17 ms·
uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook
https://reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about_disgusting_facebook_devs/ https://reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about_dis...
https://www.neowin.net/news/facebook-ads-are-so-hard-to-block-that-ublock-origin-stopped-filtering-them/ https://www.neowin.net/news/facebook-ads-are-so-hard-to-bloc...
- throwyonion 2mo ago[dead]
- jcfrei 2mo agoOnce LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo agoThis is the first and only use-case for LLMs that I am genuinely excited about.
- AlexandrB 2mo agoSuch naïveté. The much more likely scenario is that AI is used to add or replace ads in a website in a way that's now impossible to remove. Running your own AI on the browser will be disallowed to "ensure a safe browsing experience".
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo agoI wonder how far we are away from AI being required to link to the TPM in a way that the OS and hardware people can have full authority on what you can use.
- debazel 2mo agoWe're not that far off. But it will not just be for AI, but all software. Mobile OSes has already normalized the expectation that you don't control what can run on your own devices.
- monooso 2mo agoGiven that Safari doesn't even have a built-in ad-blocker, I doubt Apple will be leading the charge on this. Such a move would also presumably be incompatible with Apple's highly lucrative search engine deal with Google.
- gdulli 2mo agoIt's amazing how people think Apple has a clean reputation because they've added a thin layer of indirection to their participation in the surveillance ecosystem.
- robocat 2mo agoThey copied what our government does: deception about the causes of everything. For business, our purchases clearly reveal self-deceptive practices, and dark marketing patterns certainly take advantage of that. For government, our voting preferences reveal that we want to be deceived. Although we often say good things that our social group memes us. I'm not sure when I learnt to be so cynical.
- 65 2mo agoMakes me even more excited for Ladybird to be released.
- metahost 2mo agoApple sells ads too; increasingly across its surfaces.
- vintermann 2mo agoYes, it's a near-universal legal requirement that humans be able to tell if something is an ad or not. So once they sabotage that, they're in hot water.
- AlexandrB 2mo agoIs there any enforcement of this? Like at all? All the review bots and bots promoting random crap on reddit say otherwise. Traditional media still pays lip-service to this, but only barely.
- pjc50 2mo agoI was under the impression that America had very few legal restrictions on ads at all.
- concinds 2mo agoSafari was the first to cripple adblockers and went further than ManifestV3, but it seems their reputation will never catch up to that.
- musictubes 2mo agoAd blockers work fine for me in Safari. They may not have the flexibility of manifest v2 but they are hardly crippled. Their reputation will continue to be what it is as long as they keep making things that people like.
- pllbnk 2mo agoThe race of ending personal computing is there. I am sure big players want to control entire stack and users just sitting in front of dumb monitors consuming their ads.
- inigyou 2mo agoIt's a scam. Do not redeem (your money for a crippled device).
- threetonesun 2mo agoIf we're just talking about image based ads it would be easier to simply denylist every image on a page and only render alt-text until the user clicks to reveal it. Worth noting though that Apple injects ads into the News app, which is just a webview, so it's certainly not them that will do this.
- pavel_lishin 2mo agoI wonder what percentage of images even has meaningful alt-text.
- nemomarx 2mo agoIf it doesn't have alt text it can't have been that important as an image, I guess.
- whywhywhywhy 2mo agoYou're trying to stop ads because they're malicious but you think they'd be honest with their alt text? Ignoring that users care deeply about images so a browser that did this would be considered broken from the get go.
- sentrysapper 2mo agoYou anticipate a large language model to understand visual queues for an advertisement?
- triceratops 2mo agoCues, not queues. And yes that sounds workable.
- whywhywhywhy 2mo agoCost issues aside yeah image embedding tech is really good and can already do tasks like this, LLMs with native image understanding are even better at it. Reasons this wouldn't work are you'd really need to get it to a good enough and small enough model to run low energy use and very fast to not impact browsing. The other issue is it'll be a fixed target for a period of time so the ads could be tweaked to find how to get them through it.
- preg_match 2mo agoOn the big platforms, the ads actually have “ad” written on them somewhere or “sponsored”. It will be harder on other sites, but not that hard. There’s an unbreakable ceiling for the ads here - they need to be readable trivially by human eyes, or they don’t work as ads. So, you can hide or obfuscate the ad… but then it’s not a very good ad.
- kart23 2mo agoapple has ads in the os. that seems deeply anticompetitive
- philipallstar 2mo agoThe hard bit isn't killing ads. The hard bit is doing whatever will replace ads to pay for sites.
- rebelpixel 2mo agoBut that means wasting CPU cycles that adds to what was consumed to render the ads in the first place. Compounding all of that produces a slower browser/device experience, making the user hate ads even more.
- mdrzn 2mo agoOriginal reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about_disgusting_facebook_devs/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about...
- drcongo 2mo agoIt's easy, just block every Facebook owned domain there is. Works for me.
- 1over137 2mo agoWhere do you get the list of "every Facebook owned domain"? Can you share?
- drcongo 2mo agoA quick search on Kagi turns up a ton of them. Here you go: https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...
- The-Old-Hacker 2mo agoI use a browser extension called F.B. Purity. It's worked across multiple browsers for years. https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/
- damidekronik 2mo agoI was gonna say that uBlock still works for me on facebook, but yea I forgot I had purity quietly working for me for all those years
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoSame. FBP has been effectively perfect for over a decade now. I don't understand how uBlock Origin can't just take what FBP is doing and apply it there.
- eipi10_hn 2mo agoYou don't understand that the problem is not about the solutions. Every issue has solution. 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.
- mmsc 2mo agoThere's a concern that the developer of FB-purity passed away: https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1tw2sf9/real_concern_that_steve_fernandez_the_creator_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1tw2sf9/real_conc...
- tim333 2mo agoOh dear. Hope he's ok. I got a lot of value out of FB-purity.
- ImHereToVote 2mo agoI don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.
- inigyou 2mo agoBecause the ad ecosystem has two sides. I used to think my ISP could just magically support IPv6 and didn't need routing protocols or peering agreements, too. (They support it now) Websites with ads need to satisfy the ad buyers. This means running a bunch of JavaScript that's adversarial to the website and fingerprints both the website and the browser to determine where and to whom the ad is actually shown. It's like a cloudflare bot challenge is happening behind the scenes. Of course all this stuff doesn't happen on the website's own domain, or the website could manipulate it. And the ad that's originally delivered might not actually be the ad, but might be a script that fetches the real ad from a different server, if the incentives line up that way. Imagine you have a contract to advertise on a site, but someone else wants to advertise on the same site and pays you to forward their ad. Ad margins are razor thin, you'll do this for $0.00001 profit per impression. And your buyer might be doing the same thing to their customer. It's all a huge mess.
- ImHereToVote 2mo agoIt's ironic how trust would solve the issue and ads would become impossible to remove. Trust comes at a huge premium of course.
- inigyou 2mo agoReally shows how shady the whole industry is, even to itself.
- stochastic-parr 2mo agouBlock can filter arbitrary elements from a website, no chance that every company spends as much as facebook on making writing rules hard
- nticompass 2mo agoMan, am I happy that I deleted my Facebook. No regrets.
- baggachipz 2mo agoOh the irony: https://ibb.co/NnxGJyr1 https://ibb.co/NnxGJyr1
- SirFatty 2mo agothat's not irony.
- drnick1 2mo agoBlacklisting facebook.com at the DNS level has worked pretty well for me.
- wompapumpum 2mo ago[flagged]
- amazingamazing 2mo agoThat works, but is not really blocking the ads.
- snapplebobapple 2mo agoI agree. We should call that "blocking the bads" since the overwhelming majority of things served from that domain are bad.
- prmoustache 2mo agofacebook ads are indeed blocked.
- Gormo 2mo agoDon't forget .fbcdn.net and .fbcdn.com.
- akersten 2mo agoThey do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of `<div>` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.
- c-hendricks 2mo agoLast I tried writing custom rules for Facebook was years ago, but they did have proper aria attributes, and uBlock origin does have selectors for text content. These are from 2020: facebook.com##span:has-text(Suggested for You):xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..) facebook.com##div[aria-label="Sponsored"] span[aria-label="Sponsored"]:xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..) facebook.com##div[aria-label="Sponsored"]:xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)
- pimlottc 2mo agoWhat's with the xpath selector? Is that just matching deeply nested elements?
- c-hendricks 2mo agoGoing from memory, but that's how many elements are in the tree between what I wanted to be hidden and where the matching text/elements actually lived.
- pimlottc 2mo agoOh jeez, I hadn’t thought about the blocked element being different than the aria-tagged one. What a nightmare
- ssdspoimdsjvv 2mo agoRead up on XPath axes:)
- OhMeadhbh 2mo agoOh! The Irony! This page doesn't load when your ad blocker is turned on.
- OhMeadhbh 2mo agoApropos 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 https://search.worldcat.org/title/57068812
- squigz 2mo agoIt works here.
- mococa 2mo agoNot for me (Wipr2 on Safari), loads fine without ADS.
- usern20260720 2mo agotry loading it with JS off
- Pooge 2mo agoAre you not using uBlock Origin?
- Markoff 2mo agoworks fine for me with Vivaldi+uBlock Origin
- XorNot 2mo agoMy solution to this was just to stop using Facebook. Though evidently someone's cut a deal because Facebook groups is all over Google search results these days.
- ufmace 2mo agoWell clearly you'll need to stop using Google search too
- amanaplanacanal 2mo agoKagi search allows you to block whole domains, which is pretty great. Isn't there a browser plugin to do that for Google too?
- XorNot 2mo agoWe've been circling that since "thing reddit" became the most optimum search.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- lucrbvi 2mo agoIt would be fun to train a small vision neural network to recognize ads instead of relying on HTML or network requests. I don't know if anyone has done this yet.
- amazingamazing 2mo agoAssuming you insist on using facebook you can proxy it, using a simple script that removes all ads prior to serving. The problem of course is that this is not cheap. Easier to just not use facebook.
- psd1 2mo agoI'm keen to see this simple script, and to understand why it's simple given that ublock origin finds it hard.
- amazingamazing 2mo agoUblock origin doesnt use javascript. The script just involves a tree traversal of the dom and removal of any node that says ad. The issue is facebook obfuscates selectors so you cant easily do it the way ublock prefers.
- psd1 2mo agoSorry, still don't understand. The dom is not complete until JavaScript has run, no? So the ublock extension can do dom traversal on the rendered page, but the proxy can only operate at the request level. I assume your not running a headless browser on your squid box, lol. I'm aware that a proxy can tweak html and js, but the js will be challenging to analyse statically. If you're only blocking requests to ad domains, then presumably most people would just block them in DNS. So i still don't understand what the proxy gains you.
- amazingamazing 2mo agoNo, not a traditional one. You would render the entire page in your server, remove the ads, copy the modified html and your client would get ad free copy. You are not blocking anything in the traditional sense. Ask claude to do it, it works.
- psd1 2mo ago
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- greenleafone7 2mo agoBest solution is to never use any of those useless apps ever again.
- gregoriol 2mo agoSo basically Facebook ads won and we are doomed
- amanaplanacanal 2mo agoNah. I never see Facebook ads. Easy peasy.
- nater5000 2mo ago>and we are doomed 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.
- asadotzler 2mo agoMaybe you are doomed, but lots of others will simply walk away from it. FB may have won the battle, but that doesn't mean we have lost the war.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- hollow-moe 2mo agoThis doesn't set a good precedent unfortunately... Hello to that Google guy that just got tasked to do the same with Youtube.
- Good4boothee 2mo agoI dread the day YT finally decides it is cost effective to embed ads directly in video stream. I think Twitch is/was experimenting with it.
- shiandow 2mo agoI kind of hope it pushes people to use alternatives, because allowing your work to be violated by ads seems insane. But probably not.
- VCFundedGenYer 2mo agoFacebook is trying so hard to defeat adblockers that the actual website is borderilne unusable. I have found in the past year or so that pages just get hung on "loading" transitional screens way more often, even in normal circumstances. They need to surrender this whole anti-adblocker crusade because it will kill them in the long run (along with the billion other problems FB has)
- RiverCrochet 2mo agoMost activity on Facebook is via phone. I bet Facebook would prefer to get rid of the website entirely; the age of adding Facebook like buttons and comment sections to websites is long past. I can't think of anything that works on the website better than the phone app.
- encom 2mo ago>I bet Facebook would prefer to get rid of the website entirely For some parts they did. I tried Facebook Dating, and it's only available on phones. Also, to save you the trouble, don't use Facebook Dating. It is, to use a technical term, a fermented shitpile.
- Sylamore 2mo agoOpen the developer console and change your device mode to a mobile one, worked the last time I tried it.
- liendolucas 2mo ago> it will kill them in the long run... Now, that's something I would love to see in my lifetime.
- nelsonic 2mo agoVery simple: just block all Meta domains at your local DNS. Nobody needs Meta. And if there is something you desperately need to see on one of their platforms temporarily switch your DNS.
- red_admiral 2mo agoMy setup: separate profile for Facebook. Targeted advertising turned off. FB domains blocked on main profile. Not perfect, but it works.
- pavel_lishin 2mo agoI've tried to write a tampermonkey script to at least block the Reels, but even that's hella difficult. The solution is truly to just never be on Facebook, but - our local PTA only distributes news via Facebook. (There may be a Whatsapp group I don't know about, which isn't better.) So does the local library. If the township publishes things elsewhere, I don't know about it. I use a service to convert some pages' feeds to RSS, which is semi-reliable, but doesn't work well and is a paid service if you want more than two feeds - I wish I could hand-roll something myself.
- Marsymars 2mo agoThe immediate fix to this is regulatory action. Facebook has made itself indispensable in a number of areas that are in the public interest and should be treated as a public good for these purposes. Ads are pollution, and Facebook is forcing people to choose between ingesting pollution and using facebook marketplace, or throwing their used but functional goods in the garbage.
- qup 2mo agoIMO you shouldn't get to be in charge of a company just because it became successful. Facebook is allowed to make ads show on their own product. I hate their product, but it's theirs.
- Marsymars 2mo ago> IMO you shouldn't get to be in charge of a company just because it became successful. In a macro sense, the prerogative there is really up to the public. Companies only exist in the first place because the public has granted them the legal and social framework to exist, and the public can adjust that framework as they so choose. In a more specific sense, the math there changes once a company makes itself indispensable to the public good. There are any number of analogies I could run with, but I'll go with the analogy of a landfill. Suppose all the landfills in your city have been privatized, have a habit of burning garbage, and employ armed thugs to prevent any visitors to the landfill from wearing masks. If you've got a truckload of garbage to dispose of, you can either ingest burning garbage fumes, or dump it on the side of the road somewhere. It's absolutely in the public's interest to regulate the landfills' behaviour to prevent them from both burning garbage and from stopping people from wearing masks when they visit the landfill.
- sleepybrett 2mo agothe immediate fix to this is to stop using facebook. If your local government are using it to publish whatever useful infromation, it may be possible to sue them on the grounds that publishing their public 'good' on a private platform exclusively is against some kind of public records law. Alternatively, eventually they will publish where the audience is, if the audience is not on facebook then they will publish somewhere else.
- partloyaldemon 2mo agoI use the “natural” method for blocking Facebook ads.
- OroPla 2mo agoI have to admit that I never got to visit facebook in all my life, since my browser add-ons made it so the site would never properly load. I'm not sure whether I've been missing out or dodging a bullet.
- beardyw 2mo agoYou have missed nothing.
- whywhywhywhy 2mo agoThe approach they should have taken is to start whitelisting the components that are not ads. Think of how the structure of Meta is gonna work, there's some team in charge of ads who has a sub team now in charge of messing with the ads to stop them being blocked. If you start whitelisting everything that isn't an ad you move the problem into an area the team in charge of blocking the ads don't have control over. Highly unlikely the team in charge of stopping ad blocking has swing to then start changing the code of every other element on the page to break your non-ad white listing.
- Terretta 2mo agoOver a decade ago, web framework and web site generation tooling had already ruined any kind of automated anything, as the frameworks and tools started using what amount to GUIDs for identifiers. I suppose the charitable take on why is as only machines needed to read it, and css styles and div IDs had become token gibberish anyway, so semantics were irrelevant. Whether selecting for ads or content, one had to figure different ways of getting after it, whitelisting was already off the table. We'd found "structure" could work, but had to be fuzzy and adaptive as marketing shuffles pages around constantly, not just on the whole, but for A/B runs and personalized "experiences". So that seems back to, hey, models could help. (Though none of them, to date, attain as high success as latest hand coded "reader" tools, worth inspecting for how this could be generalized.)
- danillonunes 2mo agoCan't they mimic the structure of legit content to get passed on the whitelist?
- doodlebugging 2mo ago>Highly unlikely the team in charge of stopping ad blocking has swing... OT but I think I learned a new term today. Swing. In oil and gas we would call that suction so for future reference: Swing = Suction
- whywhywhywhy 2mo agoSwing as in the political term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(politics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(politics) because the team wouldn't be the right place in the management structure to alter the rest of the page other than the ad units.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- molticrystal 2mo agoIf anybody want to take a crack at fixing and maintaining the issue, while the team has been worn out to the treads, they are still open to pull requests [0], here is the statement that is alluded to in the article: >paintboth1234 uBO Team wrote: >The project is FOSS. Anyone else who wants to deal with this disgusting site is free to make pull requests with working solutions themselves. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about_disgusting_facebook_devs/p2f5028/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about...
- cptaj 2mo agoI'm not saying this is a rallying call to help but...
- j45 2mo agoBlocking ads sounds like a job for AI
- tamimio 2mo agoI mean the ultimate solution is block fecebook entirely and any and all its other companies/domains, but I think the best approach is not to block ads, but to block everything and only let the text and other useable html code out, that can’t be countered as your filter is not going after specific match they try to hide behind some long tags, rather than blocking all and just pass the readable useful buttons.
- nepthar 2mo agoThis is a perfect use case for AI, no?
- classified 2mo agoThis barf bag of a company is making the internet a war zone. If at all possible, the best you can do is to never touch their toxic mess.
- alex1138 2mo agoThis is literally true. I've heard their AI scrapers are especially vicious. I can imagine (I don't know this for sure, it's just what I assume) Gemini (or others, idk) kind of are classy about it. When Google pre-LLM was scraping the internet, I don't remember too many complaints about "Google is pinging my server so often it's a strain on resources" Facebook? They've always been the worst at this. By "this" I guess I mean the internet
- maxwellito 2mo agoHot take: uBlock origin could insert even MORE ads into Facebook? Discouraging people to use Facebook, and also make some money on the side. (this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
- doodlebugging 2mo agoMaintain a list of recent ads blocked in that browsing session and redirect all the ads blocked during that session from previous sites visited, especially autoplaying videos, every time someone clicks on a Facebook link. That would be funny.
- dzonga 2mo agothe tragedy is 'mainstreet' runs on Facebook. not shitter, google but fb. some local business don't even have their own sites but maintain an insta / fb page.
- zamadatix 2mo agoShitter? Edit: Ah, I assume you're referring to X (previously Twitter -> shitter taunt)
- Finnucane 2mo agoXitter.
- ravetcofx 2mo agoIt's where the GenX-ers and boomers are at who have money to spend
- SV_BubbleTime 2mo agoI love how Facebook has one reputation, an Instagram has another and they often don’t match at all even though we all know it’s the exact fucking service with a different skin and theme.
- makerofthings 2mo agoWhat's with this current trend of grouping GenX with Boomers? I am GenX and the difference between us and Boomers is wild. My GenX friends are on here. Boomers I know are afraid of self-checkout machines.
- pessimizer 2mo agoZoomers 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.
- zeafoamrun 2mo agoI 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.
- surgical_fire 2mo agoThe best way to do this is block Facebook entirely.
- maxwellito 2mo agoHot take: uBlock origin could insert even MORE ads into Facebook? Discouraging people to use Facebook, and also make some money on the side. (this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)
- Rebelgecko 2mo agoOther 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.
- rosstex 2mo agowhy not just run a 24/7 agent to do the work for them?
- seritools 2mo agowhy not "just" do it for them?
- SoftTalker 2mo agoeither 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).
- la_fayette 2mo agook thanking the team for this work over the years. i hope yt will stay ad-free :-)
- conradfr 2mo agoNot sure detailing how Facebook demoralized them is the best idea.
- mattrighetti 2mo agoWell, uBlock is entirely open source so...
- iugtmkbdfil834 2mo agoIt 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.
- nemomarx 2mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271126 More discussion here
- Cider9986 2mo agoHere's the source: https://reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5 https://reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5 https://old.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/ https://photon-reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/
- qbane 2mo agoI 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.
- amelius 2mo agoMaybe a better approach is to convert the page to an image, run OCR over it, use an LLM to remove the ads, present the result to the user.
- ImJamal 2mo agoHow would you comment or watch a video if you did that?
- amelius 2mo agoYou can still do that. The only thing I'm proposing is to do the filtering on graphical data (what the user actually sees) rather than on the DOM (which can be obfuscated; and which may change every week).
- dudhsudhd 2mo agoI don’t see how presenting an image would allow you to interact with the page, especially if all you are doing is modify the image you’re presenting, not the page itself.
- amelius 2mo agoThink of it as looking at your screen through AR goggles, where the goggles modify the image before it reaches your eyes. Everything happens at the image level so there's no way Meta can obfuscate the DOM to make ads pass through.
- kdksjxjwjd 2mo ago
- dabber21 2mo agoOut of spite they should have a block list, blocking every meta related service, disabled by default... for now
- bmurphy1976 2mo agoAll the more reason to block Facebook completely.
- beej71 2mo agoI haven't used fb for years, but yesterday I was considering going there to only repost anti-meta news stories to try to get as many of my followers to quit as possible. But I'm not convinced it will have an effect. And I'd have to use fb.
- vachina 2mo agouBlock hit them where it hurts. Facebook's entire existence hinges on serving ads.
- sleepybrett 2mo agoAnother reminder that facebook is abhorrent and not worth your time.
- sciencesama 2mo agoa killer use case of ai would be an AI adblocker !!
- mattrighetti 2mo agoI'm more surprised by the fact that people still use Facebook
- skeeter2020 2mo agoremember the amazing show "community"? Elroy: “I got a job through LinkedIn.” Annie: “What? That’s crazy! People use LinkedIn?” Elroy: “No, LinkedIn hired me to help figure out why people don’t use it.”
- Capricorn2481 2mo agoThat's an underrated season, imo. Keith David is fantastic.
- HackerThemAll 2mo agoThose childish comments are so funny. 3 billion people use Facebook regularly, and there are folks that deem themselves superior to all others who claim "I know nobody who uses Facebook". XD
- dudhsudhd 2mo agoChrist, pipe down little buddy. These “aha gotcha!” responses belong on reddit—but since you’re craving for one too, I’ll bite: “It’s not a childish comment in the slightest, and most definitely not a claim of superiority in any way either. It’s simply a fact. I, too, know a grand total of 0 persons who use Facebook. Three billion people may use it regularly but all the people I know are in the other, let’s say >vast majority<, of FIVE billion people who don’t even care about Zuckerberg’s billboard.”
- HackerThemAll 2mo agoDid you get triggered so much to have to create an account to write that comment? I think of us two it's you who need to relax XD
- hn_submit 2mo agoThe only way to keep ads off Facebook is to stop using Facebook.
- CivBase 2mo agoIf you're still using Facebook, it's because you're required to or you're the kind of person who won't be fazed by this.
- corndoge 2mo agoCorrect, for better or worse facebook is the meeting ground for many communities and if you are in those communities you have to use it.
- celestialcheese 2mo agoMarketplace. It's horrible, but the area I live in has mostly abandoned craigslist and if you want to buy/sell used stuff, marketplace is where you have to be.
- BuyMyBitcoins 2mo agoI feel like Craigslist squandered its effective monopoly with online classifieds. While I do not think that the company needed to modernize the site’s UI, it baffles me that their anti-spam tools are so rudimentary. Most searches yield irrelevant keyword-bombed results, and, such results tend to be nearly identical listings. I had yearned for a viable Craigslist alternative for years. Sadly, Facebook Marketplace won. I don’t feel comfortable searching for anything due to the fact that Facebook will inevitably use my queries to further profile me.
- Gigachad 2mo agoIt wouldn't have helped. In Australia we have Gumtree which has a UI that is just as modern as Facebook but it was still crushed. No one can compete in a space that lives on network effect.
- 2mo ago
- thinkingtoilet 2mo agoIf you're on facebook, I don't take you're need for privacy or security seriously. I'm fine with this. Stop giving Zuckerberg more money and power.
- wkjagt 2mo agoI 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.
- SvenL 2mo agoAren’t ads payed also via „impressions“, like 10k people saw your advertisement so please pay x money?
- seattle_spring 2mo agoPartially, yes. Ads are also psychological, and tracked cross-platform. If you see a BMW ad on Facebook, drive by a BMW billboard on the highway, search BMW on Google, and then go buy a BMW, they have ways of fractionally allocating the conversion to the different impressions. It's pretty crazy.
- StilesCrisis 2mo agoI always thought last-click attribution was generally used even though partial attribution was technically possible. But my info is a few years stale.
- teshaq 2mo agoYes, 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
- tonyhart7 2mo agoI 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
- kakacik 2mo agoAFAIK 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.
- wing-_-nuts 2mo agoI get what you're saying, and in the beginning days of the internet, I hoped that people would adopt a payment system where a user could distribute a pool of money to the pages that they visited, in order to pay for server uptime, content creation, etc. Of course, companies took the easy way out. Just serve ads. Until that got absolutely obnoxious and downright dangerous, then users started blocking them enmass. Well of course, we're now in a place where the internet is mostly paid for with ads, and the content creators that want to get paid up front (substack, WSJ, FT, etc) want crazy high amounts for subscription fees. I'm not a trader, so I do not get enough benefit to make it worth while to sub to those sites. So I guess I'll keep blocking ads for my own security, and bypass paywalls with archiver sites. Shame. It could have been different, but this is the bed they made, and they can lay in it.
- zetanor 2mo agoI'd pay a few dollars a month to use a service without ads and without surveillance. Services don't offer this and creators are staying on those services, so fuck them.
- metabagel 2mo agoI have YouTube Premium, so I don't see ads on YouTube.
- fsuts 2mo agoFacebook and instagram constantly email me trying to entice me to use the app. As I haven’t used it for years. I think it’s purely to massage their Active Monthly User numbers to show growth.
- zuhsetaqi 2mo ago> I think it’s purely to massage their Active Monthly User numbers to show growth. I don't think so. They want you to use the App because through the they have way more ways to track you.
- nothercastle 2mo agoThe app is a back door to your phone. It will vacuum all the data of it if allowed.
- bpatch 2mo agoAlso good to note that even if you were somehow able to block ads on Facebook, that only stops the visible output. The aggressive data collection continues as you scroll and interact with content.
- curt15 2mo ago"What do you do for work?" "I find ways to defeat adblockers"
- UncleSlacky 2mo agoWhy not just use Fluff Busting Purity? https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/
- jldl805 2mo agoOne of four extensions I run, I hope they never give up. A while back they mentioned it being harder and harder to maintain.
- SubiculumCode 2mo agoThis does seem like an area where AI could help respond to changes quickly.
- xnx 2mo agoUnfortunately, adblocking may need to move up one level to visual perception of renderee html or client-side AI heuristics about what is probably an ad. Removal may not be possible, but a masking overlay should still be.
- usui 2mo agoHow long until someone invents a fully-integrated local video and audio adblock filter running on a passthrough VR headset or smart glasses? The progress on this front is taking a while. I wouldn't mind if the audio filter is white noise and a portion of what I see is blurred out. Maybe to make it more efficient, only scan near the places I'm looking at via foveated rendering.
- throwuxiytayq 2mo agoHow about we just get on with it and delegalize ads already? They’re a net negative in every form, subsidizing disgusting companies that shouldn’t exist, infringing on everyone’s privacy (including your children! think of the children!!!!!), and making us jump through all kinds of ridiculous hoops to minimize our exposure to them. I don’t think the solution is more hoops.
- usui 2mo agoI 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.
- politician 2mo ago"companies have a right to try to send me information" The problem isn't one company sending information unsolicited, it's when hundreds of thousands of companies flood every communication channel with their own unsolicited advertising. Email, phone have become unusable channels, not to mention much of the web.
- ndriscoll 2mo agoAds 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.
- JamesSwift 2mo agoI 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
- aanet 2mo agoControversial opinion: This entire thread reads like a game of cat-and-mouse. People trying to block intrusive ads, and FB reaching into the depths of code and making it nearly impossible for anyone to do so en masse. I've been there. Tried to uncheck all the boxes on their ad platform; used all manners of ad blockers, etc; used incognito mode; used Tor; etc. etc. etc. At some point, you realize that the only way to not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely. Delete your account, get off that blasted site, and enjoy some moments of peace IRL. Having been a very early adopter of FB (since ~2004), I deleted my account and am clean + sober + much happier since 2016. (Not to say that I'm completely out of the FB ecosystem. Unfortunately, my fam is still on WhatsApp... and I've been trying to convince them to migrate to Signal...) YMMV
- liendolucas 2mo agoGold advice. People should get out of there and enjoy more of their free time!
- aanet 2mo agoIndeed. 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.
- seb1204 2mo agoI disabled YouTube app on my phone for the same reason. The shorts stole my time too easily.
- ganzsz 2mo ago
- ck2 2mo agoI haven't been on Facebook for years Why are people on anything meta or musk? Then again I figured we'd be back to personal blogs by now since "AI" can set one up in seconds
- DJBunnies 2mo agoSome of us plan events / engage socially.
- bastardoperator 2mo agoWhat's your favorite type of event to plan on Facebook?
- DJBunnies 2mo agoBirthdays, bachelor parties, random poker nights. It's far easier and has further reach than doing it manually.
- bastardoperator 2mo agoCrazy, I do all of that and more without Facebook and I don't find it difficult or manual at all. It seemed like you were implying people who use Facebook to plan tiny events are somehow more social. Maybe I read that wrong.
- metabagel 2mo agoThe obvious solution is to not use Facebook.
- sunaookami 2mo agoBut the filterlist does not come from uBo, it comes from Easylist?
- eipi10_hn 2mo agoEasyList doesn't block facebook ads
- marssaxman 2mo agoWell, I guess I'm giving up the fight to keep paying any attention to Facebook, then. It was only tolerable with an adblocker.
- harlanji 2mo agoUsing ad blockers is of poor character anyway. That's their chosen business model and if we don't accept their terms then we don't need to use their service. I am happy to pay for an Ad Free experience on services that offer it. We should all send letters to companies who we want to pay to give us an ad free experience. "I don't want to pay" is an indefensible position because everything is an energy exchange. "There is no free lunch." If we don't want to pay with money then we can pay with attention to ads, and hacking the display to take without giving in return is corrupt.
- Buttons840 2mo agoI 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.
- dartharva 2mo agocheap bait
- myroon5 2mo agoFor those ok purging the whole newsfeed: https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator
- wvenable 2mo agoI wonder if it's time to step it up a little bit. We have all the LLMs that are great at looking at code and processing it so perhaps the future of ad blocking is letting the LLM handle it. Has anyone thought about building something like this?
- seanw444 2mo agoSo you'd have a low-memory-usage super high latency ad blocker with a monthly bill, or an ad blocker that uses up several gigabytes of RAM/VRAM for slightly less high latency. Compelling.
- TaLiTr 2mo agoI think GP is talking about using an LLM to write filters for the constantly changing Facebook ad serving code, which would be distributed to users.
- seanw444 2mo agoAh. I was envisioning the LLM handling requests as they come in lol
- dreamcompiler 2mo agoYes, exactly this. The best way to fight AI is with your own AI, running locally on your own machine and loyal only to you. Also note that a highly-specialized ad-blocker agent wouldn't need a trillion parameters. It probably wouldn't even need a billion.
- underlines 2mo agoHyperpersonalized code to its rescue. With the qwen3.8-27b release tomorrow and the advent of vibe coding and the improvements into proper agentic engineering we are moving towards hyperpersonalized software. This means we don't need a centralized maintainer for smaller tools. the facebook ad blocking cat and mouse game is something I cna very well imagine to just be something my computer would solve in real time, updating the uBlock filter/userscript to adapt to any fb changes in near real-time.
- jimrandomh 2mo agoEventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad. I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be. (I think average people are making a horrible mistake about this, and are badly cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realize). If my choices are to look at ads or leave Facebook, I'll leave. But there are conversations people have there that I'd rather not lose access to, so... I guess I'd have to partially stick around and campaign for others to leave as well?
- Wolfenstein98k 2mo agoAre they cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realise, or are you just uniquely cognitively damaged by them?
- titzer 2mo agoI think my brain developed that as a defense mechanism. The web cultivated a certain kind of blindness where I literally don't look at certain parts of pages because my brain has learned that there is never anything useful there. Sometimes I just cannot see things unless I force my eyes to move across the page linearly, top to bottom. This is pathological. Like I find myself not ever looking at the top result in a search, because that is where Google has been putting ads. Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it.
- cptskippy 2mo agoI have this same affliction and have used ad-blockers for as long as I can remember. People seem to associate importance or quality with clutter. The more there is going on, the better it must be. My brain has just learned that certain page elements are never going to bring value and therefore don't exist. Very rarely I'll come across a page where valuable information is hidden in those areas and it takes someone else showing me to actually see it.
- TeMPOraL 2mo ago> Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it. It's not computers that are the problem, it's people. We've normalized (and even embraced) the situation where relationship between businesses and customers is adversarial. The phenomenon you're describing, known as "banner blindness", is just brain filtering out noise, but the thing is, that noise didn't get there by accident. What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- bloqs 2mo agoUblock Origin's creators are absolute god-kings for their consistent work to help me (for free) not be forced to engage in psychological conditioning all day via my eyeballs. I never used to have an issue with ads, but because of capitalism, they simply cannot exist without cancerously taking over everything. They start as a banner, then before you know it, you have full screen unskippable paywalls to the content, with extreme discomfort placed on the user with deliberately engaging bright colours and sudden sounds played without my consent. Sure, if I like the product such as facebook as a free platform I might consider a premium licence for some conveniences, but adverts are simply the direct representation of societal rot for profit. I paid for netflix, then eventually they started showing me ads on netflix. It never ever stops.
- dofm 2mo agoThis is the correct decision, IMO. I only use Facebook in a limited capacity (one phenomenal private group whose usefulness is unfortunately simply unmatched elsewhere, one infrequently updated page and a very locked-down, minimal personal profile). I think people need to understand what the purpose of Facebook is in terms of its function and constituent parts, in the Stafford Beer sense, and I think if enough people simply can't avoid that truth, it will eventually shrink. Adblocking lets some people pretend Facebook isn't a privacy hellhole for everyone they talk to. There is essentially no way to use it that doesn't abuse your data privacy, for one thing, but prolonging the impression that it can be ameliorated is a mistake.
- burnte 2mo agoI only use FB for the occasional Marketplace sale/purchase because the rest of the site is a cesspool of nonsense and toxic ragebait. It's impossible to only see your friends updates now, so it's lost 99% of it's utility. Letting people see how awful it is will force folks to either leave or Facebook to fix itself, which will never happen. It seems like execs prefer to drive companies into the ground and bankruptcy court rather than change them to be more user friendly.
- dylan604 2mo agoThe vast majority of FB users see the unfiltered site, yet they are not leaving contrary to your theory. FB does not seem to be anywhere near the ground or bankruptcy court. These are very strange things you're commenting about one of the largest companies on the planet.
- dofm 2mo agoI mean, obviously Facebook is not in financial difficulty. But it is, at some level, culturally dying. It is very evident. It would not be loss of revenue that troubled Facebook, for years at least — it would be slowing engagement and lower demand for reach.
- bennettnate5 2mo ago
- Glyptodon 2mo agoTBH Facebook makes it so you can't even copy and open links or highlight text properly - it's 100% hostile and keeping up with that is a lot of effort that could be put to better use.
- Beijinger 2mo agohttps://socialfixer.com/ https://socialfixer.com/ will fix it for you. It is amazing, what you can take out.
- IcyFoxe 2mo agoWhat about using AI to detect and remove ads? For all we know they might be using AI to get past the uBlock filters.
- A1kmm 2mo agoIronically given the purported theme of the 'digitalescapetools.com' site, it's behind Cloudflare, and with settings that initially blocked my from accessing it with latest Firefox on Linux (in i3 with a vertically split screen, with the browser taking up part of the screen). It was consistently giving a Cloudflare error that my browser is not supported. In case anyone else faces the same: it worked when I resized the browser window and reloaded.
- alex1138 2mo agoMark Zuckerberg is the ultimate mendacious prick We know they want to be a monopoly. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 Site doesn't work. Posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 Messages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712 https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1c0xfdz/messenger_messed_up_since_endtoend_encryption/ https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1c0xfdz/messenger... (or any thread about this) He doesn't see human beings as people
- juiceland 2mo agoDozens to hundreds of smart people spent many waking hours making sure that a person can't control what gets displayed on their personal devices when they visit Facebook.com.
- gfrecvh 2mo agoIf you're on Facebook, you deserve the ads
- alex1138 2mo agoYeah because how dare people actually connect with family and friends and "just get phone numbers/emails" or "just build their own" Stop. Blaming. Users.
- Gormo 2mo agoMoral arguments about "blaming users" do not overcome the fact that the incentive structures driving these problems absolutely do emerge from the choices and behaviors of low-information users. Viable solutions can only come from informing and persuading users to use alternative options, which relies in part on demonstrating the actual risks and consequences of the choices they've previously made (i.e. "blaming users") and simultaneously developing an ecosystem of alternative options that's sufficiently accessible to them (which already proliferate). Lots of "normal" users have already migrated away from Twitter to e.g. Mastodon, so it's not clear why this isn't reasonable for Facebook.
- gfrecvh 2mo agoPeople are on Facebook to scroll. For connection you have phones, email, text message, and others.
- stevenicr 2mo agoCan you (ublock, privacy badger, etc) at least block the videos / animations auto-playing all over the screen to give me some control over which ads steal my focus and time? Stopping the movement of all things unless click / tap to play would be a huge adblock win in my book.
- hexagonwin 2mo agovideo autoplay can be blocked in firefox with a builtin feature, though i can't test if it works for facebook
- walrus01 2mo agoI wonder if instead of blocking the facebook ads, in a continual game of whack-a-mole with facebook changing things, there would be a way to accept the ads and then generate a white opaque box overlay where the ad is rendered in the page. From the point of view of the ad server the ad has been successfully loaded and displayed, the overlay would occur exclusively in the browser rendering engine client side with no communication back to the ad server.
- Dwedit 2mo agoWould probably need a full userscript at this point?
- yaportmax 2mo agoControversial but honest question: How do anti-ads people propose the free open internet monetizes itself?
- throwaway_95283 2mo agofrom people without ad blockers, but honestly facebook is not the free open internet.
- slim 2mo agogovernment subsidy
- nemomarx 2mo agoVolunteer basis or charge users. Optional subscriptions keep small webforums alive, like HN would probably be fine with some kind of 10/mo thing. Maybe charge a small fee for new accounts? For things that need to scale past that like very large social media, the question is if that's worth those sites existing.
- yaportmax 2mo agoFirst, regarding the idea of charging people to access websites: This notion is a very Silicon Valley / coastal elite mentality IMO. A significant majority of people on the internet do not and will not pay for anything - largely because most people around the world just don't have the money for stuff like that. The data on this is pretty consistent - take Netflix for example. A majority of Netflix users choose the cheaper ad supported tier, even though it is very easy and only marginally more expensive to switch to the non-ad supported tier. And this is already filtering to the subset of people who are willing and able to pay for a streaming subscription to begin with. The same case exists for Reddit -> you can pay to have ads removed, but only 1% of users do. I see what you mean by Hacker News, but it's not a great example, since there are currently no ads and it's free. It's provided by Y Combinator, which monetizes via investing in startups (not something all internet businesses can reliably just start doing). For example - how would Reddit monetize? You cannot really expect people on Reddit all to be willing to pay to use it. And if some were - the whole value of a network is its scale -> so the drop in users would effectively kill the site. That's why there are no subscription only forums out there (at least none that I know of). With regards to your second point of if these social media sites should even exist in the first place -> that's where you the consumer get to decide. If you don't get value from it, just don't use it. People who do get value from it -> use it. If enough people collectively decide it's not valuable, then the website becomes irrelevant (see Google+ and MySpace). This is where I get very confused by anti ads people - show me a reliable alternative that is proven to work. Show me that people across the world, not just in San Francisco or London, can and will pay to access these websites/apps. And I'm not just talking about Meta - what about every random small website you have ever accessed that is ad supported? What about news websites like BBC? Or independent content creators who monetize via Instagram / YouTube ads? What about that wiki for that favorite video game of yours? Or that cooking blog? Don't get me wrong - I hate seeing ads as much as the next guy - but I can't really picture a realistic alternative.
- infinite_spin 2mo agoOne of the earliest ad blockers I used would just replace ads with artwork. I'm not the author, but I found something similar here: https://github.com/jfonsecarivera/artblock https://github.com/jfonsecarivera/artblock
- mohamedkoubaa 2mo agoTo those that use facebook in 2026, why?
- SCLeo 2mo agoAs much as I understand their decision, I hope they didn't stop. I don't use Facebook myself but now I am worried YouTube now knows that if they try a bit harder uBO would just give up.
- echelon 2mo agoLet's just build a new Facebook. We have the tools to make this orders of magnitude easier. We can do this to all of social media. Big tech gave us the magic space runes (LLMs) we can use to undo them. They have no idea what they've done. All of their value distilled into powerful exoskeletons we can run from home. Already, it's become apparent that the world is distancing itself from American Big Tech, and they're using the tools we built to pull away. It's so ironic, but frankly justified since we've impinged upon their sovereignty. We used to say that Google "hired everyone" to keep the smart people from building alternatives. To take all their free hours, keep them busy, keep them from becoming threats. Now every single one of our spare hours is a salient of attack. I have never felt so empowered to raise an army against the powers that be. They are all mortal.
- ajsnigrutin 2mo agoBuilding a facebook is easy, getting people there and hosting it is expensive, and to get that money, you need ads, and to keep getting money for those ads, you have to obfuscate your code so ublock doesn't work anymore, and you're back at the beginning.
- inigyou 2mo agoThe problem with building a new Facebook is, what is a Facebook, actually? Like, can you even write down a list of things that make up a Facebook?
- Gigachad 2mo agoYoutube offers a fairly reasonable subscription to remove ads. As far as I'm aware FB doesn't offer the same.
- 2mo ago
- nojito 2mo agoNot that difficult to defeat. A local llm can just update the blocking rules dynamically. I made my own extension by essentially prompting to create a version of ublock origin with a button that uses a local llm to dynamically generate block lists and update them.
- infl8ed 2mo agoI purchased StopTheMadness purely to stop autoplaying videos in Facebook marketplace
- TrinaryWorksToo 2mo agoDoes Fluff Busting Purity still remove Facebook ads?
- RajT88 2mo agoI still do not see ads on Facebook. But it also does not work most of the time with all the adblockers on. I hate that so many people I know use it for things.
- socalgal2 2mo agoWishing that Apple would add OS level AI so I could use it to hide ads in apps. It doesn't need to manipulate the app. It just needs to recognize them and black them out. Apple doesn't have to block anything directly, they can leave it to users to do so they are just respecting the user. As a simple one, the Facebook has this dark pattern where they put an unread count marker on Loops to try to get you to click it. It works, I click it by accident quite often even though I have zero interest in loops. There's no way to turn it off. But an OS Level AI could cover it with a black square Yes, I get I could just not use the app. I still want to see what friends and family are up to so I launch the app -> menu -> feeds. This mostly removes everything I hate. But, that unread (1) marker on the loops icon gets me
- wackget 2mo agoApple will never, ever add anything even close to that kind of functionality. This is a company which took SEVENTEEN YEARS before it allowed iPhone users to have gaps between app icons on their home screens. If you have ANY hope of Apple letting you have enough control over your device to visually block ads in apps then you are stratospherically shit outta luck.
- figmert 2mo agoAppel has, and it can be used. Apfel[0] has exposed it as a CLI: $ apfel "What is the capital of Austria?" The capital of Austria is Vienna. [0] https://apfel.franzai.com/ https://apfel.franzai.com/
- brcmthrowaway 2mo agoDoes pihole still work?
- sehw 2mo agoFacebook deleted my 20yo account for "being a bot suddenly". Let them rot.
- baking 2mo agoI've been thinking about extensions designed for specific sites. Imagine a version of Facebook from the good old days that only showed you posts from your friends and put them in reverse chronological order, also known as a timeline. I would also like a version of LinkedIn that shows me what I click on without loading whatever extraneous stuff it is that's crashing my laptop if I open too many LinkedIn tabs.
- askvictor 2mo agoThis exists for facebook.
- ssernikk 2mo agoCan you give us a link or something?
- baking 2mo agoI just installed Facebook Feed Filter on Firefox. Seems to do the trick. It hides recommendations and sponsored content. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-feed-filter/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/facebook-feed...
- askvictor 2mo agoI've been using fluff busting purity, though it hasn't been updated in a few months so starts to crack at the seams.
- esjeon 2mo agoI've just let Claude analyze an HAR file containing XHR traffic on the Facebook timeline. It happily wrote a script for extracting contents, fetch images and videos, and rebuilt the timeline into a single HTML -- highly responsive, with ZERO ads. Now, parry this.
- wormius 2mo agoI stopped trying to block it ages ago, since it was reacted* horribly anytime I tried to block ads... :( (pun fully intended)
- butt_her_churn 2mo agoLet the butter churn! This is exciting. Someone will step up and build a superior tool with GenAI. Maybe we can just say, "Hey Claude, write me an adblock solution to replace ublock origin!." Claude responds with, "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." UH OH HERE WE GO AGAIN!
- dombiscoff 2mo agoA lot of people are saying to stop using facebook as if its such a simple, catch-all answer. For a lot of people, and a lot of countries, facebook (whatsapp, too) is still the primary(only) way of communication. If not with your friends, then with your family. There's a big demand from those people to have a way of interacting with this pseudo-essential service without having to oblige to complete data rape.
- yreg 2mo agoI hate ads as much as anyone, but I find it hardly surprising that devs at companies playing cat and mouse with ad blockers read the ad blocker source code. Since when is this considered cheating?
- eipi10_hn 2mo agoThen those devs are deserved with the salary of $100/month. Scumbags.
- ryan_glass 2mo agoI'm amazed that people are still on Facebook in 2026. Deleted my account after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There really is nothing I miss.
- shevy-java 2mo agoOr stop using Facebook. It is called CIAbook for a reason anyway, run by the ultimate diva Suckerberg.
- snickerer 2mo agoAds are an attack, aimed at your brain. They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions. That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies. Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'. But we shouldn't accept being under constant attack of brain worms. I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site.
- bkaae 2mo agoWe should also normalize paying for content at the same time then.
- Parae 2mo agoYou think Meta would spy less on us and show us less ads if we payed to access their services ? They would just keep doing what they've been doing for ages and they would have even more money to keep their enshitification going. We are already paying too much for all the services with subscription. Like Spotify, Netflix and others...
- crummy 2mo agoPlenty of other services (like Spotify) stop showing you ads if you pay them enough money.
- fsflover 2mo agoUntil they decide that ads can give some profit on top of your payment. See: youtube [0], Windows, Apple [1]. [0] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/416547/youtube-premium-subscribers-claim-ad-free-servic.html https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/416547/youtub... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322556, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34299433
- SillyUsername 2mo agoWhy not just set up a build pipeline to have AI view the page, check for ads, then do the whack a mole until it removes them, or have I missed something that needs human in the loop?
- ChocolateGod 2mo agoMost people aren't going to pay for an AdBlocker.
- trencedamp 2mo agoThe last time I went on Facebook, the ads were so similar to posts it was near impossible to tell one from the other. The problem is compounded by elderly relatives liking or sharing weird AI posts, and an algorithm that seems to be random and non deterministic
- kaizenb 2mo agouBlock team is the modern times heroes fighting the good fight for us. Thanks to them I've been navigating the web with peace of mind for a long time. Sometimes I find myself thinking how our lives would be if couple of guys didn't build shitty tech startups. We've gone from creative advertising to these manipulative online marketing scams, that attack our brains, especially targeting young generation, which effects how our societies, behaviours, art and culture develop. Recommend watching: "We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI
- Zardoz84 2mo agoBut there are people who keep using FB?
- meerita 2mo agoQuestion for everyone: I'm building two browsers: a terminal browser (https://github.com/meerita/puma-browser https://github.com/meerita/puma-browser) and a new GUI browser. 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?
- martheen 2mo agoChrome is made by an advertising company that also fund almost entirely the budget of Firefox. Even Safari is made by an advertising company. FWIW most of them have some blocking for egregious ads, so they will happily kill someone's else goose. Personally I think the easiest would be to support uBO or at least have a built-in engine that can load filters written for uBO. Anything else is just wasting development time.
- breakingcups 2mo agoGoogle builds the biggest browser. Mozilla receives most of its funding through Google (though they have mobile browsers with a default ad-blocker). Microsoft is in the ad business too. I'm not surprised, why are you?
- Gareth321 2mo agoThere are many browsers which come with native ad-blocking. See Brave, Vivaldi, Opera. Most browsers are built on Chromium, and that has certain ad-block limitations now. See Manifest V3. Many people care a lot about ad-blocking, but still, most of the world does not use an ad-blockers. So it's a cost/market reach equation. What's your target demo? If it's tech enthusiasts, we'll appreciate the ad-blocking built in, but we can also easily install one ourselves if it's built on Chromium. You are unlikely to face legal issues. There have been a few test cases around the world, with most siding with the user. The argument is usually that no one should be forced to download or render something they do not wish to download or render.
- CarpeNecopinus 2mo agoI get their reasoning, but it still saddens me to see them surrender like that. Pretty much every site that lives off of ads nowadays is "disgustingly anti-user" the same degree that Facebook is. The main difference being that Facebook had the capacity and confidence to wage a full-on war on ad blocking like this. Now, with this method proven by Facebook, it's likely that more websites will follow suit.
- XzetaU8 2mo ago[dead]
- zelphirkalt 2mo agoThis is probably a good decision, because it will free up time and resources to do more productive things than saving the lost souls, that are still on Facebook. Maybe this will contribute to the downfall of Facebook, due to more people seeing how toxic the place has become, when they can no longer block those ads.
- rldjbpin 2mo agosince the leadership change, youtube has been on a similar crusade against adblocking. however, despite all the things that happened, ublock, even in the lite version, is able to work on the website. this has been quite well-covered and even discussed here. however, found it interesting that fb was able to quietly win the battle. however, it is a shame that nothing can be done on the mobile front, at least inside the apps. it is insane how sometimes every other thing you see is a sponsored post or an ad.
- matheusmoreira 2mo ago> however, found it interesting that fb was able to quietly win the battle. I think it's just because nobody actually cares. Too much effort for marginal gains. Who even uses Facebook in 2026? Instagram I get it, but Facebook? YouTube is a completely different matter.
- rldjbpin 2mo ago> Who even uses Facebook in 2026? Instagram I get it, but Facebook? 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.
- ReptileMan 2mo agoI mean this is literally a task in which AIs excel - figure out how to filter this thing from this code.
- pino83 2mo agoGood news!! Don't spend massive amount of time in sth that doesn't deserve to exist. Do something useful with your time instead!
- matheusmoreira 2mo agoCan't wait for an ad blocking AI model to show up.
- t23414321 2mo agoThanks. I think it still could be fine ? I don't use Facebook - but I was able to download any video from Youtube, see no ads till adblockers and youtube-dl - and that's the race making things harder and unaccessible (yes, custom - but excesive DIY URL filtering rules only, same since ~2 years, are still enough to see no ads on YT, hope, that on Facebook too, and I can live with that).
- croes 2mo agoAt every FB developer working on that: You are definitely the baddies.
- bamboozled 2mo agoHonestly who still uses Facebook ?
- gblargg 2mo agoThis actually means it will become easier to block ads on Fakebook, because they won't be trying as hard. You'll just have to find custom filters people have shared to a smaller audience.
- iamflimflam1 2mo agoFacebook is in terminal decline - I don’t know any young people who use it. Even I don’t use it - and I’m not even young.
- Invictus0 2mo agoMeta's revenue is over $220B/yr and growing. Try to avoid saying complete nonsense
- underlines 2mo agoHyperpersonalized code to its rescue. With the qwen3.8-27b release tomorrow and the advent of vibe coding and the improvements into proper agentic engineering we are moving towards hyperpersonalized software. This means we don't need a centralized maintainer for smaller tools. the facebook ad blocking cat and mouse game is something I cna very well imagine to just be something my computer would solve in real time, updating the uBlock filter/userscript to adapt to any fb changes in near real-time.
- nottorp 2mo agoWait, but 95% of "content" on Facebook is an ad. So what would be left if you blocked all ads? :)
- ghm2199 2mo agoThe futility of getting your loved ones off facebook's feed toxicity became apparent to me in my face, years ago, when I tried for a week on my dad's iPad(perfect delivery system for this drug cause if allows no extensions on browsers) to "cleanup" his feed be following and liking a bunch of sane content and actively down voting really shitty content with ads. I tried turning off politically sensitive content and trying to tell the ad engine what ads were scammy or I did not like. Within a few days it was undone. Soft porn(ish) mixed with violent videos and of course all the scam like ads resurfaced. Part of it is the person who is addicted to this stuff and part of it is this shitty product called Facebook that loves to show horrible things to my dad. I asked why he watches all of it, "Masala"(hindi for spice) is the word he uses to describe his addiction.
- dwedge 2mo agoGuessing the AI written article doesn't add much that the title doesn't already reveal. Read the first few paragraphs and closed it
- jFriedensreich 2mo agothe answer to facebook being bad is obviously not block-listing but allow-listing content. we had the same learning in security years ago. what this might look like is ai assisted desired data extraction and using clients tailored to user needs and user agency to use that data. Unfortunately alternative platforms that are user aligned are not the solution as you cannot force your whole cities groups or old family members to move which is the main pain point for people who use adblockers and still also on facebook.
- corford 2mo agoIf ads on these sites irritate people, why don't they just stop using them? Feels like that's long term a more likely avenue to get these sites to adjust how they monetise rather than papering over the problem with a blocker.
- aqme28 2mo agoIf you're an engineer and your job is to defeat ublock origin, your work is not ethical. You're a facebook engineer-- you'll do just fine working elsewhere.
- cineticdaffodil 2mo ago[dead]
- mococa 2mo agoEven my parents don’t use facebook anymore…
- dotcoma 2mo agoThey should tell their users to get off of Facebook.
- mediumsmart 2mo agoAnyone, including me, gets what they deserve when loading Facebook.
- khernandezrt 2mo agoWhy are we still using Facebook? That's the real question here.
- theshackleford 2mo agoI still use it because over the years, all my IRL clubs and hobbies moved away from forums and sites to it. Using it has very little impact on me, and allows to continue participating in IRL activities and clubs I’ve been a member of for years. If they all pack up and move somewhere else, I’ll move as well, if not, I won’t. I don’t use it for any purpose outside of engaging with those communities and I’m not going to give up my social life to make a statement, I don’t care enough.
- site-packages1 2mo agoI check it once a month or three. Boomer relatives still use it and so it's nice to see their updates once in a while. I've also heard good things about Marketplace, but don't use it myself because I fear my lame would-be for sale posts would end up on friends' feeds and it would be mortifying if people I know in real life thought I used Facebook.
- nla 2mo agoIt's actually pretty trivial to block all FB ads -- but a browser plug-in alone won't cut it. FB does a bunch of really annoying break the internet patterns like rotating your session and VIP every 30 seconds -- or less.
- damsta 2mo agoUnfortunately with agents Meta can easily run hundreds of automated experiments on real browsers with each commit in the uBlock Origin's repo and each change in various filter lists to find clean workarounds and submit PRs with patches. You can try fighting this on the other side with similar approach, but why waste time and tokens, just stop using Facebook.
- cromka 2mo agoThere's too much money in it for Meta to not throw a serious budget at it that will outweigh any effort the community can make. Like you said, we shall all just stop using it.
- everyone 2mo agoI mean who gives a shit, I just hope this doesnt encourage Youtube to fight for thee same outcome.
- guhcampos 2mo agoI'm with the developer here. At some point the effort is just not worth it anymore. Facebook, as a platform, has long since lost the relevance as a social network, it is basically just an ad platform these days. So why keep wasting resources on trying to block ads from an ad platform? A user who does not want to see ads on Facebook probably should just stop using Facebook altogether. I get the appeal for staying on Instagram, Youtube, Reddit and other platforms despite the ads: these provide some sort of - maybe controversial - value for the user, even if it's just cat videos or whatever. Facebook has lost its value proposition so long ago it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day. uBlock's resources are much better allocated into other initiatives: like Chrome .
- duxup 2mo ago> Facebook, as a platform, has long since lost the relevance as a social network I don’t understand how this is determined.
- jabroni_salad 2mo agoAt some point facebook has switched gears to be more about public/semipublic forums and marketplace. If you wanted the old facebook that was for your immediate family/friends/acquaintances then it isnt really relevant anymore compared to group texts. I just gave FB a few screenlengths of scrolling. There was one post from a family member and about 20 from people I am not friends with and groups I do not follow. I used to use an extension to get rid of that extra stuff (Purity) but at some point I stopped fighting it and stopped visiting too.
- duxup 2mo agoI don’t like Facebook either, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant as a social network.
- RestlessMind 2mo ago> it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day Apparently, they have 3B MAUs and 2B DAUs. So you are in some real bubble. While I don't use it, my parents and all their friends use Facebook to share pictures and exchange messages.
- kaicianflone 2mo agofeel like we’re close to a customized compute era where ads get filtered out by default via something like a diffusion browser or diffusion based Mixed Reality. Feels like it’s already possible with LLMs with enough test time compute to RE endpoints users want to keep and exclude those they don’t.
- surcap526 2mo ago[dead]
- classified 2mo agoI want to take the opportunity to thank the maintainers of uBlock Origin for their outstanding work. The internet would be hell without you. And Facebook just showed (again) they are willing to go the extra mile to be as contemptible and repugnant as possible.
- herzigma 2mo agoThe fact that Instagram ads are so good and Facebook ads are so bad should tell us something.
- philipdavis 2mo agoIs this article written by AI?
- MetroWind 2mo agoAll over the internet I saw this news title "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook". Shouldn't the title be something like "Trillion dollar corporation forces small opensource project from blocking their attack against users' browser"?
- swordsith 2mo agomy solution to nasty websites with js ridden everything is to scrape and remake the entirely new dom populate it with only content you verify, sure you might lose some detail but its easy to copy website ui if you desire. can be done with something like tamperminkey or a browser ext
- Studui81Labs 2mo ago[flagged]
- akagusu 2mo agoMeta is one of the worst corporations in the world. Nothing they do benefits the society. Stop using their products.