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Comment by YeahSureWhyNot | Hacker News Reader

I quit FB more than a year ago but stared going in my profile again because I had to create a page for my app and I am shocked how slow and cluttered fb desktop site has become. its alarmingly bad, like terrible and yet I read on the news that their advertising revenue has increased. did people start using fb more? who clicks on these ads? who buys stuff on fb.

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FB revenue is more than 90% from mobile. Only nerds use desktop nowadays.

I don't want it on my phone, so I only use the Messenger client there, and only use the rest of FB on my laptop.

My understanding is that the hip and with-it (or the under-30s) don't use FB anyway nowadays.

For me, it's almost purely a slightly better version of SMS.

Facebook sort-of-recently introduced measures to defeat ad blockers, which I think has greatly increased the number of clicks.

Yes the “Similar to other stories you’ve interacted with...” has introduced a nice new level of spamvertising.

Surely any clicks resulting from adblocker-defeating measures are unintentional clicks by frustrated users?

People who install adblockers are people who do not want to click on ads.

Well, some of us do: https://adnauseam.io/

Is there any benefit to that? I mean, does it convince anyone of anything, like that you're not using an ad-blocker? Or is it a pure public service?

I don't use it myself, but as far as I understand it, the idea is to increase the noise you make so that any signal you make would get lost.

Ads can't be tailored to you if you click on every ad ever shown to you (in the background of course).

> who clicks on these ads?

Me, accidentally while trying to tell facebook to never show me that ad again.

Like you noticed, the ad situation has become dire.

It could be a boiling the frog thing, but IMO the desktop experience hasn't changed much in a few years. It's not exactly information-dense, but more so than Twitter, somehow, despite the latter's "short text only" origins.

imho, advertising is an extremely fuzzy business. Advertisers throw money on campaigns because facebook tells them to do so, and then increases their prices. It generates revenue for sure, but i dont see it working out well in the long term

mbasic.facebook.com

Still cluttered and awful but fast.

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