uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
digitalescapetools.com
digitalescapetools.com
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.
We are already paying too much for all the services with subscription. Like Spotify, Netflix and others...
[0] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/416547/youtub...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322556, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
Amazon does the same with product ads.
That's more like "paying to not see ads" than "paying for content".
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.
However they do not stop tracking you.
I just wish I had the option they have in the Netherlands. Where you can set the "Following" tab as the primary and it doesn't constanly revert back.
A judge decreed that that must be done for users in the Netherlands but it's not available anywhere else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At times I've had Spotify, Netflix and Mubi subscriptions. As a UK-resident with a TV, I pay for the BBC.
I feel I more than adequately contribute to cultural production.
In some ways, the current situation suits me fine. I take the free stuff where I'm technically capable. I'll block the ads, pirate to my hearts content, use yt-dlp, BPC, userscripts.
I'm not not paying for stuff, but I've enough financial pressures already, thank you very much. I don't see why I should send all my money to (mostly) US corporations, who've farmed and resold user-generated content.
> Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'.
also wait, we're talking about a US company, should we be paying a US company, for "content"? Is all "content" produced by these US megacorps, I don't think so, they're purely extractive
what are you gonna do, make more Marvel movies? lol
(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?
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:
> 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.
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.
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.
What more do you want??
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.
What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org)
1975 points by smnrg on April 5, 2025 | 1409 comments
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'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.
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”.
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.)
This is a wild assertion.
Were we not able to build roads before billboards were invented? Does your telephone company interrupt your call with ads? Does the postal service open your letters to insert a leaflet with promotional offers? What alternate universe do people who claim this live in???
This is a fact with almost anything that you look at around you, not only software. Any incentives in general.
Also, people prefer to have ads than to pay for something. You will say ads are worse or whatever, and you can be right. But the fact is that people that do not pay for software have no problem in being monetized. Otherwise free apps would not have users and paying apps would have a lot. But the reality is that paid apps have a higher barrier to entry from the point of view of users reached.
And flies eat horse shit because they occasionally get nutrients from it
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"
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.
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).
We do have the technology to make those glasses now.
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.
Hard disagree. At least commercial entertainment providers have to work to retain their customers, unlike public broadcasters where they get funded (either via taxes or forced licenses) no matter how many people dislike them.
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.
That's generous. In less-privileged countries it was the other way round.
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?
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...
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.
If they are willing do sell you to data harvesters then that won't be the only unethical thing they are willing to do. Be thankful that they have voluntarily outed their publication as untrustworthy and move on.
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.
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.
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.
underlying technology doesn't materialize out of thin air though. Google and Facebook have invested lots of dollars and engineering hours into making Youtube or Whatsapp video a seamless smooth experience for billions of users. That's why the technology seems cheap now. Early on, there were big concerns about Youtube profitability.
> it's that even cheap phones are absurdly powerful
Again, thanks to Android which was funded indirectly by ads.
> c.f. bittorrent
That is plain old theft.
> And some of those problems (e.g. content moderation, discovery) don't exist when self-publishing or curating partners.
Curating partners have economies of scale. That's how you get Youtube. And for self publishing, you can see that most of the "self publishers" on internet are at the mercy of adtech giants (Google and Facebook) for distribution.
> destroying competition from companies that just want to fairly offer a service
That's why I cite Youtube premium. Google offered an ad-free option at a fair price and yet hardly anyone wants to pay for that.
Bittorrent does not equate to theft, and the point is it demonstrates that actually distribution costs nothing. The production of most media was paid for generations ago. It can be free or extremely cheap because it's literally free on the provider side. The thing that costs money is monetization.
The fact that self-publishers are at the mercy of ad companies is the point. The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.
And they exist because of demand from the consumers. All those providers have no incentive to invest and upgrade their offerings if there is no demand. Said otherwise, without the likes of YouTube and Whatsapp video chat (and many other ad-funded social media apps), we would be stuck in 2010-era infrastructure.
> You don't need a centralized service for video calls.
Need is a funny word. You need a centralized effort to enhance the user experience of video calls which is very expensive. And very companies have resources to pull that off and offer a great experience for free. Only 3 I can think of - Google, Facebook, Apple (via Facetime). Only Apple is not ad-funded and they keep it to their devices only which is for rich people. Ad-funded products at least made it available to the entire populace.
> The ad companies destroy every market they infect. Because they use predatory pricing.
I gave you a counter-example to your thesis about Youtube Premium which was offered at a reasonable price. Its failure shows that predatory pricing is an excuse - real reason is that people simply prefer to not pay.
Phone companies are literally a concrete, non-theoretical demonstration that call signaling doesn't need to be centralized for a good experience. There's also already XMPP which works like email: you can add your contacts and just start video calls over it just like you can just send emails. It works today. It scales today. You can use it right now, but the monopolists lock everyone into their networks.
Your "counter-example" proves my point: giving youtube away for free canabalizes youtube premium.
Movies and TV are video, hence they couldn't be free and without ads, just like they aren't on YT. Music seems much more believable.
P2P technology assumes no firewalls, plenty of IP addresses (and no CGNAT), no intermittent connectivity and no energy saving measures. P2p works well if you have a desktop connected directly to the internet via a dial-up modem with its own IP address, it works decently on an always on ADSL connection behind a router, on a cellular connection which mostly stays powered down to save battery life, it doesn't work at all.
Centralized services aren't going to make intermittent cellular connections somehow work for video chat. You need reliable bandwidth to the endpoints for that. AFAIK cellular devices are almost all ipv6 already.
I brought up p2p in that context, but if one wanted to also do movies, my understanding is three's already software you can put on a raspberry pi/SBC/spare computer to act as a torrent->stream relay.
The fact is "implement everything yourself" is already done. There's already off the shelf free software for this stuff.
What is "worth" is ultimately decided by the market.
What should be allowed, like sacrificing children, is decided by the society. Two very separate topics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
Very rarely I'll come across a page where valuable information is hidden in those areas and it takes someone else showing me to actually see it.
It'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 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).
> "Make and they'll come" is only possible if you're already successful.
That's just because your competitors are already shoving ads in front of your potential customer's faces. If they weren't allowed to do that you would be fine without doing it as well. It's the definition of a zero sum game.
This is a thought I want to pull on
I have a view that organisations, with their network of misaligned incentives, mean that companies act something like an alien lifeform. Something with a decentralised brain, unable to plan beyond immediate stimuli
Companies consume and self-cannibalise. They are both aggressively rational in pursuit of profit but irrational when it comes to preserving their ecosystems
Many companies look like groups of people where nobody has total control. Everyone is reacting to some stakeholder, even the CEO is terrified of "the shareholders". So these organisations cut off healthy limbs (layoffs), engage in lurid rituals (AI), and wastefully destroy the natural resources of the humans who work for them
I first heard this idea in a James Bridle lecture, where he suggested that the strange behaviour of companies was a good starting point for understanding what an alien lifeform might behave like. And he observed the ways that humans and machines now mirror each other.
Inside our society, controlled by these aliens, humans act like machines (Taylorism at work, self-censorship for algorithms at play). Machines act like humans (AI, spam, computer programs mediating relationships).
Underneath it is a frantic need to quantize everything so it can be dominated
Corporations were the first paperclip maximizers.
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.
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.
What they do is actually a robbery of others' time, privacy, screen space, money, and freedom. All for profit.
Why put up with that? Is Kagi too expensive for you?
The term is 28 years old.
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.
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”.
Soon they will be woven in to LLMs where they suggest the things they are paid to suggest.
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 :)
(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 no fan of ads and I am willing to pay for services I use to avoid seeing them - but I've learned over recent years that most people simply do not agree with that premise.
I'd also like to see astroturfing / promoting things for money without disclosing it explicitly illegal. Again, anything to stop systematic manipulation.
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.
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 like that! Would be hard to be absolutist (“never mention children’s cancer unless I ask directly, read a related article, or we’re friends”) but sure, can imagine a better way than today.
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.
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!
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.
Can run on most decently powered consumer devices.
Latency not great vs ad block though, of course.
Perhaps a fine tuned model explicit to this purpose could be even more compact.
I don't know if I am the same. But I do find it very difficult to use an internet browser with no adblocker.
Perhaps it's because I have now spent more time using browsers with blockers, than without
Ad servers seem to generally just nope out of serving me ads on their own when I have Firefox's tracking protection cranked up.
Between that and Kagi down-ranking shitty ad-infested domains, it just ... isn't really a problem for me.
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?
That isn't enough for me. I don't just want to not see the ads, I want to stop them being fetched entirely.
There are two big problems with ads.
* The ad network can build up a very complete profile of what you like, dislike, and generally what you're looking at on the web. Yes, that profile is "anonymised" so far as it goes, but in reality, that doesn't really matter. If you know what you're looking for, there would be enough tells in the data that can de-anonymise you. Covering up the ads doesn't stop this data being collected; it merely stops you wanting to click on the ad.
* Ads are a very common malware delivery system, and although nowadays it's probably less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it, there are instances of it happening in the past. Stopping ads from being fetched entirely would obviously prevent this.
Less common but we just saw a week ago that malware-via-ads is definitely still happening today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170001
This one replaced users clipboard contents with a particular bitcoin wallet address. So a few people who happened to be on their way to send some crypto pasted the malicious wallet address instead of the one they actually copied to their clipboard. This has stolen at least $100k so far.
1. Facebook already knows everything you see and do on facebook
2. Facebook is the ad network and serves its own ads.
Therefore blocking ads on facebook won't prevent facebook from knowing everything you do.
GP seems to have a fair understanding of the situation, care to explain why you think it's wrong?
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.
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.
What you're missing is that, without good adblockers and possibly other tools, facebook also knows everything you do everywhere else on the internet.
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.
Did you not skip over a lot of steps in between?
User: Hey can I read a document named this?
Server: Sure, let me spend resources and spin harddisk and lookup the thing you wanted. Oh hey, I found it .. here ya go
User: Great.
----
You've conviently ignored the resources the "old" web had to spend to serve you. Nothing has really changed it. Also the thing you wanted, that was "source code". We just called it html. It is no different than javascript+css+html5.
Yes, the server resources that were necessary to serve web pages are the origin of advertising, because the admins somehow had to keep the lights on and their bills paid. I don't fault them for this. I don't begrudge them for being, basically, forced into carrying advertising because the freeloading users wouldn't settle for any other way. Advertising allowed a "free web" to continue unabated for a long time.
But advertisements don't need to be resource-intensive on the client side. They don't need to eat gobs of bandwidth, CPU, memory, or our eyeballs. But the fact that they do chew up these resources is partly for why they need to die now.
Server admins can pay for their resources however, and offset their costs however they please. I'm fine with subscription or pay-per-use models or whatever. I honestly have very little use for ad-supported models, and my daily web habits are such that I really don't visit ad-supported websites at all, except for YouTube, where I normally pay for a Premium subscription to completely eliminate all formal ads, anyway. And that's the way it should be.
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.
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.
However, I have no clue whether the content delivery system is already like that, and if not, then why. My domain knowledge is slim.
I dont mind ads that are native to the page. I mind adnets.
So, it is war, then.
- 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?
Ad enthusiasts are always quick to defend how useful ads actually are so let them put their money where their mouth is and have the market decide.
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
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.
- 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.
Or with just not using these services.
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.)
Washington State has a ~1960s law which I think was pretty clever: Highway advertisements can only be for things someone driving by can actually on the premises under the sign.
That prevents the typical chains of billboards while making it pretty straightforward for actual stores. The law will probably need revision if/when someone tries to skirt it by putting in billboards with an attached symbolic vending-machine.
I had a shocking experience a few years ago with my wife. I installed pihole on our home network. She immediately began complaining that the internet was broken. On enquiry, I discovered that all the ads she had been tapping and clicking on were gone. She liked and used those ads. I worry that for many people, the line between entertainment and advertisement is already gone. They're more than willing to be advertised to, provided they are entertained.
Pessimism wins when capital is opposite individual interest.
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.
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.
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
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.
My personal view is that if you take a personal, not a preaching stand early and often people just learn that's who you are. I've never had a Myspace or FB or IG, or any other sort of account like that. To all of the people who say they can only stay in touch that way I just said, "I'm available via text, phone, chat group, Discord, email, Signal, and half a dozen more ways. If that isn't easy enough then maybe we don't need to keep in touch."
The only reason I can imagine seriously engaging with those things is as a business owner who watched FB railroad them into advertising there or being screwed, and happily I've never been in that position.
So yeah... at some point you have to accept that most people will happily dig in, and even most people who have qualms will find ways to justify why it's ok FOR THEM. You just have to make your own choice and stick with it, firmly and politely.
100%
That's the way to go.
And tbh, not being on FB hasn't affected my social life. I'm in touch with people {friends | family | colleagues | etc} the way I want. And if I miss any social events, that's Ok. No FOMO here. Mostly JOMO.
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.
You're also ignoring the enormous role that social media played in the rise of ISIS, and their ongoing recruitment and terror efforts. The "mommy bloggers" who share terrible, unmoderated advice ranging from somewhat harmful to downright lethal.
How many kids killed themselves as a result of bullying that followed them every waking moment through the net, almost always via social media?
You don't need a time machine to see the harm, if what you need to see is actually a body count. For the rest of us the psychological and behavioral impact is negative enough without needing to taking 'pure poison' overly literally.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
After a period of a doing this I started to get new ads only periodically, and after a couple of sessions of removing every one of them, the rest of the month was quiet.
I fucking beat the Facebook ad department.
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(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..) facebook.com##span:has-text(Suggested for You):upward(8)
I tried to block this popup with uBlock Origin to no avail. No matter what element I selected, it was still there. Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.
Small win.
It appears to still be up for me. ??
Then I tried the normal view and ... wow, so many auto-playing video ads disguised as regular posts.
When are they going to admit that the redesign sucks and there's a reason everyone keeps loading the old reddit interface? Who has the ego that can't handle the truth, that their UI/UX design is garbage and loathed?
The random phrases turned into links that are never helpful means I can't trust any link in comments now, there's that stupid AI box that never has useful or helpful info, conversations are a nightmare to try and read through.
I will never understand how it is that a site which exists almost entirely for conversations, made a new UI that severely fucks with "read the conversation."
The real fix!
The best solution. Highly recommended.
This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?
EFF: Adversarial Interoperability - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
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.
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.
I really think the new internet is going to be a radically different experience soon.
For a while now, I've seen blogposts from marketers desperate to do to AI what SEO did to search engines.
I hope they fail to enshitify the LLM experience the way they enshitified search, but I wouldn't count on it in the absence of AI messing with production so hard that nobody even wants to market stuff in the first place.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
many of times, i have looked to purchase a product or service and remember an ad that i saw that has alter my decision.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Friends you can only contract through Facebook are not very deep friends.
That's great if you already can reach everyone. But Facebook in theory is meant to cater to the lost-touch-with-person years ago thing
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.
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?
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?
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 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.
Thank you for the information.
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.
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.
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.
I called people, met people in person, sought out classified ads, made sure I was in the right parking lot at the right time to run into the right people.
I hustled to survive for most of my life, and I sure as hell did not need Zucks help to do it. In fact my web design clients were mostly small businesses that wanted to host their own websites to get them SEO and visibility that Facebook pages could not offer.
Again, everyone loves to make excuses for their dependence. I prefer independence.
People don't answer cold calls! They increasingly don't read emails. There are no classified ads worth a damn. They work from home! They ask AI more than they google.
The remaining stuff is on Facebook.
It is pointless arguing people shouldn't look to Facebook to find these kinds of jobs and get those recommendations, and preaching the morality of independence to, say, a gel nail technician who makes all her money from friends recommending her and social media photos of her work, is nonsense.
I hope you're not the guy who tell people who are on the breadline that Facebook is bad and they should use classified ads. Because that guy sounds old and out of touch.
It doesn't matter what we think of Facebook (and instagram, and to a smaller extent other social media); it is crucial to networking.
I know the breadline well. Worked my way up from living in my car and eating out of trash cans. I do not personally know anyone who has come up from a lower place than me, and my advice remains constant because people are still the same even as technology evolves.
You can network at meetups, giving talks, trade shows, workshops, classes. Nothing converts higher than meeting people in person. That was true 20 years ago and may be even more true 20 years from now as human generated content on the internet drops to near zero.
Never build a business on hoping an algorithm someone else controls is nice to you.
No. Enough. The community is fucking screaming at you
Someone that loves their users does not fire the mods in response to API change protest. And censorship galore, and too much power concentrated in the mods and site
Consider that the daughter of the guy who purposefully weakened his product's encryption on behalf of Mossad (and was considered a hero of the state), the same daughter who was rubbing elbows with the world's richest and most powerful people, was a reddit powermod with moderation power on a huge number of major subreddits.
Anyone who thinks that the ~500 most popular subreddits are anything but government/corporate manipulators is deluding themselves.
Rather than creating tiktok but open source, we should just dump the idea entirely. Social media was a net negative to society.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(7.99 if subscribed via Appstore/Google Play, Apple/Google is getting €2 of your ad-free subscription there, too)
Twitch did that a while back and uBlock Origin was ineffective against their video ads within a few months.
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.
[role=main] {
display: none;
}
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.
The problem is every time a solution is added to uBO, they will counter that. An extension will work great if the websites don't target on that.
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.
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.
$ apfel "What is the capital of Austria?"
The capital of Austria is Vienna.
More discussion here
Such a move would also presumably be incompatible with Apple's highly lucrative search engine deal with Google.
For business, our purchases clearly reveal self-deceptive practices, and dark marketing patterns certainly take advantage of that.
For government, our voting preferences reveal that we want to be deceived. Although we often say good things that our social group memes us.
I'm not sure when I learnt to be so cynical.
Worth noting though that Apple injects ads into the News app, which is just a webview, so it's certainly not them that will do this.
Ignoring that users care deeply about images so a browser that did this would be considered broken from the get go.
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.
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.
Like you said, we shall all just stop using it.
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.
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.
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.
I personally would love to see someone create a platform for selling secondhand computer equipment specifically. Poshmark for bitpushers in effect.
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.
Now, parry this.
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."
Has anyone thought about building something like this?
Criminalizing information flow is a non-trivial problem that I wouldn't want governments to be in control of.
The problem isn't one company sending information unsolicited, it's when hundreds of thousands of companies flood every communication channel with their own unsolicited advertising.
Email, phone have become unusable channels, not to mention much of the web.
not shitter, google but fb. some local business don't even have their own sites but maintain an insta / fb page.
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!
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.
Shouldn't the title be something like "Trillion dollar corporation forces small opensource project from blocking their attack against users' browser"?
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.
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?
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.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-feed...
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
But probably not.
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.
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
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.
(I used to work in this area, but my knowledge is ~4y out of date)
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.
>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.
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?
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?
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.
This means we don't need a centralized maintainer for smaller tools. the facebook ad blocking cat and mouse game is something I cna very well imagine to just be something my computer would solve in real time, updating the uBlock filter/userscript to adapt to any fb changes in near real-time.
I 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.
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.
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.
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...
I'll concede that it doesn't work out a lot of the time. This is not very different from for-profit websites. Also, your number of 9.9/10 is probably pulled out of your ass. I'm note sure what the real number is, but I'd wager it's lower than 9.9/10.
I'm not sure how old you are, but in the early 2000s there were so many community forums; most of them survived. Even if it doesn't, the community can go to another host at some point.
This isn't the counterargument you think it is.
For every Wikipedia or Thunderbird that gets millions in donations you get thousands of others that cannot live off sparse donations alone.
And since you are lazy to read the article:
"After three years of running our Fediverse server, we're shutting it down. Not because we've given up on the Fediverse, but because it isn't safe or sustainable enough for a community org like ours to run a server on a shoestring...
...Since 2024, all of our core funding and funding bids have fallen away. The server dwindled to three active users, and the operating costs and effort of keeping it maintained were no longer worth it for our economy of scale. It was a bigger cost, and more effort, than the rest of our hosting put together."
This is one of many examples of hobbyist / community run instances of what you describe, as donations didn't even work for them and they shut down.
Remember, they cannot do ads or subscriptions, so donations are their only way to be sustainable.
> I'm not sure how old you are, but in the early 2000s...
Spare us your fallacious "back in the old days" argument, we aren't there anymore, we are talking about now.
The issue they are having is moderation, not technical costs. This is the same issue sites like Reddit have. In the article, they even mention that private social media sites use moderation centres from poor countries. That is abhorrent. Not sure why you are advocating for this?
> Spare us your fallacious "back in the old days" argument, we aren't there anymore, we are talking about now.
From my perspective, what is the point of continuing this conversation if you won't address an example in the past where my argument worked?
You go an admit that you haven't read the article and then you knowingly make a strawman argument saying I support "social media sites using moderation centres from poor countries"
Where did I even explicitly say I supported this? You just made that up and you know it.
The argument is about funding without ads, those that run hobbyist federated social media like Mastodon cannot use Ads or subscriptions, so they need to use donations (which is unsustainable)
Even if you throw in moderation, isn't even worth it if you're running a costly Mastodon instance and no donations are coming in.
> From my perspective, what is the point of continuing this conversation if you won't address an example in the past where my argument worked?
Because they simply don't work today and at scale. We have new problems today that didn't exist in the past.
To clear it up, I read the article before my most recent reply to you. The very article that you linked mentions that private social networks use moderation centres from poor countries. Did you read the article you linked to me before sending it?
> Because they simply don't work today and at scale. We have new problems today that didn't exist in the past.
So your response is just to throw your hands up and say "won't work". Buddy, let me tell you, we could squeeze out a lot more performance to run social networks if we needed to. The hard part is the moderation, as you correct identified. But private-run social networks use questionable labour to moderate anyway (as per the article you linked).
In the past running a hobbyist social media worked, it can work again.
Mastodon isn't a good example. It's written in Ruby and serves up a heavy React application. A light version of it could be written in something much faster, and served up on something much smaller.
You haven't provided a coherent argument to suggest otherwise. Goodbye and thanks for the discussion.
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.
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.
Stopping the movement of all things unless click / tap to play would be a huge adblock win in my book.
And Facebook just showed (again) they are willing to go the extra mile to be as contemptible and repugnant as possible.
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.
Oh well, I cant be mad at the uBO team. Much appreciation for all they have given me over the years
(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
That would be funny.
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 don't think non-fb apps are only running the meta's ad revenue, which is meant to overtake google's.
while i personally don't use it, does not mean they are not getting enough eyeballs.
The issue is facebook obfuscates selectors so you cant easily do it the way ublock prefers.
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/
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
It's far easier and has further reach than doing it manually.
Facebook? They've always been the worst at this. By "this" I guess I mean the internet
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.
In case anyone else faces the same: it worked when I resized the browser window and reloaded.
Not perfect, but it works.
(pun fully intended)
Don't spend massive amount of time in sth that doesn't deserve to exist.
Do something useful with your time instead!
(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
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.
You are definitely the baddies.
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.
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"
Since when is this considered cheating?
I hate that so many people I know use it for things.
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.
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
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.
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.
And the world was better off before "modern social media."
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.