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Discussion (94 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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. ??
This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?
Sure, it's more computationally-expensive than running an HTML selection, but it's also not "staggering" by any reasonable stretch.
EFF: Adversarial Interoperability - https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...
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.
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
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.)
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.
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)
https://www.fbpurity.com/
(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
That would be funny.
Such a move would also presumably be incompatible with Apple's highly lucrative search engine deal with Google.
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.
>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...
Not perfect, but it works.
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 either burning garbage or from stopping people from wearing masks when they visit the landfill.
Though evidently someone's cut a deal because Facebook groups is all over Google search results these days.
Websites with ads need to satisfy the ad buyers. This means running a bunch of JavaScript that's adversarial to the website and fingerprints both the website and the browser to determine where and to whom the ad is actually shown. It's like a cloudflare bot challenge is happening behind the scenes. Of course all this stuff doesn't happen on the website's own domain, or the website could manipulate it.
And the ad that's originally delivered might not actually be the ad, but might be a script that fetches the real ad from a different server, if the incentives line up that way. Imagine you have a contract to advertise on a site, but someone else wants to advertise on the same site and pays you to forward their ad. Ad margins are razor thin, you'll do this for $0.00001 profit per impression. And your buyer might be doing the same thing to their customer. It's all a huge mess.
In ye old days, you had newspapers who sold ads, and had to at least satisfy their customers. What the newspaper advertised reflected on the newspaper, and where the advertiser advertised, reflected on the advertiser. Now we have a situation where no one is accountable. Spammy ad sites are a thing, because there isn't that direct relationship between advertiser and website.
(I used to work in this area, but my knowledge is ~4y out of date)
Networks are only necessary if you want to run new ads for every year or tie into their browsing history or other algorithmic stuff. But if someone wants to pay you 3k to run a banner ad for a few weeks that would be pretty easy to just embed.
You don't have to run a marketplace. Back then, people were calling via phone to put an ad into the newspaper. The same concept can still apply today.
You can just place an ad _where you actually want it_ instead of having a shitty decision engine decide it for you. Marketing budgets are messed up all over the place since social media, because they're really inefficient in finding the customers that actually wants to buy their stuff.
If you don't believe me, just take a look at facebook, they're trying to shove ads up your feed 99% of the time. It's a feed of ads, not a feed of "friends" anymore. Good luck trying to catch the 1% of posts that were actually the reason why you used the platform in the first place.