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Comment by eeeeeeeeeeeee | Hacker News Reader

Yep, seems like a total waste of time. The people scraping will spend the necessary time to get around this (and then distribute that knowledge to the masses) so it seems like a pointless arms race. Facebook employees could better use their time on developing actual features that bring value.

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> Facebook employees could better use their time on developing actual features that bring value.

The problem here of course is that circumventing the ad blocking is the most direct way Facebook can find value.

How is this waste of time / pointless ? They do bring value for fb, they reduce the loss of ad money.

Because they are fighting the people that absolutely do not want to see advertisements whatsoever (most normal people I know do not have ad-blockers), which already makes them the least likely to be attracted by advertisements. If anything, those brands are souring their reputation anytime they are seen by those kind of people in a medium that those consumers find obnoxious.

You can make a similar argument that the RIAA/MPAA going after piracy is a waste of time. Again, focus on delivering value to actual customers.

If Facebook spent more time on making a friendly ecosystem / community I would be more open to signing back up again. Instead, it seems they are hyper-focused on advertisements at the expense of everything else.

"Delivering value to customers"? It's a website-cum-message board. There is no further value to deliver via software features; all of that work is going towards meeting the needs of advertisers.

And advertisers are asking them to show what they are doing to combat adblocking. FB isn't doing this to target customers least likely to convert, they're doing it to check a box for their ad sales team.

Newsflash: Facebook's customers are advertisers, not the honeypot victims stuck to their site.

But there’s a trade off. Fewer ads better placed means fewer people likely to block them and more people likely to actually look at them instead of skim past. It’s also likely that the people who were blocking ads are less likely to click on them and thus (for some advertisers) lower value impressions anyway.

Revenue is (simplistically) the product of impressions and value per impression. It’s not therefore immediately obvious that moves like this actually do increase revenue for them, especially over the long term since one potential side effect of doing this is giving more ammunition to the ‘delete Facebook’ crowd.

> which already makes them the least likely to be attracted by advertisements. If anything, those brands are souring their reputation anytime they are seen by those kind of people in a medium that those consumers find obnoxious.

Facebook thinks otherwise. Between you and them, I suspect they are more likely to have some evidence or trials to support their position.

Value doesn't keep the lights on.

Uh. Yes it does?

You can't make money off something without any value to people. People have to "want" the thing

They could render the whole thing in canvas for example

So you'd block all canvas elements if ads are always a <canvas>.

If they turn all their posts into <canvas> then it'd kill any accessibility features and the ability to copy-paste text and such so I doubt they'd go that far.

Even then, a scraper could run OCR on the canvas image to get the text out of it.

I don't think these html pieces is very accessibility-tool friendly..

And then you’d switch to an img tag

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