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uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook (digitalescapetools.com)
submitted 2 days ago* by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 36 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Not that I use Facebook myself, but I think this was a misstep in the U block team.

All this did was tell the major companies out there that the only thing they have to do to make it so u block origins no longer works on their site is to make it extremely tedious for the team working on the project to make filters. So I expect that now that they've officially dropped support for Facebook, the other major sites are going to look at how Facebook is doing it, and they're going to adopt a similar systems

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  • [–] 7 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Companies absolutely can pay people solely to combat ad blockers. That will always win. Facebook doesn't have a "system" other than always changing their system. Any company can constantly change how they display ads. The ad blockers are just always playing catch up until the corporation exhausts the volunteers energy.

    If the solution is to get new volunteers to keep up the work, why don't we have people willing to take on that role? Most people that have the know how arent using facebook anyway, so there's no motivation from them.

    Without legislature to enforce some rules on corporations, the ones with the money will always win.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago

    This looks like the problem here isn't a technical one, like how to best render a site.

    The problem is that some of us (too many) have become dependent on hostile systems (machines + hostile owners + desperate humans willing to serve the owners in exchang for bread aka the employees).

    The solution as I see it is twofold:

    1. Shift to friendly systems.
    2. Treat the relationship to a hostile system as a war, and properly prosecute that war.
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  • [–] 4 points 2 days ago* (1 child)

    I'm not sure I'm understanding the point of your comment. It sounds like you are making the case that somehow Ublock origin announcing they are no longer blocking ads on facebook because it's too cumbersome, somehow will not cause companies to be like "oh facebook figured out the ad blocking problem, what did they do" and then try to implement similar systems.

    Yes more people could contribute, but you know what else would help the cause as well? Not announcing to the world the solution to break your product. They have now put in writing that the solution to making the "problem" their product creates go away, is to just make it super obnoxious/tedious for the team to try and find filters on. This is going to act like gas on fire and only cause more work for them than if they had just silently let the filters phase out and use the excuse none of the maintainers are on the platform anymore.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago

    It's not a matter of technical implementation, but a procedural one. It was never a secret, it was just too expensive and impractical to do. If you changed how you implement ads every single day, the ad blockers would have to change their rules every day. Just keep going forever, and eventually the adblockers won't have the resources to keep up.

    It's like if a food truck driver was trying to operate without a permit. If they sat in the same spot every day, officials would see them and easily catch them. If they moved to different apots around town every day and repainted their truck, they could evade officials. That's not a secret, it's just that it's more work than it's worth. While not a great analogy for many reasons, the idea is that it was never a secret how to get past ad blockers. It was just never worth the money. You'd spend more money implementing the evasion than you'd get back from the ad revenue.

    At this point yhey are probably using AI to do the job of adjusting ad formats, so humans especially couldn't keep up. Perhaps AI could be used to counteract it, but that's expensive to setup and keep running. A free software obviously can't aford that.

    Sure, they could have been silent about it, but they would still get reports about missed ads. There would be enough hubbub online they'd eventually have to address. Maybe this way they can use the attenion to get more contributors

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  • [–] 9 points 2 days ago

    Yep! I'll admit, I haven't read the news, but by what people keep talking about in comments, it seems that ublock said that the reason was how annoying it was to keep fighting against facebook, but if they had just said "yeah we're dropping facebook's priority, not enough ublock users go there for it to be useful to monitor their changes as frequently" it wouldn't become that big of a sign for other companies to do the same thing that facebook is doing (also throws shade at how dead facebook is) but at the end of the day this has always been a fight of attrition and what fuels ublock is spite, and for people to have any of it they'd need to at least care about the product buried under the ads

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago

    one would hope that devs dropping support for a specific site would compel the users of uBlock origin to reconsider the sites they visit and the code they allow to be executed within their hardware… :(

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