just block all of Facebook itself... don't target the ads, Facebook is the ad.
why do people INSIST on playing inside the dragons den? seal the fuckers up and block them entirely.
just block all of Facebook itself... don't target the ads, Facebook is the ad.
why do people INSIST on playing inside the dragons den? seal the fuckers up and block them entirely.
This is bad news, and I think it's quite short-sighted to assume that this will only affect Facebook.
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.
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.
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”.
Me too, I quit 15 years ago.
Assuming that there isn't a better extension out there for people to switch to, this move might push some people into quitting Facebook completely.
If you're using uBlock origin, then you won't see ads anywhere else. Meanwhile on Facebook, every few posts will be an ad.
🚮
I mean I do too, but I've just gotten around to installing unlock on my in-laws laptop to save them from the deluge of ads and the misadventures of fake ads that are really scams.
As they are reluctant to stop using Facebook, it was the perfect solution.

They just randomize the DOM. Which is a pretty terrible thing to do. So I can completely understand why they stop blocking ads on that terrible site.
That stinks. Today is Facebook. Tomorrow it’s a site you use. I guess that means I’ll have to figure out how to block this shit elsewhere.
Oh, it's rather simple actually.
I have Facebook, Meta, and all their various domains blacklisted on my PiHole.
I thought the story was that they aren't individually hard to block, they just keep doing the same thing ublock was doing and directly countering the changes
In my rich fantasy life, this announcement is just a ruse, to get Facebook to drop its guard.
Real life is never as good as my rich fantasy life though.
Is the shotgun approach not useful? Every post has to contain "Ad" or "sponsored", could you not exclude every post that has those words?
I am an idiot speak slowly.
From the article
The same post talks about some of Facebook’s tactics for bypassing the adblockers. A user in the thread described trying to use uBlock's element picker to block the word "Sponsored" on ads, only to find Facebook splits the word into individual letters, each wrapped in its own line of code. A member of the uBO development team confirmed this isn't new, and that the technique has been in use for roughly five years. They also added that Facebook has at times gone further by randomizing letter order and inserting fake characters to throw off pattern-matching filters.
Facebook splits the text “Ad” in the code so you have an “A” and “d” defined separately and then through some magic make them appear together when rendered… and then they change the exact locations and naming frequently.
Facebook and youtube would crumble completely without ads. That's where the real money is.
I accidentally saw a youtube ad today. It was a fake product with ai video and voice over. Complete scam. It was several minutes unskippable so i assume that's expensive. They must be hoping to scam a lot of people. I had no idea it had gotten so bad.
The majority of the YouTube ads I get are for dick pills. I'm a 50 year old woman who watches critical role, videos on curly hair and chunky blanket knitting. Their algorithm sucks.
In the last couple weeks it’s constant Mormon ads lol, the church put a cute girl on YouTube hawking their fairy tale book and are blitzing the male demo
I only check FB at home. I have a separate Firefox profile just for it. Using Pihole. I almost never see ads. Maybe one or two will slip by. But I only spend maybe 10min on the site. 1-2 times a week.
I thought I read a post on here earlier today that said that ublock will continue to block facerook ads?
uBlock Origin really needs to find a way to define content-based rules for sites which use DOM randomization. After all, the ads still have places where they can go and ad content is structurally always very different from actual content.
If they let Facebook win, YouTube will do it next. And a year later, uBlock Origin will have stopped working on half the web.
"They" don't use Facebook anyway and all the people using their free labor acting as through they are paying customers finally got to them. I'm with the uBlock guys on dropping Facebook when it's such thankless painful work
I thought of a possible solution. The close to 7 figure engineers are probably vibe-coding and automating their scrambling algos already. uBO, or someone else, just needs to set up a pipeline with agentic AI analyzing the current block-blocking method to unscramble it. Release daily builds. Could be a site specific addon too, doesn't have to be a general adblock addon.
Fight AI with AI.
I'm stuck using fucking facebook, messenger and whatsapp. Facebook and messenger are where all the non-techie people in my kids' sports communicate, and I've got some dear people far away that uses whatsapp.
I had deleted my account back before it was called meta, but had to get a new one. Fuck me if I'm going to install their app though.
If we could wean people off of meta it'd be great.
Fair. Better to focus on ads embedded everywhere else. Not much point trying to block the ads once you're inside the ad store.
Facebook's business is ads not social interaction so that is where their efforts are channelled.
0.0.0.0 facebook .com
I also have no life opportunities with people that make this place worse. Which is basically everyone. All because of a stupid website.
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