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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has a really interesting feature that I haven’t seen in Twitter, Google, or others. I can block all ads from a page.

Whenever I see a political ad, I can choose “don’t show me any more ads from XXX” and it actually works. This was a godsend during the primary and I wish was available in other platforms.

I’m surprised they have this feature and have expected it to go away for years.

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I actually took this a step further and un-followed all of my friends. It took me more than a few hundred clicks, but Facebook now shows me a completely empty news feed. There's no ads either, although I'm not sure if that's because of uBlock Origin or if it's because there's not enough posts to stick ads in-between.

As soon as there's another service I can use as a modern Rolodex, I'll be using that instead. I think most people only have an account for this reason...

Why doesn't Google do it? They already have gmail and chrome, I could see Googledex heavily populated from their existing data.

isn't Google Contacts a digital Rolodex? What you're describing sounds like white pages.

Google contacts has the downside of inserting everyone’s birthday into my calendar. I can’t remove a birthday from a contact once Google knows it. Super annoying and a dumb example of trying to use shared cloud data instead of my locally curated contacts list.

They tried with Google+, there's was nothing stopping people from using Google to socialize, no-one wants to.

At that point, why not just use (Facebook) Messenger and stop using the main website altogether? Messenger gives you the benefit of a Rolodex without subjecting you to the normal feed. Facebook did a pretty good job of cleaning up bloat from Messenger recently too.

You can literally block an account when you see an ad on twitter and never see anything from them. If you do it enough you stop seeing almost any ads from anyone in my experience.

What are you talking about? Twitter lets you block advertiser accounts. I would say Twitter is better about it, because they just let me block the account. Facebook makes (or rather, used to make) me go through several steps of "are you sure? wouldn't you rather just hide this person? what if you asked them nicely first?" bullshit.

And after doing it a few times (maybe two dozen?), suddenly the block feature was gone completely. I have hundreds of accounts blocked on Twitter.

In Twitter, I can block or mute the account that promoted the ad, but that turns off all messaging. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but if I block an advertiser on Facebook, I can still see non-ads.

Yeah, but other messages from an advertiser are still ads, even if they aren't "ads" that they paid Facebook for, so I don't want to see those, either.

It works for regular posts too. I hide all posts from major and minor news sources and eliminates almost all political commentary from my Facebook feed.

With twitter you can block the user that prompoted the tweet and you won't see any tweets, promoted or other wise from them.

Doesn't such a feature contribute to the creation of echo chambers? It's hard to tell when it comes to something like ads as they usually aren't a great source of information.

I don't really want my political views enforced or challenged on Facebook, its really not the place for it.

Why should i have to when all i want is a C rate messenger service?

I suppose it does, but I feel like echo chambers are more dangerous when people don't necessarily realize they've entered one (e.g. when all of your FB friends only share posts centered around a particular political view).

I feel like there's less danger here since one needs to manually click that they don't want to see a particular type of content

Echo chambers are deliberately created by the platform according to what they think will keep the user on the site. It is fundamentally anti-user. This is the person self-selecting what they want to see. It's a very different thing.

Echo chambers are also chosen by users, though. They choose who to friend, follow, un follow, like, block, etc. In a broader sense, people have media habits that are fueled by their own views, I doubt a trumpism follower would choose to read NYT or WaPo. There is some personal agency here.

Echo chambers are a bit of a myth. If anything, social media has given more awareness of what the other side is up to than was previously the case.

A little. But I don’t think watching ads helps break down echo chambers. I don’t think ads aren’t genuine messaging so I can live without seeing a post from Coke or Joe Biden 5 times in my feed.

It's nice you can do that, but Facebook has 19 million other ads they're happy to show.... so it's still crap if you see any ads.

Wouldn't it be simpler to just use ublock origin?

I haven’t figured out how to run ublock on my phone.

On android, one can use facebook in the firefox mobile browser instead of the app. Firefox mobile does allow ublock origin, and it's trivial to add a home shortcut to any web app.

This has other advantages: facebook web site can't ask for a 1000 permissions or to be updated regularly, won't run in the background eating memory and battery and this will limit the disk space it can eat.

You're paying the price with a less integrated UI, yet given the pros, it may be worth it.

Or use brave browser. Or use an Android app called Virtual Hosts that allows you to use a custom hosts file to block ads.

Exactly. Basically, let's not expect any GAFAM to have our interest in mind and just do it ourself.

I’m on iOS so this isn’t an option. There are tradeoffs, but I rarely use Facebook and it’s one of the few native apps I’d rather use than the browser interface.

ublock hasn't been able to block facebook ads for me for several months at least.

ublock or ublock origin?

origin. I didn't realize that the original ublock even still exists.

I also have every built in list enabled except for regional lists.

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