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They are welcome to try. And I am welcome to try harder to block them. As long as they don't try to force some sort of legislation on how people can use their

They are welcome to try. And I am welcome to try harder to block them. As long as they don't try to force some sort of legislation on how people can use their internet connection, and their internet browser to fetch and display content, there's no problem. The real problem is Facebook is already full of advertising disguised as content. From sponsored posts to content from things you "like". So I'm kind of surprised they need to go out of their way to explicitly announce that they will be disguising ads. They already have the power to inject it in the middle of content invisibly.

lopatin 10y ago
Serious question: Why do you block FB ads? I wouldn't say that FB ads are any more disguised as content as, say, newspaper ads. And follow up: If FB decided to shut down some features to ad-blocking users, do you think that would be unfair?
- ultramancool 10y ago
  > If FB decided to shut down some features to ad-blocking users, do you think that would be unfair? I think "they're welcome to try" is exactly the right response here. Nothing is "fair" or "unfair", at least not in a way that advertisers or ad blockers care about. No matter what they do it's entirely possible to trick their scripts into believing I'm displaying ads, because they run not on facebook's servers but on my computer. Where I get the control.
  - denzil_correa 10y ago
    > No matter what they do it's entirely possible to trick their scripts into believing I'm displaying ads I hope this is true. I still think Facebook can do much more devious things like having posts on your news feeds from friends which look like posts but are ads. Kind of like native advertising.
  - paulmd 10y ago
    I'm just waiting for the day when websites are rendering themselves inside a DRM-protected container in an HTML5 page. That's where I see all of this inevitably heading. DRM-protected media extensions are almost uniquely positioned for this. They're designed around the abilities to uniquely identify the user and resist tampering. The only thing that's missing right now is interactivity.
    - krstck 10y ago
      Ah yes, because who doesn't want to return to the days of AOL's "channels". I think you're completely right, btw. After AOL, it only took a few years for websites to become rapidly Flash-based. It looks like we're going back to that again (not Flash, but same thing - black boxed).
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  In my case, I use social media to keep up with people I know, not to look at advertisements. Ads make me not want to be there (and I hardly ever am). For the follow up, I assume I agree with the parent post by reiterating that what Facebook does on its own site is its own business, but if the company lobbied for legislation that required people to look at ads online, then that would be a problem. Besides, if Facebook made the experience so detestable that people were willing to leave for another social network, then Google and every other college freshman would leap at the opportunity to be the next big thing.
- gramstrong 10y ago
  Facebook already owns my personal data and any content that I publish. Why should I also have to look at ads?
  - SolarUpNote 10y ago
    What good is your personal information if it's not to show you personalized ads?
    - alkonaut 10y ago
      They can sell it to third parties, who can in turn show ads on other sites.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  - supster 10y ago
    That data and content is (near) worthless if they can't serve up ads against it.
    - creshal 10y ago
      That's facebook's problem, not the user's.
      - untog 10y ago
        And Facebook is acting on that problem.
        fwn 10y ago
        I don't think that this was questioned here.
      - omginternets 10y ago
- hodder 10y ago
  "Serious question: Why do you block FB ads?" Because I dont like looking at ads.
  - delta1 10y ago
    It seems so obvious
  - omginternets 10y ago
    I've said it before and I'll say it again: "if you [Facebook] want me to consume ads, make ads I want to consume". The thing is, this already exists and it's called native advertising. The trick is to create advertisements that, while endorsing a product, have real value for me. A simple example: a tutorial on doing XYZ with Docker on Google Compute Engine might (A) be relevant to my interests and immediately useful, and (B) incite me to use GCE. Ad-blockers block the scummy, bottom-feeder, AIDS-of-the-internet ads.
    - freehunter 10y ago
      I actually run a local-interest blog for my small city, and whenever I talk to people about it they're amazed I don't have ads all over the place. "How do you make money", "why would you run this site without making money", "you should be getting something for it", etc. They don't immediately realize that 90% of the content on the site is advertising, and I actually am getting paid for it. I'll write an article about whatever I want, in whatever tone I want, for free. But sometimes businesses want to set their own tone, or want me to write about something that isn't immediately interesting to me. Sometimes they want me to run a story before I would otherwise do so. And they'll pay me for that. Not a lot, but it generally covers the cost of hosting at least. I have an entire section, accessible from any page, that goes into my advertising policy and how businesses can contact me. Ads don't have to look like ads. And ads can give value, too. Did the local tavern pay me to run a story talking about their new 1/2 off drinks special every Wednesday? They sure did. But people clicked on it and read the article and then visited the bar and took advantage of the promotion. Not because they were tricked into doing so, but because it was interesting to them and they got value from it. And those people will come back to the site again tomorrow and read the next one, because my advertising provides real value to them.
- creshal 10y ago
  Users running adblockers likely wouldn't click the ads anyway, so I don't really see the problem. That some advertisers think they should pay by impression and not by click is their own stupidity.
  - untog 10y ago
    > That some advertisers think they should pay by impression and not by click is their own stupidity. It's not. Ads can be entirely successful without a click - sometimes it'll just be a reminder of the brand's name the next time you are shopping for their product. "Users running adblockers likely wouldn't click the ads anyway" is a pretty naive view of how the ad industry operates.
    - ionised 10y ago
      > sometimes it'll just be a reminder of the brand's name the next time you are shopping for their product. All it does is make me avoid the product out of spite.
      - untog 10y ago
        Assuming you're consciously aware of what's going on. Maybe you are, but you wouldn't know if you aren't. You can't really claim to be immune to subconscious tricks.
      - robryan 10y ago
        This isn't what usually happens though. If advertising drove negative value to a brand over time it just wouldn't be purchased. Not many companies can take off purely on the quality of their product, especially in boring industries. I can't think of an insurance company which I learned about outside of widespread advertising.
      - type0 10y ago
        The Mere Exposure Effect does work though, probably more effectively than you realize.
  - 10y ago
- natrius 10y ago
  When you allow targeted ads into your life, you're putting changes in your behavior on the market each time you touch a device. Those behavior changes are intended to make you give the buyer more money than they paid. The market will find every flaw in your psychology that can be used to take money from your pocket. These flaws exist: Las Vegas is built on them. Targeted ads are the Las Vegas of the mind.
  - johndavidback 10y ago
    That's all well and good, but a key distinction here is that you are using Facebook for absolutely no out-of-pocket expenditure. Going to Vegas costs actual dollars. I suppose a stark, diametric alternative to being forced to view targeted ads would be Facebook as a paid subscription service. It's the age old issue of 'Someone has to pay for this party.'
    - natrius 10y ago
      Facebook's profitability is not your problem. It's their job to figure out how to get paid. It's your job to protect your mind. Targeted ads are worse than gambling. We made sure everyone's aware of the dangers of gambling, but everyone's in the dark about targeted ads. These companies know what they're doing. If people want to portray ad blocking as stealing, so be it. Steal from them. They deserve it.
      - hsod 10y ago
        > Facebook's profitability is not your problem. No, but acting with honesty and fairness is. Facebook is asking you not to use their service if you are going to block ads. I think it's obvious that the "right" thing to do is to respect their wishes, not sneeringly defy them while using their resources and giving nothing in return.
        _RPM 10y ago
        > Giving them nothing in return. You're giving them a lot, even if you don't click on ads or see ads. Is it not clear that your data is valuable? You're giving them personal information. Not that people that aren't developers care.
- CaptSpify 10y ago
  Because they are annoying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5JdX_iQ2Hk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5JdX_iQ2Hk tl;dw: Advertisers are untrustworthy and act in bad faith. Once we give them an inch, they take a mile. If you met a person like that, would you continue to socialize with them? I wouldn't
- findK 10y ago
  "If FB decided to shut down some features to ad-blocking users, do you think that would be unfair?".. Besides scrolling through your feed, is there much you do on FB? It's just a news aggregation site now.
denzil_correa 10y ago
> They are welcome to try. And I am welcome to try harder to block them. Technically, Facebook could insert news feed ads like a post from one of your friend (assume that the friend has liked some page or organization). It could be tough to distinguish between ads and posts much like native advertising.
- mgbmtl 10y ago
  Ads already affect the experience significantly, this would do so even more. (not that I use Facebook, but Tumblr for example, has extremely annoying repetitive offensive ads)
  - ulucs 10y ago
    Do you remember the time when staff broke the audio ads and they kept looping with no way to stop whatsoever? And people still go on about blocking ads being unethical
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- mattmanser 10y ago
  It's a legal requirement in most countries to clearly distinguish ads from content.
  - SilasX 10y ago
    Distinguish them to human viewers, not to computers. If the aggregate effect of all the CSS and element classes is to make ads look one way and non-ads look a different way (each with slight variations), it's an AI-complete problem infer an answer to "given these elements and this CSS sheet, which subset of them looks different and add-like to a human?"
    - robrenaud 10y ago
      Is it an AI-complete problem to do email spam classification? Why is determining if a facebook post is an ad or not so different than spam classification?
legohead 10y ago
I worked for a company that got most of its revenue from online ads. When I started, adblockers were 20%. When it got up to 35% the boss decided to take action. We hired a third party anti-adblocker, and it worked great. It went back and forth with the adblockers as they updated to block our anti-blocking. Most adblock extensions use some standard rules-lists, similar to email spam lists like Spamhaus. I guess we pissed someone off enough and they introduced a rule to block all AJAX requests on our site. This pretty much ruined our site, so we finally relented and removed the anti-adblocking altogether.
- r3bl 10y ago
  Slightly off-topic, but I have to ask: have you tried (or considered) hosting your own ads?
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    It's really easy to get caught by basic lists. After use garbish/deceptive class names / ID's of DOM or file names, you get more popular and cat and mouse games start with block list maintainers.
- mjevans 10y ago
  Have you tried leaner, less obtrusive, ads? Something like straight simple text?
  - legohead 10y ago
    We started off nice: "Hey, you are disabling ads, please turn them on" etc. Then we offered an ad-free subscription (almost worthless). And I think we played with another idea or two, before finally going through with the blocking adblockers.
    - chiph 10y ago
      I think you missed the point of the question - people install adblockers typically because they find the ads are intrusive (full-screen graphic overlays, etc), or their machine gets infected with ad network-delivered malware. If you presented ads that were respectful to the visitor (i.e. weren't offensive) I expect the blocker escalation war would cease.
kbenson 10y ago
> They are welcome to try. And I am welcome to try harder to block them. Well, you've given them permission to try. I doubt they are giving you any such permission, so you're actually presuming quite a bit when you say you're welcome to try as well. This actually matters, because as far as the law is concerned, you don't have any right to to the content beyond what they allow you (excluding laws specific to your submitted content, depending on locality). I understand ads and ad-blocking stir visceral reactions in people, but really, if you don't like what they are doing, you shouldn't use their service. Anything else is just enabling the behavior you dislike, as even if you are not being marketed to, you are providing a reason for other people to want to use the site that are marketed to.
- MichaelGG 10y ago
  I don't understand this. It's your browser. It's not like it's illegal to, say, run a noncompliant browser that misrenders things. An adblocker is the same.
  - danielweber 10y ago
    "I can do what I want with my browser" is irrelevant to the fact that you do not have a right to Facebook's content. They give out the content on their terms.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    > It's not like it's illegal to, say, run a noncompliant browser that misrenders things. Actually it may be, if their terms of service say you aren't allowed to use devices such as that. For example, lynx, or some programming language user agent. That said, I wasn't really specifically addressing legality. There's a legal argument, and a ethical argument. The legal argument is quite clear IMO. The ethical argument is what's interesting in my view. People have justified actions that are clearly against the expressed interest of the content providers and producers in some cases, and I find it interesting to explore the reasoning. I myself do this, as I use an ad blocker, but I've drawn my own line and reasons for doing so, and have my own complicated feelings about it. Having has this conversation multiple times here, invariable security comes up as a big reason for some people why they feel justified, when they do feel conflicted in other areas. Having a content provider serve their own ads weakens the position of security argument quite a bit, so I'm interested in seeing how people react in that case. Edit: s/moral/ethical/
type0 10y ago
I fear that when it doesn't shows to be working they would make their own browser and make it obligatory.

lopatin 10y ago

Serious question: Why do you block FB ads? I wouldn't say that FB ads are any more disguised as content as, say, newspaper ads. And follow up: If FB decided to shut down some features to ad-blocking users, do you think that would be unfair?

ultramancool 10y ago
> If FB decided to shut down some features to ad-blocking users, do you think that would be unfair? I think "they're welcome to try" is exactly the right response here. Nothing is "fair" or "unfair", at least not in a way that advertisers or ad blockers care about. No matter what they do it's entirely possible to trick their scripts into believing I'm displaying ads, because they run not on facebook's servers but on my computer. Where I get the control.
- denzil_correa 10y ago
  > No matter what they do it's entirely possible to trick their scripts into believing I'm displaying ads I hope this is true. I still think Facebook can do much more devious things like having posts on your news feeds from friends which look like posts but are ads. Kind of like native advertising.
- paulmd 10y ago
  I'm just waiting for the day when websites are rendering themselves inside a DRM-protected container in an HTML5 page. That's where I see all of this inevitably heading. DRM-protected media extensions are almost uniquely positioned for this. They're designed around the abilities to uniquely identify the user and resist tampering. The only thing that's missing right now is interactivity.
  - krstck 10y ago
    Ah yes, because who doesn't want to return to the days of AOL's "channels". I think you're completely right, btw. After AOL, it only took a few years for websites to become rapidly Flash-based. It looks like we're going back to that again (not Flash, but same thing - black boxed).
rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
In my case, I use social media to keep up with people I know, not to look at advertisements. Ads make me not want to be there (and I hardly ever am). For the follow up, I assume I agree with the parent post by reiterating that what Facebook does on its own site is its own business, but if the company lobbied for legislation that required people to look at ads online, then that would be a problem. Besides, if Facebook made the experience so detestable that people were willing to leave for another social network, then Google and every other college freshman would leap at the opportunity to be the next big thing.
gramstrong 10y ago
Facebook already owns my personal data and any content that I publish. Why should I also have to look at ads?
- SolarUpNote 10y ago
  What good is your personal information if it's not to show you personalized ads?
  - alkonaut 10y ago
    They can sell it to third parties, who can in turn show ads on other sites.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- supster 10y ago
  That data and content is (near) worthless if they can't serve up ads against it.
  - creshal 10y ago
    That's facebook's problem, not the user's.
    - untog 10y ago
      And Facebook is acting on that problem.
      - fwn 10y ago
        I don't think that this was questioned here.
    - omginternets 10y ago
hodder 10y ago
"Serious question: Why do you block FB ads?" Because I dont like looking at ads.
- delta1 10y ago
  It seems so obvious
- omginternets 10y ago
  I've said it before and I'll say it again: "if you [Facebook] want me to consume ads, make ads I want to consume". The thing is, this already exists and it's called native advertising. The trick is to create advertisements that, while endorsing a product, have real value for me. A simple example: a tutorial on doing XYZ with Docker on Google Compute Engine might (A) be relevant to my interests and immediately useful, and (B) incite me to use GCE. Ad-blockers block the scummy, bottom-feeder, AIDS-of-the-internet ads.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    I actually run a local-interest blog for my small city, and whenever I talk to people about it they're amazed I don't have ads all over the place. "How do you make money", "why would you run this site without making money", "you should be getting something for it", etc. They don't immediately realize that 90% of the content on the site is advertising, and I actually am getting paid for it. I'll write an article about whatever I want, in whatever tone I want, for free. But sometimes businesses want to set their own tone, or want me to write about something that isn't immediately interesting to me. Sometimes they want me to run a story before I would otherwise do so. And they'll pay me for that. Not a lot, but it generally covers the cost of hosting at least. I have an entire section, accessible from any page, that goes into my advertising policy and how businesses can contact me. Ads don't have to look like ads. And ads can give value, too. Did the local tavern pay me to run a story talking about their new 1/2 off drinks special every Wednesday? They sure did. But people clicked on it and read the article and then visited the bar and took advantage of the promotion. Not because they were tricked into doing so, but because it was interesting to them and they got value from it. And those people will come back to the site again tomorrow and read the next one, because my advertising provides real value to them.
creshal 10y ago
Users running adblockers likely wouldn't click the ads anyway, so I don't really see the problem. That some advertisers think they should pay by impression and not by click is their own stupidity.
- untog 10y ago
  > That some advertisers think they should pay by impression and not by click is their own stupidity. It's not. Ads can be entirely successful without a click - sometimes it'll just be a reminder of the brand's name the next time you are shopping for their product. "Users running adblockers likely wouldn't click the ads anyway" is a pretty naive view of how the ad industry operates.
  - ionised 10y ago
    > sometimes it'll just be a reminder of the brand's name the next time you are shopping for their product. All it does is make me avoid the product out of spite.
    - untog 10y ago
      Assuming you're consciously aware of what's going on. Maybe you are, but you wouldn't know if you aren't. You can't really claim to be immune to subconscious tricks.
    - robryan 10y ago
      This isn't what usually happens though. If advertising drove negative value to a brand over time it just wouldn't be purchased. Not many companies can take off purely on the quality of their product, especially in boring industries. I can't think of an insurance company which I learned about outside of widespread advertising.
    - type0 10y ago
      The Mere Exposure Effect does work though, probably more effectively than you realize.
- 10y ago
natrius 10y ago
When you allow targeted ads into your life, you're putting changes in your behavior on the market each time you touch a device. Those behavior changes are intended to make you give the buyer more money than they paid. The market will find every flaw in your psychology that can be used to take money from your pocket. These flaws exist: Las Vegas is built on them. Targeted ads are the Las Vegas of the mind.
- johndavidback 10y ago
  That's all well and good, but a key distinction here is that you are using Facebook for absolutely no out-of-pocket expenditure. Going to Vegas costs actual dollars. I suppose a stark, diametric alternative to being forced to view targeted ads would be Facebook as a paid subscription service. It's the age old issue of 'Someone has to pay for this party.'
  - natrius 10y ago
    Facebook's profitability is not your problem. It's their job to figure out how to get paid. It's your job to protect your mind. Targeted ads are worse than gambling. We made sure everyone's aware of the dangers of gambling, but everyone's in the dark about targeted ads. These companies know what they're doing. If people want to portray ad blocking as stealing, so be it. Steal from them. They deserve it.
    - hsod 10y ago
      > Facebook's profitability is not your problem. No, but acting with honesty and fairness is. Facebook is asking you not to use their service if you are going to block ads. I think it's obvious that the "right" thing to do is to respect their wishes, not sneeringly defy them while using their resources and giving nothing in return.
      - _RPM 10y ago
        > Giving them nothing in return. You're giving them a lot, even if you don't click on ads or see ads. Is it not clear that your data is valuable? You're giving them personal information. Not that people that aren't developers care.
CaptSpify 10y ago
Because they are annoying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5JdX_iQ2Hk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5JdX_iQ2Hk tl;dw: Advertisers are untrustworthy and act in bad faith. Once we give them an inch, they take a mile. If you met a person like that, would you continue to socialize with them? I wouldn't
findK 10y ago
"If FB decided to shut down some features to ad-blocking users, do you think that would be unfair?".. Besides scrolling through your feed, is there much you do on FB? It's just a news aggregation site now.

denzil_correa 10y ago

> They are welcome to try. And I am welcome to try harder to block them. Technically, Facebook could insert news feed ads like a post from one of your friend (assume that the friend has liked some page or organization). It could be tough to distinguish between ads and posts much like native advertising.

mgbmtl 10y ago
Ads already affect the experience significantly, this would do so even more. (not that I use Facebook, but Tumblr for example, has extremely annoying repetitive offensive ads)
- ulucs 10y ago
  Do you remember the time when staff broke the audio ads and they kept looping with no way to stop whatsoever? And people still go on about blocking ads being unethical
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mattmanser 10y ago
It's a legal requirement in most countries to clearly distinguish ads from content.
- SilasX 10y ago
  Distinguish them to human viewers, not to computers. If the aggregate effect of all the CSS and element classes is to make ads look one way and non-ads look a different way (each with slight variations), it's an AI-complete problem infer an answer to "given these elements and this CSS sheet, which subset of them looks different and add-like to a human?"
  - robrenaud 10y ago
    Is it an AI-complete problem to do email spam classification? Why is determining if a facebook post is an ad or not so different than spam classification?

legohead 10y ago

I worked for a company that got most of its revenue from online ads. When I started, adblockers were 20%. When it got up to 35% the boss decided to take action. We hired a third party anti-adblocker, and it worked great. It went back and forth with the adblockers as they updated to block our anti-blocking. Most adblock extensions use some standard rules-lists, similar to email spam lists like Spamhaus. I guess we pissed someone off enough and they introduced a rule to block all AJAX requests on our site. This pretty much ruined our site, so we finally relented and removed the anti-adblocking altogether.

r3bl 10y ago
Slightly off-topic, but I have to ask: have you tried (or considered) hosting your own ads?
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  It's really easy to get caught by basic lists. After use garbish/deceptive class names / ID's of DOM or file names, you get more popular and cat and mouse games start with block list maintainers.
mjevans 10y ago
Have you tried leaner, less obtrusive, ads? Something like straight simple text?
- legohead 10y ago
  We started off nice: "Hey, you are disabling ads, please turn them on" etc. Then we offered an ad-free subscription (almost worthless). And I think we played with another idea or two, before finally going through with the blocking adblockers.
  - chiph 10y ago
    I think you missed the point of the question - people install adblockers typically because they find the ads are intrusive (full-screen graphic overlays, etc), or their machine gets infected with ad network-delivered malware. If you presented ads that were respectful to the visitor (i.e. weren't offensive) I expect the blocker escalation war would cease.

kbenson 10y ago

> They are welcome to try. And I am welcome to try harder to block them. Well, you've given them permission to try. I doubt they are giving you any such permission, so you're actually presuming quite a bit when you say you're welcome to try as well. This actually matters, because as far as the law is concerned, you don't have any right to to the content beyond what they allow you (excluding laws specific to your submitted content, depending on locality). I understand ads and ad-blocking stir visceral reactions in people, but really, if you don't like what they are doing, you shouldn't use their service. Anything else is just enabling the behavior you dislike, as even if you are not being marketed to, you are providing a reason for other people to want to use the site that are marketed to.

MichaelGG 10y ago
I don't understand this. It's your browser. It's not like it's illegal to, say, run a noncompliant browser that misrenders things. An adblocker is the same.
- danielweber 10y ago
  "I can do what I want with my browser" is irrelevant to the fact that you do not have a right to Facebook's content. They give out the content on their terms.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > It's not like it's illegal to, say, run a noncompliant browser that misrenders things. Actually it may be, if their terms of service say you aren't allowed to use devices such as that. For example, lynx, or some programming language user agent. That said, I wasn't really specifically addressing legality. There's a legal argument, and a ethical argument. The legal argument is quite clear IMO. The ethical argument is what's interesting in my view. People have justified actions that are clearly against the expressed interest of the content providers and producers in some cases, and I find it interesting to explore the reasoning. I myself do this, as I use an ad blocker, but I've drawn my own line and reasons for doing so, and have my own complicated feelings about it. Having has this conversation multiple times here, invariable security comes up as a big reason for some people why they feel justified, when they do feel conflicted in other areas. Having a content provider serve their own ads weakens the position of security argument quite a bit, so I'm interested in seeing how people react in that case. Edit: s/moral/ethical/

type0 10y ago

I fear that when it doesn't shows to be working they would make their own browser and make it obligatory.