It was a tedious process and a tool like this could help a lot of people find their own value in the platform by getting a fresh start. Sadly, FB has no interest in that and would rather corral us in ways as to maximize their own benefit, not ours.
It was a tedious process and a tool like this could help a lot of people find their own value in the platform by getting a fresh start. Sadly, FB has no interest in that and would rather corral us in ways as to maximize their own benefit, not ours.
There is nothing in my follows or "likes" that would indicate that this is anything I'd be interested in. It's just as bad as the broadcast TV ads that they "disrupted:" indiscriminate, obtrusive and unwanted.
Now that I think of it, a client side extension that automates this process, would be an interesting thing. Generally the same idea as the extension mentioned in the top post, which automates the client-side of unfollowing everything, but for attempting to 'block' ads from everything. I wonder if they've rate limited that...
The ad-buyers funnel their ad buys through agencies and separate accounts.
For almost a year, a plurality of my ads have been either for some sort of meat, or Dubai.
I have tried "Never show from this source again" and I get very similar ads, from a different source.
I have tried "This is a sensitive subject" and I will seem the same ad in a day or two.
Oh, they also show ads for fake electronics gear at a tiny fraction of the price of the real thing.
Oh, and they show me ads for US politicos. I'm a Briton in the Netherlands, though a lot of my friends are Americans.
If someone knows why obscuring HTML to force ads isn't more common practice, I'd be curious to know. I get it maybe for small websites that need the organic traffic (I assume Google would hit your SEO if your page structure looks like FB's), but how can it be so hard when it is indeed possible? I could understand if Google more specifically doesn't even try as they may lose adblocking nerds and they could use the data anyway, but I would expect to come across more sites that found solutions or clever ways of serving ads around UBO/ABP, at least make me use the picker. Is it really a colossal job to obscure ads and if it is reachable wouldn't medium-sized websites that find implementations remain unpatched for quite a while (big world out there)? Do you really need to own >$100B/Y business on godly margins or AWS to afford a fighting chance at that arm's race?
Three basic reasons:
1. For websites that aren't as large as Facebook, most advertisers insist on running their own code on the page to do things like count impressions (to make sure the owner of the site can't lie about how many views the ads got). This is easily blockable.
2. It's not profitable for most websites to engage in an arms race with ad blockers. Your web developers' time is almost certainly better spent on trying to grow the userbase, not showing ads to a subset of users who will almost certainly not click on them. (And businesses will often make decisions based on data from third-party trackers that are also blocked by ad blockers, so it's possible the relevant department does not even know those users exist.)
3. There is already a very difficult-to-block form of advertisement available to many websites: sponsored content. Just bake the advertisement directly into the video, or as a paragraph of a long blog post with no distinguishing CSS, or something.
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/anila7/faceb...
You'd think "targeted advertising" would encourage people to limit their payments to people in the correct country.
Looking back when I left in 2014, facebook has turned into 4chan but worse because its connected to real life identities. It's an utter garbage fire and I laugh at the users of it.
If you unfollow all your friends/pages, your feed will be empty and will look something like this: https://romanvesely.com/static/b031d9ff5bb48d618d1226fb363a9...
I did much the same. I unfollowed every page, and any person I hadn't seen in person within the past year.
My Facebook is now a carefully curated list of people I like, and cat pictures. It's done wonders for my mental health.
Facebook and other social media platforms actually gives users a lot of tools to tailor their feeds. Muting or unfollowing people (leaving the friend connection intact) should be the go-to operation for anyone who's always posting things you aren't interested in.
The other half of tailoring your feed is learning to embrace the like button. If you see something you like, click the like button. Sounds simple, but I know a lot of people who refuse to click the like button because they dislike the concept of like counts, but they forget that it's one of the primary mechanisms for telling the algorithms what you want to see. The more you like content, the more you'll see it.
No way will I ever engage with like/dislike buttons. My preference is that organisations like Faceache should never learn that I even exist.
I don't have a problem with ranking my feed, by the way; I don't have a feed. I've never had a Faceache account, and that fact causes me zero grief.
This way advanced users get the feeds they want without FB worrying about creating another "API" to be discovered by NYT journalists on a slow news day
Also there is no dislike button. FB needs to understand that when I say I don't like an ad it means I don't like it, and should not only immediately apologize but also ensure I don't see ads like that again, if they want me to use their platform.
Less and less people are using facebook. Most (worldwide) never did in the first place. But an ugly man compensates for insecurity about his physical appearance by pretending he has more power than he does, despite him in reality having plenty of power to feel secure.
Facebook: you want to do something in an automated way? Enjoy your two day clickfest. Real life: yeah, I'm going to just use something else, and people coming of age will laugh about this legacy antiquated service.
Do you know how you get a fresh start without this process you found tedious? Put in a bunch of fake info into your profile, then just leave the account alone, forever. Then go somewhere else. Facebook has a large userbase. If you're not there for the other users, why in the world would you not use one of the hundred other similar services?
Now, as far as my personal opinion: facebook should lose the lawsuit. This extension is a script run by the user. There might be something that says the user has to click and can't run scripts, that the user agreed to. Facebook then has a case, against the user, and should start suing their users. Facebook has no standing against the people who wrote the script, but are not running it against facebook servers. I am free to write any piece of code, that does anything, as long as I don't have a contract with Facebook saying I won't. This is called freedom of speech, and a government does not have authority to make me stop. And a private company has no enforcement authority, because they're a company, not a government.
So I hear. This is the trajectory of all social-media sites; they cease to be fashionable and hip, as their early users (late teens to early 20s) move on. What remains is then children, old fuddy-duddies, politicos and advertisers. So they become even less fashionable and less hip. Consider Myspace.
What surprises me is that Faceache has lasted so long. If I were into gambling on stocks, I'd be shorting Faceache.
One thing I struggle with is the tags. You unfollow someone and your feed won't include their posts anymore, but it _will_ include random posts that they're tagged in, and I haven't yet found a way to curtail this. I've used "Hide this post" repeatedly because the option text says "see fewer posts like this", but it hasn't really had an effect. Have you found a way to fix this?
Unfortunately, in my situation, my family is so deeply steeped in Facebook that I have no choice. We already have group chats and the like, and some stuff gets posted there, especially if someone wants me in particular to know something. But if you try to go down that road, you're only going to get the newsworthy headlines: your grandma died, Matt had a kid, etc.
But in a lot of cases, people just want to shout little things at the world, and when my family does that, it's on Facebook. It's unreasonable to expect everyone I care about to announce everything twice, once to everyone and a second time to just me, so I knew I was going to miss some things. But recently it came to my attention just how much I was missing, and it's just not worth it. You only get your family once. Keeping up with the little things means getting back on Facebook, so I'm back on Facebook.
I'm trying to think of a for-profit business that does not do that and coming up short.
Look at GoDaddy, a near-universally despised company that has managed to become a dominant player by engaging in anti-user practices. But there's plenty of other players that profit in that same space while maintaining really positive relationships with their customers.
So while I'm sympathetic to the viewpoint that for-profit businesses always and only act like for-profit businesses, there's still some room to maneuver. Facebook has clearly chosen to manipulate and data mine every single user to within inches of their lives in what amounts to a scorched earth policy.
If you don't like what FB as a company is doing, the only way to resist it is not to play. So eventually I abandoned my carefully constructed feed and went to look for better pastures.
Sadly, I think very few people use it this way, billions of people use it as all-in-one hub, and that leads to disaster we see nowadays.
Another key thing is to simply not install FB on phone. Only use it once a day when on desktop. Such a nice tool to connect with old friends otherwise.
It would be nice if I could easily switch between networks but I have to keep the same pared down list of people and things I follow.
It reminds me of Google circles where you could have more fine grained networks.