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.

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.

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.

There’s a delicate balance, more impressions isn’t always a good outcome. Id assume here given the battle against ad blockers that the platforms do believe the aggregate impression mix leads to good performance for advertisers though

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.

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.

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

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.

    [role=main] {
      display: none;
    }

The only thing I'm proposing is to do the filtering on graphical data (what the user actually sees) rather than on the DOM (which can be obfuscated; and which may change every week).

More discussion here

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

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/

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

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

I can get my content in front of tons of people for a pittance. I can upload a list of my best customers and run a lookalike campaign. I can run a re-targeting campaign on lapsed regulars. I can spend $16 to generate $1000. It's like fishing with dynamite.

Think about the type of person who uses FB. They don't care about ads. They don't care that it's fake content. They don't care that at least half the feed is AI slop. They just keep scrolling, clicking and buying.

Meta didn't create these people. They only got them all to gather in one place and then started selling access. There's a sucker born every minute and they grow up and join FB. This isn't a defense of Meta by any means. They are a horrible company and the world would be better off if business models like theirs were outlawed. The point is nothing is going to change with them unless there's legislative action.

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

I don't think so. They want you to use the App because through the they have way more ways to track you.

Elroy: “I got a job through LinkedIn.”

Annie: “What? That’s crazy! People use LinkedIn?”

Elroy: “No, LinkedIn hired me to help figure out why people don’t use it.”

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

Of course, companies took the easy way out. Just serve ads. Until that got absolutely obnoxious and downright dangerous, then users started blocking them enmass.

Well of course, we're now in a place where the internet is mostly paid for with ads, and the content creators that want to get paid up front (substack, WSJ, FT, etc) want crazy high amounts for subscription fees. I'm not a trader, so I do not get enough benefit to make it worth while to sub to those sites.

So I guess I'll keep blocking ads for my own security, and bypass paywalls with archiver sites. Shame. It could have been different, but this is the bed they made, and they can lay in it.

People dont have issue with creators getting paid, they have issue with absolutely evil platforms that host that and scoop up most of the value between creators and consumers. Platforms that willingly promote ie racist content because it simply drives more views/clicks.

"I find ways to defeat adblockers"