I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the money that's put into circumventing ad blockers isn't really generating more sales.
It's like a door to door sales person thinking that if only they could find a way to unlock my door I would buy their stuff.
You don't actually need to click on an ad or purchase something from an ad site in order for Facebook to make money selling ad space.
The moment these ads are loaded on the page, real time auction occurs, where advertisers place bids algorithmically and automatically, based on your profile. Facebook makes it's money by selling this ad space. It doesn't particularly care whether you click on them or not. But if they don't load in the first place, there's nothing for Facebook to sell.
The real insideous part is that advertisers don't need to actually bid on the auction to participate, and anyone participating gets to havest your ad profile. This is one of the big ways data brokers are able to build profiles on you. They can then do whatever they want with this info, and you'd probably never know.
That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them. If ads are loaded or not is also often verified by independent third party trackers that you have to embed on your page next to the ad. There's whole industries built on this stuff and it's not as simple as "we sell the slot and don't care if people see it or click on it".
Thanks for your insight. It probably would have been more helpful if you took the time to quote the particular part of my comment which you believe to be untrue.
If youre referring to whether or not Meta "cares" of you click and ad or not, then fair play. I'd argue that's more or less semantics, but ok, they do care and there is indeed an entire industry built on them caring.
In my defense I was more referring to the fact that whether you click or not doesn't change the fact that there is still ad sales happening in the background, and based on that, yes my assesment is correct.
If you'd like to clarify which part of my argument you had issue with instead of having me just guess, that'd be helpful too.
I mean you are both right, it's been a few years since I have been in adtech, and it isn't black and white. There are few places that will pay for stuff that isn't clicked through, but there are places that are willing to pay on an impression basis for things like video or images. It's just like not worth it to most places to throw those ads on their property since it's fairly low quality advertisers.
More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.
The teams spending the kind of money these ad networks care about are doing a lot of upper funnel brand marketing where exposure is more important than clicks and where conversions are expected to be much lower for this segment of spend.
The largest brands (Walmart, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, etc.) put a lot of analytics into their ad spend. I worked on an ad platform with a large audience that these kinds of brands wanted to get their name in front of, but the audience was exceedingly unlikely to click on big-brand ads on our platform. The brands figured this out quickly and pushed hard for cost-per-click rather than cost-per-impression because cost-per-click was essentially free brand marketing for them, even if they were paying $100 per click.
The next tier down was kind of the opposite. They weren't big enough to surface things like this, and they hired agencies for most of their ad spend. When focusing on the top of the funnel, there's this strange incentive with agencies where they often get more budget to spend if they can connect that directly to eye balls. Agencies are incentivized to throw the ads up everywhere and pay well to do so. They love cost-per-impression because we could deliver a large, predictable number of eye balls in a hurry.
All that said, we put no effort into getting around ad blockers as we were serving these ads on our own site/app and we viewed fighting ad blockers as fighting our users. Our ads were served inline in HTML, but clearly identified in the HTML of the page. It took blockers a while to catch on and block them, but they eventually did.
This is correct, and the extra insidious part is that folks who are tech-savvy and privacy-conscious are more valuable profiles than normies, because we generally work in higher income jobs/industries. So whether we click or not is irrelevant, Facebook gets paid more for showing us ads than they do for typical normies.
Good luck. I'd wager that most methods to protect your privacy aren't nearly as effective as we think they are. While I don't think it means that you shouldn't try to protect your information, I typically assume that anything short of very extreme measures is only mildly effective.
Online advertising is less and less about forcing a pitch to conversion in the moment its viewed. Even if someone with an ad blocker would never click on the ad anyway, repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure. Six months or even a year from then, when that user is looking for a specific SaaS tool, for example, the brand they saw 40 times already is the one that feels established and safe, and it's more likely to lead to a conversion without ever clicking the original ad.
The second part of putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers is tracking & fingerprinting, especially across devices.
In general, ads work by anchoring a brand name in your memory for when you eventually are looking for said product or service, the goal isn't always to force a conversion on the spot.
What if the conversation is negative? I have very little patience for halfbaked ads disguised as posts. Some companies just show what they are and sell, but too often these days it's a memey post-like advertisement which will be a negative the next conversation "ah, yes that company with those annoyingly fake ads, just like their [product]". But I do not rule out I'm the odd one out and the people deciding the tools to for upon people fall for those ads.
It doesn't matter if your personal interaction is negative if on the whole it's positive across a larger corpus of users. By and large this exposure tactic works more than not.
Ads do a lot more than advertise. They track and collect data about you without you interacting at all. I don’t use an adblocker to not see ads, i use an ad blocker to not load ads or interact with their providers servers at all.
in that money is the atomic unit of economic control, sure.
government's don't surveil for money, unless you bend the argument a bit to say the government has finite resources and is run off money itself. which is kinda true, but also kinda fuzzy (the Fed).
Yes, but if a user doesn’t convert the advertiser will see worse performance metrics as cost per click/conversion/install is higher. That isn’t a good long term outcome for the platform, since advertisers can switch their budgets elsewhere (to Google/Youtube)
There’s a delicate balance, more impressions isn’t always a good outcome. Id assume here given the battle against ad blockers that the platforms do believe the aggregate impression mix leads to good performance for advertisers though
Partially, yes. Ads are also psychological, and tracked cross-platform. If you see a BMW ad on Facebook, drive by a BMW billboard on the highway, search BMW on Google, and then go buy a BMW, they have ways of fractionally allocating the conversion to the different impressions. It's pretty crazy.
I don't like ads and don't want to buy random stuff, but they totally work me sometimes, and I'm sure there has got to be many like me. It's one of the big reasons I don't go on social media really anymore. I mostly have willpower, but in moments of weakness I'll see a perfectly targeted ad, it'll be for something affordable, and I'll but it. It was never a big problem for me as it's only happened a handful of times, but everything I've bought this way has been useless and I've gotten rid of it all.
I believe tracking and privacy invasions cannot be solved through technological means, it needs to be solved through laws and regulations.
We need to prod our representatives to ban the selling of our private information. Websites themselves can use the information but they're prohibited from selling it to anyone else. Why? Because the data changes hands and borders several times after which we lose all control over it.
> is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway
Even cringy ads that digust or anger users in the moment have a subtle effect of making them more likely to buy or recommend that brand in the future. The name recognition is what advertisers are buying, it doesn't have to immediately persuade the user to click for them to get what they want.
Do we no longer habitually install an ad block for friends and family? There's gotta be some naive users with an ad blocker that way, or default within brave or whatever
I go a bit further - if something penetrates firefox + ublock origin combo, I'll go out of my way to make sure I'll never, ever buy such product or service if I can avoid that (not always possible but reasonably frequent).
Its quichotesque effort but the only thing that can move the needle a bit since everybody involved cares only about money here - waiting for some toothless legislation is useless when harm is happening now.
There is a ton of shady stuff that UBO let's through. Some of it can be filtered with the optional lists but not all. You really need NoScript and LocalCDN in the arsenal to pare back the invasive abuse of privacy.
ads are like billboards. the company doesn't make money by making sure your buy the product, it make money by getting the product in front of you. You might not buy the product today, but there is a chance that since you've seen the product, you might buy it in the future.
many of times, i have looked to purchase a product or service and remember an ad that i saw that has alter my decision.
I got a facebook account because I wanted to use marketplace. I just use one of those CSS browser plugins to hide the newsfeed which is where all the ads pop up. The following does the trick for me:
Marketplace. It's horrible, but the area I live in has mostly abandoned craigslist and if you want to buy/sell used stuff, marketplace is where you have to be.
I feel like Craigslist squandered its effective monopoly with online classifieds.
While I do not think that the company needed to modernize the site’s UI, it baffles me that their anti-spam tools are so rudimentary. Most searches yield irrelevant keyword-bombed results, and, such results tend to be nearly identical listings.
I had yearned for a viable Craigslist alternative for years. Sadly, Facebook Marketplace won. I don’t feel comfortable searching for anything due to the fact that Facebook will inevitably use my queries to further profile me.
I recently perused Marketplace, and it appears to be so thoroughly infested with barely disguised scams, bogus prices and other garbage as to be usable by only the most intrepid and determined shoppers.
you could use NoBook or MaterialBook, both on Github, personally I don't have FB account 10+ years and not missing it (besides marketplace, though don't see even there better deals than local classifieds website)
I wrote and shared uBlock Origin filters for Facebook, shared on Reddit and up to a week later they changed the DOM structure bypassed the filters. After some attempts I no longer publish the filters.
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).
I don’t see how presenting an image would allow you to interact with the page, especially if all you are doing is modify the image you’re presenting, not the page itself.
Are you saying you would get the image, detect the ad in the image, then regenerate the HTML without the ad based on where it was located in the image?
How long until someone invents a fully-integrated local video and audio adblock filter running on a passthrough VR headset or smart glasses? The progress on this front is taking a while. I wouldn't mind if the audio filter is white noise and a portion of what I see is blurred out. Maybe to make it more efficient, only scan near the places I'm looking at via foveated rendering.
How about we just get on with it and delegalize ads already? They’re a net negative in every form, subsidizing disgusting companies that shouldn’t exist, infringing on everyone’s privacy (including your children! think of the children!!!!!), and making us jump through all kinds of ridiculous hoops to minimize our exposure to them. I don’t think the solution is more hoops.
I don't think ads should be illegal because companies have a right to try to send me information or inform me of their products, but I also have a right to block them. The problem is that client-side computing seems to be lagging behind. Once an effective local video+audio filter is invented, it's either game over for adware or another arms race will begin where humans and classifiers can't tell what an ad is anymore (this has already run to completion on many platforms like Reddit, Amazon, and Google Maps anyway).
Criminalizing information flow is a non-trivial problem that I wouldn't want governments to be in control of.
Ads and the surveillance ecosystem are more than just a company sending you information. They're paying another company, which that other company uses to provide services below cost (often free, and often creating network lock-in effects), which is clearly an anti-competitive business practice. Ads completely destroy markets they operate in.
"companies have a right to try to send me information"
The problem isn't one company sending information unsolicited, it's when hundreds of thousands of companies flood every communication channel with their own unsolicited advertising.
Email, phone have become unusable channels, not to mention much of the web.
100%. Personally, I hate Meta and I don't use their apps. There's so much bullshit and fake news on there it's not even funny. But my business uses FB and Insta because they deliver results.
I can get my content in front of tons of people for a pittance. I can upload a list of my best customers and run a lookalike campaign. I can run a re-targeting campaign on lapsed regulars. I can spend $16 to generate $1000. It's like fishing with dynamite.
Think about the type of person who uses FB. They don't care about ads. They don't care that it's fake content. They don't care that at least half the feed is AI slop. They just keep scrolling, clicking and buying.
Meta didn't create these people. They only got them all to gather in one place and then started selling access. There's a sucker born every minute and they grow up and join FB. This isn't a defense of Meta by any means. They are a horrible company and the world would be better off if business models like theirs were outlawed. The point is nothing is going to change with them unless there's legislative action.
I can't imagine how pissed I would be if my local government told me I need to use and thereby support a website that is fine with showing users ads with AI-generated CSAM.
I love how Facebook has one reputation, an Instagram has another and they often don’t match at all even though we all know it’s the exact fucking service with a different skin and theme.
What's with this current trend of grouping GenX with Boomers? I am GenX and the difference between us and Boomers is wild. My GenX friends are on here. Boomers I know are afraid of self-checkout machines.
Zoomers don't know the difference. They don't know much (because we destroyed the schools and the media right before whey were born.) They have no idea if there's any difference between the 70s and the 40s.
But to be fair, when I was 19 everybody over 30 was basically the same kind of old to me. Also boomers are the most childish generation in history, and attempt to hide amongst Xers.
The weird thing is that they think that Millennials created their culture. Xers created their culture. Millennials were raised on Disney and N'SYNC.
It is an interesting experiment. Ads on my network are mostly blocked, but wife did notice a spike on her FB stuff. Now that she knows how nice ( edit: well, not automatically awful ) net is without ads, lets see if accepts the trade off.
Those childish comments are so funny. 3 billion people use Facebook regularly, and there are folks that deem themselves superior to all others who claim "I know nobody who uses Facebook". XD
Christ, pipe down little buddy. These “aha gotcha!” responses belong on reddit—but since you’re craving for one too, I’ll bite:
“It’s not a childish comment in the slightest, and most definitely not a claim of superiority in any way either. It’s simply a fact. I, too, know a grand total of 0 persons who use Facebook. Three billion people may use it regularly but all the people I know are in the other, let’s say >vast majority<, of FIVE billion people who don’t even care about Zuckerberg’s billboard.”
Using ad blockers is of poor character anyway. That's their chosen business model and if we don't accept their terms then we don't need to use their service.
I am happy to pay for an Ad Free experience on services that offer it. We should all send letters to companies who we want to pay to give us an ad free experience. "I don't want to pay" is an indefensible position because everything is an energy exchange. "There is no free lunch." If we don't want to pay with money then we can pay with attention to ads, and hacking the display to take without giving in return is corrupt.
Other adblock tools have gone the route of allowing "good" ads through and only blocking "bad" ads. Of course the definition of good vs bad might depend on who sponsors the dev.
Apropos of nothing, I noted @markoff said they liked John Markoff in the 80s. As a complete aside, may I recommend to readers Markoff's book "What the Dormouse Said." From 2005, it's a deep-dive into the relationship between 60s counter-culture and 70s / 80s era microcomputer movers and shakers. Want to read about Doug Engelbart tripping balls in the Santa Cruz Mountains? It's in there. Or maybe I just made that up in a LSD fueled trip to the center of my mind. But that KIND of thing is in there. Abbie Hoffman somehow influenced Steve Jobs fascination with PARC derived WIMP systems. An image of Richard Nixon getting his face punched was burned into the original PC BIOS ROMs. Tim O'Leary developed software in the 80s. One of these is not true, but you have to read the book to find out which.
I misread the domain as "digital cesspools" and that is indeed what Facebook is. If you're still on there you're going to get subjected to their abusive practices.
either the agents are not good enough to do it, or they cost too much, or perhaps they refuse (i.e. seeing it as trying to subvert the intended function of the site or something).
Nobody owes creators a dime. Creators need to earn their income by producing something worth consuming, and being on a platform that is acceptable to the consumer.
And the world was better off before "modern social media."
I'd pay a few dollars a month to use a service without ads and without surveillance. Services don't offer this and creators are staying on those services, so fuck them.
I get what you're saying, and in the beginning days of the internet, I hoped that people would adopt a payment system where a user could distribute a pool of money to the pages that they visited, in order to pay for server uptime, content creation, etc.
Of course, companies took the easy way out. Just serve ads. Until that got absolutely obnoxious and downright dangerous, then users started blocking them enmass.
Well of course, we're now in a place where the internet is mostly paid for with ads, and the content creators that want to get paid up front (substack, WSJ, FT, etc) want crazy high amounts for subscription fees. I'm not a trader, so I do not get enough benefit to make it worth while to sub to those sites.
So I guess I'll keep blocking ads for my own security, and bypass paywalls with archiver sites. Shame. It could have been different, but this is the bed they made, and they can lay in it.
AFAIK creators these days earn via additional channels like merch, tiktok etc. Direct views of some videos aren't prime for quite some time.
People dont have issue with creators getting paid, they have issue with absolutely evil platforms that host that and scoop up most of the value between creators and consumers. Platforms that willingly promote ie racist content because it simply drives more views/clicks.
TIL there are creators on FB, I thought it's social network for people to meet friends or for companies/restaurants to present themselves, but creators? that sounds more like Youtube
There are. Several model maker communities use it to put stuff up for sale. It is a nice way to find other model makers.
The reason I joined FB no longer exists for me. I remember why I stopped talking to many of the 'friends' I had. I silenced all of them and only join interesting groups now. Even then I only log in once or twice a year.
I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the money that's put into circumventing ad blockers isn't really generating more sales.
It's like a door to door sales person thinking that if only they could find a way to unlock my door I would buy their stuff.
You don't actually need to click on an ad or purchase something from an ad site in order for Facebook to make money selling ad space.
The moment these ads are loaded on the page, real time auction occurs, where advertisers place bids algorithmically and automatically, based on your profile. Facebook makes it's money by selling this ad space. It doesn't particularly care whether you click on them or not. But if they don't load in the first place, there's nothing for Facebook to sell.
The real insideous part is that advertisers don't need to actually bid on the auction to participate, and anyone participating gets to havest your ad profile. This is one of the big ways data brokers are able to build profiles on you. They can then do whatever they want with this info, and you'd probably never know.
That's not true. If your ad placements don't perform, people are not going to book them. If ads are loaded or not is also often verified by independent third party trackers that you have to embed on your page next to the ad. There's whole industries built on this stuff and it's not as simple as "we sell the slot and don't care if people see it or click on it".
Thanks for your insight. It probably would have been more helpful if you took the time to quote the particular part of my comment which you believe to be untrue.
If youre referring to whether or not Meta "cares" of you click and ad or not, then fair play. I'd argue that's more or less semantics, but ok, they do care and there is indeed an entire industry built on them caring.
In my defense I was more referring to the fact that whether you click or not doesn't change the fact that there is still ad sales happening in the background, and based on that, yes my assesment is correct.
If you'd like to clarify which part of my argument you had issue with instead of having me just guess, that'd be helpful too.
I mean you are both right, it's been a few years since I have been in adtech, and it isn't black and white. There are few places that will pay for stuff that isn't clicked through, but there are places that are willing to pay on an impression basis for things like video or images. It's just like not worth it to most places to throw those ads on their property since it's fairly low quality advertisers.
More to the point though, if there isn't ads rendered, you can't even get accidental clicks.
The teams spending the kind of money these ad networks care about are doing a lot of upper funnel brand marketing where exposure is more important than clicks and where conversions are expected to be much lower for this segment of spend.
The largest brands (Walmart, McDonald's, Coca-Cola, etc.) put a lot of analytics into their ad spend. I worked on an ad platform with a large audience that these kinds of brands wanted to get their name in front of, but the audience was exceedingly unlikely to click on big-brand ads on our platform. The brands figured this out quickly and pushed hard for cost-per-click rather than cost-per-impression because cost-per-click was essentially free brand marketing for them, even if they were paying $100 per click.
The next tier down was kind of the opposite. They weren't big enough to surface things like this, and they hired agencies for most of their ad spend. When focusing on the top of the funnel, there's this strange incentive with agencies where they often get more budget to spend if they can connect that directly to eye balls. Agencies are incentivized to throw the ads up everywhere and pay well to do so. They love cost-per-impression because we could deliver a large, predictable number of eye balls in a hurry.
All that said, we put no effort into getting around ad blockers as we were serving these ads on our own site/app and we viewed fighting ad blockers as fighting our users. Our ads were served inline in HTML, but clearly identified in the HTML of the page. It took blockers a while to catch on and block them, but they eventually did.
This is correct, and the extra insidious part is that folks who are tech-savvy and privacy-conscious are more valuable profiles than normies, because we generally work in higher income jobs/industries. So whether we click or not is irrelevant, Facebook gets paid more for showing us ads than they do for typical normies.
and thats why you lock down your privacy, so they get nothing other than "generic privacy enthusiast #1000101010101"
Good luck. I'd wager that most methods to protect your privacy aren't nearly as effective as we think they are. While I don't think it means that you shouldn't try to protect your information, I typically assume that anything short of very extreme measures is only mildly effective.
Online advertising is less and less about forcing a pitch to conversion in the moment its viewed. Even if someone with an ad blocker would never click on the ad anyway, repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure. Six months or even a year from then, when that user is looking for a specific SaaS tool, for example, the brand they saw 40 times already is the one that feels established and safe, and it's more likely to lead to a conversion without ever clicking the original ad.
The second part of putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers is tracking & fingerprinting, especially across devices.
In general, ads work by anchoring a brand name in your memory for when you eventually are looking for said product or service, the goal isn't always to force a conversion on the spot.
What if the conversation is negative? I have very little patience for halfbaked ads disguised as posts. Some companies just show what they are and sell, but too often these days it's a memey post-like advertisement which will be a negative the next conversation "ah, yes that company with those annoyingly fake ads, just like their [product]". But I do not rule out I'm the odd one out and the people deciding the tools to for upon people fall for those ads.
It doesn't matter if your personal interaction is negative if on the whole it's positive across a larger corpus of users. By and large this exposure tactic works more than not.
Ads do a lot more than advertise. They track and collect data about you without you interacting at all. I don’t use an adblocker to not see ads, i use an ad blocker to not load ads or interact with their providers servers at all.
Ads are for surveillance as much if not more than they are for money
Presumable the ads on Facebook are served by Facebook and they know who you are and what you are doing on Facebook.
I believe that, as long as you add that the surveillance is also for money.
in that money is the atomic unit of economic control, sure.
government's don't surveil for money, unless you bend the argument a bit to say the government has finite resources and is run off money itself. which is kinda true, but also kinda fuzzy (the Fed).
Aren’t ads payed also via „impressions“, like 10k people saw your advertisement so please pay x money?
Yes, but if a user doesn’t convert the advertiser will see worse performance metrics as cost per click/conversion/install is higher. That isn’t a good long term outcome for the platform, since advertisers can switch their budgets elsewhere (to Google/Youtube)
There’s a delicate balance, more impressions isn’t always a good outcome. Id assume here given the battle against ad blockers that the platforms do believe the aggregate impression mix leads to good performance for advertisers though
Partially, yes. Ads are also psychological, and tracked cross-platform. If you see a BMW ad on Facebook, drive by a BMW billboard on the highway, search BMW on Google, and then go buy a BMW, they have ways of fractionally allocating the conversion to the different impressions. It's pretty crazy.
I always thought last-click attribution was generally used even though partial attribution was technically possible. But my info is a few years stale.
I don't like ads and don't want to buy random stuff, but they totally work me sometimes, and I'm sure there has got to be many like me. It's one of the big reasons I don't go on social media really anymore. I mostly have willpower, but in moments of weakness I'll see a perfectly targeted ad, it'll be for something affordable, and I'll but it. It was never a big problem for me as it's only happened a handful of times, but everything I've bought this way has been useless and I've gotten rid of it all.
Story time? I want to know about the useless items.
lol, no, it's mostly embarrassing :P Well, they included a silicone sponge and a massive blanket.
I believe tracking and privacy invasions cannot be solved through technological means, it needs to be solved through laws and regulations.
We need to prod our representatives to ban the selling of our private information. Websites themselves can use the information but they're prohibited from selling it to anyone else. Why? Because the data changes hands and borders several times after which we lose all control over it.
> is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway
Even cringy ads that digust or anger users in the moment have a subtle effect of making them more likely to buy or recommend that brand in the future. The name recognition is what advertisers are buying, it doesn't have to immediately persuade the user to click for them to get what they want.
100% higher up decision, I bet they loose more on this than the powerpoint slide says they are earning.
Do we no longer habitually install an ad block for friends and family? There's gotta be some naive users with an ad blocker that way, or default within brave or whatever
They are no longer handling Facebook in the ad blocker. Installing an ad blocker won't help.
I go a bit further - if something penetrates firefox + ublock origin combo, I'll go out of my way to make sure I'll never, ever buy such product or service if I can avoid that (not always possible but reasonably frequent).
Its quichotesque effort but the only thing that can move the needle a bit since everybody involved cares only about money here - waiting for some toothless legislation is useless when harm is happening now.
There is a ton of shady stuff that UBO let's through. Some of it can be filtered with the optional lists but not all. You really need NoScript and LocalCDN in the arsenal to pare back the invasive abuse of privacy.
ads are like billboards. the company doesn't make money by making sure your buy the product, it make money by getting the product in front of you. You might not buy the product today, but there is a chance that since you've seen the product, you might buy it in the future.
many of times, i have looked to purchase a product or service and remember an ad that i saw that has alter my decision.
The only way to keep ads off Facebook is to stop using Facebook.
I got a facebook account because I wanted to use marketplace. I just use one of those CSS browser plugins to hide the newsfeed which is where all the ads pop up. The following does the trick for me:
I also don't have any friends on it.Marketplace has video ads that play with sound as you scroll by now. It's incredible
Ah, well I guess I'll be seeing those soon then? I don't use Marketplace too much (and just got burned recently so I've soured on it).
If you're still using Facebook, it's because you're required to or you're the kind of person who won't be fazed by this.
Correct, for better or worse facebook is the meeting ground for many communities and if you are in those communities you have to use it.
Marketplace. It's horrible, but the area I live in has mostly abandoned craigslist and if you want to buy/sell used stuff, marketplace is where you have to be.
I feel like Craigslist squandered its effective monopoly with online classifieds.
While I do not think that the company needed to modernize the site’s UI, it baffles me that their anti-spam tools are so rudimentary. Most searches yield irrelevant keyword-bombed results, and, such results tend to be nearly identical listings.
I had yearned for a viable Craigslist alternative for years. Sadly, Facebook Marketplace won. I don’t feel comfortable searching for anything due to the fact that Facebook will inevitably use my queries to further profile me.
I recently perused Marketplace, and it appears to be so thoroughly infested with barely disguised scams, bogus prices and other garbage as to be usable by only the most intrepid and determined shoppers.
you could use NoBook or MaterialBook, both on Github, personally I don't have FB account 10+ years and not missing it (besides marketplace, though don't see even there better deals than local classifieds website)
I wrote and shared uBlock Origin filters for Facebook, shared on Reddit and up to a week later they changed the DOM structure bypassed the filters. After some attempts I no longer publish the filters.
Maybe a better approach is to convert the page to an image, run OCR over it, use an LLM to remove the ads, present the result to the user.
How would you comment or watch a video if you did that?
That sounds like an upside.
You can still do that.
The only thing I'm proposing is to do the filtering on graphical data (what the user actually sees) rather than on the DOM (which can be obfuscated; and which may change every week).
I don’t see how presenting an image would allow you to interact with the page, especially if all you are doing is modify the image you’re presenting, not the page itself.
Are you saying you would get the image, detect the ad in the image, then regenerate the HTML without the ad based on where it was located in the image?
You don’t need to regenerate, insert a DOM element to obscure it.
Could you publish it with a license saying it shall not be used by any Facebook employee or something?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271126
More discussion here
With 104 comments at the moment, that’s where the bulk of the discussion is happening.
well this post was like one hour earlier, they should have merged it earlier when there were zero posts in both
How long until someone invents a fully-integrated local video and audio adblock filter running on a passthrough VR headset or smart glasses? The progress on this front is taking a while. I wouldn't mind if the audio filter is white noise and a portion of what I see is blurred out. Maybe to make it more efficient, only scan near the places I'm looking at via foveated rendering.
How about we just get on with it and delegalize ads already? They’re a net negative in every form, subsidizing disgusting companies that shouldn’t exist, infringing on everyone’s privacy (including your children! think of the children!!!!!), and making us jump through all kinds of ridiculous hoops to minimize our exposure to them. I don’t think the solution is more hoops.
I don't think ads should be illegal because companies have a right to try to send me information or inform me of their products, but I also have a right to block them. The problem is that client-side computing seems to be lagging behind. Once an effective local video+audio filter is invented, it's either game over for adware or another arms race will begin where humans and classifiers can't tell what an ad is anymore (this has already run to completion on many platforms like Reddit, Amazon, and Google Maps anyway).
Criminalizing information flow is a non-trivial problem that I wouldn't want governments to be in control of.
Ads and the surveillance ecosystem are more than just a company sending you information. They're paying another company, which that other company uses to provide services below cost (often free, and often creating network lock-in effects), which is clearly an anti-competitive business practice. Ads completely destroy markets they operate in.
"companies have a right to try to send me information"
The problem isn't one company sending information unsolicited, it's when hundreds of thousands of companies flood every communication channel with their own unsolicited advertising.
Email, phone have become unusable channels, not to mention much of the web.
For those ok purging the whole newsfeed: https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator
This does seem like an area where AI could help respond to changes quickly.
ok thanking the team for this work over the years. i hope yt will stay ad-free :-)
Here's the source:
https://reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5
https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/
Archived comments / VPN: https://photon-reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/
the tragedy is 'mainstreet' runs on Facebook.
not shitter, google but fb. some local business don't even have their own sites but maintain an insta / fb page.
100%. Personally, I hate Meta and I don't use their apps. There's so much bullshit and fake news on there it's not even funny. But my business uses FB and Insta because they deliver results.
I can get my content in front of tons of people for a pittance. I can upload a list of my best customers and run a lookalike campaign. I can run a re-targeting campaign on lapsed regulars. I can spend $16 to generate $1000. It's like fishing with dynamite.
Think about the type of person who uses FB. They don't care about ads. They don't care that it's fake content. They don't care that at least half the feed is AI slop. They just keep scrolling, clicking and buying.
Meta didn't create these people. They only got them all to gather in one place and then started selling access. There's a sucker born every minute and they grow up and join FB. This isn't a defense of Meta by any means. They are a horrible company and the world would be better off if business models like theirs were outlawed. The point is nothing is going to change with them unless there's legislative action.
Shitter? Edit: Ah, I assume you're referring to X (previously Twitter -> shitter taunt)
Xitter.
the ONLY way my county communicates emergency alerts is facebook. it's absolutely wild. how do I know if I'm in a state of emergency? facebook. :)
I can't imagine how pissed I would be if my local government told me I need to use and thereby support a website that is fine with showing users ads with AI-generated CSAM.
Your country has sold your safety to private interests. Demand better from them.
It's where the GenX-ers and boomers are at who have money to spend
I love how Facebook has one reputation, an Instagram has another and they often don’t match at all even though we all know it’s the exact fucking service with a different skin and theme.
What's with this current trend of grouping GenX with Boomers? I am GenX and the difference between us and Boomers is wild. My GenX friends are on here. Boomers I know are afraid of self-checkout machines.
Zoomers don't know the difference. They don't know much (because we destroyed the schools and the media right before whey were born.) They have no idea if there's any difference between the 70s and the 40s.
But to be fair, when I was 19 everybody over 30 was basically the same kind of old to me. Also boomers are the most childish generation in history, and attempt to hide amongst Xers.
The weird thing is that they think that Millennials created their culture. Xers created their culture. Millennials were raised on Disney and N'SYNC.
Not sure detailing how Facebook demoralized them is the best idea.
Well, uBlock is entirely open source so...
Facebook and instagram constantly email me trying to entice me to use the app. As I haven’t used it for years.
I think it’s purely to massage their Active Monthly User numbers to show growth.
> I think it’s purely to massage their Active Monthly User numbers to show growth.
I don't think so. They want you to use the App because through the they have way more ways to track you.
The app is a back door to your phone. It will vacuum all the data of it if allowed.
It is an interesting experiment. Ads on my network are mostly blocked, but wife did notice a spike on her FB stuff. Now that she knows how nice ( edit: well, not automatically awful ) net is without ads, lets see if accepts the trade off.
I was wondering why I suddenly started seeing these in my feed, I figured I would have to write my own extension to fix it.
Oh well, I cant be mad at the uBO team. Much appreciation for all they have given me over the years
Well, I guess I'm giving up the fight to keep paying any attention to Facebook, then. It was only tolerable with an adblocker.
uBlock hit them where it hurts. Facebook's entire existence hinges on serving ads.
I'm more surprised by the fact that people still use Facebook
remember the amazing show "community"?
Elroy: “I got a job through LinkedIn.”
Annie: “What? That’s crazy! People use LinkedIn?”
Elroy: “No, LinkedIn hired me to help figure out why people don’t use it.”
That's an underrated season, imo. Keith David is fantastic.
Those childish comments are so funny. 3 billion people use Facebook regularly, and there are folks that deem themselves superior to all others who claim "I know nobody who uses Facebook". XD
Christ, pipe down little buddy. These “aha gotcha!” responses belong on reddit—but since you’re craving for one too, I’ll bite:
“It’s not a childish comment in the slightest, and most definitely not a claim of superiority in any way either. It’s simply a fact. I, too, know a grand total of 0 persons who use Facebook. Three billion people may use it regularly but all the people I know are in the other, let’s say >vast majority<, of FIVE billion people who don’t even care about Zuckerberg’s billboard.”
All the more reason to block Facebook completely.
The obvious solution is to not use Facebook.
Out of spite they should have a block list, blocking every meta related service, disabled by default... for now
Using ad blockers is of poor character anyway. That's their chosen business model and if we don't accept their terms then we don't need to use their service.
I am happy to pay for an Ad Free experience on services that offer it. We should all send letters to companies who we want to pay to give us an ad free experience. "I don't want to pay" is an indefensible position because everything is an energy exchange. "There is no free lunch." If we don't want to pay with money then we can pay with attention to ads, and hacking the display to take without giving in return is corrupt.
I think my computer should display information the way I want it to, and that's okay!
I do pay for the energy that powers my monitor and CPU after all.
Hot take: uBlock origin could insert even MORE ads into Facebook? Discouraging people to use Facebook, and also make some money on the side.
(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
Other adblock tools have gone the route of allowing "good" ads through and only blocking "bad" ads. Of course the definition of good vs bad might depend on who sponsors the dev.
Oh! The Irony! This page doesn't load when your ad blocker is turned on.
Not for me (Wipr2 on Safari), loads fine without ADS.
Are you not using uBlock Origin?
It works here.
works fine for me with Vivaldi+uBlock Origin
try loading it with JS off
Apropos of nothing, I noted @markoff said they liked John Markoff in the 80s. As a complete aside, may I recommend to readers Markoff's book "What the Dormouse Said." From 2005, it's a deep-dive into the relationship between 60s counter-culture and 70s / 80s era microcomputer movers and shakers. Want to read about Doug Engelbart tripping balls in the Santa Cruz Mountains? It's in there. Or maybe I just made that up in a LSD fueled trip to the center of my mind. But that KIND of thing is in there. Abbie Hoffman somehow influenced Steve Jobs fascination with PARC derived WIMP systems. An image of Richard Nixon getting his face punched was burned into the original PC BIOS ROMs. Tim O'Leary developed software in the 80s. One of these is not true, but you have to read the book to find out which.
https://search.worldcat.org/title/57068812
I haven't been on Facebook for years
Why are people on anything meta or musk?
Then again I figured we'd be back to personal blogs by now since "AI" can set one up in seconds
Some of us plan events / engage socially.
"What do you do for work?"
"I find ways to defeat adblockers"
Actually, 10 years ago, I knew someone with roughly that job description (neither Google nor Facebook).
Be evil.
I misread the domain as "digital cesspools" and that is indeed what Facebook is. If you're still on there you're going to get subjected to their abusive practices.
why not just run a 24/7 agent to do the work for them?
either the agents are not good enough to do it, or they cost too much, or perhaps they refuse (i.e. seeing it as trying to subvert the intended function of the site or something).
why not "just" do it for them?
Another reminder that facebook is abhorrent and not worth your time.
I know this is gonna be unpopular take
but for modern social media to function, they need showing ads to pay creator
many people livelihood depends on it, creator make content in turn of revenue sharing that user get for free
Nobody owes creators a dime. Creators need to earn their income by producing something worth consuming, and being on a platform that is acceptable to the consumer.
And the world was better off before "modern social media."
I'd pay a few dollars a month to use a service without ads and without surveillance. Services don't offer this and creators are staying on those services, so fuck them.
I get what you're saying, and in the beginning days of the internet, I hoped that people would adopt a payment system where a user could distribute a pool of money to the pages that they visited, in order to pay for server uptime, content creation, etc.
Of course, companies took the easy way out. Just serve ads. Until that got absolutely obnoxious and downright dangerous, then users started blocking them enmass.
Well of course, we're now in a place where the internet is mostly paid for with ads, and the content creators that want to get paid up front (substack, WSJ, FT, etc) want crazy high amounts for subscription fees. I'm not a trader, so I do not get enough benefit to make it worth while to sub to those sites.
So I guess I'll keep blocking ads for my own security, and bypass paywalls with archiver sites. Shame. It could have been different, but this is the bed they made, and they can lay in it.
I have YouTube Premium, so I don't see ads on YouTube.
AFAIK creators these days earn via additional channels like merch, tiktok etc. Direct views of some videos aren't prime for quite some time.
People dont have issue with creators getting paid, they have issue with absolutely evil platforms that host that and scoop up most of the value between creators and consumers. Platforms that willingly promote ie racist content because it simply drives more views/clicks.
TIL there are creators on FB, I thought it's social network for people to meet friends or for companies/restaurants to present themselves, but creators? that sounds more like Youtube
There are. Several model maker communities use it to put stuff up for sale. It is a nice way to find other model makers.
The reason I joined FB no longer exists for me. I remember why I stopped talking to many of the 'friends' I had. I silenced all of them and only join interesting groups now. Even then I only log in once or twice a year.