7 ms·

Eventually, 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 th

• Wolfenstein98k 2mo ago
  Are they cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realise, or are you just uniquely cognitively damaged by them?
• titzer 2mo ago
  I 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 ago
    I 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.
    • kcexn 2mo ago
      I mean. That's how profiteering works for the most part. Extracting wealth from people who don't know better is many times easier than creating more wealth for everyone.
    • bitpush 2mo ago
      > What I can't wrap my head around is, businesses are run by people, and all these entrepreneurs are making explicit decisions to abuse their fellow human beings to smaller or greater degree, and everyone seems fine with it. This is a simplistic way to think about it. Even the most altruistic physician needs to advertise their services if they hope to make a living out of it. Even the best film maker, the best actor needs to "hit the circuits" to promote their movie. "Make and they'll come" is only possible if you're already successful. Apple can chose not to advertise, since they are Apple (although they do plenty of advertising themselves).
      • account42 2mo ago
        The physicians doesn't need to shove ads in front of people's faces in order for people in need of a physician to find him. > "Make and they'll come" is only possible if you're already successful. That's just because your competitors are already shoving ads in front of your potential customer's faces. If they weren't allowed to do that you would be fine without doing it as well. It's the definition of a zero sum game.
    • ashleyn 2mo ago
  • rcMgD2BwE72F 2mo ago
    >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. Why put up with that? Is Kagi too expensive for you?
  • oblio 2mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness The term is 28 years old.
  • xattt 2mo ago
    > I 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. I’ve fallen victim to this when I was doing coursework in the last decade. Either a moodle module or a block of text in box in a textbook had something important to the concept I was learning, but I subconsciously ignored it because it had a format similar to an internet ad.
    • account42 2mo ago
      Something to ad to the long list of "real costs of ad-supported content and services".
  • magicalhippo 2mo ago
    I was asked to test the redesigned web page of a large bank. They had eye tracking cameras and such hooked up to study how I used the web page. They ran through some scenarios, and one was how to get a car loan. I studied the homepage and found nothing, then clicked the menu and found loans, but no car loan on the loans page. I ended up searching and found it. After each scenario they asked me some questions, and the first question I got for the car loan scenario was why I hadn't clicked on the link on the front page. There was no link, I replied puzzled. There was a large image they said. I stared in disbelief. The person running the scripts navigated to the homepage, and pointed at the screen. There, at the bottom, a blinking banner about car loans. I replied that it must have triggered my mental ad blocker, since ads are typically banners, frequently near the edges and animated somehow, so I never even registered the banner. They looked genuinely puzzled at my response. This was 25 years ago. My mental ad blocker is still active, though uBlock Origin on Firefox takes care of most of them. For me physical ad blocking is more about a first-line defense against malware and such than it is about getting rid of obnoxious ads. The latter my mental blocker does fine enough, though it can be annoying.
    • rescbr 2mo ago
      I guess it’s ages of fake download button ads in download pages. My instinct is “if it is an ad, then whatever it is offering is a scam”.
    • ygra 2mo ago
      Also known as banner blindness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banner_blindness). I'm genuinely surprised that a UX person doing usability testing (for a website!) has never heard of this. But I guess there's people missing basic knowledge in every field.
      • necovek 2mo ago
        Let's also note that they did say "25 years ago". UX research then and now was, at the very least, different, and there was less experience with web-specific behaviour. I'd also note that it was mostly graphic designers doing web design back then, or maybe that's just me.
  • Gigachad 2mo ago
    These days ads are woven in to content itself. It's most obvious on youtube where youtubers are paid to talk about products and disguise it as reviews or informative. Or other content creators happening to show something mixed in with the normal content. Soon they will be woven in to LLMs where they suggest the things they are paid to suggest.
  • balderdash 2mo ago
    I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on an add on purpose on a website (I’ve definitely click on one or two a month because of dark patterns). I’m always perplexed as to who is clicking on them because like you they’re just noise I don’t pay attention to.
    • tiznow 2mo ago
      The same people who still pay for cable and get roped into spending half an hour watching an infomercial at 4am.
• npilk 2mo ago
  Yes, 100%. I played around with building this last year and even a simple version was already fairly effective: https://notes.npilk.com/experiments-with-ai-adblock https://notes.npilk.com/experiments-with-ai-adblock One interesting thing is that it also removed some "internal CTAs" to engage (like "Start your day with our podcast!"). These aren't technically ads, so something like uBlock doesn't remove them. But honestly, I don't really mind having those filtered out too.
  • stubish 2mo ago
    I'm hoping those NP chips ending up in some new computers will be able to run something like this. Thanks for your work! A general purpose system, especially if trained by the users, would be more than just an adblocker. It could be trained to block out spiders or other phobia triggers for instance. Even regenerate the photo but with a kitten. Blur our tabloid clickbait 'in other news' links. The killer app for AR glasses will be blocking out billboards and logos.
    • rand_flip_bit 2mo ago
      > It could be trained to block out spiders or other phobia triggers for instance. Even regenerate the photo but with a kitten. Blur our tabloid clickbait 'in other news' links. Sounds like the plot of a Black Mirror episode :)
• wildzzz 2mo ago
  Sites will start streaming in the whole webpage using DRM so the only thing that can actually see the ad is your monitor.
  • TeMPOraL 2mo ago
    We'll definitely need open models here, because proprietary AI services can (and I imagine will) be set to detect invisible watermarks in the ads and refuse to filter them out. (It's almost obvious extension of current AI image fingerprinting efforts. If a robust invisible watermark can be used to tell the image was AI generated, the same scheme can also be used for general DRM.)
  • TacticalCoder 2mo ago
    > Sites will start streaming in the whole webpage using DRM so the only thing that can actually see the ad is your monitor. If it comes that, I'll put my real monitor in front of that DRMed monitor (doable with flat screens) and I'll have a private LLM, in real-time, pushing on the real monitor (the one I look at), an ad-free version of the DRM'ed monitor. DRM is nasty but private AI models are already more powerful and they'll only ever got better. And those open-weights are never ever going back in the box.
    • Barbing 2mo ago
      They’re really going to make us drink the verification cans :( …require a refundable purchase of a sponsored product, maybe. Then our bot has to buy it, or in another scenario with the already-used tactic: take the quiz on which ads we saw or whatever. Then we’ll need a robot with human eyes to blink at the camera over the screen when that’s a requirement. Have to hook it up to a nervous system when the bodysensor monitor wants to make sure we did responded to the jumpscare or got emotional at the right place. Spot checks by humans knocking on your door (lifetime ban from all ad-funded businesses if you don’t answer). Will have to settle for friends rehashing content until encryption’s illegal and so is any retelling. Any rebroadcast, retransmission, or account of this xyz, without the express written consent of abcd, is prohibited.
  • asadotzler 2mo ago
• ajkjk 2mo ago
  I'm hoping we can mostly ban ads in my lifetime (on the basis that companies should not be allowed to freely try to manipulate unconsenting strangers. and that it makes the world suck to live in and we don't have to put up with that). Nothing would make me happier honestly.
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Who's we? Politicians?
    • ajkjk 2mo ago
      Well, the populace. But yeah presumably via politicians. It certainly might require winning a few elections.
      • inigyou 2mo ago
        Does that system actually work?
        • ajkjk 2mo ago
          Yes.
  • joshuat 2mo ago
    This would also mean a lot of currently "free" services becoming paid in some other fashion, which I think people would be equally up-in-arms about. I'm no fan of ads and I am willing to pay for services I use to avoid seeing them - but I've learned over recent years that most people simply do not agree with that premise.
    • Yaa101 2mo ago
      And the paid services that at some point do show ads?
    • ajkjk 2mo ago
• tshaddox 2mo ago
  > Eventually, 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. Surely a better way to think of this is that a person's AI agent will simply find, via whatever means necessary, the information that the person is interested in. It's hard to imagine the person will still be operating on the old "pull" model where they deliberately visit a specific website or open a specific app.
  • RajT88 2mo ago
    Hate all you want. This is the level of Microsoft Scout at the moment. I tell it what sites to go to, and the information I am interested it, and it grabs it using Playwright. I am hoping I can get a self-host option working as well as this.
• bookofjoe 2mo ago
  Whatever cognitive damage I've suffered since joining Facebook early on seems to have had the effect of erasing my awareness of the damage.
• teravor 2mo ago
  I expect the end to be a custom client for an in-demand site such as facebook. when you visit it your custom browser (or code injected into google chrome) will pull all the actual content from the site page you are on and display it with its own template.
• pbhjpbhj 2mo ago
  Meanwhile, aren't companies already making screen captures to check for presentation (on 'smart' TV at least)? The presence of the output can be required, and it can be tested by hashing or some such (within the monitor, signed by TPU) without need of privacy violations. We'll have to have an overlay screen that is a separate device. Then your meta-glasses will be snitching on you ... Mind you some glasses with a built in ML module could block all ads, not just on-screen ones. Rich people will see the World as green and pleasant and make gestured enquiries as to why we don't want to eat brioche!
  • 8note 2mo ago
    almost guaranteed that those ad blocking glasses would be DRM-ed out of being able to read anything
• RunSet 2mo ago
  This browser extension is so inimical to online advertising Google (world's largest advertising corporation) banned it from the Chrome web store. https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ It loads every ad, and clicks them without display them. So the advertiser still pays for the click but the user never sees ads.
  • bitpush 2mo ago
    is it available on Safari? If not, why?
  • Terr_ 2mo ago
    I feel that could easily backfire if your account or IP gets marked as an agent for malicious click-fraud.
    • genewitch 2mo ago
      I can't tell if it's adnauseam or the fact i use ipv6 that gets me to click traffic lights and busses all the time, but i don't care, click those ads!
    • devilsdata 2mo ago
      Don't threaten me with a good time.
      • Terr_ 2mo ago
        The problem is the creepy big-data-advert-ocracy might propagate that scarlet-letter in ways that are unfair an unpredictable. So a throwaway account for reading Reddit (even as it decays) might lead to an totally unrelated account you do care about getting unfairly suspended, or the MonopolyCloudFlareBot "helping" your bank starts rejecting your IP/browser-fingerprint, etc. This would worry me less if we had laws that make it easy to demand accountability and fixes, but we don't. (Not much in the US, and in the EU efficacy is still questionable.)
        • 2mo ago
• adam_arthur 2mo ago
  You can already do this with smaller LLMs, like 10B range. The computer vision/image interpretation has been sufficient at this magnitude for a few months now. Can run on most decently powered consumer devices. Latency not great vs ad block though, of course. Perhaps a fine tuned model explicit to this purpose could be even more compact.
  • k1m 2mo ago
    That's an interesting idea to try as a browser extension. I think Facebook is particularly egregious here, so I doubt you'd need to run something like this on other sites. But if it worked fast enough on just Facebook, it would be useful.
• zero_shift 2mo ago
  > I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be. I don't know if I am the same. But I do find it very difficult to use an internet browser with no adblocker. Perhaps it's because I have now spent more time using browsers with blockers, than without
  • denismi 2mo ago
    I have not used an adblocker for many years. Ad servers seem to generally just nope out of serving me ads on their own when I have Firefox's tracking protection cranked up. Between that and Kagi down-ranking shitty ad-infested domains, it just ... isn't really a problem for me.
• polski-g 2mo ago
  I want to support things that are useful. So I whitelist Fandom wiki in my ad blocker... Good God it's like an infected IE browser from the early 2000s with 8 toolbars. How do people use the Internet like this? Why isn't there just a single banner ad at the top, like how Altavista used to look?
  • inigyou 2mo ago
    Fandom isn't a good thing that is useful. It's internet pollution for money, it's just another SEO slop site wit slightly more useful content. Most of the wikis with actual content moved away years ago, of course Fandom keeps presenting their last versions to try and squeeze some more traffic out of Google.
  • wookmaster 2mo ago
    it’s disgusting how many have done it. Just 60% of the screen is ads even on mobile.
• Sophira 2mo ago
  > Eventually, 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. That isn't enough for me. I don't just want to not see the ads, I want to stop them being fetched entirely. There are two big problems with ads. * The ad network can build up a very complete profile of what you like, dislike, and generally what you're looking at on the web. Yes, that profile is "anonymised" so far as it goes, but in reality, that doesn't really matter. If you know what you're looking for, there would be enough tells in the data that can de-anonymise you. Covering up the ads doesn't stop this data being collected; it merely stops you wanting to click on the ad. * Ads are a very common malware delivery system, and although nowadays it's probably less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it, there are instances of it happening in the past. Stopping ads from being fetched entirely would obviously prevent this.
  • nerdsniper 2mo ago
    > less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it Less common but we just saw a week ago that malware-via-ads is definitely still happening today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49170001 This one replaced users clipboard contents with a particular bitcoin wallet address. So a few people who happened to be on their way to send some crypto pasted the malicious wallet address instead of the one they actually copied to their clipboard. This has stolen at least $100k so far.
    • ohyoutravel 2mo ago
      Wow that’s super smart. Obviously I don’t have any sympathy for crypto bros losing money, but it’s easy to see how something like this could be applied to typing account numbers into something else. More safeguards on the latter, but essentially the crypto one is a proof of concept of something that could affect real people.
    • dominicrose 2mo ago
      Web browsers let web programmers do what they want. Some things should be native to the browser and not allow any tinkering, like selecting text, copying, etc.
• Escapade5160 2mo ago
  Nah, we will find a way to scrape those conversations and distribute elsewhere.
• modzu 2mo ago
  you mean a rectangle over the entire page?
• frollogaston 2mo ago
  I'm like this with YouTube. It's fair that they don't want me blocking ads and will try their best to prevent it. If they ever succeed, I'll leave without complaint. Already never use it on my phone cause adblocking is annoying on there.
  • phoghed 2mo ago
    I just pay them a pittance in exchange for no ads for the whole family across all devices.
    • platevoltage 2mo ago
      Yeah. It's the only streaming service other than Nebula that I pay for, and I use it enough that they're probably paying out more to creators than they're getting from me.
    • deleted 2mo ago
      [deleted]
    • Barbing 2mo ago
      Not a pittance but worth it. So fast, so reliable, such incredible engineers and comedians sharing such amazing things.
    • frollogaston 2mo ago
      YT Premium makes sense, I just don't personally care enough to deal with yet another subscription.
• neves 2mo ago
  This arms race ends with regulations preventing big tech practices that are nocive for human beings: - no disguised ads. They must be clearly marked -limit screen real state dedicated to ads - what the user didn't explicitly asked for, is an ad We can't wait for companies to "do no evil". What would you ad to the list?
  • account42 2mo ago
    - Every ad-supported service must also be provided ad-free at a price no higher than the ad revenue would be. Ad enthusiasts are always quick to defend how useful ads actually are so let them put their money where their mouth is and have the market decide.
• safety1st 2mo ago
  > If my choices are to look at ads or leave Facebook, I'll leave I'm reminded of a simple observation about negotiations: the one who's willing to walk away is usually the one with the upper hand in the negotiation. I think this is a choice we need to be considering on every level right now. What technology are you willing to walk away from? Fundamentally from my perspective the operating system and browser are *user agents,* they are pieces of software I permit to exist on the device I own because they do my bidding. The major manufacturers have perverted these user agents to a previously unfathomable degree under the presumption that you won't walk away and they can just keep on boiling the frog. I'll walk away, in fact I feel like the more I walk away the better my life becomes. Switching to Linux a decade ago was more than worth the headaches considering what colleagues using Windows now have to put up with. Staying on Firefox + uBlock has been worth the headache vs. what people without a reliable ad blocker have had to put up with. Turning off my phone completely for a growing portion of the day has totally been worth it for peace of mind and freedom of distraction. At this stage my relationship with technology seems to revolve heavily around the principle "how do I minimize exposure to technology produced by the largest American crime syndicates (Google, Microsoft, Meta etc)." This may be a radical or absolutist view but frankly my life is way better for it
• lovich 2mo ago
  > Eventually, 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 think fandom wikis appear to have surpassed even this level of bad which I thought was the floor. I’ll look up a character or lore and fandom has managed to SEO their way to the top of search. I’ll click on the link because I haven’t trained myself to avoid them immediately yet. I’ll then have a site load that immediately makes my pc fans take off like a vtol engine or make my phone start overheating to the point that it dims like the luminosity to protect itself as it reloads ads over and over and even reloads the page. If I am willing to abuse myself enough to stay on the page to scroll down it then waits until I go to click on a link to immediately load an ad where I clicked and treat it like a real ad click. At this point with the modern internet I do not know why any marketing department trusts the metrics they are getting from websites for click thrus. Every ad I’ve clicked on in the past year has been a trick on me and not a real click thru and has made me hate the company paying for the ad. It feels like it’s nearing 100% fraud.
  • Barbing 2mo ago
    Should add https://breezewiki.com https://breezewiki.com to my StopTheMadness URL redirects
    • lovich 2mo ago
      Neat, this will resolve a weekly headache. Thanks for the link
      • Barbing 2mo ago
        Oh welcome!
• vivzkestrel 2mo ago
  - there is also a 3rd option - its called 9$ a month with a blue check mark on all facebook groups and pages - you gotta wonder why zuck hasnt done that
  • sire-vc 2mo ago
    Every social media site that has tried a paid option has given up or vanished because nobody pays, full stop. Whatsapp is popular because it's free and no other reason.
    • vivzkestrel 2mo ago
      working just fine for x
• xnx 2mo ago
  Same. Every time I see an ad I feel like I've been dosed with a small amount of poison.
• doix 2mo ago
  Surely it ends with alternative clients? Seems much easier and more efficient. Facebook UI is crap anyway, just have something scrape the data and present it in a format that's not optimized for whatever KPI FB cares about and without ads. Or with just not using these services.
  • aembleton 2mo ago
    The problem is extracting the data from Facebook. They do a lot of work to obfuscate their markup. You'd probably be best loading the whole thing in a headless browser, taking screenshots, running that through an LLM and getting the data.
• jex_the_ape 2mo ago
  This is an ugly half-solution. I want a vision model that only rips out the significant text content and related images from the page and displays them in a lovingly typeset emacs org-mode buffer.
• plutokras 2mo ago
  > Eventually, 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. That would be a killer feature for AR glasses. Imagine no billboards, no political posters, no neon storefront clutter.
  • cybrox 2mo ago
    And you can get all that for the low price of just $199/mon on your new glasses subscription!
  • JoshTriplett 2mo ago
    > That would be a killer feature for AR glasses. Imagine no billboards, no political posters, no neon storefront clutter. ...people invisible to you by wrapping themselves in a banner-ad cape... (Actual plot device in a science fiction book.)
    • grumbelbart2 2mo ago
      Oh, which book if you don't mind sharing?
    • aembleton 2mo ago
      Or even someone wearing a Nike branded baseball cap, hoodie, trousers and trainers.
  • MagicMoonlight 2mo ago
    [dead]
  • kikokikokiko 2mo ago
    And some people appearing like flesh exposed monsters with ping pong balls for eyes
    • tripzilch 2mo ago
      This always happens when I'm out of gum
• trencedamp 2mo ago
  There's a better solution and that is to just not go on Facebook
• Gareth321 2mo ago
  Yeah we've got two years tops before local LLMs are proficient at this and ads are dead. Google, Apple et al. will drag their feet but they won't be able to stop it.
  • wildrhythms 2mo ago
    Traditional internet banner style ads are dead. "Paid promotion" influencer ads are going to take over (they already are).
    • Gareth321 2mo ago
      No doubt, and there is a lot of discussion and theory on how humans will remain superior in "taste" for at least a few more years. People enjoy following other people which entertain and inspire them. At first these will be real people, but very soon they'll be LLMs. They'll look and act and talk and think like people, but they won't be people. I had a shocking experience a few years ago with my wife. I installed pihole on our home network. She immediately began complaining that the internet was broken. On enquiry, I discovered that all the ads she had been tapping and clicking on were gone. She liked and used those ads. I worry that for many people, the line between entertainment and advertisement is already gone. They're more than willing to be advertised to, provided they are entertained.
• Cpoll 2mo ago
  In my experience, conversations on Facebook also cause cognitive damage.
• littlecranky67 2mo ago
  I've been saying this for a while: the ad-based business model is dying. It is only a matter of time until local AI models can "see" your screen and identify any sort of ads and remove/hide them. This also includes messages in "sponsored content", paid articles, etc.
  • aembleton 2mo ago
    Most people don't run adblockers, even though they're pretty effective against 98% of ads. I doubt they're all going to rush for a local AI model.
  • unified101 2mo ago
    There's trillions on the line. So you can be sure this will lead to trusted computing widewine style for ads till the pixels are lit up and the audio waves hit the speaker. Pessimism wins when capital is opposite individual interest.
• deanc 2mo ago
  Nice idea, but unless you sandbox the page until you've done that, you risk loading the malware also, as well as the tracking the ads ship.
• dspillett 2mo ago
  > I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be. I don't have a problem with ads entirely, as long as they aren't egregious (things popping up or otherwise moving around while I'm reading, flashy animation, unexpected audio) and the things that are egregious I can just nope out of by leaving a site when they happen and never going back (if I really want the content then archive.today is usually an option). The reason I block ads is that it indirectly blocks the stalking, at least a bit, that is inherent in modern ad-tech. Adverts based on what I'm currently looking at are fine, much like I might see demonstrations of other TVs while looking at a TV in a TV shop, as are ads targetted at the local area or even more generally (ala billboards). But ads based on where I've been before are not: I don't want someone from Tesco following me into the pub to ask if I've considered any further that Anusol I looked at in their pharmacy isle the other day, or someone from Boots following me in to see if I want to buy some from them because someone saw me in Tesco and told them what I was looking at.
• everyday7732 2mo ago
  It seems possible that ads will get even more insidious. People you follow will post an image, and it could be edited to include a product placement. People who make a post which incidentally mentions a product or organisation will see that their posts get slightly more viewers. This might be innocent at first but soon people will notice the pattern and start name dropping brands in posts intentionally for the view boost.
  • genewitch 2mo ago
    bigger influencers can pay money to get a list of companies that will drive more engagement when mentioned in a video, as the list is updated!
• airmastiff 2mo ago
  Out of curiosity, what sort of conversations on Facebook are still happening? I used to be informed about events, announcements from organizations (including government ones, which is absolutely ridiculous) and extremely rare updates from real people I know. And that would sort of reel me in. Now whenever I log in, the feed is mostly some sort of rage-bait adjacent slop. The useful stuff simply stopped breaking through. When I go to the pages directly, there are some news, but my feed didn't show them. So when I realized, that there is no salami left in this turd sandwich I simply stopped checking in.
• tarr11 2mo ago
  No the arms race ends with everything on meta being an ad and computer models inserting ads into every piece of content. Eg A bottle of Coca Cola subtly inserted on the countertop, a video where someone in the background is wearing a particular watch.
• another_twist 2mo ago
  This is an interesting direction. I wonder if Open LLM models can help with this sort of thing.
• thatguy0900 2mo ago
  Wouldn't the next step of the arms race just be bots who are sufficiently able to weave ads into content that it's unrecognizable? Casually talking about things we use is completely normal and unavoidable, but a huge target for advertising