XLE comments on Facebook ads are so hard to block that uBlock Origin stopped filtering them

[–] XLE@piefed.social 6 points 3 months ago (3 children)

This is bad news, and I think it's quite short-sighted to assume that this will only affect Facebook.

[–] misk@piefed.social [S] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Facebook is particularly skilled in preventing scraping and ad-blocking among all of big tech platforms. Reddit and Twitter still can’t manage to block third party clients/viewers for example. Facebook experience with those was always awful.

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[–] XLE@piefed.social 3 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Facebook and Instagram are the worst offenders in my experience too, but is there really anything that would prevent them from repackaging and selling their solutions to other companies? Or a competitor attempting to make a copy of it?

If I've learned anything from looking at competing products over the years, it's that every company will attempt to lower itself to the bar of the worst but successful company. And if uBO developers give up, that's blood in the water all these sharks can smell.

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[–] misk@piefed.social [S] 3 points 3 months ago

For Instagram there’s Imginn and you can set automatic redirect with an extension. Instagram is a much less complex as a website though.

Facebook is a behemoth of various functionality they accumulated over the years. This complexity is probably what allows them to obfuscate so much of it. Reddit is kind of screwed as long as old.reddit.com exists. If I had to guess Meta treats it as a competitive advantage or „a moat”.

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