it.
Has anyone thought about building something like this?
underlines 6 hours ago [-]
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.
seanw444 1 days ago [-]
So you'd have a low-memory-usage super high latency ad blocker with a monthly bill, or an ad blocker that uses up several gigabytes of RAM/VRAM for slightly less high latency. Compelling.
TaLiTr 1 days ago [-]
I think GP is talking about using an LLM to write filters for the constantly changing Facebook ad serving code, which would be distributed to users.
seanw444 1 days ago [-]
Ah. I was envisioning the LLM handling requests as they come in lol
dreamcompiler 1 days ago [-]
Yes, exactly this. The best way to fight AI is with your own AI, running locally on your own machine and loyal only to you. Also note that a highly-specialized ad-blocker agent wouldn't need a trillion parameters. It probably wouldn't even need a billion.
usui 1 days ago [-]
How long until someone invents a fully-integrated local video and audio adblock filter running on a passthrough VR headset or smart glasses? The progress on this front is taking a while. I wouldn't mind if the audio filter is white noise and a portion of what I see is blurred out. Maybe to make it more efficient, only scan near the places I'm looking at via foveated rendering.
throwuxiytayq 1 days ago [-]
How about we just get on with it and delegalize ads already? They’re a net negative in every form, subsidizing disgusting companies that shouldn’t exist, infringing on everyone’s privacy (including your children! think of the children!!!!!), and making us jump through all kinds of ridiculous hoops to minimize our exposure to them. I don’t think the solution is more hoops.
usui 1 days ago [-]
I don't think ads should be illegal because companies have a right to try to send me information or inform me of their products, but I also have a right to block them. The problem is that client-side computing seems to be lagging behind. Once an effective local video+audio filter is invented, it's either game over for adware or another arms race will begin where humans and classifiers can't tell what an ad is anymore (this has already run to completion on many platforms like Reddit, Amazon, and Google Maps anyway).
Criminalizing information flow is a non-trivial problem that I wouldn't want governments to be in control of.
ndriscoll 1 days ago [-]
Ads and the surveillance ecosystem are more than just a company sending you information. They're paying another company, which that other company uses to provide services below cost (often free, and often creating network lock-in effects), which is clearly an anti-competitive business practice. Ads completely destroy markets they operate in.
politician 1 days ago [-]
"companies have a right to try to send me information"
The problem isn't one company sending information unsolicited, it's when hundreds of thousands of companies flood every communication channel with their own unsolicited advertising.
Email, phone have become unusable channels, not to mention much of the web.
lucrbvi 1 days ago [-]
It would be fun to train a small vision neural network to recognize ads instead of relying on HTML or network requests. I don't know if anyone has done this yet.
nticompass 1 days ago [-]
Man, am I happy that I deleted my Facebook. No regrets.
baking 17 hours ago [-]
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.
askvictor 17 hours ago [-]
This exists for facebook.
ssernikk 16 hours ago [-]
Can you give us a link or something?
dzonga 1 days ago [-]
the tragedy is 'mainstreet' runs on Facebook.
not shitter, google but fb. some local business don't even have their own sites but maintain an insta / fb page.
zamadatix 1 days ago [-]
Shitter? Edit: Ah, I assume you're referring to X (previously Twitter -> shitter taunt)
Finnucane 1 days ago [-]
Xitter.
jm4 1 days ago [-]
100%. Personally, I hate Meta and I don't use their apps. There's so much bullshit and fake news on there it's not even funny. But my business uses FB and Insta because they deliver results.
I can get my content in front of tons of people for a pittance. I can upload a list of my best customers and run a lookalike campaign. I can run a re-targeting campaign on lapsed regulars. I can spend $16 to generate $1000. It's like fishing with dynamite.
Think about the type of person who uses FB. They don't care about ads. They don't care that it's fake content. They don't care that at least half the feed is AI slop. They just keep scrolling, clicking and buying.
Meta didn't create these people. They only got them all to gather in one place and then started selling access. There's a sucker born every minute and they grow up and join FB. This isn't a defense of Meta by any means. They are a horrible company and the world would be better off if business models like theirs were outlawed. The point is nothing is going to change with them unless there's legislative action.
dzonga 1 days ago [-]
ruthless pragmatism.
kotaKat 1 days ago [-]
the ONLY way my county communicates emergency alerts is facebook. it's absolutely wild. how do I know if I'm in a state of emergency? facebook. :)
MrDrMcCoy 1 days ago [-]
Your country has sold your safety to private interests. Demand better from them.
kotaKat 1 days ago [-]
I can't. They spent hours listening to the citizens tell them not to enter a 187(g) with ICE and then they spun around and immediately voted to approve the 187(g). Citizens are powerless, period here, and they keep voting in the worst possible interests because the leopards haven't ate their face yet.
OkayPhysicist 22 hours ago [-]
The really cool thing about local politicians is that unlike higher levels of government, they tend to actually live locally. Means you can pretty easily coordinate things like pleasant sit-down conversations, or shouting obscenities at them while they're trying to do their grocery shopping.
kotaKat 9 hours ago [-]
The really bad thing about that is the "try that in a small town" factor when they just call their friend, the police chief, and next thing you know you're trying to remember the ACLU's phone number for your one phone call (:
MrDrMcCoy 23 hours ago [-]
Sure you can. Make calls. Send letters. Get petitions signed. Start a fundraiser to run local TV and radio ads. Lease a billboard. Be a pest. Don't stop.
bothers 1 days ago [-]
I can't imagine how pissed I would be if my local government told me I need to use and thereby support a website that is fine with showing users ads with AI-generated CSAM.
ravetcofx 1 days ago [-]
It's where the GenX-ers and boomers are at who have money to spend
SV_BubbleTime 1 days ago [-]
I love how Facebook has one reputation, an Instagram has another and they often don’t match at all even though we all know it’s the exact fucking service with a different skin and theme.
makerofthings 1 days ago [-]
What's with this current trend of grouping GenX with Boomers? I am GenX and the difference between us and Boomers is wild. My GenX friends are on here. Boomers I know are afraid of self-checkout machines.
pessimizer 1 days ago [-]
Zoomers don't know the difference. They don't know much (because we destroyed the schools and the media right before whey were born.) They have no idea if there's any difference between the 70s and the 40s.
But to be fair, when I was 19 everybody over 30 was basically the same kind of old to me. Also boomers are the most childish generation in history, and attempt to hide amongst Xers.
The weird thing is that they think that Millennials created their culture. Xers created their culture. Millennials were raised on Disney and N'SYNC.
otterley 1 days ago [-]
> we destroyed the schools and the media right before whey were born
Hey, leave me out of this!
Marsymars 1 days ago [-]
The immediate fix to this is regulatory action.
Facebook has made itself indispensable in a number of areas that are in the public interest and should be treated as a public good for these purposes.
Ads are pollution, and Facebook is forcing people to choose between ingesting pollution and using facebook marketplace, or throwing their used but functional goods in the garbage.
yaportmax 22 hours ago [-]
Are you proposing banning advertising on Facebook? You know this will effectively destroy Facebook, Google, every free ad supported website on the internet?
Marsymars 17 hours ago [-]
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.
yaportmax 15 hours ago [-]
They have a paid ad-free option in Europe. Nobody pays for it at all. Same with every company ever that does that (YouTube, Reddit - this is a tiny fraction of their customers).
Preventing them from blocking adblockers is effectively the same thing as banning ads in that it destroys revenue. Remember that that would impact all parts of the internet, even the companies without the resources of Meta. So maybe a company the scale of Meta weathers a policy like this - but many smaller advertising based businesses would not. So effectively, you would be driving even more consolidation of power in the industry and the acceleration of the decline of the open internet.
Also - no ads on marketplace? I personally do like using marketplace vs the alternative (Craigslist), and personally I would prefer that stays available for me to use (and for free).
Marsymars 7 hours ago [-]
> Preventing them from blocking adblockers is effectively the same thing as banning ads in that it destroys revenue. Remember that that would impact all parts of the internet, even the companies without the resources of Meta.
I'm only suggesting preventing Meta from blocking adblockers. (And the world would likely be a better place if Meta's revenue were destroyed — but I expect they would do just fine without blocking ad-blockers — basically every other property on the web does.)
> Also - no ads on marketplace? I personally do like using marketplace vs the alternative (Craigslist), and personally I would prefer that stays available for me to use (and for free).
So maybe your jurisdiction has multiple online marketplaces and needs less regulation around them. Mine does not. It's akin to having a single consumer-hostile utility/telecom/railroad/etc. provider.
asadotzler 20 hours ago [-]
We were fine before any of that. The web in 2007 was fantastic. Then Google bought DoubleClick, consolidated web advertising and Facebook opened itself to not-edu addresses. Those events were the beginning of the end. Everything that sucks about the web today can be traced back to those two events. I say fuck 'em, roll the clock back to 2007 and let the chips fall where they may. I don't care if that means a Facebook doesn't exist or that Google is just a search engine and not the web's majority shareholder.
sleepybrett 1 days ago [-]
the immediate fix to this is to stop using facebook. If your local government are using it to publish whatever useful infromation, it may be possible to sue them on the grounds that publishing their public 'good' on a private platform exclusively is against some kind of public records law.
Alternatively, eventually they will publish where the audience is, if the audience is not on facebook then they will publish somewhere else.
Marsymars 1 days ago [-]
> the immediate fix to this is to stop using facebook.
Sure, but that relegates my old but perfectly functional macbook to the trash. There's literally no functional alternative to fb marketplace for getting used goods re-used at any kind of scale.
jonesy827 1 days ago [-]
Craigslist?
Marsymars 1 days ago [-]
Effectively non-existent in Canada. Kijiji nominally exists, but I dual list everything I'm trying to get rid of on both kijiji/facebook out of principle and get like 20x more interest on facebook.
qup 1 days ago [-]
IMO you shouldn't get to be in charge of a company just because it became successful.
Facebook is allowed to make ads show on their own product.
I hate their product, but it's theirs.
Marsymars 1 days ago [-]
> IMO you shouldn't get to be in charge of a company just because it became successful.
In a macro sense, the prerogative there is really up to the public. Companies only exist in the first place because the public has granted them the legal and social framework to exist, and the public can adjust that framework as they so choose.
In a more specific sense, the math there changes once a company makes itself indispensable to the public good. There are any number of analogies I could run with, but I'll go with the analogy of a landfill. Suppose all the landfills in your city have been privatized, have a habit of burning garbage, and employ armed thugs to prevent any visitors to the landfill from wearing masks. If you've got a truckload of garbage to dispose of, you can either ingest burning garbage fumes, or dump it on the side of the road somewhere. It's absolutely in the public's interest to regulate the landfills' behaviour to prevent them from both burning garbage and from stopping people from wearing masks when they visit the landfill.
underlines 11 hours ago [-]
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.
la_fayette 1 days ago [-]
ok thanking the team for this work over the years. i hope yt will stay ad-free :-)
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?
Gareth321 12 hours ago [-]
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.
martheen 13 hours ago [-]
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.
breakingcups 13 hours ago [-]
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?
t23414321 12 hours ago [-]
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).
nla 8 hours ago [-]
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.
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
corford 10 hours ago [-]
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.
zelphirkalt 13 hours ago [-]
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.
mediumsmart 9 hours ago [-]
Anyone, including me, gets what they deserve when loading Facebook.
dombiscoff 16 hours ago [-]
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.
SubiculumCode 1 days ago [-]
This does seem like an area where AI could help respond to changes quickly.
ryan_glass 16 hours ago [-]
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.
jFriedensreich 10 hours ago [-]
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.
hollow-moe 1 days ago [-]
This doesn't set a good precedent unfortunately... Hello to that Google guy that just got tasked to do the same with Youtube.
Good4boothee 1 days ago [-]
I dread the day YT finally decides it is cost effective to embed ads directly in video stream. I think Twitch is/was experimenting with it.
shiandow 1 days ago [-]
I kind of hope it pushes people to use alternatives, because allowing your work to be violated by ads seems insane.
But probably not.
kaicianflone 7 hours ago [-]
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.
conradfr 1 days ago [-]
Not sure detailing how Facebook demoralized them is the best idea.
mattrighetti 1 days ago [-]
Well, uBlock is entirely open source so...
aqme28 10 hours ago [-]
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.
trencedamp 14 hours ago [-]
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
gblargg 12 hours ago [-]
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.
molticrystal 1 days ago [-]
If anybody want to take a crack at fixing and maintaining the issue, while the team has been worn out to the treads, they are still open to pull requests [0], here is the statement that is alluded to in the article:
>paintboth1234 uBO Team wrote:
>The project is FOSS. Anyone else who wants to deal with this disgusting site is free to make pull requests with working solutions themselves.
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.
walrus01 23 hours ago [-]
I wonder if instead of blocking the facebook ads, in a continual game of whack-a-mole with facebook changing things, there would be a way to accept the ads and then generate a white opaque box overlay where the ad is rendered in the page.
From the point of view of the ad server the ad has been successfully loaded and displayed, the overlay would occur exclusively in the browser rendering engine client side with no communication back to the ad server.
rldjbpin 12 hours ago [-]
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.
matheusmoreira 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
dwedge 10 hours ago [-]
Guessing the AI written article doesn't add much that the title doesn't already reveal. Read the first few paragraphs and closed it
It is an interesting experiment. Ads on my network are mostly blocked, but wife did notice a spike on her FB stuff. Now that she knows how nice ( edit: well, not automatically awful ) net is without ads, lets see if accepts the trade off.
bmurphy1976 1 days ago [-]
All the more reason to block Facebook completely.
OroPla 1 days ago [-]
I have to admit that I never got to visit facebook in all my life, since my browser add-ons made it so the site would never properly load. I'm not sure whether I've been missing out or dodging a bullet.
beardyw 1 days ago [-]
You have missed nothing.
SillyUsername 14 hours ago [-]
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?
ChocolateGod 14 hours ago [-]
Most people aren't going to pay for an AdBlocker.
fsuts 1 days ago [-]
Facebook and instagram constantly email me trying to entice me to use the app. As I haven’t used it for years.
I think it’s purely to massage their Active Monthly User numbers to show growth.
zuhsetaqi 1 days ago [-]
> I think it’s purely to massage their Active Monthly User numbers to show growth.
I don't think so. They want you to use the App because through the they have way more ways to track you.
nothercastle 1 days ago [-]
The app is a back door to your phone. It will vacuum all the data of it if allowed.
nottorp 11 hours ago [-]
Wait, but 95% of "content" on Facebook is an ad. So what would be left if you blocked all ads? :)
yaportmax 22 hours ago [-]
Controversial but honest question: How do anti-ads people propose the free open internet monetizes itself?
boneskull 21 hours ago [-]
I don’t have any proposal because it’s not my problem to solve. I’m no businessman or economist.
The free, open internet keeps chugging along (for better or worse) regardless of how many ads I block. Especially those companies who run ad networks.
Feel free to make a moral judgement on those who block ads, because most everyone who is blocking ads has already made a judgement about online advertising and its surveilling bedfellows.
devilsdata 21 hours ago [-]
Easy. No corporate social media networks. Hobbyists run local light social networks (such as forums) again (like they do currently; see Mastodon, Lemmy), with super efficient SSR HTML that is cheap to host.
colesantiago 20 hours ago [-]
That doesn’t answer their question, like at all.
BenjiWiebe 18 hours ago [-]
Yes it does. Hobbyists are willing to spend their own money, hence their blog doesn't need ads.
Businesses make money by selling products/services, so they don't need money.
Wikipedia is donation supported.
GP is pretty much saying - if it can only survive by running ads, let's do without it.
colesantiago 10 hours ago [-]
> Yes it does. Hobbyists are willing to spend their own money, hence their blog doesn't need ads.
Until it is unsustainable which is the majority of cases due to no funding.
> Wikipedia is donation supported.
The majority of websites are not as big as Wikipedia, let alone having donations in the tens of millions.
The GP talks about Mastodon which hobbyists run and users sign up to instances to have their social identity on.
toot.community, mastodon.cloud and many others are closing down this month due to no funding.
And even some organisations don't want to run instances due to it being expensive. (1.)
Even mozilla.social shut down.
Sure, these services wouldn't run ads, but they can't charge users either which leaves donations as the only way to fund it, and 9.9/10 times it doesn't work.
Using Wikipedia as an example to prove a point about donations makes no sense for everyone else who also contribute to the open web for free.
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.
nemomarx 22 hours ago [-]
Volunteer basis or charge users. Optional subscriptions keep small webforums alive, like HN would probably be fine with some kind of 10/mo thing. Maybe charge a small fee for new accounts?
For things that need to scale past that like very large social media, the question is if that's worth those sites existing.
yaportmax 22 hours ago [-]
First, regarding the idea of charging people to access websites:
This notion is a very Silicon Valley / coastal elite mentality IMO. A significant majority of people on the internet do not and will not pay for anything - largely because most people around the world just don't have the money for stuff like that.
The data on this is pretty consistent - take Netflix for example. A majority of Netflix users choose the cheaper ad supported tier, even though it is very easy and only marginally more expensive to switch to the non-ad supported tier. And this is already filtering to the subset of people who are willing and able to pay for a streaming subscription to begin with. The same case exists for Reddit -> you can pay to have ads removed, but only 1% of users do.
I see what you mean by Hacker News, but it's not a great example, since there are currently no ads and it's free. It's provided by Y Combinator, which monetizes via investing in startups (not something all internet businesses can reliably just start doing). For example - how would Reddit monetize? You cannot really expect people on Reddit all to be willing to pay to use it. And if some were - the whole value of a network is its scale -> so the drop in users would effectively kill the site. That's why there are no subscription only forums out there (at least none that I know of).
With regards to your second point of if these social media sites should even exist in the first place -> that's where you the consumer get to decide. If you don't get value from it, just don't use it. People who do get value from it -> use it. If enough people collectively decide it's not valuable, then the website becomes irrelevant (see Google+ and MySpace).
This is where I get very confused by anti ads people - show me a reliable alternative that is proven to work. Show me that people across the world, not just in San Francisco or London, can and will pay to access these websites/apps. And I'm not just talking about Meta - what about every random small website you have ever accessed that is ad supported? What about news websites like BBC? Or independent content creators who monetize via Instagram / YouTube ads? What about that wiki for that favorite video game of yours? Or that cooking blog? Don't get me wrong - I hate seeing ads as much as the next guy - but I can't really picture a realistic alternative.
nemomarx 22 hours ago [-]
I do some volunteer time on a small web forum, and we have subscription options on there. It pays for server costs reasonably fine, if not dev time for new features or anything. Users come from lots of places around the world, although the discussion is still mostly in English. It is optional, but the number of power users willing to pay for it covers the rest. You could also look at SomethingAwful as a reasonable strategy?
If people love a community and like spending time on it, they'll be willing to help keep it running and avoid shutting down. You don't get any real profit, but do you need that to run a website? And if people don't love it enough to pay for it, you do have to wonder if it really needs to exist.
I think Reddit could get away with their reddit pro and paying for awards deal, honestly. They would need to rely more on volunteer labor and volunteer development, but a site could exist like that. I assume it's how Lemmy and Lobsters run?
yaportmax 22 hours ago [-]
This sounds great, but can you lay out for me how people on Facebook and Instagram are going to volunteer to get access to it for free? What are the mechanics of this?
nemomarx 22 hours ago [-]
What I mean is something like those sites could be developed and moderated by volunteers, to be clear, to cut down on operating costs. The users would be a good pool to draw from for this and if you like, the site can dole out subscription features to them in exchange for that?
In my view the problems are that we scale past the point of volunteer moderation being practical, we want to pay for full time devs and so on for the sites, and we want the operation to somehow also make a profit. If you view it more as a hobby that you sink some money into to keep it alive, the economics on a small site can be much more reasonable. Think of an individual blogger and their comment section - the blogger might naturally pay some hundreds a year for hosting on their own, as part of that hobby impulse.
Waterluvian 22 hours ago [-]
You make things that cost money cost money? I don't think I really understand the premise of the question.
yaportmax 22 hours ago [-]
See my response to the other guy who replied -> remove the free ad supported tier and people will not pay and the network will cease to exist.
Waterluvian 22 hours ago [-]
Thats pretty silly. It existed before ads.
I think at best your perspective is “threatening me with a good time.” There’s really nothing online I value that can only exist because of millions of free users.
throwaway_95283 22 hours ago [-]
from people without ad blockers, but honestly facebook is not the free open internet.
colesantiago 20 hours ago [-]
The real answer, like with any service in the real world is to charge for it.
That is the only way to keep any service online sustainable without ads.
There are also donations, but that can only take you so far.
Things cost money, server costs and domain costs rise, bandwidth gets expensive as bots and AI agents surge and scrape websites.
It is the only way, without having ads all over the place.
eur0pa 15 hours ago [-]
The internet, its forums, chats, and rings were just fine until techbros came into the picture
slim 22 hours ago [-]
government subsidy
sparcpile 20 hours ago [-]
They don't. Trying to monetize it was mistake #1.
Mistake #2 was letting the tech bros anywhere near it.
vachina 1 days ago [-]
uBlock hit them where it hurts. Facebook's entire existence hinges on serving ads.
stevenicr 23 hours ago [-]
Can you (ublock, privacy badger, etc) at least block the videos / animations auto-playing all over the screen to give me some control over which ads steal my focus and time?
Stopping the movement of all things unless click / tap to play would be a huge adblock win in my book.
hexagonwin 10 hours ago [-]
video autoplay can be blocked in firefox with a builtin feature, though i can't test if it works for facebook
pino83 12 hours ago [-]
Good news!!
Don't spend massive amount of time in sth that doesn't deserve to exist.
One of four extensions I run, I hope they never give up. A while back they mentioned it being harder and harder to maintain.
dotcoma 9 hours ago [-]
They should tell their users to get off of Facebook.
Glyptodon 24 hours ago [-]
TBH Facebook makes it so you can't even copy and open links or highlight text properly - it's 100% hostile and keeping up with that is a lot of effort that could be put to better use.
wormius 16 hours ago [-]
I stopped trying to block it ages ago, since it was reacted* horribly anytime I tried to block ads... :(
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.
JamesSwift 1 days ago [-]
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
CarpeNecopinus 14 hours ago [-]
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.
bpatch 1 days ago [-]
Also good to note that even if you were somehow able to block ads on Facebook, that only stops the visible output. The aggressive data collection continues as you scroll and interact with content.
matheusmoreira 12 hours ago [-]
Can't wait for an ad blocking AI model to show up.
sehw 17 hours ago [-]
Facebook deleted my 20yo account for "being a bot suddenly". Let them rot.
OhMeadhbh 1 days ago [-]
Oh! The Irony! This page doesn't load when your ad blocker is turned on.
delduca 1 days ago [-]
Not for me (Wipr2 on Safari), loads fine without ADS.
Pooge 1 days ago [-]
Are you not using uBlock Origin?
squigz 1 days ago [-]
It works here.
usern20260720 1 days ago [-]
try loading it with JS off
Markoff 1 days ago [-]
works fine for me with Vivaldi+uBlock Origin
OhMeadhbh 1 days ago [-]
Apropos of nothing, I noted @markoff said they liked John Markoff in the 80s. As a complete aside, may I recommend to readers Markoff's book "What the Dormouse Said." From 2005, it's a deep-dive into the relationship between 60s counter-culture and 70s / 80s era microcomputer movers and shakers. Want to read about Doug Engelbart tripping balls in the Santa Cruz Mountains? It's in there. Or maybe I just made that up in a LSD fueled trip to the center of my mind. But that KIND of thing is in there. Abbie Hoffman somehow influenced Steve Jobs fascination with PARC derived WIMP systems. An image of Richard Nixon getting his face punched was burned into the original PC BIOS ROMs. Tim O'Leary developed software in the 80s. One of these is not true, but you have to read the book to find out which.
Hot take: uBlock origin could insert even MORE ads into Facebook? Discouraging people to use Facebook, and also make some money on the side.
(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
doodlebugging 1 days ago [-]
Maintain a list of recent ads blocked in that browsing session and redirect all the ads blocked during that session from previous sites visited, especially autoplaying videos, every time someone clicks on a Facebook link.
That would be funny.
A1kmm 23 hours ago [-]
Ironically given the purported theme of the 'digitalescapetools.com' site, it's behind Cloudflare, and with settings that initially blocked my from accessing it with latest Firefox on Linux (in i3 with a vertically split screen, with the browser taking up part of the screen). It was consistently giving a Cloudflare error that my browser is not supported.
In case anyone else faces the same: it worked when I resized the browser window and reloaded.
nelsonic 1 days ago [-]
Very simple: just block all Meta domains at your local DNS. Nobody needs Meta. And if there is something you desperately need to see on one of their platforms temporarily switch your DNS.
IcyFoxe 23 hours ago [-]
What about using AI to detect and remove ads? For all we know they might be using AI to get past the uBlock filters.
My setup: separate profile for Facebook. Targeted advertising turned off. FB domains blocked on main profile.
Not perfect, but it works.
TrinaryWorksToo 20 hours ago [-]
Does Fluff Busting Purity still remove Facebook ads?
classified 7 hours ago [-]
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.
zeafoamrun 1 days ago [-]
I misread the domain as "digital cesspools" and that is indeed what Facebook is. If you're still on there you're going to get subjected to their abusive practices.
sunaookami 1 days ago [-]
But the filterlist does not come from uBo, it comes from Easylist?
maxwellito 1 days ago [-]
Hot take: uBlock origin could insert even MORE ads into Facebook? Discouraging people to use Facebook, and also make some money on the side.
(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
Rebelgecko 1 days ago [-]
Other adblock tools have gone the route of allowing "good" ads through and only blocking "bad" ads. Of course the definition of good vs bad might depend on who sponsors the dev.
1 days ago [-]
gfrecvh 23 hours ago [-]
If you're on Facebook, you deserve the ads
alex1138 18 hours ago [-]
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.
Gormo 9 hours ago [-]
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.
surgical_fire 1 days ago [-]
The best way to do this is block Facebook entirely.
ImHereToVote 1 days ago [-]
I don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Because the ad ecosystem has two sides. I used to think my ISP could just magically support IPv6 and didn't need routing protocols or peering agreements, too. (They support it now)
Websites with ads need to satisfy the ad buyers. This means running a bunch of JavaScript that's adversarial to the website and fingerprints both the website and the browser to determine where and to whom the ad is actually shown. It's like a cloudflare bot challenge is happening behind the scenes. Of course all this stuff doesn't happen on the website's own domain, or the website could manipulate it.
And the ad that's originally delivered might not actually be the ad, but might be a script that fetches the real ad from a different server, if the incentives line up that way. Imagine you have a contract to advertise on a site, but someone else wants to advertise on the same site and pays you to forward their ad. Ad margins are razor thin, you'll do this for $0.00001 profit per impression. And your buyer might be doing the same thing to their customer. It's all a huge mess.
gwbas1c 1 days ago [-]
I think that just goes to prove that content providers and ad providers could defeat ad blockers if they worked together. (And perhaps made the ads less offensive so people don't have motivation to block them.)
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Ad networks hate content providers. I guess it comes with the territory when you're trying to operate a money printer - you hate anyone who poses an obstacle to your money printing.
HDThoreaun 1 days ago [-]
Well facebook just beat the ad blockers without working together with their ad customers
ImHereToVote 1 days ago [-]
It's ironic how trust would solve the issue and ads would become impossible to remove. Trust comes at a huge premium of course.
inigyou 1 days ago [-]
Really shows how shady the whole industry is, even to itself.
stochastic-parr 1 days ago [-]
uBlock can filter arbitrary elements from a website, no chance that every company spends as much as facebook on making writing rules hard
account42 1 days ago [-]
uBlock filter list authors are however also not going to spend as much effort as they have been spending on Facebook on every random site that is currently covered by generic rules that catch entire ad networks.
benj111 1 days ago [-]
Trust?
In ye old days, you had newspapers who sold ads, and had to at least satisfy their customers. What the newspaper advertised reflected on the newspaper, and where the advertiser advertised, reflected on the advertiser. Now we have a situation where no one is accountable. Spammy ad sites are a thing, because there isn't that direct relationship between advertiser and website.
jefftk 1 days ago [-]
Advertisers don't trust websites to display their ads. If a site takes full control of their ads experience and hosts everything first-party I agree it's hard to block (site can keep changing things to thwart the ad blocker), but then it's also hard for the advertisers to see whether they're being ripped off. Which means most won't advertise on the site, and the site makes much less money than if they remain in the current ad ecosystem (even counting that some ads will be blocked).
(I used to work in this area, but my knowledge is ~4y out of date)
Ekaros 1 days ago [-]
Most sites are not in business of running ad marketplace. They are in content production and SEO(as in pulling views). I don't think at scale they could operate it would be worth to be ad marketplace. Or would they get the customers(advertisers).
nemomarx 1 days ago [-]
Content based ads work fine for this. If you have a site about some topic, advertisers for that audience can just pay you some amount to put their ad in your posts or embed an image.
Networks are only necessary if you want to run new ads for every year or tie into their browsing history or other algorithmic stuff. But if someone wants to pay you 3k to run a banner ad for a few weeks that would be pretty easy to just embed.
cookiengineer 1 days ago [-]
> Most sites are not in business of running ad marketplace.
You don't have to run a marketplace. Back then, people were calling via phone to put an ad into the newspaper. The same concept can still apply today.
You can just place an ad _where you actually want it_ instead of having a shitty decision engine decide it for you. Marketing budgets are messed up all over the place since social media, because they're really inefficient in finding the customers that actually wants to buy their stuff.
If you don't believe me, just take a look at facebook, they're trying to shove ads up your feed 99% of the time. It's a feed of ads, not a feed of "friends" anymore. Good luck trying to catch the 1% of posts that were actually the reason why you used the platform in the first place.
johanyc 14 hours ago [-]
> since social media, because they're really inefficient in finding the customers that actually wants to buy their stuff.
Is it really? I would think targeted ads are way more efficient than traditional non targeted ads. Eg I've never seen menstrual pad (something I would never use) ads online.
> take a look at facebook, they're trying to shove ads up your feed
That's the consumers experience, not advertisers
dspillett 1 days ago [-]
This is to an extent why facebook can make the ads harder to block, they control the ad infrastructure (or at least some of it) as well as the app infrastructure.
For many sites that is not the case, running adtech infrastructure is not even close to their primary business and taking the task on individually isn't worth the admin cost. Companies wanting to advertise don't just come along and say “my product is aligned with your content, could I pay for one of your advert slots?” because they don't want to just target the people who are actively looking at relevant content. They want to follow people who look at relevant content around like little stalkers, so the adverts can be put in front of you even when you've moved on to looking at less relevant content - and that requires tracking between sites which a smaller individual site can not do on its own or have the clout to negotiate a good exchange with other sites with.
ImHereToVote 12 hours ago [-]
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.
cptaj 1 days ago [-]
I'm not saying this is a rallying call to help but...
partloyaldemon 1 days ago [-]
I use the “natural” method for blocking Facebook ads.
croes 12 hours ago [-]
At every FB developer working on that:
You are definitely the baddies.
nepthar 1 days ago [-]
This is a perfect use case for AI, no?
Zardoz84 14 hours ago [-]
But there are people who keep using FB?
yreg 16 hours ago [-]
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?
thinkingtoilet 1 days ago [-]
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.
drcongo 1 days ago [-]
It's easy, just block every Facebook owned domain there is. Works for me.
1over137 1 days ago [-]
Where do you get the list of "every Facebook owned domain"? Can you share?
why not just run a 24/7 agent to do the work for them?
seritools 1 days ago [-]
why not "just" do it for them?
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
either the agents are not good enough to do it, or they cost too much, or perhaps they refuse (i.e. seeing it as trying to subvert the intended function of the site or something).
brcmthrowaway 19 hours ago [-]
Does pihole still work?
sciencesama 1 days ago [-]
a killer use case of ai would be an AI adblocker !!
butt_her_churn 16 hours ago [-]
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!
mattrighetti 1 days ago [-]
I'm more surprised by the fact that people still use Facebook
skeeter2020 1 days ago [-]
remember the amazing show "community"?
Elroy: “I got a job through LinkedIn.”
Annie: “What? That’s crazy! People use LinkedIn?”
Elroy: “No, LinkedIn hired me to help figure out why people don’t use it.”
Capricorn2481 1 days ago [-]
That's an underrated season, imo. Keith David is fantastic.
HackerThemAll 1 days ago [-]
Those childish comments are so funny. 3 billion people use Facebook regularly, and there are folks that deem themselves superior to all others who claim "I know nobody who uses Facebook". XD
dudhsudhd 1 days ago [-]
Christ, pipe down little buddy. These “aha gotcha!” responses belong on reddit—but since you’re craving for one too, I’ll bite:
“It’s not a childish comment in the slightest, and most definitely not a claim of superiority in any way either. It’s simply a fact. I, too, know a grand total of 0 persons who use Facebook. Three billion people may use it regularly but all the people I know are in the other, let’s say >vast majority<, of FIVE billion people who don’t even care about Zuckerberg’s billboard.”
HackerThemAll 10 hours ago [-]
Did you get triggered so much to have to create an account to write that comment? I think of us two it's you who need to relax XD
curt15 1 days ago [-]
"What do you do for work?"
"I find ways to defeat adblockers"
arendtio 1 days ago [-]
Actually, 10 years ago, I knew someone with roughly that job description (neither Google nor Facebook).
devilll 1 days ago [-]
Be evil.
RajT88 19 hours ago [-]
I still do not see ads on Facebook. But it also does not work most of the time with all the adblockers on.
I hate that so many people I know use it for things.
nojito 22 hours ago [-]
Not that difficult to defeat. A local llm can just update the blocking rules dynamically.
I made my own extension by essentially prompting to create a version of ublock origin with a button that uses a local llm to dynamically generate block lists and update them.
Another reminder that facebook is abhorrent and not worth your time.
ck2 1 days ago [-]
I haven't been on Facebook for years
Why are people on anything meta or musk?
Then again I figured we'd be back to personal blogs by now since "AI" can set one up in seconds
DJBunnies 1 days ago [-]
Some of us plan events / engage socially.
bastardoperator 16 hours ago [-]
What's your favorite type of event to plan on Facebook?
classified 1 days ago [-]
This barf bag of a company is making the internet a war zone. If at all possible, the best you can do is to never touch their toxic mess.
alex1138 16 hours ago [-]
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
j45 1 days ago [-]
Blocking ads sounds like a job for AI
infl8ed 20 hours ago [-]
I purchased StopTheMadness purely to stop autoplaying videos in Facebook marketplace
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
Assuming you insist on using facebook you can proxy it, using a simple script that removes all ads prior to serving. The problem of course is that this is not cheap. Easier to just not use facebook.
psd1 1 days ago [-]
I'm keen to see this simple script, and to understand why it's simple given that ublock origin finds it hard.
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
Ublock origin doesnt use javascript. The script just involves a tree traversal of the dom and removal of any node that says ad.
The issue is facebook obfuscates selectors so you cant easily do it the way ublock prefers.
psd1 1 days ago [-]
Sorry, still don't understand. The dom is not complete until JavaScript has run, no? So the ublock extension can do dom traversal on the rendered page, but the proxy can only operate at the request level. I assume your not running a headless browser on your squid box, lol. I'm aware that a proxy can tweak html and js, but the js will be challenging to analyse statically. If you're only blocking requests to ad domains, then presumably most people would just block them in DNS. So i still don't understand what the proxy gains you.
amazingamazing 1 days ago [-]
No, not a traditional one. You would render the entire page in your server, remove the ads, copy the modified html and your client would get ad free copy. You are not blocking anything in the traditional sense. Ask claude to do it, it works.
psd1 23 hours ago [-]
Thanks, now i understand you. I didn't think of that because it's insane, but maybe i am just old.
classified 7 hours ago [-]
Insane is the new normal these days.
1 days ago [-]
shevy-java 15 hours ago [-]
Or stop using Facebook. It is called CIAbook for a reason anyway, run by the ultimate diva Suckerberg.
bloqs 1 days ago [-]
Ublock Origin's creators are absolute god-kings for their consistent work to help me (for free) not be forced to engage in psychological conditioning all day via my eyeballs. I never used to have an issue with ads, but because of capitalism, they simply cannot exist without cancerously taking over everything. They start as a banner, then before you know it, you have full screen unskippable paywalls to the content, with extreme discomfort placed on the user with deliberately engaging bright colours and sudden sounds played without my consent. Sure, if I like the product such as facebook as a free platform I might consider a premium licence for some conveniences, but adverts are simply the direct representation of societal rot for profit. I paid for netflix, then eventually they started showing me ads on netflix. It never ever stops.
bamboozled 12 hours ago [-]
Honestly who still uses Facebook ?
Dwedit 23 hours ago [-]
Would probably need a full userscript at this point?
everyone 8 hours ago [-]
I mean who gives a shit, I just hope this doesnt encourage Youtube to fight for thee same outcome.
ReptileMan 12 hours ago [-]
I mean this is literally a task in which AIs excel - figure out how to filter this thing from this code.
tamimio 1 days ago [-]
I mean the ultimate solution is block fecebook entirely and any and all its other companies/domains, but I think the best approach is not to block ads, but to block everything and only let the text and other useable html code out, that can’t be countered as your filter is not going after specific match they try to hide behind some long tags, rather than blocking all and just pass the readable useful buttons.
throwyonion 1 days ago [-]
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surcap526 7 hours ago [-]
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cineticdaffodil 9 hours ago [-]
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XzetaU8 13 hours ago [-]
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harlanji 1 days ago [-]
Using ad blockers is of poor character anyway. That's their chosen business model and if we don't accept their terms then we don't need to use their service.
I am happy to pay for an Ad Free experience on services that offer it. We should all send letters to companies who we want to pay to give us an ad free experience. "I don't want to pay" is an indefensible position because everything is an energy exchange. "There is no free lunch." If we don't want to pay with money then we can pay with attention to ads, and hacking the display to take without giving in return is corrupt.
Buttons840 1 days ago [-]
I think my computer should display information the way I want it to, and that's okay!
I do pay for the energy that powers my monitor and CPU after all.
tonyhart7 1 days ago [-]
I know this is gonna be unpopular take
but for modern social media to function, they need showing ads to pay creator
many people livelihood depends on it, creator make content in turn of revenue sharing that user get for free
SoftTalker 1 days ago [-]
Nobody owes creators a dime. Creators need to earn their income by producing something worth consuming, and being on a platform that is acceptable to the consumer.
And the world was better off before "modern social media."
wing-_-nuts 1 days ago [-]
I get what you're saying, and in the beginning days of the internet, I hoped that people would adopt a payment system where a user could distribute a pool of money to the pages that they visited, in order to pay for server uptime, content creation, etc.
Of course, companies took the easy way out. Just serve ads. Until that got absolutely obnoxious and downright dangerous, then users started blocking them enmass.
Well of course, we're now in a place where the internet is mostly paid for with ads, and the content creators that want to get paid up front (substack, WSJ, FT, etc) want crazy high amounts for subscription fees. I'm not a trader, so I do not get enough benefit to make it worth while to sub to those sites.
So I guess I'll keep blocking ads for my own security, and bypass paywalls with archiver sites. Shame. It could have been different, but this is the bed they made, and they can lay in it.
zetanor 1 days ago [-]
I'd pay a few dollars a month to use a service without ads and without surveillance. Services don't offer this and creators are staying on those services, so fuck them.
metabagel 1 days ago [-]
I have YouTube Premium, so I don't see ads on YouTube.
kakacik 1 days ago [-]
AFAIK creators these days earn via additional channels like merch, tiktok etc. Direct views of some videos aren't prime for quite some time.
People dont have issue with creators getting paid, they have issue with absolutely evil platforms that host that and scoop up most of the value between creators and consumers. Platforms that willingly promote ie racist content because it simply drives more views/clicks.
Markoff 1 days ago [-]
TIL there are creators on FB, I thought it's social network for people to meet friends or for companies/restaurants to present themselves, but creators? that sounds more like Youtube
sumtechguy 1 days ago [-]
There are. Several model maker communities use it to put stuff up for sale. It is a nice way to find other model makers.
The reason I joined FB no longer exists for me. I remember why I stopped talking to many of the 'friends' I had. I silenced all of them and only join interesting groups now. Even then I only log in once or twice a year.
ghm2199 11 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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...
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.
>I draw a line on advertising for myself
the typical phrase in English, "I draw the line at advertising for myself" would mean that is the thing that has gone too far, something you will not accept. you used a slightly different phrase, but it is still where I draw the line.
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.
Plex lifetime pass is now over $700 dollars
My dashcam that used to let me use the app to locally pull down videos now requires an account to view the files on my camera that is putting out it's own password protected wifi network, just so the company can harvest more data and track me easier. This device cost several hundred dollars.
Streaming services introduce ads anyway and increase the cost.
You used to be able to buy complete functional software like Microsoft Office and the Adobe suite.
All this is because companies cannot be statically profitable unless they're entirely privately owned. All companies need to constantly increase profit, which means even if you're happy to pay for something, eventually the company will squeeze you hard enough that you no longer want to pay for it anymore.
On my home network? Jellyfin all day except for random encoding issues.
But people also really like to get things for free. And there’s plenty of interest in exploiting this fact to get something out of those people without them knowing it.
If you make the kind of content that costs a lot to create but almost nothing to copy, you have a dilemma: Set the price too high, and you aren't getting any money from the poor at all at all, even though they're willing to pay far above your copying costs. Set the price too low, and you aren't extracting as much profit from the rich as you could be.
Ads let you serve the same product to everybody, regardless of income, because they pay for the product indirectly, by buying the advertised products. Rich people have more money and buy more products, so they, in effect, pay more for the same content. poor people pay less.
I think this is a beautiful system in many ways. Ads give us access to all the world's music, plenty of educational content (on Youtube), including from the world's topmost universities, international texting, picture messaging, phone and video calls of unlimited duration, even some movies and TV. And it's all free, which it wouldn't be if not for ads.
If we banned ads, many people just wouldn't be able to afford to talk to their family or listen to their favorite artists every day.
The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology. It's not ads that make it possible. Ads enable market capture that prevents other low-cost alternatives from proliferating. They raise costs to society.
we still have it. WhatsApp video chat is the most widely used video chat app.
> we already had p2p calling with Skype; we've regressed in that area
Skype was barely present on mobile and got acquired by Microsoft before Mobile took off. Then it was as good as dead. So we have in fact progressed massively that anyone in Asia with a crappy handset and a decent connection can still have a video chat with anyone else in the world.
> Music, movies, TV could be mostly free if we had retained the original 28 year copyright period
And world would be so much better if no one was greedy. The fact is that we have not retained original copyright period and the reasons are beyond adtech, so what are you gonna do about it? Also, that doesn't solve the problem of long-tail content which is massively entertaining.
> The things you list are all free or nearly free to run with modern technology
Lol wut? Try running your own Youtube and you will discover massive technical problems (storage, network bandwidth, content moderation, discovery etc).
> Ads enable market capture
Google tried YT premium and look at its adoption numbers. It starts at 89 INR in India (less than a USD) and yet its adoption is minimal. 89 INR is cheap for at least a few hundred million Indians. People simply prefer ads over paying up.
Ads don't make it possible for people to have cheap access to movies. The fact that it costs literally nothing (c.f. bittorrent) to distribute them does. Especially for older recordings that were already paid for generations ago. It actually costs more resources to centralize distribution to serve ads.
Yes it is expensive to run a giant worldwide monopoly on video distribution. But that's not necessary. And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.
People taking ads over paying is exactly why they are anticompetitive. They allow below cost services, destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service, leading to everything having ads and surveillance, eventually driving up costs of everything.
It may be true that if they just put a little bit of fecal matter in the soup that they could give the soup away for free... but why would I want to eat shit soup? Even if you were to tell me that rationally there's so little shit in the soup that I couldn't notice the taste, and that there'd be no statistically significant health risks from it, why would I eat it? "Both rich and poor pay the same amount for this soup" doesn't sway me either.
And never mind that me, looking from the outside inward, I see them cranking up the shit percentage constantly.
If banning fecal matter in soup means the world has less soup, I've already made peace with that consequence.
>phone and video calls of unlimited duration,
Perhaps I'm so old now that I've lost the plot, but my phone calls (what few I make) are paid for explicitly and directly. Them being unmetered has nothing to do with advertisement revenue. Care to explain?
I believe that we should, generally, as a society, discourage communication in bad faith, and ads very, very easily fall into that category. So perhaps in a local sense it is worth it for the reasons you suggest, but I think the mass dependence of our society on advertising makes our lives worse.
You were splitting that cost with the advertisers.
This is not a defence of advertising, just a reality check on this bad example.
In the US, at least, I think the lack of competition (almost monopoly pricing in most areas) has led to exactly the opposite situation - plenty of profits for the cable providers.
Do you have evidence for the claim that the monthly fees are not enough to cover the cost of providing the service?
I tried to find numbers but couldn’t, so I’m left with a macroeconomic argument. Better details would be welcome.
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.
The ads themselves don’t do that. Some networks running those ads might.
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.
What incentive does that mechanism have to spur innovation for government-run Facebook? Does the government fund two Facebooks and scale funding based on market share? Or, like what virtually always happens in government, does it metastasize, realize it's actual "customer" isn't its "users" but is actually the government itself, and act accordingly to protect and grow its own budget?
Everything about a subscription model is better. If it sucks, don't pay for it, and if no one thinks its a worthwhile bargain then they run out of money and it dies. Efficient. If people do like it, then great.
> Steal from everyone (taxation) [...] give the money to government-run Facebook, and everything will be great because Government
Not touching this. As an exercise, take it upon yourself to figure out how much it cost per meter (or, I assume more familiar to you -- football field) for the road you last used, and where that money came from.
> government-run Facebook?
Yes. But, it depends what you think Facebook is, which I'm assuming isn't what Meta does with Facebook. They are in the business of collecting, profiling, and selling to data brokers, and influence to foreign countries or private interests. All of this is of negative value to both end user and society. In a world with a "government run Facebook", it wouldn't exist.
So what is the service Facebook actually provides then? A way to manage communities and events. A way to find, connect, and communicate with others. And it would absolutely be a good case for something that could easily surpass the value of services provided by "facebook", if done right, without incentive beyond making good services.
Not sure if you've noticed or paid much attention. None of the most important services do product development guided by <improving the service>. Google wouldn't have replaced Play Music. Your search result might be immediately useful but that would make you move on. I'd also wager that your YouTube client doesn't automatically skip the sponsor segments.
I don’t have Facebook or use any social media (except LinkedIn) and yet I still plan events, connect, and communicate with others. I have not touched a mainstream social media site since probably 2013.
We don't need Facebook, and we especially don’t need to spend a bunch of money on a poorly run government Facebook either.
Out of curiosity, what brings you here? Also, what is your favorite AI model?
I use Claude but don’t have too strong of an opinion on any specific model provider.
The OP was responding to "government run Facebook?" and the premise is "we need Facebook-style technology to do XYZ things like plan events" but for-profit Facebook fills that need with these negative repercussions: "collecting, profiling, and selling to data brokers, and influence to foreign countries or private interests." and then argues that it follows that a government run Facebook should exist to handle the things that the OP is asserting are necessary without any of the identified downside.
The flaw in the premise is that you need Facebook or a government fun Facebook to do any of the things the OP suggested. You don't. And I'd argue not only should we not have a government fun Facebook, we shouldn't have Facebook or other social media to begin with.
I'm sure the OP is going to come in now and say that wasn't their premise. I'm simply responding to the words that they wrote. No matter how it is framed or how the goalposts are moved, you simply do not need Facebook nor do you need a government run Facebook.
It does, in precisely the way I described. Your comment was not engaging with the point they brought up.
> The flaw in the premise is that you need Facebook or a government fun Facebook to do any of the things the OP suggested.
This is not in their premise. Nobody "needs" it for those things, I will grant and have granted. Regardless, some still "use" it for those things. OP never said people can't replace it with other means to do what Facebook currently does for them, just that they apparently don't want to, as revealed by their use of Facebook for the doings in question. If you still think that's wrong, please point me to the passage in their comment which contradicts it, because I am failing to find it.
> I'm sure the OP is going to come in now and say that wasn't their premise.
Funny. I now wonder if I'm going to be dismissed as a sock puppet.
Ok that's incorrect because I did engage with the point they brought up in that comment, and then even quoted it specifically.
> This is not in their premise. Nobody "needs" it for those things, I will grant and have granted. Regardless, some still "use" it for those things. OP never said people can't replace it with other means to do what Facebook currently does for them, just that they apparently don't want to, as revealed by their use of Facebook for the doings in question. If you still think that's wrong, please point me to the passage in their comment which contradicts it, because I am failing to find it.
If that was their premise I would just reject it off-hand as the equivalent of just saying stuff. People use Facebook. Cows moo. Sometimes it rains on Tuesday. Who cares?
The point isn't whether or not people use or need Facebook, what was in question and being discussed was the negative aspects and whether some other version of a Facebook could be swapped in to have the "good" parts of Facebook without the "bad".
For example:
Underlying this is the presumption that we should have a service like Facebook, and the question is who should run it and what the effects might be. You can see the OP outlining these negative effect here for yourself.My point is I disagree with the need to solve this problem by creating what will inevitably by giant software conflagrations that ultimately, in my view, do not serve any real purpose because not only does the government version serve no purpose, the private market version doesn't either.
If you want to actually challenge my point instead of engaging in "nuh uh that wasn't the premise" you could just say well other people think they need it or really want it and you're just stating an opinion, or something along those lines.
If you really want to play this whole "logical fallacy" game, then I can start demanding sources and specific definitions of words used too and you can spend hundreds of characters defining specific terms so that your own discussion points aren't themselves some variation of a "logical fallacy".
Folks who toss those things around usually don't know how to use them correctly (as we see here with you and others) or they hide behind them when their various points are met with challenges they can't overcome.
“Provide incentive programs and reward those that take on such initiatives.”
We have that too, we call it capitalism. It’s not very unique, but we heavily market it under the “land of opportunity” moniker. Do a thing of value and your reward is the lion’s share of that value. “You get what you’re given” seems to make some countries happy, but I’m sure you can understand the appeal of “you get what you earn”, even if neither of them matches the brochure. The scholars can debate the pros and cons of it, and where it goes wrong, but you’re talking about investment reward structures like it’s a fresh concept coming out of Scandinavia.
On that note, let’s set aside the endless conversation around “government Facebook” and talk foundational: Size, diversity, and population. It’s funny when I see comments from micro->small nation states with relatively homogeneous citizens throwing up their hands like “Everyone should just agree on what to have for dinner, like we do.” Oh I’m sure you’re aware that ‘America be big’, maybe even visited New York and were impressed by all those not-tall non-blonde people waking around, but perhaps without fully appreciating that it alone has a 50% higher population than your whole country. Something more your speed would be the Atlanta metro area, which still has a ~10% higher population. Getting everyone to happily chip in a few bucks on a half pepperoni/vegetarian pizza (or, I assume more familiar to you — “Grøt med smør eller rørte bær”) is a lot easier when everyone can be fed by that pizza.
But that leads to the larger point: we don’t have as much of a problem getting our Norway sized cities to provide various communal welfare services to the local residents, the problem is in scaling that up to 65 Norways.
Or did you have a different menu in mind?
[1] I don't like this talk, I'm just using it as an example.
Nothing can be more irritating than hearing from naive Europeans about the virtue of government while they live in a cradle state, after having demolished their own continent in two world wars and essentially entering into a kind of receivership with the United States. Yes the government paves roads. It also raises armies. Nothing a European would know about. Your continent is under Russian invasion and your leaders are forced to grovel at America's feet, constantly prostrating themselves to a President you clearly despise. It must be nice having such a naive view of government, when your own have been so thoroughly neutered as to be scarcely recognizable as such. It is no wonder you speak of "government-run Facebook" with a lack of irony that in the United States could be mistaken for sarcasm.
Let us see how your faith in government progresses as your society is no longer given the unfettered benefit of American generosity. Let us see as Europe is made to stand on its own two feet if your governments retain their docile nature. But I have faith in you yet. Government may not be your foe. But anyone with any sense of history knows it is not your friend either. Treating government as a self evident solution to every problem is the sort of fantasy only a modern European could conjure.
PS: It is pretty darn cozy in the cradle.
The money just goes into private hands instead. Is that really the better option here? Innovation isn't necessary if you have a de facto monopoly - and frankly, Facebook is a good example; nothing it has done in 10 years was actually an improvement to the service or humanity.
It would be alright to socialize the good parts and get rid of the bad ones.
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.
Hmm curious to know where you live that you still get Youtube-supplied ads with YT Premium?
Because "ad-free" is literally the headline feature.
Unless you're talking about in-video ads and sponsorships added in by the video creators themselves, and then that's not something in YT's control (although they provide the "skip commonly skipped sections" feature in Premium that helps with this).
they can require ad and sponsor-free copies of videos to be uploaded in order to get YT premium revenue.
they control the platform. that they choose not to make the premium experience ad free is up to them
Also why would YT get involved in the content of videos themselves, beyond legal moderation requirements?
That's a slippery slope in itself, and it would just lead to a cat-and-mouse game where creators try to incorporate sponsorships in less obvious/visible ways, which is a net bad thing for the audience.
Now at least creators are required to disclose when their videos contain sponsored segments or paid advertisements. What you propose would take away that accountability.
As it stands, you can see when a video includes ads, and you can choose to not watch it. That's your choice.
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.
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.
And yet somehow I still get 30 minutes of ads before a watching a goddamn movie in a cinema.
> 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 too much for all the services with subscription. Like Spotify, Netflix and others...
However they do not stop tracking you.
That's more like "paying to not see ads" than "paying for content".
Amazon does the same with product ads.
[0] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/416547/youtub...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322556, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
Meanwhile spotify also has at least two autogenerated playlists of the songs you have chosen to play more than a few times. Literally "Here's the songs you recently took an interest in", and they do not fill your front page with that autogenerated playlist!
Because that copy they are shoving in your face is not Informing you of useful Features or Inviting you to try something we made, but is instead managed by the marketing department.
Their incentives would be aligned to users, not advertisers.
The ideological changes alone would be like living in a different world entirely.
Heck, maybe micropayments would become viable at that point.
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
I will add though, that the freemium model does not necessarily have to cease existing. Some platform for written articles can have articles available at no cost, and then put a paywall in front of other articles. I don't see the problem with that. It will be a careful balancing act of content creators, how much is in the freemium section, so that they attract a sufficient number of readers/fans/supporters.
(Disclosure: my employer owns an ad network. Opinions my own.)
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?
What more do you want??
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.
> 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.
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).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
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.
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.
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.
I could not understand how people can watch movie interrupted 10x by an add break.
Not wishing the return of communism, but yeah, I would simply ban all ads. No useful purpose to the society, whatsoever. Treat it like smoking and other drugs. Yes, can fill the coffers, but overall it is detrimental to the society.
If you want info about something you need, there are catalogues, consumer groups, enthusiast forums and internet search in general. Yes, the ads can be used to create new needs. Overall (if you really think what this achieves), that is a bug, not a feature.
Yes, there will be ways to sneak-in ads in a shady way, but that can be prosecuted. And the scale of exposure matters, a lot.
No! This is utterly false! TV for much of American history was about 9 minutes of advertising per hour of content. Then Cable came out with no ads at all. The US does not have a legal limit, so as our culture got more and more hyped about squeezing every single dime out of counterparties, companies have been increasing advertising.
In the 60s, companies were willingly leaving money on the table.
In the UK, you are still limited to only 9 minutes per hour of advertising.
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".
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.
What is the point of communication if not to change what others think?
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.
pumping gas is another one that takes advantage of captivity to force ads. i hate it.
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.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
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.
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).
So I am not sure if all is bad in that sense. Bc it lets the apps for sharing without people having to pay to exist in the first place.
I am not doing any assessment regarding to the toxicity of ads. I am just trying to objectively say that this also spreads "horizontally" software for free in some sense.
Like, the fact that instagram's average revenue per user is around $25 means that instagram ads are, on average, tricking people into buying 100s of dollars of crap they don't need.
If the ads weren't successfully brainwashing people, eventually people would stop buying ads presumably.
... But yes, I agree people will generally choose a "brainwashed consumer" tax to the tune of $300/year over paying instagram $25/year.
So, what's the solution? Advertisement should be illegal, the government should tax everyone a bit more, and taxpayer dollars should go to making ad-free social networks where people can post pictures of their dog.
Like, having highways and electricity and the internet was seen as beneficial, so the government has subsidized a huge amount of infrastructure for those things, to the benefit of all.
If being able to search the largest collection of knowledge ever created, the internet, has value to the people, the government should create or subsidize an ad-free search engine. If communicating has such value, the government should create or subsidize a messaging app that doesn't brainwash the users.
(Technically, the terms are still there but they're called Titles and Statutes and other things that require a bunch of ceremony and agreement to change, not just an email.)
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"
For example, I found out about the local farmer's market in my city via advertisements being hung up around town, and that helped me get fresh produce and find some community. I'm not sure if I ever would have found that farmer's market otherwise.
I also found one job via a "Who's Hiring" hacker news post, and that's obviously an advertisement thread advertising open positions.
Of course, these do not balance out the negative impact of ads, such as advertising credit cards and sports gambling and gacha gambling games to get people into debt, advertising tv shows and movies to waste people's time watching garbage, and generally advertising garbage that makes people who were otherwise happy waste money and time for no real gain in life satisfaction.
I think a lot of people use the term “ad” to refer solely to the latter category. This goes back to the origin of modern advertising (and even earlier with snake oil salesman and charlatans, which were scamming merchants using music and stage shows lol — sound familiar?) and using the term “public relations” as an alternative to “propaganda”.
I'd categorize job postings a bit differently, if Facebook was full of (legitimate) job postings I think it would be less of an issue. I agree on all the gambling stuff you wrote.
And flies eat horse shit because they occasionally get nutrients from it
I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be. (I think average people are making a horrible mistake about this, and are badly cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realize). If my choices are to look at ads or leave Facebook, I'll leave. But there are conversations people have there that I'd rather not lose access to, so... I guess I'd have to partially stick around and campaign for others to leave as well?
That isn't enough for me. I don't just want to not see the ads, I want to stop them being fetched entirely.
There are two big problems with ads.
* The ad network can build up a very complete profile of what you like, dislike, and generally what you're looking at on the web. Yes, that profile is "anonymised" so far as it goes, but in reality, that doesn't really matter. If you know what you're looking for, there would be enough tells in the data that can de-anonymise you. Covering up the ads doesn't stop this data being collected; it merely stops you wanting to click on the ad.
* Ads are a very common malware delivery system, and although nowadays it's probably less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it, there are instances of it happening in the past. Stopping ads from being fetched entirely would obviously prevent this.
Less common but we just saw a week ago that malware-via-ads is definitely still happening today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170001
This one replaced users clipboard contents with a particular bitcoin wallet address. So a few people who happened to be on their way to send some crypto pasted the malicious wallet address instead of the one they actually copied to their clipboard. This has stolen at least $100k so far.
However, I have no clue whether the content delivery system is already like that, and if not, then why. My domain knowledge is slim.
1. Facebook already knows everything you see and do on facebook
2. Facebook is the ad network and serves its own ads.
Therefore blocking ads on facebook won't prevent facebook from knowing everything you do.
GP seems to have a fair understanding of the situation, care to explain why you think it's wrong?
Well, it certainly replaces valuable data like how long have you looked at a given ad with either nothing, or random noise (e.g. if you draw a rectangle over them).
We are no longer living in 2013 where people posted about everything they do. Sure, plenty people do so still, and our interactions with that (even implicitly like how long we looked at it) is plenty of value in and of itself, but I disagree with the general notion.
The effectiveness of ads is that they can just throw stuff at you and "see" what sticks, without you ever telling a word.
When did you agree to be sold without representation and a contract, again? Something about malicious contracts nobody reads? Pretty sure that behavior remains...criminal.
Its been long documented that these systems are attempting to monitor you, even if you did not sign up for the service or interact with it.
I.e., you are categorically incorrect.
What you're missing is that, without good adblockers and possibly other tools, facebook also knows everything you do everywhere else on the internet.
I dont mind ads that are native to the page. I mind adnets.
The web started as this proposition: you send a request to remote computer. Request says "Hey... can I read a document named this?" and the computer shows you the document. Now this may have included images and external links and sound, and whatnot.
But today, the web is more of an application delivery system too. So many requests go "Hey... can I have a resource by this name?" and the remote computer may send you a lot of source code that basically demands to run on your machine in order to get that resource.
And advertisements are piggybacking on those resources. They are a "package deal" where they are saying "you wanna read this text? you gotta take all this extra stuff with it."
And is it any surprise that coinminers are unleashed and other unpleasant things come down the pipe? Big fat videos and huge images are hogging resources.
So here's the bottom line: I don't need to use the web for free. I don't intend to freeload anyone's site or resources. But I also don't want them freeloading on me. I'm not going to download their crap; I'm not going to run their programs; I'm not going to occupy my own system's resources to display their ads when I don't want them.
So it seems fair to block "ads" that are asking to use my resources without paying for them. So I would prefer not to transact--at all--with any remote system that wanted to freeload on my resources in exchange for worthless information, like news, or forums.
What I really want is a non-executable web. I first started using the web in the mid-90s and most websites were like that. HTML, images, colours, fonts (but only from a pre-defined short list), and the occasional sound. If a site used JavaScript at all, it was for trivial stuff such as rollovers (which can now be done using CSS only).
I’d like to go back to that situation, maybe not exclusively but as a separate option. Give me a non-executable web of text, hyperlinks, images, videos and sounds (but no auto-play), CSS, forms, and web components (that can be targeted by links and fetched without refreshing the entire page) so we can do really nice discussion forums, web mail, multimedia encyclopedias (think Encarta) and other server-rendered resources, all without client-side scripting.
It doesn’t even need to be a different protocol or anything like that. It would be enough to have an otherwise modern browser but with no JS engine and a search engine that only indexes pages that lack JavaScript so that they render and function correctly on that JS-free browser.
Naturally, the search engine would miss a lot of the spam sites out there because they all rely on JavaScript. It would also miss many legitimate sites that rely on JavaScript but that’s okay.
It would create a space for JavaScript-free sites to get attention and develop a community. It would of course allow commercial sites, but they’d have to rely on display advertising and traditional marketing (targeted audiences based on subject matter) rather than behavioural tracking. This was the kind of advertising used in magazines and newspapers. It was far less obnoxious but still quite effective when the audience was large enough. It also demanded a lot more creativity from the ad industry, as documented in the show Mad Men.
Considering the money in advertising on the internet, if web moved to more of a content delivery platform, we'd have both 1. content start including ads inline (you see that on Youtube already), and 2. static/server-side tracking techniques improve even further.
Even if we disallow cross-site resources, site owners will implement tracking server-side, though that obviously introduces a trust question between trackers and hosters.
With those two, an ad network with sufficient tracking support from web sites would still be able to cross-link the traffic on a single user and achieve similar results.
This does not mean we should not fight it. But this would just be a step in the cat-and-mouse game, but a very expensive and hardly achievable one too :)
Yes, a site would still be able to host their own ads but advertisers wouldn’t be able to collect any analytics without implicitly trusting the host site. That really matters!
It means the advertisers need to enter a business relationship with the site directly. They can’t simply join a JavaScript ad-auction (the way nearly all ads work now). This makes them more akin to the sponsors we see now in videos. No tracking, just plain old fashioned audience targeting pertaining to the subject matter.
Or watch a video. Or do some basic editing of some kind of medium that I will only do once and would make no sense to download a whole application for?
Why throw out the baby as well? Besides, ads can be part of text content as well.
This is typically something that should be regulated by laws, not through tech.
I have zero faith in government’s ability to regulate these things correctly. Viz. cookie pop ups.
Did you not skip over a lot of steps in between?
User: Hey can I read a document named this?
Server: Sure, let me spend resources and spin harddisk and lookup the thing you wanted. Oh hey, I found it .. here ya go
User: Great.
----
You've conviently ignored the resources the "old" web had to spend to serve you. Nothing has really changed it. Also the thing you wanted, that was "source code". We just called it html. It is no different than javascript+css+html5.
Hacker News is dynamic, a webserver has to dynamic stitch together the comments and send you an html. It has to make sure the page is always fresh with latest comments, and vote count. There's batch processing happening in the background, with multiple rounds of storage and backup.
So yes, to the user it is "Please give me the homepage" and "Here ya go" but behind the scenes it is expensive, at this scale.
Yes, the server resources that were necessary to serve web pages are the origin of advertising, because the admins somehow had to keep the lights on and their bills paid. I don't fault them for this. I don't begrudge them for being, basically, forced into carrying advertising because the freeloading users wouldn't settle for any other way. Advertising allowed a "free web" to continue unabated for a long time.
But advertisements don't need to be resource-intensive on the client side. They don't need to eat gobs of bandwidth, CPU, memory, or our eyeballs. But the fact that they do chew up these resources is partly for why they need to die now.
Server admins can pay for their resources however, and offset their costs however they please. I'm fine with subscription or pay-per-use models or whatever. I honestly have very little use for ad-supported models, and my daily web habits are such that I really don't visit ad-supported websites at all, except for YouTube, where I normally pay for a Premium subscription to completely eliminate all formal ads, anyway. And that's the way it should be.
So, it is war, then.
This is pathological. Like I find myself not ever looking at the top result in a search, because that is where Google has been putting ads.
Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it.
They ran through some scenarios, and one was how to get a car loan. I studied the homepage and found nothing, then clicked the menu and found loans, but no car loan on the loans page. I ended up searching and found it.
After each scenario they asked me some questions, and the first question I got for the car loan scenario was why I hadn't clicked on the link on the front page. There was no link, I replied puzzled. There was a large image they said. I stared in disbelief.
The person running the scripts navigated to the homepage, and pointed at the screen. There, at the bottom, a blinking banner about car loans.
I replied that it must have triggered my mental ad blocker, since ads are typically banners, frequently near the edges and animated somehow, so I never even registered the banner.
They looked genuinely puzzled at my response.
This was 25 years ago. My mental ad blocker is still active, though uBlock Origin on Firefox takes care of most of them.
For me physical ad blocking is more about a first-line defense against malware and such than it is about getting rid of obnoxious ads. The latter my mental blocker does fine enough, though it can be annoying.
My instinct is “if it is an ad, then whatever it is offering is a scam”.
It's not computers that are the problem, it's people.
We've normalized (and even embraced) the situation where relationship between businesses and customers is adversarial. The phenomenon you're describing, known as "banner blindness", is just brain filtering out noise, but the thing is, that noise didn't get there by accident.
What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.
This is a thought I want to pull on
I have a view that organisations, with their network of misaligned incentives, mean that companies act something like an alien lifeform. Something with a decentralised brain, unable to plan beyond immediate stimuli
Companies consume and self-cannibalise. They are both aggressively rational in pursuit of profit but irrational when it comes to preserving their ecosystems
Many companies look like groups of people where nobody has total control. Everyone is reacting to some stakeholder, even the CEO is terrified of "the shareholders". So these organisations cut off healthy limbs (layoffs), engage in lurid rituals (AI), and wastefully destroy the natural resources of the humans who work for them
I first heard this idea in a James Bridle lecture, where he suggested that the strange behaviour of companies was a good starting point for understanding what an alien lifeform might behave like. And he observed the ways that humans and machines now mirror each other.
Inside our society, controlled by these aliens, humans act like machines (Taylorism at work, self-censorship for algorithms at play). Machines act like humans (AI, spam, computer programs mediating relationships).
Underneath it is a frantic need to quantize everything so it can be dominated
Look at the state of the world. Yes, you do look like you give a shit.
Also there's an effect here where if just 10% of shareholders care about this it still makes sense to go for it if you think you can be faster than your competition.
The result is this flailing tentacled monster where each appendix seems to have a mind of its own and sometimes littlw regard for even the other parts of its own body.
Corporations were the first paperclip maximizers.
Local incentives. Every single person and entity is just maximizing their gain against the rules and rewards. The way you become really powerful and rich is to create an organization where all the local incentives keep funneling to you, sitting at the top.
This is a simplistic way to think about it. Even the most altruistic physician needs to advertise their services if they hope to make a living out of it. Even the best film maker, the best actor needs to "hit the circuits" to promote their movie.
"Make and they'll come" is only possible if you're already successful. Apple can chose not to advertise, since they are Apple (although they do plenty of advertising themselves).
What they do is actually a robbery of others' time, privacy, screen space, money, and freedom. All for profit.
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.
Soon they will be woven in to LLMs where they suggest the things they are paid to suggest.
The term is 28 years old.
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.
Why put up with that? Is Kagi too expensive for you?
https://adnauseam.io/
It loads every ad, and clicks them without display them. So the advertiser still pays for the click but the user never sees ads.
So a throwaway account for reading Reddit (even as it decays) might lead to an totally unrelated account you do care about getting unfairly suspended, or the MonopolyCloudFlareBot "helping" your bank starts rejecting your IP/browser-fingerprint, etc.
This would worry me less if we had laws that make it easy to demand accountability and fixes, but we don't. (Not much in the US, and in the EU efficacy is still questionable.)
Anywho, you're right that the final example is more-likely to be resolved, thanks to a formal customer relationship backed up by decades of law plus physical locations... but what about Reddit, Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. where they sometimes don't even have any remotely responsive support system or nearby physical branch?
Basically I'm saying we have some Kafkaesque stuff out there, it isn't sensible or fair, and if someone wants to tweak the nose of the beast they should at least consider the range of what could go wrong.
Just quit them. They're all garbage anyway.
One interesting thing is that it also removed some "internal CTAs" to engage (like "Start your day with our podcast!"). These aren't technically ads, so something like uBlock doesn't remove them. But honestly, I don't really mind having those filtered out too.
A general purpose system, especially if trained by the users, would be more than just an adblocker. It could be trained to block out spiders or other phobia triggers for instance. Even regenerate the photo but with a kitten. Blur our tabloid clickbait 'in other news' links.
The killer app for AR glasses will be blocking out billboards and logos.
Sounds like the plot of a Black Mirror episode :)
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.
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!
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.)
- 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?
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.
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.
Eg A bottle of Coca Cola subtly inserted on the countertop, a video where someone in the background is wearing a particular watch.
Or OP: OP posted the link in good faith, not to interfere with my brain but to inform me. Reminder to brush your teeth = benevolent. Reminder wealthy people might be happy if they give a smidge of money this year to a good cause can be a check-in on whether we’re being holistically solid folks more than evidence of a desire for mental domination?
Maybe that thinking demands only word of mouth promotion, but not sure that roundly and uniquely beats videorecording a promotion and paying someone to play the video back for strangers.
(per my previous, zany, comment you can tell I’m on your side, as Jerry would hopefully see… he probably addressed my points above too in the full text)
I'm no fan of ads and I am willing to pay for services I use to avoid seeing them - but I've learned over recent years that most people simply do not agree with that premise.
And overall society would get cheaper and more efficient since all that budget allocated to advertising would vanish with no consequences. Advertising is mostly a zero sum game where you have to advertise to get ahead of the other businesses advertisements. If companies stopped getting in to bidding wars for the top place on google, all of that money could be freed up for something useful.
I'd also like to see astroturfing / promoting things for money without disclosing it explicitly illegal. Again, anything to stop systematic manipulation.
I don't know if I am the same. But I do find it very difficult to use an internet browser with no adblocker.
Perhaps it's because I have now spent more time using browsers with blockers, than without
Ad servers seem to generally just nope out of serving me ads on their own when I have Firefox's tracking protection cranked up.
Between that and Kagi down-ranking shitty ad-infested domains, it just ... isn't really a problem for me.
(It's almost obvious extension of current AI image fingerprinting efforts. If a robust invisible watermark can be used to tell the image was AI generated, the same scheme can also be used for general DRM.)
If it comes that, I'll put my real monitor in front of that DRMed monitor (doable with flat screens) and I'll have a private LLM, in real-time, pushing on the real monitor (the one I look at), an ad-free version of the DRM'ed monitor.
DRM is nasty but private AI models are already more powerful and they'll only ever got better. And those open-weights are never ever going back in the box.
…require a refundable purchase of a sponsored product, maybe. Then our bot has to buy it, or in another scenario with the already-used tactic: take the quiz on which ads we saw or whatever. Then we’ll need a robot with human eyes to blink at the camera over the screen when that’s a requirement. Have to hook it up to a nervous system when the bodysensor monitor wants to make sure we did responded to the jumpscare or got emotional at the right place.
Spot checks by humans knocking on your door (lifetime ban from all ad-funded businesses if you don’t answer).
Will have to settle for friends rehashing content until encryption’s illegal and so is any retelling. Any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this xyz, without the express written consent of abcd, is prohibited.
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
Pessimism wins when capital is opposite individual interest.
Or with just not using these services.
- its called 9$ a month with a blue check mark on all facebook groups and pages
- you gotta wonder why zuck hasnt done that
Whatsapp is popular because it's free and no other reason.
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.
Surely a better way to think of this is that a person's AI agent will simply find, via whatever means necessary, the information that the person is interested in. It's hard to imagine the person will still be operating on the old "pull" model where they deliberately visit a specific website or open a specific app.
I tell it what sites to go to, and the information I am interested it, and it grabs it using Playwright.
I am hoping I can get a self-host option working as well as this.
How do people use the Internet like this? Why isn't there just a single banner ad at the top, like how Altavista used to look?
This entire thread reads like a game of cat-and-mouse. People trying to block intrusive ads, and FB reaching into the depths of code and making it nearly impossible for anyone to do so en masse.
I've been there. Tried to uncheck all the boxes on their ad platform; used all manners of ad blockers, etc; used incognito mode; used Tor; etc. etc. etc.
At some point, you realize that the only way to not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely. Delete your account, get off that blasted site, and enjoy some moments of peace IRL.
Having been a very early adopter of FB (since ~2004), I deleted my account and am clean + sober + much happier since 2016.
(Not to say that I'm completely out of the FB ecosystem. Unfortunately, my fam is still on WhatsApp... and I've been trying to convince them to migrate to Signal...)
YMMV
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.
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.
Once you stop using them for a few months you wont miss them. Its all part of the game to keep you sucked in.
I do wish there was a valid electronic alternativ. Hosted in our own country. But here we are.
Also nice for events.
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.
But I do make the time and effort to call Dad though.
No point calling Mum, dementia has done away with that being anything but stressful for her.
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.
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.
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.
It saved me net an hour or more or mindless scrolling every day. Every single day. Not to mention the benefits of no more FOMO, better mental health, etc. AND left me with more time to actually accomplish things I wanted to do but somehow thought I never had the time.
The thing is: you have to find + allocate time and attention (= your most precious resource) to the things that matter most to you.
Since then I've been working on my online learning (30+ courses done, including several DL/ML certifications), read more books, and most importantly, focused on my health by working out nearly every day.
Small wins individually, but they have compounded greatly over time.
I 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 doesnt stop it. That what a lot of people dont understand. If you never had a FB, Insta, Whatsapp, etc... account, you STILL have a FB ad profile. It's worse than what people think.
What one can control is not paying attention to the damned site. [Many more added to that list, btw]
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.
I tried to block this popup with uBlock Origin to no avail. No matter what element I selected, it was still there. Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.
Small win.
[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/32706
It appears to still be up for me. ??
Then I tried the normal view and ... wow, so many auto-playing video ads disguised as regular posts.
When are they going to admit that the redesign sucks and there's a reason everyone keeps loading the old reddit interface? Who has the ego that can't handle the truth, that their UI/UX design is garbage and loathed?
The random phrases turned into links that are never helpful means I can't trust any link in comments now, there's that stupid AI box that never has useful or helpful info, conversations are a nightmare to try and read through.
I will never understand how it is that a site which exists almost entirely for conversations, made a new UI that severely fucks with "read the conversation."
The real fix!
The best solution. Highly recommended.
This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?
Sure, it's more computationally-expensive than running an HTML selection, but it's also not "staggering" by any reasonable stretch.
I would agree if this was an easily solvable problem with classical approaches. Clearly it is not, since even uBlock is giving up.
At any rate, "staggering" is relative. White-labeled web browsers becoming the most common GUI engine would have made an engineer's eyes water 20 years ago.
If you're running thousands of those concentrated into a single data center, your aggregate power draw is going to be huge, but a single server is entirely reasonable for a small business, or even a home user, to operate.
EFF: Adversarial Interoperability - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
I really think the new internet is going to be a radically different experience soon.
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!!!
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.
So what you're saying is: you want Facebook to pay out something like $200M which is such a small amount it won't even realize, $170M will go to lawyers, everybody else gets $1.30.
That seems like how it might pan out.
It's like a door to door sales person thinking that if only they could find a way to unlock my door I would buy their stuff.
The moment these ads are loaded on the page, real time auction occurs, where advertisers place bids algorithmically and automatically, based on your profile. Facebook makes it's money by selling this ad space. It doesn't particularly care whether you click on them or not. But if they don't load in the first place, there's nothing for Facebook to sell.
The real insideous part is that advertisers don't need to actually bid on the auction to participate, and anyone participating gets to havest your ad profile. This is one of the big ways data brokers are able to build profiles on you. They can then do whatever they want with this info, and you'd probably never know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfNIRyPi5QA
You'd be surprised at how opaque and complex ad attribution and ROAS calculation has become for the average business, and how many marketing departments are operating on high-level metrics without having an intuitive understanding of how their ads are performing. Many of them rely on the ad networks' own metrics to determine ad performance, and don't even have their own internal attribution models.
More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.
The next tier down was kind of the opposite. They weren't big enough to surface things like this, and they hired agencies for most of their ad spend. When focusing on the top of the funnel, there's this strange incentive with agencies where they often get more budget to spend if they can connect that directly to eye balls. Agencies are incentivized to throw the ads up everywhere and pay well to do so. They love cost-per-impression because we could deliver a large, predictable number of eye balls in a hurry.
All that said, we put no effort into getting around ad blockers as we were serving these ads on our own site/app and we viewed fighting ad blockers as fighting our users. Our ads were served inline in HTML, but clearly identified in the HTML of the page. It took blockers a while to catch on and block them, but they eventually did.
Maybe 15 years ago multi-touch attribution was the big push but even that only adds minimal insights into how ad spend affects the behavior you're trying to measure. It helps with high-level channel attribution but it's still at best directional.
So once you reach a point when increasing spend at Meta/Google results in superlinear increases in CAC vs. spend, you eventually end up having to move those ad dollars elsewhere and over time (and a lot of money) you get an intuitive understanding of how these other mediums trickle down to the metrics that matter.
You're totally right about agencies and their perverse incentives and how that leads to sub-optimal spend allocation.
He did.
This also depends on whether ads are being sold as "pay-per-click" or "pay-per-view" (although in the biz they say "impression" rather than "view"). For the latter, websites like Meta who sell ad space only get paid when people actually click on them.
if nobody clicks on the ads nobody's going to buy ad space because people who place ads care about whether their ads translate into sales. So of course Facebook cares, and ultimately only cares about how many people respond to them because how much money they'll make depend on how much money the ads make.
That's why FB has invested ungodly sums into trying to figure out the preferences of their users.
We are now in an adversarial situation regarding our personal information, but our adversaries depend on sources we have a modicum of control over. If I signed my dog up for a physical mailer, I wonder how long would it take for a portion of the internet to consider Doctor-Professor Kensington a legal individual.
The second part of putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers is tracking & fingerprinting, especially across devices.
In general, ads work by anchoring a brand name in your memory for when you eventually are looking for said product or service, the goal isn't always to force a conversion on the spot.
This is exactly why I don't want to see their shit, ever. It just doubles my resolve to not see it. They are targeting my underbrain, my subconscious, and do not want it.
There's one particular insurance company that continued to evade my ad blocking attempts for literally years. I will never buy from them. My current insurance is fine and the ad-mongers can get bent until their business dies.
If some magic-genie offered the tradeoff of "You can't install third-party adblockers, but your privacy will be magically guaranteed", that would be really appealing.
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.
government's don't surveil for money, unless you bend the argument a bit to say the government has finite resources and is run off money itself. which is kinda true, but also kinda fuzzy (the Fed).
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.
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
I've mostly ditched everything but YouTube now. Honestly, just not using Google seach and gmail makes a HUGE difference in how targeted ads get. I still have an instagram account that a very rarely check, but since I'm not a big cookie blocker, I'll see ads for stuff I was recently searching for. Oh! And I feel like one of those "I don't have a TV" people from the 90s, but I no longer carry a smartphone either. I haven't bought anything from an ad in a few years at this point. It likely still counts but the closest is buying something a YouTuber has recommended from a video I sought out for an interest I already had.
A silicone sponge seems so oxymoronical: that was my responsible impetus.
Hard to avoid commercial interests. Sell poets on the block.
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.
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.
uBlock Origin is one guy holding back the sea with his finger in the dike.
Even cringy ads that digust or anger users in the moment have a subtle effect of making them more likely to buy or recommend that brand in the future. The name recognition is what advertisers are buying, it doesn't have to immediately persuade the user to click for them to get what they want.
Its quichotesque effort but the only thing that can move the needle a bit since everybody involved cares only about money here - waiting for some toothless legislation is useless when harm is happening now.
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.
This is not true. Most people with ad blockers are everyday people. And even for people who are hardcore against ads, they may find a useful product or see something that they will think of again in the future.
many of times, i have looked to purchase a product or service and remember an ad that i saw that has alter my decision.
Think of how the structure of Meta is gonna work, there's some team in charge of ads who has a sub team now in charge of messing with the ads to stop them being blocked.
If you start whitelisting everything that isn't an ad you move the problem into an area the team in charge of blocking the ads don't have control over.
Highly unlikely the team in charge of stopping ad blocking has swing to then start changing the code of every other element on the page to break your non-ad white listing.
Whether selecting for ads or content, one had to figure different ways of getting after it, whitelisting was already off the table.
We'd found "structure" could work, but had to be fuzzy and adaptive as marketing shuffles pages around constantly, not just on the whole, but for A/B runs and personalized "experiences".
So that seems back to, hey, models could help.
(Though none of them, to date, attain as high success as latest hand coded "reader" tools, worth inspecting for how this could be generalized.)
OT but I think I learned a new term today.
Swing. In oil and gas we would call that suction so for future reference:
Swing = Suction
I only use Facebook in a limited capacity (one phenomenal private group whose usefulness is unfortunately simply unmatched elsewhere, one infrequently updated page and a very locked-down, minimal personal profile).
I think people need to understand what the purpose of Facebook is in terms of its function and constituent parts, in the Stafford Beer sense, and I think if enough people simply can't avoid that truth, it will eventually shrink.
Adblocking lets some people pretend Facebook isn't a privacy hellhole for everyone they talk to. There is essentially no way to use it that doesn't abuse your data privacy, for one thing, but prolonging the impression that it can be ameliorated is a mistake.
There is clearly a need for facebook/reddit alternatives for useful groups like the one you describe. There are things like Mastodon out there, but they haven't gained much traction. What will it take to get people off of platforms that are actively hostile to their users? What is keeping existing alternatives from being used?
No. Enough. The community is fucking screaming at you
Someone that loves their users does not fire the mods in response to API change protest. And censorship galore, and too much power concentrated in the mods and site
Consider that the daughter of the guy who purposefully weakened his product's encryption on behalf of Mossad (and was considered a hero of the state), the same daughter who was rubbing elbows with the world's richest and most powerful people, was a reddit powermod with moderation power on a huge number of major subreddits.
Anyone who thinks that the ~500 most popular subreddits are anything but government/corporate manipulators is deluding themselves.
They haven't for me (just tested before posting this comment), which I realize might be temporary. Have they published a policy, or did you get caught in A/B testing hell?
I know why they did this, I get it, but they did me a favor by severely curbing the time I might otherwise waste on their web site. For that I thank them.
A quick google search shows thousands of complaints on, ironically, Reddit itself. So it's probably not just an A/B test, more likely a gradual rollout.
I guess the upside of reddit selling all that post data to AI firms is I'm not sure I'll really need to use reddit anymore. Which means I'll never login to post since I won't be seeing other threads to distract myself with. Which seems like long term will hurt reddit's future data.
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.
They are not always excuses and you really should understand that if you have tech industry experience.
Try having a small business in some niches and doing so without Facebook.
But it does exist, and in any town or city there are dozens of people running microbusinesses in competitive niches that rely on word of mouth and recommendation which is largely sustained through Facebook comments, "I'll message you!" and tagging in posts and photos.
Anyone in hustle culture — odd job/handymen, mobile hairdressers/beauticians/nail technicians, day workers, gardeners, plumbers, event photographers; Facebook is unfortunately crucial to keeping the doors open.
All of these people could have websites, but people don't browse websites. They could run ads in newspapers, but people don't look at those. And google is dead for stuff like this, listings and trade directories are not much good either.
At the lowest level of freelance income, Facebook is basically indispensible because it is the only social network with a regional basis and solid local group mechanisms, and because your both your customers and competitors are there. It probably sustains tens of millions of such workers.
This is where the tension lies. For sure I wish Facebook would shrink and that the web was healthier and people would understand the damage it can do, but "just don't use it" is not advice that works for millions of people.
It is Facebook that needs to change, through slow attrition of engagement with bait content and scam ads.
Thank you. One reason I spend more time on my Mastodon feed than my Bluesky feed is there are fewer people there complaining about Twitter. Less rage and complaining in general.
Rather than creating tiktok but open source, we should just dump the idea entirely. Social media was a net negative to society.
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.
But it is, at some level, culturally dying. It is very evident.
It would not be loss of revenue that troubled Facebook, for years at least — it would be slowing engagement and lower demand for reach.
Are you so sure? Anecdotally, I know increasingly more people who either left the platform or stopped using it last years, and this seems to be a pattern if we believe online sources [0]. Of course many stay, but the platform gets worse and worse ime.
I visit facebook only for events and some groups that I cannot avoid, so I just enter specific pages there than navigating feeds. But looking at the normal feed, it is just so bad. Complete nonsense, irrelevant stuff and more and more AI generated slop. If we exclude some groups, no real, organic people actually post (except some influencers). For those who stay, assuming they do not get the "friends feed", I am really unsure how they can tolerate that.
[0] https://policy.economy.ac/news/2026/05/202605289098
It's hard to leave a monopoly, and you can't contact your friends any other way https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
Anecdotally, someone I know deleted their account, had it reactivated (the site did this) and now they show up on People You May Know. Plenty of other people have tried deleting it and found it nigh impossible
Not just your comment. It's all over the place here.
But maybe I shouldn't be throwing stones in my glass house. I smoked cigarettes for a few years on college, knew they were terrible for me and for those around me, but continued for too long because I frankly enjoyed the pleasure.
I don’t think people need to leave, necessarily, and I cannot urge them to do so. But I do think people should shrink their engagement with it, use it as little as is feasible, shrink their footprint, allow it less, so Facebook changes. Unfortunately it is a big part of life on the internet, it’s often people’s literal job to be there, but that doesn’t mean it’s good.
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 .
I don’t understand how this is determined.
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.
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.
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
(7.99 if subscribed via Appstore/Google Play, Apple/Google is getting €2 of your ad-free subscription there, too)
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.
Like you said, we shall all just stop using it.
They need to surrender this whole anti-adblocker crusade because it will kill them in the long run (along with the billion other problems FB has)
For some parts they did. I tried Facebook Dating, and it's only available on phones.
Also, to save you the trouble, don't use Facebook Dating. It is, to use a technical term, a fermented shitpile.
Now, that's something I would love to see in my lifetime.
The solution is truly to just never be on Facebook, but - our local PTA only distributes news via Facebook. (There may be a Whatsapp group I don't know about, which isn't better.) So does the local library. If the township publishes things elsewhere, I don't know about it.
I use a service to convert some pages' feeds to RSS, which is semi-reliable, but doesn't work well and is a paid service if you want more than two feeds - I wish I could hand-roll something myself.
While I do not think that the company needed to modernize the site’s UI, it baffles me that their anti-spam tools are so rudimentary. Most searches yield irrelevant keyword-bombed results, and, such results tend to be nearly identical listings.
I had yearned for a viable Craigslist alternative for years. Sadly, Facebook Marketplace won. I don’t feel comfortable searching for anything due to the fact that Facebook will inevitably use my queries to further profile me.
My guess is that the default state is the scam garbage. It quickly learns your preferences. Which I hate. I miss having my 5 sections of craigslist I could browse over my morning coffee and not feel like I'm missing a deal.
The only thing I'm proposing is to do the filtering on graphical data (what the user actually sees) rather than on the DOM (which can be obfuscated; and which may change every week).
Everything happens at the image level so there's no way Meta can obfuscate the DOM to make ads pass through.
As a simple one, the Facebook has this dark pattern where they put an unread count marker on Loops to try to get you to click it. It works, I click it by accident quite often even though I have zero interest in loops. There's no way to turn it off. But an OS Level AI could cover it with a black square
Yes, I get I could just not use the app. I still want to see what friends and family are up to so I launch the app -> menu -> feeds. This mostly removes everything I hate. But, that unread (1) marker on the loops icon gets me
If you have ANY hope of Apple letting you have enough control over your device to visually block ads in apps then you are stratospherically shit outta luck.
https://www.fbpurity.com/
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
More discussion here
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.
Now, parry this.
Such a move would also presumably be incompatible with Apple's highly lucrative search engine deal with Google.
For business, our purchases clearly reveal self-deceptive practices, and dark marketing patterns certainly take advantage of that.
For government, our voting preferences reveal that we want to be deceived. Although we often say good things that our social group memes us.
I'm not sure when I learnt to be so cynical.
Worth noting though that Apple injects ads into the News app, which is just a webview, so it's certainly not them that will do this.
Ignoring that users care deeply about images so a browser that did this would be considered broken from the get go.
It will be harder on other sites, but not that hard. There’s an unbreakable ceiling for the ads here - they need to be readable trivially by human eyes, or they don’t work as ads.
So, you can hide or obfuscate the ad… but then it’s not a very good ad.
Reasons this wouldn't work are you'd really need to get it to a good enough and small enough model to run low energy use and very fast to not impact browsing. The other issue is it'll be a fixed target for a period of time so the ads could be tweaked to find how to get them through it.
Has anyone thought about building something like this?
Criminalizing information flow is a non-trivial problem that I wouldn't want governments to be in control of.
The problem isn't one company sending information unsolicited, it's when hundreds of thousands of companies flood every communication channel with their own unsolicited advertising.
Email, phone have become unusable channels, not to mention much of the web.
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.
not shitter, google but fb. some local business don't even have their own sites but maintain an insta / fb page.
I can get my content in front of tons of people for a pittance. I can upload a list of my best customers and run a lookalike campaign. I can run a re-targeting campaign on lapsed regulars. I can spend $16 to generate $1000. It's like fishing with dynamite.
Think about the type of person who uses FB. They don't care about ads. They don't care that it's fake content. They don't care that at least half the feed is AI slop. They just keep scrolling, clicking and buying.
Meta didn't create these people. They only got them all to gather in one place and then started selling access. There's a sucker born every minute and they grow up and join FB. This isn't a defense of Meta by any means. They are a horrible company and the world would be better off if business models like theirs were outlawed. The point is nothing is going to change with them unless there's legislative action.
But to be fair, when I was 19 everybody over 30 was basically the same kind of old to me. Also boomers are the most childish generation in history, and attempt to hide amongst Xers.
The weird thing is that they think that Millennials created their culture. Xers created their culture. Millennials were raised on Disney and N'SYNC.
Hey, leave me out of this!
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.
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.
Preventing them from blocking adblockers is effectively the same thing as banning ads in that it destroys revenue. Remember that that would impact all parts of the internet, even the companies without the resources of Meta. So maybe a company the scale of Meta weathers a policy like this - but many smaller advertising based businesses would not. So effectively, you would be driving even more consolidation of power in the industry and the acceleration of the decline of the open internet.
Also - no ads on marketplace? I personally do like using marketplace vs the alternative (Craigslist), and personally I would prefer that stays available for me to use (and for free).
I'm only suggesting preventing Meta from blocking adblockers. (And the world would likely be a better place if Meta's revenue were destroyed — but I expect they would do just fine without blocking ad-blockers — basically every other property on the web does.)
> Also - no ads on marketplace? I personally do like using marketplace vs the alternative (Craigslist), and personally I would prefer that stays available for me to use (and for free).
So maybe your jurisdiction has multiple online marketplaces and needs less regulation around them. Mine does not. It's akin to having a single consumer-hostile utility/telecom/railroad/etc. provider.
Alternatively, eventually they will publish where the audience is, if the audience is not on facebook then they will publish somewhere else.
Sure, but that relegates my old but perfectly functional macbook to the trash. There's literally no functional alternative to fb marketplace for getting used goods re-used at any kind of scale.
Facebook is allowed to make ads show on their own product.
I hate their product, but it's theirs.
In a macro sense, the prerogative there is really up to the public. Companies only exist in the first place because the public has granted them the legal and social framework to exist, and the public can adjust that framework as they so choose.
In a more specific sense, the math there changes once a company makes itself indispensable to the public good. There are any number of analogies I could run with, but I'll go with the analogy of a landfill. Suppose all the landfills in your city have been privatized, have a habit of burning garbage, and employ armed thugs to prevent any visitors to the landfill from wearing masks. If you've got a truckload of garbage to dispose of, you can either ingest burning garbage fumes, or dump it on the side of the road somewhere. It's absolutely in the public's interest to regulate the landfills' behaviour to prevent them from both burning garbage and from stopping people from wearing masks when they visit the landfill.
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.
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?
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.
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.
I'm not surprised, why are you?
But probably not.
>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...
But I'm not convinced it will have an effect. And I'd have to use fb.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Businesses make money by selling products/services, so they don't need money.
Wikipedia is donation supported.
GP is pretty much saying - if it can only survive by running ads, let's do without it.
Until it is unsustainable which is the majority of cases due to no funding.
> Wikipedia is donation supported.
The majority of websites are not as big as Wikipedia, let alone having donations in the tens of millions.
The GP talks about Mastodon which hobbyists run and users sign up to instances to have their social identity on.
toot.community, mastodon.cloud and many others are closing down this month due to no funding.
And even some organisations don't want to run instances due to it being expensive. (1.)
Even mozilla.social shut down.
Sure, these services wouldn't run ads, but they can't charge users either which leaves donations as the only way to fund it, and 9.9/10 times it doesn't work.
Using Wikipedia as an example to prove a point about donations makes no sense for everyone else who also contribute to the open web for free.
1. https://gfsc.community/why-we-discontinued-our-mastodon-serv...
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.
For things that need to scale past that like very large social media, the question is if that's worth those sites existing.
This notion is a very Silicon Valley / coastal elite mentality IMO. A significant majority of people on the internet do not and will not pay for anything - largely because most people around the world just don't have the money for stuff like that.
The data on this is pretty consistent - take Netflix for example. A majority of Netflix users choose the cheaper ad supported tier, even though it is very easy and only marginally more expensive to switch to the non-ad supported tier. And this is already filtering to the subset of people who are willing and able to pay for a streaming subscription to begin with. The same case exists for Reddit -> you can pay to have ads removed, but only 1% of users do.
I see what you mean by Hacker News, but it's not a great example, since there are currently no ads and it's free. It's provided by Y Combinator, which monetizes via investing in startups (not something all internet businesses can reliably just start doing). For example - how would Reddit monetize? You cannot really expect people on Reddit all to be willing to pay to use it. And if some were - the whole value of a network is its scale -> so the drop in users would effectively kill the site. That's why there are no subscription only forums out there (at least none that I know of).
With regards to your second point of if these social media sites should even exist in the first place -> that's where you the consumer get to decide. If you don't get value from it, just don't use it. People who do get value from it -> use it. If enough people collectively decide it's not valuable, then the website becomes irrelevant (see Google+ and MySpace).
This is where I get very confused by anti ads people - show me a reliable alternative that is proven to work. Show me that people across the world, not just in San Francisco or London, can and will pay to access these websites/apps. And I'm not just talking about Meta - what about every random small website you have ever accessed that is ad supported? What about news websites like BBC? Or independent content creators who monetize via Instagram / YouTube ads? What about that wiki for that favorite video game of yours? Or that cooking blog? Don't get me wrong - I hate seeing ads as much as the next guy - but I can't really picture a realistic alternative.
If people love a community and like spending time on it, they'll be willing to help keep it running and avoid shutting down. You don't get any real profit, but do you need that to run a website? And if people don't love it enough to pay for it, you do have to wonder if it really needs to exist.
I think Reddit could get away with their reddit pro and paying for awards deal, honestly. They would need to rely more on volunteer labor and volunteer development, but a site could exist like that. I assume it's how Lemmy and Lobsters run?
In my view the problems are that we scale past the point of volunteer moderation being practical, we want to pay for full time devs and so on for the sites, and we want the operation to somehow also make a profit. If you view it more as a hobby that you sink some money into to keep it alive, the economics on a small site can be much more reasonable. Think of an individual blogger and their comment section - the blogger might naturally pay some hundreds a year for hosting on their own, as part of that hobby impulse.
I think at best your perspective is “threatening me with a good time.” There’s really nothing online I value that can only exist because of millions of free users.
That is the only way to keep any service online sustainable without ads.
There are also donations, but that can only take you so far.
Things cost money, server costs and domain costs rise, bandwidth gets expensive as bots and AI agents surge and scrape websites.
It is the only way, without having ads all over the place.
Mistake #2 was letting the tech bros anywhere near it.
Stopping the movement of all things unless click / tap to play would be a huge adblock win in my book.
Don't spend massive amount of time in sth that doesn't deserve to exist.
Do something useful with your time instead!
https://www.fbpurity.com/
(pun fully intended)
Oh well, I cant be mad at the uBO team. Much appreciation for all they have given me over the years
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.
https://search.worldcat.org/title/57068812
(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
That would be funny.
In case anyone else faces the same: it worked when I resized the browser window and reloaded.
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/
Though evidently someone's cut a deal because Facebook groups is all over Google search results these days.
Isn't there a browser plugin to do that for Google too?
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.
Not perfect, but it works.
And Facebook just showed (again) they are willing to go the extra mile to be as contemptible and repugnant as possible.
(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
Stop. Blaming. 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.
Websites with ads need to satisfy the ad buyers. This means running a bunch of JavaScript that's adversarial to the website and fingerprints both the website and the browser to determine where and to whom the ad is actually shown. It's like a cloudflare bot challenge is happening behind the scenes. Of course all this stuff doesn't happen on the website's own domain, or the website could manipulate it.
And the ad that's originally delivered might not actually be the ad, but might be a script that fetches the real ad from a different server, if the incentives line up that way. Imagine you have a contract to advertise on a site, but someone else wants to advertise on the same site and pays you to forward their ad. Ad margins are razor thin, you'll do this for $0.00001 profit per impression. And your buyer might be doing the same thing to their customer. It's all a huge mess.
In ye old days, you had newspapers who sold ads, and had to at least satisfy their customers. What the newspaper advertised reflected on the newspaper, and where the advertiser advertised, reflected on the advertiser. Now we have a situation where no one is accountable. Spammy ad sites are a thing, because there isn't that direct relationship between advertiser and website.
(I used to work in this area, but my knowledge is ~4y out of date)
Networks are only necessary if you want to run new ads for every year or tie into their browsing history or other algorithmic stuff. But if someone wants to pay you 3k to run a banner ad for a few weeks that would be pretty easy to just embed.
You don't have to run a marketplace. Back then, people were calling via phone to put an ad into the newspaper. The same concept can still apply today.
You can just place an ad _where you actually want it_ instead of having a shitty decision engine decide it for you. Marketing budgets are messed up all over the place since social media, because they're really inefficient in finding the customers that actually wants to buy their stuff.
If you don't believe me, just take a look at facebook, they're trying to shove ads up your feed 99% of the time. It's a feed of ads, not a feed of "friends" anymore. Good luck trying to catch the 1% of posts that were actually the reason why you used the platform in the first place.
Is it really? I would think targeted ads are way more efficient than traditional non targeted ads. Eg I've never seen menstrual pad (something I would never use) ads online.
> take a look at facebook, they're trying to shove ads up your feed
That's the consumers experience, not advertisers
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.
You are definitely the baddies.
Since when is this considered cheating?
Elroy: “I got a job through LinkedIn.”
Annie: “What? That’s crazy! People use LinkedIn?”
Elroy: “No, LinkedIn hired me to help figure out why people don’t use it.”
“It’s not a childish comment in the slightest, and most definitely not a claim of superiority in any way either. It’s simply a fact. I, too, know a grand total of 0 persons who use Facebook. Three billion people may use it regularly but all the people I know are in the other, let’s say >vast majority<, of FIVE billion people who don’t even care about Zuckerberg’s billboard.”
"I find ways to defeat adblockers"
I hate that so many people I know use it for things.
I made my own extension by essentially prompting to create a version of ublock origin with a button that uses a local llm to dynamically generate block lists and update them.
We know they want to be a monopoly. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
Site doesn't work. Posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 Messages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712 https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1c0xfdz/messenger... (or any thread about this)
He doesn't see human beings as people
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
Facebook? They've always been the worst at this. By "this" I guess I mean the internet
The issue is facebook obfuscates selectors so you cant easily do it the way ublock prefers.
I am happy to pay for an Ad Free experience on services that offer it. We should all send letters to companies who we want to pay to give us an ad free experience. "I don't want to pay" is an indefensible position because everything is an energy exchange. "There is no free lunch." If we don't want to pay with money then we can pay with attention to ads, and hacking the display to take without giving in return is corrupt.
I do pay for the energy that powers my monitor and CPU after all.
but for modern social media to function, they need showing ads to pay creator
many people livelihood depends on it, creator make content in turn of revenue sharing that user get for free
And the world was better off before "modern social media."
Of course, companies took the easy way out. Just serve ads. Until that got absolutely obnoxious and downright dangerous, then users started blocking them enmass.
Well of course, we're now in a place where the internet is mostly paid for with ads, and the content creators that want to get paid up front (substack, WSJ, FT, etc) want crazy high amounts for subscription fees. I'm not a trader, so I do not get enough benefit to make it worth while to sub to those sites.
So I guess I'll keep blocking ads for my own security, and bypass paywalls with archiver sites. Shame. It could have been different, but this is the bed they made, and they can lay in it.
People dont have issue with creators getting paid, they have issue with absolutely evil platforms that host that and scoop up most of the value between creators and consumers. Platforms that willingly promote ie racist content because it simply drives more views/clicks.
The reason I joined FB no longer exists for me. I remember why I stopped talking to many of the 'friends' I had. I silenced all of them and only join interesting groups now. Even then I only log in once or twice a year.
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.