uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook | Hacker News Reader

uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook

digitalescapetools.com

730 pointsMarkoff922 comments

https://reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about_dis...

https://www.neowin.net/news/facebook-ads-are-so-hard-to-bloc...

Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain. They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions.

That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies.

Decades of ad propaganda have tricked people into seeing them as something 'normal'. But we shouldn't accept being under constant attack of brain worms.

I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site.

> I propose a sane rule for all humans: if you see an ad somewhere, or if you suspect a hidden ad ('influencers' trying to promote something), close the tab immediately and never return to that site.

But this very site has lots of ads on it. Up until a few days ago, there was an "Apply to YC Fall 2026" link at the bottom of every page, and the front page usually has ads on it too [0]. So it seems tricky to strictly follow your proposed rule while simultaneously posting here.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Another%20...

> Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain.

Ads are an attack aimed at your computer too. They download malicious code to spy on you and gather intelligence data about everything you like, you visit, you buy,... it is malicious software hacking into your computer. The fact that some of the richest companies in the world are the criminals does not make it less of a crime.

The propaganda part is, of course, also totally true. Lies, manipulation, etc. has been normalized when a few years back will have been considered a crime.

There is some utility to ads. Knowing that my favorite shop has a promotion, that a movie, game or book I've been waiting for is out, or something other that might interest me has some usefulness. The problem isn't the ad per se, it's optimization through A/B-tests and the like, mass psychological experiments with all the rigor of scientific studies and none of the academic ethical safeguards for human subject experimentation.

We should also normalize paying for content at the same time then.

> if you see an ad somewhere [...] close the tab immediately and never return to that site

I would even extend this: if you are bugged by an ad, avoid the product, the vendor and tell everyone why you do so. Also tell it to the vendor, why you avoid their product (aggressive, non blockable ads at facebook for example).

This doesn’t just apply to ads. It’s been a single piece of a larger systematic attack on your thinking.

Have people become more or less free over time as technology and progress came to help improve our lives and make things easier or more efficient? The average person, the same one most exposed to ad propaganda, are also exposed to propaganda in various forms in other areas of life. Even tv and music serve as propaganda for thinking malware and “worms”.

Spend a moment analyzing some popular mainstream music from the last decade for themes of culture, worldviews and others.

The big gotcha here is this: many people think OTHERS are under propaganda; and you yourself are not. And now you can get censored for pointing things out about this on social media.

In Covid I posted a nazi scientists quote on propaganda and got censored. Try it yourself.

> They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions.

Isn't your comment an attack as well by that line of thinking? Am I attacking you by arguing that people nowadays are way to quick to consider something "damaging" "attacks".

It's way worse than that, it's an attack to the entire society.

The vast majority of ads lie; therefore, they are actively harmful. They create a situation where being surrounded by false things is normal. They promote the improvement of tools to make deception and tracking better and better.

On top of that, they install evil incentives for the medias, the news, and business models, influencing consumption, public options and opinions.

Finally, they concentrate power in those who already have enough money to pay for ads. You may have the better product, but a big player with better PR will win.

Ads are one of our most destructive creations. It's much, much more dangerous than it looks.

This. At least you can switch them off on the web but now big-ad is putting bright flickering digital billboards in sight of every public place. Politicians won't do a thing because they're some of the biggest customers. Obey.

It's insane to think how much brain power, computing power, electricity and component lifecycle wear have been wasted through the years, yelling random stuff at me; or even worse than random; often stuff that is directly harmful to me.

As somebody who – not entirely willingly – is working mostly remote, the only interruption in the day I have from the outside world is the sudden loud inane noises of commercials.

See also:

What if we made advertising illegal? (simone.org)

1975 points by smnrg on April 5, 2025 | 1409 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

I hate how normal ads seem to be to young people (under age 30). Just seeing TikTok videos secondhand on YouTube the videos seems stuffed with people pushing crap. YouTube channels none are without ads either by YouTube or by the channel owners.

Plus the "oh you have an add blocker!!" whining if you dare try to slow the firehose of ads coming at you. Yes I do have an ad blocker because it seems my entire existence is fodder for your website or app's ad machine to capture and use.

Bill Hicks on Marketing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

alternatively, keep using ad blockers.

Facebook may have won this round, but AI tilts the balance overwhelming in favor of ad blockers.

consider: you can (in principle) scrape the entire screen, find the ads with machine vision and paste black rectangles over them. or simply have an AI use playwright to scrape the page and rerender it for you. these are excellent, pro-user use cases for AI.

Your first line is just as true of every single internet comment you have ever read, including your own.

> I propose a sane rule

You know this is untenable. You would be unable to use search engines for over a decade, or walk into a Target, or a gas station, or almost any public square if you truly believed this. You don't believe it. You're being hopelessly histrionic and that's not productive for anyone.

my least favorite part of flying is the part where i'm strapped to a chair during taxi with a screen and speaker inches from my face and they use that moment to force a few ads into my eye socket. it feels very Citizen Kane.

pumping gas is another one that takes advantage of captivity to force ads. i hate it.

Your comment is also an attack aimed to manipulate my worldview and actions. The only difference is the corporate ad is more sophisticated.

I just can't take this seriously. I grew up with TV being literally 1/3 ads and there was absolutely no way to skip them. People complained idly, but nobody really had a problem with it because we knew that TV isn't free. Nothing on the internet comes close to that level of ad intrusiveness, but I often hear unhinged statements like "They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions. That's horrible, worse than attacking a machine with malware, damaging persons and societies."

Ads are mind rape.

That's quite paranoid, they surely are annoying, but certain ads can be relevant.

Actually, from what I've noticed X/Twitter ads are way worse than the ones on Meta platforms.

And I completely hate seeing ads on YouTube or when browsing random websites in general.

Skill issue? Some people are clearly more vulnerable than others. You can occasionally get useful information from ads.

Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad.

I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be. (I think average people are making a horrible mistake about this, and are badly cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realize). If my choices are to look at ads or leave Facebook, I'll leave. But there are conversations people have there that I'd rather not lose access to, so... I guess I'd have to partially stick around and campaign for others to leave as well?

> Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad.

That isn't enough for me. I don't just want to not see the ads, I want to stop them being fetched entirely.

There are two big problems with ads.

* The ad network can build up a very complete profile of what you like, dislike, and generally what you're looking at on the web. Yes, that profile is "anonymised" so far as it goes, but in reality, that doesn't really matter. If you know what you're looking for, there would be enough tells in the data that can de-anonymise you. Covering up the ads doesn't stop this data being collected; it merely stops you wanting to click on the ad.

* Ads are a very common malware delivery system, and although nowadays it's probably less common to have an ad that will auto-download malware without you clicking it, there are instances of it happening in the past. Stopping ads from being fetched entirely would obviously prevent this.

I think my brain developed that as a defense mechanism. The web cultivated a certain kind of blindness where I literally don't look at certain parts of pages because my brain has learned that there is never anything useful there. Sometimes I just cannot see things unless I force my eyes to move across the page linearly, top to bottom.

This is pathological. Like I find myself not ever looking at the top result in a search, because that is where Google has been putting ads.

Something is seriously broken with computers and we can't seem to face it.

This browser extension is so inimical to online advertising Google (world's largest advertising corporation) banned it from the Chrome web store.

https://adnauseam.io/

It loads every ad, and clicks them without display them. So the advertiser still pays for the click but the user never sees ads.

Yes, 100%. I played around with building this last year and even a simple version was already fairly effective: https://notes.npilk.com/experiments-with-ai-adblock

One interesting thing is that it also removed some "internal CTAs" to engage (like "Start your day with our podcast!"). These aren't technically ads, so something like uBlock doesn't remove them. But honestly, I don't really mind having those filtered out too.

Meanwhile, aren't companies already making screen captures to check for presentation (on 'smart' TV at least)? The presence of the output can be required, and it can be tested by hashing or some such (within the monitor, signed by TPU) without need of privacy violations.

We'll have to have an overlay screen that is a separate device. Then your meta-glasses will be snitching on you ...

Mind you some glasses with a built in ML module could block all ads, not just on-screen ones. Rich people will see the World as green and pleasant and make gestured enquiries as to why we don't want to eat brioche!

> I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be.

I don't have a problem with ads entirely, as long as they aren't egregious (things popping up or otherwise moving around while I'm reading, flashy animation, unexpected audio) and the things that are egregious I can just nope out of by leaving a site when they happen and never going back (if I really want the content then archive.today is usually an option).

The reason I block ads is that it indirectly blocks the stalking, at least a bit, that is inherent in modern ad-tech. Adverts based on what I'm currently looking at are fine, much like I might see demonstrations of other TVs while looking at a TV in a TV shop, as are ads targetted at the local area or even more generally (ala billboards). But ads based on where I've been before are not: I don't want someone from Tesco following me into the pub to ask if I've considered any further that Anusol I looked at in their pharmacy isle the other day, or someone from Boots following me in to see if I want to buy some from them because someone saw me in Tesco and told them what I was looking at.

This arms race ends with regulations preventing big tech practices that are nocive for human beings:

- no disguised ads. They must be clearly marked -limit screen real state dedicated to ads - what the user didn't explicitly asked for, is an ad

We can't wait for companies to "do no evil". What would you ad to the list?

> Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad.

That would be a killer feature for AR glasses. Imagine no billboards, no political posters, no neon storefront clutter.

You can already do this with smaller LLMs, like 10B range. The computer vision/image interpretation has been sufficient at this magnitude for a few months now.

Can run on most decently powered consumer devices.

Latency not great vs ad block though, of course.

Perhaps a fine tuned model explicit to this purpose could be even more compact.

> I am significantly less tolerant of ads than average people seem to be.

I don't know if I am the same. But I do find it very difficult to use an internet browser with no adblocker.

Perhaps it's because I have now spent more time using browsers with blockers, than without

> Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad.

I think fandom wikis appear to have surpassed even this level of bad which I thought was the floor.

I’ll look up a character or lore and fandom has managed to SEO their way to the top of search. I’ll click on the link because I haven’t trained myself to avoid them immediately yet. I’ll then have a site load that immediately makes my pc fans take off like a vtol engine or make my phone start overheating to the point that it dims like the luminosity to protect itself as it reloads ads over and over and even reloads the page.

If I am willing to abuse myself enough to stay on the page to scroll down it then waits until I go to click on a link to immediately load an ad where I clicked and treat it like a real ad click.

At this point with the modern internet I do not know why any marketing department trusts the metrics they are getting from websites for click thrus. Every ad I’ve clicked on in the past year has been a trick on me and not a real click thru and has made me hate the company paying for the ad.

It feels like it’s nearing 100% fraud.

It seems possible that ads will get even more insidious.

People you follow will post an image, and it could be edited to include a product placement.

People who make a post which incidentally mentions a product or organisation will see that their posts get slightly more viewers. This might be innocent at first but soon people will notice the pattern and start name dropping brands in posts intentionally for the view boost.

I'm hoping we can mostly ban ads in my lifetime (on the basis that companies should not be allowed to freely try to manipulate unconsenting strangers. and that it makes the world suck to live in and we don't have to put up with that). Nothing would make me happier honestly.

I'm like this with YouTube. It's fair that they don't want me blocking ads and will try their best to prevent it. If they ever succeed, I'll leave without complaint. Already never use it on my phone cause adblocking is annoying on there.

No the arms race ends with everything on meta being an ad and computer models inserting ads into every piece of content.

Eg A bottle of Coca Cola subtly inserted on the countertop, a video where someone in the background is wearing a particular watch.

Sites will start streaming in the whole webpage using DRM so the only thing that can actually see the ad is your monitor.

> If my choices are to look at ads or leave Facebook, I'll leave

I'm reminded of a simple observation about negotiations: the one who's willing to walk away is usually the one with the upper hand in the negotiation.

I think this is a choice we need to be considering on every level right now. What technology are you willing to walk away from? Fundamentally from my perspective the operating system and browser are *user agents,* they are pieces of software I permit to exist on the device I own because they do my bidding. The major manufacturers have perverted these user agents to a previously unfathomable degree under the presumption that you won't walk away and they can just keep on boiling the frog.

I'll walk away, in fact I feel like the more I walk away the better my life becomes. Switching to Linux a decade ago was more than worth the headaches considering what colleagues using Windows now have to put up with. Staying on Firefox + uBlock has been worth the headache vs. what people without a reliable ad blocker have had to put up with. Turning off my phone completely for a growing portion of the day has totally been worth it for peace of mind and freedom of distraction.

At this stage my relationship with technology seems to revolve heavily around the principle "how do I minimize exposure to technology produced by the largest American crime syndicates (Google, Microsoft, Meta etc)." This may be a radical or absolutist view but frankly my life is way better for it

Yeah we've got two years tops before local LLMs are proficient at this and ads are dead. Google, Apple et al. will drag their feet but they won't be able to stop it.

I want to support things that are useful. So I whitelist Fandom wiki in my ad blocker... Good God it's like an infected IE browser from the early 2000s with 8 toolbars.

How do people use the Internet like this? Why isn't there just a single banner ad at the top, like how Altavista used to look?

Same. Every time I see an ad I feel like I've been dosed with a small amount of poison.

Nice idea, but unless you sandbox the page until you've done that, you risk loading the malware also, as well as the tracking the ads ship.

I've been saying this for a while: the ad-based business model is dying. It is only a matter of time until local AI models can "see" your screen and identify any sort of ads and remove/hide them. This also includes messages in "sponsored content", paid articles, etc.

Surely it ends with alternative clients? Seems much easier and more efficient. Facebook UI is crap anyway, just have something scrape the data and present it in a format that's not optimized for whatever KPI FB cares about and without ads.

Or with just not using these services.

Wouldn't the next step of the arms race just be bots who are sufficiently able to weave ads into content that it's unrecognizable? Casually talking about things we use is completely normal and unavoidable, but a huge target for advertising

I expect the end to be a custom client for an in-demand site such as facebook. when you visit it your custom browser (or code injected into google chrome) will pull all the actual content from the site page you are on and display it with its own template.

This is an ugly half-solution. I want a vision model that only rips out the significant text content and related images from the page and displays them in a lovingly typeset emacs org-mode buffer.

Whatever cognitive damage I've suffered since joining Facebook early on seems to have had the effect of erasing my awareness of the damage.

- there is also a 3rd option

- its called 9$ a month with a blue check mark on all facebook groups and pages

- you gotta wonder why zuck hasnt done that

This is an interesting direction. I wonder if Open LLM models can help with this sort of thing.

Nah, we will find a way to scrape those conversations and distribute elsewhere.

In my experience, conversations on Facebook also cause cognitive damage.

There's a better solution and that is to just not go on Facebook

Out of curiosity, what sort of conversations on Facebook are still happening? I used to be informed about events, announcements from organizations (including government ones, which is absolutely ridiculous) and extremely rare updates from real people I know. And that would sort of reel me in. Now whenever I log in, the feed is mostly some sort of rage-bait adjacent slop. The useful stuff simply stopped breaking through. When I go to the pages directly, there are some news, but my feed didn't show them. So when I realized, that there is no salami left in this turd sandwich I simply stopped checking in.

Are they cognitively damaged by ads in ways they don't realise, or are you just uniquely cognitively damaged by them?

> Eventually, this arms race ends with a computer vision model that looks at the screen, classifies visual elements as ads, and draws a rectangle over anything that looks like an ad.

Surely a better way to think of this is that a person's AI agent will simply find, via whatever means necessary, the information that the person is interested in. It's hard to imagine the person will still be operating on the old "pull" model where they deliberately visit a specific website or open a specific app.

you mean a rectangle over the entire page?

Controversial opinion:

This entire thread reads like a game of cat-and-mouse. People trying to block intrusive ads, and FB reaching into the depths of code and making it nearly impossible for anyone to do so en masse.

I've been there. Tried to uncheck all the boxes on their ad platform; used all manners of ad blockers, etc; used incognito mode; used Tor; etc. etc. etc.

At some point, you realize that the only way to not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely. Delete your account, get off that blasted site, and enjoy some moments of peace IRL.

Having been a very early adopter of FB (since ~2004), I deleted my account and am clean + sober + much happier since 2016.

(Not to say that I'm completely out of the FB ecosystem. Unfortunately, my fam is still on WhatsApp... and I've been trying to convince them to migrate to Signal...)

YMMV

I keep waiting for people to understand that algorithmic social media communities that serve ads and harvest info are pure poison. The problem is that everyone thinks they've got it under control, for them it isn't a problem or it's a manageable one.

My personal view is that if you take a personal, not a preaching stand early and often people just learn that's who you are. I've never had a Myspace or FB or IG, or any other sort of account like that. To all of the people who say they can only stay in touch that way I just said, "I'm available via text, phone, chat group, Discord, email, Signal, and half a dozen more ways. If that isn't easy enough then maybe we don't need to keep in touch."

The only reason I can imagine seriously engaging with those things is as a business owner who watched FB railroad them into advertising there or being screwed, and happily I've never been in that position.

So yeah... at some point you have to accept that most people will happily dig in, and even most people who have qualms will find ways to justify why it's ok FOR THEM. You just have to make your own choice and stick with it, firmly and politely.

Unfortunately it’s hard to replace local groups for me. It’s mostly crap but there is very useful updates there as well and I live in a small enough community there’s no alternative. I’ve used them to get rides, forest fire info, community event info etc.

I used to use marketplace as well but they’ve completely ruined it with shipped products and ads and stuff from too far away. They’d rather show me pages upon pages of shit I’ll never buy because it’s shipped or three hours away than show me just the five results for “dresser” within 20 miles of me. So now i only interact with marketplace through buy/sell groups. God I miss Craigslist.

you realize that the only way to not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely

You're probably right when it comes to benefiting the company, but technically - at least for me - using only https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr means no ads/sponsored/whatever. Only the posts I actually want to see, and chronologically so easy to continue where you left off. I don't understand why this isn't more common knowledge but have been using this for years and it makes the whole platform usable exactly for what I want to use it for: tracking things which haven't moved on from it yet without being forced to consume anything else.

Btw there's also https://www.instagram.com/?variant=following which does something similar on Instagram.

> At some point, you realize that the only way to not get served ads on Facebook -- and thereby not benefit the company itself -- is to get rid of it completely. Delete your account, get off that blasted site, and enjoy some moments of peace IRL.

Exactly. Not only do I blocklist every known Meta domain at my DNS (I run the unbound DNS server at home) I also took all the IP blocks from Meta's ASNs and have automatically blocked them at the firewall level.

And I did that before doing so was, like now, just one LLM prompt away.

1 billion people are on Telegram: they may not be much better than WhatsApp but Telegram does not have Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and is not worth 1.5 trillion.

Really: just fuck the Zuck and his PHP/JavaScript ecosystem. Just get off, entirely off, that crappy abusive ad-ridden, surveillance ecosystem.

Delete your accounts today.

I've migrated my fam by just refusing to use it at some point "sorry folks no facebook apps on my phone". It was kinda hard when I needed something from them, but once they needed something from me they had to install my preferred communications channel.

> Delete your account, get off that blasted site,

This doesnt stop it. That what a lot of people dont understand. If you never had a FB, Insta, Whatsapp, etc... account, you STILL have a FB ad profile. It's worse than what people think.

Gold advice. People should get out of there and enjoy more of their free time!

This is the way! And I wish I could be part of it. Sadly, FB Marketplace is the only platform I that seems to be decent for random sales os stuff I no longer need.

Please, tell me there is this better option called X/Y, and I’ll happily switch. I just haven’t found it.

Such a shame that some afterthought Meta accidentally implemented is better than the rest of their entire platform.

I'm finally reading "Careless People." If I hadn't deleted my FB account back in 2023, I definitely would've done it five chapters into reading this hit piece.

Deleting Facebook, Instagram, X (Formerly Twitter), and TikTok was the best decision I have ever made. I thought that I would really miss them but I just don't.

I like FB Messenger because all the state is stored on there instead of being annoying about E2EE. My group chats aren't important enough to need security, but I still don't want them getting randomly nuked like has happened on Signal and Whatsapp.

I had a period before I dropped Facebook where I actually manually removed every add from the timeline with the added option of "I don't want to see ads from this company ever again", and frankly it worked.

After a period of a doing this I started to get new ads only periodically, and after a couple of sessions of removing every one of them, the rest of the month was quiet.

I fucking beat the Facebook ad department.

In general the internet has become shit so I try to just use it less.

They do this by adding a ton of useless markup and splitting words like "ad" into single-letter spans with random class names and 8-layer deep nests of `<div>` so it's very hard to write selectors against. One has to wonder how that div soup affects accessibility as I find it very unlikely that this content is presented nicely to assistive tools. I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

I recently found this out the hard way. Instagram’s web app has a super annoying popup. To click the comments button for a post, your cursor has to pass over the username, which just happens to launch a profile preview with the “follow” button exactly where the comments button was, causing you to unintentionally follow the account.

I tried to block this popup with uBlock Origin to no avail. No matter what element I selected, it was still there. Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.

Last I tried writing custom rules for Facebook was years ago, but they did have proper aria attributes, and uBlock origin does have selectors for text content. These are from 2020:

  facebook.com##span:has-text(Suggested for You):xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)
  facebook.com##div[aria-label="Sponsored"] span[aria-label="Sponsored"]:xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)
  facebook.com##div[aria-label="Sponsored"]:xpath(../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../../..)

But can't they just use an xpath expression to test the computed text content of a node, like `/path/to/ad/div[contains(., 'sponsored')]`? In that expression, there could be any number of nested elements inside the terminal `<div>` and it wouldn't matter. (And you'd probably have to use a regex test to account for tricky white space.)

> so it's very hard to write selectors against

This sounds perfectly matched for an on-device LLM?

Maybe reverse tactics and block/hide anything that isn't something you want to see.

> very hard to write selectors against.

Or was hard to write selectors against before, you know, AI.

It seems ironic to give up now. You can probably rig up an agent to automatically look for new div labyrinths and write selectors for them.

You can bet Facebook are using AI to generate these labyrinths!!!

Could you not just go after the deeply nested spans? I assume they aren't messing up everything else like that.

Who would file an ADA suit for a screen reader being unable to correctly read an ad?

> I hope they get all the ADA suits they deserve for this.

So what you're saying is: you want Facebook to pay out something like $200M which is such a small amount it won't even realize, $170M will go to lawyers, everybody else gets $1.30.

That seems like how it might pan out.

Or an unauthorised access / exceeds access to a computer system prosecution in at least one jurisdiction somewhere around the world.

If the owner of the system has a 'no ads' policy and a security mechanism to prevent ad servers from accessing their display without their authorisation, it is one thing if a company accidentally circumvents that by changing their page in a way that breaks detection (and unless there are records it was deliberate) they probably get the benefit of doubt from authorities.

But if they are blatantly going to quite great effort to circumvent the adblock security system to exceed their unauthorised access without the consent of and against the wishes of the owner of the client system, surely that's a clear-cut criminal case?

Of course, prosecutions of these types of things in many countries unfortunately tend to go after individuals who target big companies, but almost never the other way around.

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.

You don't actually need to click on an ad or purchase something from an ad site in order for Facebook to make money selling ad space.

The moment these ads are loaded on the page, real time auction occurs, where advertisers place bids algorithmically and automatically, based on your profile. Facebook makes it's money by selling this ad space. It doesn't particularly care whether you click on them or not. But if they don't load in the first place, there's nothing for Facebook to sell.

The real insideous part is that advertisers don't need to actually bid on the auction to participate, and anyone participating gets to havest your ad profile. This is one of the big ways data brokers are able to build profiles on you. They can then do whatever they want with this info, and you'd probably never know.

Online advertising is less and less about forcing a pitch to conversion in the moment its viewed. Even if someone with an ad blocker would never click on the ad anyway, repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure. Six months or even a year from then, when that user is looking for a specific SaaS tool, for example, the brand they saw 40 times already is the one that feels established and safe, and it's more likely to lead to a conversion without ever clicking the original ad.

The second part of putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers is tracking & fingerprinting, especially across devices.

In general, ads work by anchoring a brand name in your memory for when you eventually are looking for said product or service, the goal isn't always to force a conversion on the spot.

I go a bit further - if something penetrates firefox + ublock origin combo, I'll go out of my way to make sure I'll never, ever buy such product or service if I can avoid that (not always possible but reasonably frequent).

Its quichotesque effort but the only thing that can move the needle a bit since everybody involved cares only about money here - waiting for some toothless legislation is useless when harm is happening now.

Ads do a lot more than advertise. They track and collect data about you without you interacting at all. I don’t use an adblocker to not see ads, i use an ad blocker to not load ads or interact with their providers servers at all.

The biggest buyers of ads are not promoting products, they're shilling for politicians. The same way junk mail props up the postal service, political ads keep the lights on at local TV channels. They are unwatchable during election season, and there's some election campaign happening all the time. Mayors, governors, senators, congress.

Facebook and Youtube are just the newest battlefields. If it's not politician ads, it's military ads, partisan "nonprofit" ads, or ads for podcasts. I don't need to see any of them.

That said, as long as UBO keeps up the good fight on the open web, I'm good. Facebook is basically a memory now, and there are other ways to access Youtube that are actually less taxing on their bandwidth because they don't have auto-play enabled and don't show a 45-minute podcast episode as a pre-roll.

Ads are for surveillance as much if not more than they are for money

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.

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.

Aren’t ads payed also via „impressions“, like 10k people saw your advertisement so please pay x money?

Advertising is and always has been a fundamentally adversarial relationship between the consumer and the publisher. Everyone knows that, with few exceptions, no one ever wants to see ads. So I guess I'm not sure why you're surprised that advertisers still want to show ads to people who would rather not see them. That's everyone.

First it's literally how they make money. Selling ads. Meta doesn't have any other real source of income. (RayBan glasses don't count.)

If they don't show you ads, they lose money. (Because they need to pay for the servers, traffic.)

Second. Lots of people say "I don't look at ads, I don't care, they don't work on me", but actual behaviour says otherwise.

Third some people just install uBlock to their families and they don't even know they have it.

First thing is that Facebook makes money by showing ads, not by selling the product shown on the ad.

Second thing is that besides a small minority of people who refuse to buy advertised products out of spite, some would be blockers still do if the ad get shown. Maybe less than those without ad blockers, but still more than zero.

Third thing is that the point of advertising is not just direct sales. Some companies put up ads just to "take space", to establish themselves as leaders in their sector and not let others in. That's why you see som much advertisement for Coca-Cola. They don't expect you to buy a can of Coke just after you have seen the ad, you probably already have some in your fridge anyways. But by doing that, they make sure that when you want a drink, you think about Coca-Cola and not something else.

Do we no longer habitually install an ad block for friends and family? There's gotta be some naive users with an ad blocker that way, or default within brave or whatever

I believe tracking and privacy invasions cannot be solved through technological means, it needs to be solved through laws and regulations.

We need to prod our representatives to ban the selling of our private information. Websites themselves can use the information but they're prohibited from selling it to anyone else. Why? Because the data changes hands and borders several times after which we lose all control over it.

ads are like billboards. the company doesn't make money by making sure your buy the product, it make money by getting the product in front of you. You might not buy the product today, but there is a chance that since you've seen the product, you might buy it in the future.

many of times, i have looked to purchase a product or service and remember an ad that i saw that has alter my decision.

> is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway

Even cringy ads that digust or anger users in the moment have a subtle effect of making them more likely to buy or recommend that brand in the future. The name recognition is what advertisers are buying, it doesn't have to immediately persuade the user to click for them to get what they want.

I have ad blockers everywhere apart from the instagram app. I have bought a ton of stuff off the ads on there. I'm not proud, but have to admit I am powerless against them. Underwear, t-shirts, soap, online courses I have never used, I am a sucker, which is why I need these ad blockers.

>someone with an ad blocker installed is not going to click on their ads and buy the advertised products anyway

This is not true. Most people with ad blockers are everyday people. And even for people who are hardcore against ads, they may find a useful product or see something that they will think of again in the future.

100% higher up decision, I bet they loose more on this than the powerpoint slide says they are earning.

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.

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.)

>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

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.

Can't they mimic the structure of legit content to get passed on the whitelist?

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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.

Blacklisting facebook.com at the DNS level has worked pretty well for me.

That works, but is not really blocking the ads.

Don't forget .fbcdn.net and .fbcdn.com.

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)

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.

> it will kill them in the long run...

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

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.

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.

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

Youtube offers a fairly reasonable subscription to remove ads. As far as I'm aware FB doesn't offer the same.

They probably gave up in part because Facebook provides very little value...

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.

The only way to keep ads off Facebook is to stop using Facebook.

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.

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.

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)

I wrote and shared uBlock Origin filters for Facebook, shared on Reddit and up to a week later they changed the DOM structure bypassed the filters. After some attempts I no longer publish the filters.

Could you publish it with a license saying it shall not be used by any Facebook employee or something?

Maybe a better approach is to convert the page to an image, run OCR over it, use an LLM to remove the ads, present the result to the user.

I use a browser extension called F.B. Purity. It's worked across multiple browsers for years.

https://www.fbpurity.com/

There's a concern that the developer of FB-purity passed away: https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1tw2sf9/real_conc...

I was gonna say that uBlock still works for me on facebook, but yea I forgot I had purity quietly working for me for all those years

Same. FBP has been effectively perfect for over a decade now. I don't understand how uBlock Origin can't just take what FBP is doing and apply it there.

I'm with the developer here. At some point the effort is just not worth it anymore.

Facebook, as a platform, has long since lost the relevance as a social network, it is basically just an ad platform these days. So why keep wasting resources on trying to block ads from an ad platform? A user who does not want to see ads on Facebook probably should just stop using Facebook altogether.

I get the appeal for staying on Instagram, Youtube, Reddit and other platforms despite the ads: these provide some sort of - maybe controversial - value for the user, even if it's just cat videos or whatever. Facebook has lost its value proposition so long ago it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day.

uBlock's resources are much better allocated into other initiatives: like Chrome .

> Facebook, as a platform, has long since lost the relevance as a social network

I don’t understand how this is determined.

> it's hard for me to understand why would anyone tolerate using it to this day

Apparently, they have 3B MAUs and 2B DAUs. So you are in some real bubble. While I don't use it, my parents and all their friends use Facebook to share pictures and exchange messages.

Wishing that Apple would add OS level AI so I could use it to hide ads in apps. It doesn't need to manipulate the app. It just needs to recognize them and black them out. Apple doesn't have to block anything directly, they can leave it to users to do so they are just respecting the user.

As a simple one, the Facebook has this dark pattern where they put an unread count marker on Loops to try to get you to click it. It works, I click it by accident quite often even though I have zero interest in loops. There's no way to turn it off. But an OS Level AI could cover it with a black square

Yes, I get I could just not use the app. I still want to see what friends and family are up to so I launch the app -> menu -> feeds. This mostly removes everything I hate. But, that unread (1) marker on the loops icon gets me

Apple will never, ever add anything even close to that kind of functionality. This is a company which took SEVENTEEN YEARS before it allowed iPhone users to have gaps between app icons on their home screens.

If you have ANY hope of Apple letting you have enough control over your device to visually block ads in apps then you are stratospherically shit outta luck.

Appel has, and it can be used. Apfel[0] has exposed it as a CLI:

    $ apfel "What is the capital of Austria?"
    The capital of Austria is Vienna.

[0] https://apfel.franzai.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49271126

More discussion here

With 104 comments at the moment, that’s where the bulk of the discussion is happening.

well this post was like one hour earlier, they should have merged it earlier when there were zero posts in both

Once LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.

Given that Safari doesn't even have a built-in ad-blocker, I doubt Apple will be leading the charge on this.

Such a move would also presumably be incompatible with Apple's highly lucrative search engine deal with Google.

The race of ending personal computing is there. I am sure big players want to control entire stack and users just sitting in front of dumb monitors consuming their ads.

If we're just talking about image based ads it would be easier to simply denylist every image on a page and only render alt-text until the user clicks to reveal it.

Worth noting though that Apple injects ads into the News app, which is just a webview, so it's certainly not them that will do this.

Safari was the first to cripple adblockers and went further than ManifestV3, but it seems their reputation will never catch up to that.

Yes, it's a near-universal legal requirement that humans be able to tell if something is an ad or not. So once they sabotage that, they're in hot water.

Apple sells ads too; increasingly across its surfaces.

This is the first and only use-case for LLMs that I am genuinely excited about.

You anticipate a large language model to understand visual queues for an advertisement?

But that means wasting CPU cycles that adds to what was consumed to render the ads in the first place. Compounding all of that produces a slower browser/device experience, making the user hate ads even more.

The hard bit isn't killing ads. The hard bit is doing whatever will replace ads to pay for sites.

apple has ads in the os. that seems deeply anticompetitive

Unfortunately with agents Meta can easily run hundreds of automated experiments on real browsers with each commit in the uBlock Origin's repo and each change in various filter lists to find clean workarounds and submit PRs with patches. You can try fighting this on the other side with similar approach, but why waste time and tokens, just stop using Facebook.

There's too much money in it for Meta to not throw a serious budget at it that will outweigh any effort the community can make.

Like you said, we shall all just stop using it.

Dozens to hundreds of smart people spent many waking hours making sure that a person can't control what gets displayed on their personal devices when they visit Facebook.com.

Best solution is to never use any of those useless apps ever again.

The immediate fix to this is regulatory action.

Facebook has made itself indispensable in a number of areas that are in the public interest and should be treated as a public good for these purposes.

Ads are pollution, and Facebook is forcing people to choose between ingesting pollution and using facebook marketplace, or throwing their used but functional goods in the garbage.

the immediate fix to this is to stop using facebook. If your local government are using it to publish whatever useful infromation, it may be possible to sue them on the grounds that publishing their public 'good' on a private platform exclusively is against some kind of public records law.

Alternatively, eventually they will publish where the audience is, if the audience is not on facebook then they will publish somewhere else.

Are you proposing banning advertising on Facebook? You know this will effectively destroy Facebook, Google, every free ad supported website on the internet?

IMO you shouldn't get to be in charge of a company just because it became successful.

Facebook is allowed to make ads show on their own product.

I hate their product, but it's theirs.

I've just let Claude analyze an HAR file containing XHR traffic on the Facebook timeline. It happily wrote a script for extracting contents, fetch images and videos, and rebuilt the timeline into a single HTML -- highly responsive, with ZERO ads.

Now, parry this.

Doesn’t your HAR file have everything an agent would need to send requests to FB as if it was you? I hope it was an aged one.

It would be fun to train a small vision neural network to recognize ads instead of relying on HTML or network requests. I don't know if anyone has done this yet.

uBlock team is the modern times heroes fighting the good fight for us. Thanks to them I've been navigating the web with peace of mind for a long time.

Sometimes I find myself thinking how our lives would be if couple of guys didn't build shitty tech startups. We've gone from creative advertising to these manipulative online marketing scams, that attack our brains, especially targeting young generation, which effects how our societies, behaviours, art and culture develop.

Recommend watching:

"We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI

I wonder if it's time to step it up a little bit. We have all the LLMs that are great at looking at code and processing it so perhaps the future of ad blocking is letting the LLM handle it.

Has anyone thought about building something like this?

Man, am I happy that I deleted my Facebook. No regrets.

How long until someone invents a fully-integrated local video and audio adblock filter running on a passthrough VR headset or smart glasses? The progress on this front is taking a while. I wouldn't mind if the audio filter is white noise and a portion of what I see is blurred out. Maybe to make it more efficient, only scan near the places I'm looking at via foveated rendering.

the tragedy is 'mainstreet' runs on Facebook.

not shitter, google but fb. some local business don't even have their own sites but maintain an insta / fb page.

All over the internet I saw this news title "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook".

Shouldn't the title be something like "Trillion dollar corporation forces small opensource project from blocking their attack against users' browser"?

Why are we still using Facebook? That's the real question here.

ok thanking the team for this work over the years. i hope yt will stay ad-free :-)

My solution to this was just to stop using Facebook.

Though evidently someone's cut a deal because Facebook groups is all over Google search results these days.

Oh the irony: https://ibb.co/NnxGJyr1

I've been thinking about extensions designed for specific sites. Imagine a version of Facebook from the good old days that only showed you posts from your friends and put them in reverse chronological order, also known as a timeline.

I would also like a version of LinkedIn that shows me what I click on without loading whatever extraneous stuff it is that's crashing my laptop if I open too many LinkedIn tabs.

Mark Zuckerberg is the ultimate mendacious prick

We know they want to be a monopoly. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433

Site doesn't work. Posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719 Messages: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712 https://www.reddit.com/r/facebook/comments/1c0xfdz/messenger... (or any thread about this)

He doesn't see human beings as people

This does seem like an area where AI could help respond to changes quickly.

This doesn't set a good precedent unfortunately... Hello to that Google guy that just got tasked to do the same with Youtube.

Not sure detailing how Facebook demoralized them is the best idea.

I don't understand why websites don't just take ownership of ads. Then it will be impossible to block them.

One of the earliest ad blockers I used would just replace ads with artwork. I'm not the author, but I found something similar here: https://github.com/jfonsecarivera/artblock

If anybody want to take a crack at fixing and maintaining the issue, while the team has been worn out to the treads, they are still open to pull requests [0], here is the statement that is alluded to in the article:

>paintboth1234 uBO Team wrote:

>The project is FOSS. Anyone else who wants to deal with this disgusting site is free to make pull requests with working solutions themselves.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about...

I haven't used fb for years, but yesterday I was considering going there to only repost anti-meta news stories to try to get as many of my followers to quit as possible.

But I'm not convinced it will have an effect. And I'd have to use fb.

It is an interesting experiment. Ads on my network are mostly blocked, but wife did notice a spike on her FB stuff. Now that she knows how nice ( edit: well, not automatically awful ) net is without ads, lets see if accepts the trade off.

All the more reason to block Facebook completely.

Question for everyone: I'm building two browsers: a terminal browser (https://github.com/meerita/puma-browser) and a new GUI browser.

For the GUI one, I'm focusing on privacy and reliability, and I was wondering if having a built-in ad blocker would be a good feature.

Why don't the major browsers have one? Have they had legal problems with ad blocking, or do they simply not want to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?

Should I build a native ad blocker?

I have to admit that I never got to visit facebook in all my life, since my browser add-ons made it so the site would never properly load. I'm not sure whether I've been missing out or dodging a bullet.

Hyperpersonalized code to its rescue. With the qwen3.8-27b release tomorrow and the advent of vibe coding and the improvements into proper agentic engineering we are moving towards hyperpersonalized software.

This means we don't need a centralized maintainer for smaller tools. the facebook ad blocking cat and mouse game is something I cna very well imagine to just be something my computer would solve in real time, updating the uBlock filter/userscript to adapt to any fb changes in near real-time.

If you're an engineer and your job is to defeat ublock origin, your work is not ethical. You're a facebook engineer-- you'll do just fine working elsewhere.

Facebook and instagram constantly email me trying to entice me to use the app. As I haven’t used it for years.

I think it’s purely to massage their Active Monthly User numbers to show growth.

https://socialfixer.com/ will fix it for you. It is amazing, what you can take out.

I wonder if instead of blocking the facebook ads, in a continual game of whack-a-mole with facebook changing things, there would be a way to accept the ads and then generate a white opaque box overlay where the ad is rendered in the page.

From the point of view of the ad server the ad has been successfully loaded and displayed, the overlay would occur exclusively in the browser rendering engine client side with no communication back to the ad server.

If you're on facebook, I don't take you're need for privacy or security seriously. I'm fine with this. Stop giving Zuckerberg more money and power.

A lot of people are saying to stop using facebook as if its such a simple, catch-all answer. For a lot of people, and a lot of countries, facebook (whatsapp, too) is still the primary(only) way of communication. If not with your friends, then with your family. There's a big demand from those people to have a way of interacting with this pseudo-essential service without having to oblige to complete data rape.

Thanks. I think it still could be fine ? I don't use Facebook - but I was able to download any video from Youtube, see no ads till adblockers and youtube-dl - and that's the race making things harder and unaccessible (yes, custom - but excesive DIY URL filtering rules only, same since ~2 years, are still enough to see no ads on YT, hope, that on Facebook too, and I can live with that).

I'm amazed that people are still on Facebook in 2026. Deleted my account after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. There really is nothing I miss.

uBlock hit them where it hurts. Facebook's entire existence hinges on serving ads.

The best way to do this is block Facebook entirely.

Why not just use Fluff Busting Purity?

https://www.fbpurity.com/

This is probably a good decision, because it will free up time and resources to do more productive things than saving the lost souls, that are still on Facebook. Maybe this will contribute to the downfall of Facebook, due to more people seeing how toxic the place has become, when they can no longer block those ads.

Controversial but honest question: How do anti-ads people propose the free open internet monetizes itself?

The last time I went on Facebook, the ads were so similar to posts it was near impossible to tell one from the other. The problem is compounded by elderly relatives liking or sharing weird AI posts, and an algorithm that seems to be random and non deterministic

Can you (ublock, privacy badger, etc) at least block the videos / animations auto-playing all over the screen to give me some control over which ads steal my focus and time?

Stopping the movement of all things unless click / tap to play would be a huge adblock win in my book.

I want to take the opportunity to thank the maintainers of uBlock Origin for their outstanding work. The internet would be hell without you.

And Facebook just showed (again) they are willing to go the extra mile to be as contemptible and repugnant as possible.

If ads on these sites irritate people, why don't they just stop using them? Feels like that's long term a more likely avenue to get these sites to adjust how they monetise rather than papering over the problem with a blocker.

Not that difficult to defeat. A local llm can just update the blocking rules dynamically.

I made my own extension by essentially prompting to create a version of ublock origin with a button that uses a local llm to dynamically generate block lists and update them.

It's actually pretty trivial to block all FB ads -- but a browser plug-in alone won't cut it. FB does a bunch of really annoying break the internet patterns like rotating your session and VIP every 30 seconds -- or less.

Unfortunately, adblocking may need to move up one level to visual perception of renderee html or client-side AI heuristics about what is probably an ad. Removal may not be possible, but a masking overlay should still be.

This actually means it will become easier to block ads on Fakebook, because they won't be trying as hard. You'll just have to find custom filters people have shared to a smaller audience.

the answer to facebook being bad is obviously not block-listing but allow-listing content. we had the same learning in security years ago. what this might look like is ai assisted desired data extraction and using clients tailored to user needs and user agency to use that data. Unfortunately alternative platforms that are user aligned are not the solution as you cannot force your whole cities groups or old family members to move which is the main pain point for people who use adblockers and still also on facebook.

Oh! The Irony! This page doesn't load when your ad blocker is turned on.

For those ok purging the whole newsfeed: https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator

It's easy, just block every Facebook owned domain there is. Works for me.

I was wondering why I suddenly started seeing these in my feed, I figured I would have to write my own extension to fix it.

Oh well, I cant be mad at the uBO team. Much appreciation for all they have given me over the years

Hot take: uBlock origin could insert even MORE ads into Facebook? Discouraging people to use Facebook, and also make some money on the side.

(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)

TBH Facebook makes it so you can't even copy and open links or highlight text properly - it's 100% hostile and keeping up with that is a lot of effort that could be put to better use.

Anyone, including me, gets what they deserve when loading Facebook.

since the leadership change, youtube has been on a similar crusade against adblocking. however, despite all the things that happened, ublock, even in the lite version, is able to work on the website. this has been quite well-covered and even discussed here.

however, found it interesting that fb was able to quietly win the battle. however, it is a shame that nothing can be done on the mobile front, at least inside the apps. it is insane how sometimes every other thing you see is a sponsored post or an ad.

Also good to note that even if you were somehow able to block ads on Facebook, that only stops the visible output. The aggressive data collection continues as you scroll and interact with content.

Assuming you insist on using facebook you can proxy it, using a simple script that removes all ads prior to serving. The problem of course is that this is not cheap. Easier to just not use facebook.

Why not just set up a build pipeline to have AI view the page, check for ads, then do the whack a mole until it removes them, or have I missed something that needs human in the loop?

Very simple: just block all Meta domains at your local DNS. Nobody needs Meta. And if there is something you desperately need to see on one of their platforms temporarily switch your DNS.

Here's the source:

https://reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5

https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/

Archived comments / VPN: https://photon-reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/

I haven't been on Facebook for years

Why are people on anything meta or musk?

Then again I figured we'd be back to personal blogs by now since "AI" can set one up in seconds

Guessing the AI written article doesn't add much that the title doesn't already reveal. Read the first few paragraphs and closed it

Meta is one of the worst corporations in the world. Nothing they do benefits the society. Stop using their products.

This barf bag of a company is making the internet a war zone. If at all possible, the best you can do is to never touch their toxic mess.

Well, I guess I'm giving up the fight to keep paying any attention to Facebook, then. It was only tolerable with an adblocker.

So basically Facebook ads won and we are doomed

my solution to nasty websites with js ridden everything is to scrape and remake the entirely new dom populate it with only content you verify, sure you might lose some detail but its easy to copy website ui if you desire. can be done with something like tamperminkey or a browser ext

Ironically given the purported theme of the 'digitalescapetools.com' site, it's behind Cloudflare, and with settings that initially blocked my from accessing it with latest Firefox on Linux (in i3 with a vertically split screen, with the browser taking up part of the screen). It was consistently giving a Cloudflare error that my browser is not supported.

In case anyone else faces the same: it worked when I resized the browser window and reloaded.

feel like we’re close to a customized compute era where ads get filtered out by default via something like a diffusion browser or diffusion based Mixed Reality. Feels like it’s already possible with LLMs with enough test time compute to RE endpoints users want to keep and exclude those they don’t.

Original reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1vgcjg5/about...

What about using AI to detect and remove ads? For all we know they might be using AI to get past the uBlock filters.

The obvious solution is to not use Facebook.

My setup: separate profile for Facebook. Targeted advertising turned off. FB domains blocked on main profile.

Not perfect, but it works.

Wait, but 95% of "content" on Facebook is an ad. So what would be left if you blocked all ads? :)

I stopped trying to block it ages ago, since it was reacted* horribly anytime I tried to block ads... :(

(pun fully intended)

Out of spite they should have a block list, blocking every meta related service, disabled by default... for now

Good news!!

Don't spend massive amount of time in sth that doesn't deserve to exist.

Do something useful with your time instead!

The fact that Instagram ads are so good and Facebook ads are so bad should tell us something.

Facebook deleted my 20yo account for "being a bot suddenly". Let them rot.

Another reminder that facebook is abhorrent and not worth your time.

I misread the domain as "digital cesspools" and that is indeed what Facebook is. If you're still on there you're going to get subjected to their abusive practices.

Hot take: uBlock origin could insert even MORE ads into Facebook? Discouraging people to use Facebook, and also make some money on the side.

(this is a joke obviously, but boy that would be fun and against the T&C)

I get their reasoning, but it still saddens me to see them surrender like that.

Pretty much every site that lives off of ads nowadays is "disgustingly anti-user" the same degree that Facebook is. The main difference being that Facebook had the capacity and confidence to wage a full-on war on ad blocking like this. Now, with this method proven by Facebook, it's likely that more websites will follow suit.

But the filterlist does not come from uBo, it comes from Easylist?

Can't wait for an ad blocking AI model to show up.

I'm not saying this is a rallying call to help but...

They should tell their users to get off of Facebook.

At every FB developer working on that:

You are definitely the baddies.

Does Fluff Busting Purity still remove Facebook ads?

I use the “natural” method for blocking Facebook ads.

If you're on Facebook, you deserve the ads

Even my parents don’t use facebook anymore…

But there are people who keep using FB?

To those that use facebook in 2026, why?

This is a perfect use case for AI, no?

Blocking ads sounds like a job for AI

Facebook is in terminal decline - I don’t know any young people who use it. Even I don’t use it - and I’m not even young.

Is this article written by AI?

Or stop using Facebook. It is called CIAbook for a reason anyway, run by the ultimate diva Suckerberg.

I mean the ultimate solution is block fecebook entirely and any and all its other companies/domains, but I think the best approach is not to block ads, but to block everything and only let the text and other useable html code out, that can’t be countered as your filter is not going after specific match they try to hide behind some long tags, rather than blocking all and just pass the readable useful buttons.

Does pihole still work?

why not just run a 24/7 agent to do the work for them?

Let the butter churn! This is exciting. Someone will step up and build a superior tool with GenAI. Maybe we can just say, "Hey Claude, write me an adblock solution to replace ublock origin!." Claude responds with, "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." UH OH HERE WE GO AGAIN!

a killer use case of ai would be an AI adblocker !!

I'm more surprised by the fact that people still use Facebook

"What do you do for work?"

"I find ways to defeat adblockers"

I hate ads as much as anyone, but I find it hardly surprising that devs at companies playing cat and mouse with ad blockers read the ad blocker source code.

Since when is this considered cheating?

I still do not see ads on Facebook. But it also does not work most of the time with all the adblockers on.

I hate that so many people I know use it for things.

I mean this is literally a task in which AIs excel - figure out how to filter this thing from this code.

I mean who gives a shit, I just hope this doesnt encourage Youtube to fight for thee same outcome.

I purchased StopTheMadness purely to stop autoplaying videos in Facebook marketplace

Honestly who still uses Facebook ?

Ublock Origin's creators are absolute god-kings for their consistent work to help me (for free) not be forced to engage in psychological conditioning all day via my eyeballs. I never used to have an issue with ads, but because of capitalism, they simply cannot exist without cancerously taking over everything. They start as a banner, then before you know it, you have full screen unskippable paywalls to the content, with extreme discomfort placed on the user with deliberately engaging bright colours and sudden sounds played without my consent. Sure, if I like the product such as facebook as a free platform I might consider a premium licence for some conveniences, but adverts are simply the direct representation of societal rot for profit. I paid for netflix, then eventually they started showing me ads on netflix. It never ever stops.

Would probably need a full userscript at this point?

The futility of getting your loved ones off facebook's feed toxicity became apparent to me in my face, years ago, when I tried for a week on my dad's iPad(perfect delivery system for this drug cause if allows no extensions on browsers) to "cleanup" his feed be following and liking a bunch of sane content and actively down voting really shitty content with ads. I tried turning off politically sensitive content and trying to tell the ad engine what ads were scammy or I did not like.

Within a few days it was undone. Soft porn(ish) mixed with violent videos and of course all the scam like ads resurfaced. Part of it is the person who is addicted to this stuff and part of it is this shitty product called Facebook that loves to show horrible things to my dad.

I asked why he watches all of it, "Masala"(hindi for spice) is the word he uses to describe his addiction.

Using ad blockers is of poor character anyway. That's their chosen business model and if we don't accept their terms then we don't need to use their service.

I am happy to pay for an Ad Free experience on services that offer it. We should all send letters to companies who we want to pay to give us an ad free experience. "I don't want to pay" is an indefensible position because everything is an energy exchange. "There is no free lunch." If we don't want to pay with money then we can pay with attention to ads, and hacking the display to take without giving in return is corrupt.

I know this is gonna be unpopular take

but for modern social media to function, they need showing ads to pay creator

many people livelihood depends on it, creator make content in turn of revenue sharing that user get for free

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