uBlock Origin Is Giving Up the Fight to Keep Ads Off Facebook

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• The only way to keep ads off Facebook is to stop using Facebook.
  by hn_submit
• you could use NoBook or MaterialBook, both on Github, personally I don't have FB account 10+ years and not missing it (besides marketplace, though don't see even there better deals than local classifieds website)
  by Markoff
• If 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.
  by CivBase
• I got a facebook account because I wanted to use marketplace. I just use one of those CSS browser plugins to hide the newsfeed which is where all the ads pop up. The following does the trick for me:

      [role=main] {
        display: none;
      }
  

  I also don't have any friends on it.
  by sodapopcan
• As 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.
  by SCLeo
• Let'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.

  by echelon
• They probably gave up in part because Facebook provides very little value...
  by qiine
• Youtube offers a fairly reasonable subscription to remove ads. As far as I'm aware FB doesn't offer the same.
  by Gigachad
• Given that YouTube already has a suite of anti-adblocking checks in their UI code [1] (e.g. submit a fake request to the /player endpoint and see if anything removed the ads from it - which also tells you exactly which fields you need to remove from which request, lol), I don't know why they don't have someone looking at the latest filters and reacting to them.

  Twitch did that a while back and uBlock Origin was ineffective against their video ads within a few months.

  [1] https://bsky.app/profile/soitis.dev/post/3lvk7przgus2u

  by insin
• I'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.

  by pavel_lishin
• Facebook 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)

  by VCFundedGenYer
• > it will kill them in the long run...

  Now, that's something I would love to see in my lifetime.

  by liendolucas
• Most 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.
  by RiverCrochet
• Blacklisting facebook.com at the DNS level has worked pretty well for me.
  by drnick1
• Don't forget .fbcdn.net and .fbcdn.com.
  by Gormo
• That works, but is not really blocking the ads.
  by amazingamazing
• 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.

  by dofm
• I don't mean personal offense to you but I find the heavily qualified "I don't support this person/organization but I support this person/organization" doublespeak to be frustrating.

  Not just your comment. It's all over the place here.

  But maybe I shouldn't be throwing stones in my glass house. I smoked cigarettes for a few years on college, knew they were terrible for me and for those around me, but continued for too long because I frankly enjoyed the pleasure.

  by not_a_bot_4sho
• I 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.
  by burnte
• > I think people need to understand what the purpose of Facebook is in terms of its function and constituent parts

  Given how many people do not yet use adblockers, I don't have much reason to believe that this will lead to significant amounts of people suddenly seeing this.

  by Vinnl
• Where Facebook has gone, I fear other U.S. social media is headed. Reddit recently blocked access to old.reddit.com for users who are not logged in, which suggests they're doubling down on user tracking. On top of that are the increasing privacy, censorship, and disinformation concerns that come with using any U.S.-based social media.

  There is clearly a need for facebook/reddit alternatives for useful groups like the one you describe. There are things like Mastodon out there, but they haven't gained much traction. What will it take to get people off of platforms that are actively hostile to their users? What is keeping existing alternatives from being used?

  by beloch
• 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.

  by whywhywhywhy
• Can't they mimic the structure of legit content to get passed on the whitelist?
  by danillonunes
• The ad team runs the whole business at meta. If theres an issue they dont have control over theyll just take control of that part of the code.
  by HDThoreaun
• >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

  by doodlebugging
• Over 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.)

  by Terretta
• 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.

  by wkjagt
• I don't like ads and don't want to buy random stuff, but they totally work me sometimes, and I'm sure there has got to be many like me. It's one of the big reasons I don't go on social media really anymore. I mostly have willpower, but in moments of weakness I'll see a perfectly targeted ad, it'll be for something affordable, and I'll but it. It was never a big problem for me as it's only happened a handful of times, but everything I've bought this way has been useless and I've gotten rid of it all.
  by sodapopcan
• Ads are a type of malware, they're often used to bootstrap more aggressive types of malware.

  The door to door sales person wants to unlock your door so they can sell the info to somebody else who shows up and steals your TV.

  by __MatrixMan__
• Ads are for surveillance as much if not more than they are for money
  by Lammy