uBlock Origin Stops Trying to Block Facebook Ads
uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook
uBlock Origin, the popular ad blocker, has announced it will no longer attempt to block ads on Facebook. The decision comes after years of an ongoing battle, as Facebook continuously changes its ad delivery methods to evade blockers. The developer cites the disproportionate effort required to keep up with Facebook's countermeasures, making it an unsustainable fight. Users on Facebook will now have to rely on other means to avoid ads, or simply accept them.
We've decided to stop chasing Facebook's ever-changing ad-serving techniques; it's a battle we can no longer win.
- dofm
This 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.
- Beijinger
https://socialfixer.com/ will fix it for you. It is amazing, what you can take out.
- jimrandomh
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 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?
- aanet
Controversial 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
- wkjagt
I know this is probably a very naive question, but what is the end goal putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers? Surely, someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway. I don't really know what I am talking about, but I guess it's all about ad impressions that generate money, but doesn't this strategy end up making less money, because the money that's put into circumventing ad blockers isn't really generating more sales.
It's like a door to door sales person thinking that if only they could find a way to unlock my door I would buy their stuff.
- akersten
They 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.
- Glyptodon
TBH 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.
- whywhywhywhy
The 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.
- drnick1
Blacklisting facebook.com at the DNS level has worked pretty well for me.
- hn_submit
The only way to keep ads off Facebook is to stop using Facebook.