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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

Swing as in the political term https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_(politics) because the team wouldn't be the right place in the management structure to alter the rest of the page other than the ad units.

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?

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