I can think of a few simple tricks already. One: Host from the main facebook.com domain, either inserting it in the basic html page response from the server, or from an API / content location that cannot be predicted. (ad calls should be indistinguishable from 'normal' content calls). Two, do the same with content locations, so no 'div id="ad"' or anything like that. Should be easy enough.
If true I believe that this would actually be an important improvement. This removes some plausible deniability regarding malware and other abuse; Facebook (or whomever else adopts this scheme) must guard more carefully against abuse when the content is coming from their own domains, as opposed to some third party.
The efforts I've seen so far from other websites include randomized IDs and class names, and base64 encoded images inlined so the file path/hostname can't be used as a parameter for blocking.
Good luck. I suspect in no time uBlock Origin will have found a way to remove the ad elements from the DOM, even if they are served directly with the html of facebook and not a 3rd party domain.
uBlock can already do this (I use it for hiding the Twitter "while you were away" nonsense), although I suspect that the next step is Facebook scrambling DOM classes and ids with no discernable pattern.
Yeah, or visual, anything with this CSS attributes applied (so even if they randomize names it can still be blocked) to it or something. Maybe even the element at this rendered location, which would pretty much guaranteed kill them unless they wanted to change ad locations randomly. In any case this is a pretty trivial problem.
There are people that would like Twitter to just be a straight-up, chronological feed of tweets from people that you follow.
I'd love it if the infinite scrolling shit went away and I could look at tweets by last hour, last 12 hours, last 24 hours, etc, and then paginate by day after that.
You act like engineering things that most people like is a bad thing.
You're not going to please everyone. Even people who will like it a month down the line will hate it when you first roll out the change. And we should you have to support (|feature|!) different websites?
I'm being down-voted because I'm arguing for a feature that all-knowing "hackers" on here feel is hampering their user experience. Because they know what's best for every product they use. And everyone uses that product in the exact way they do so the product should be catered to only them.
Something like react-armor can make cryptographically unpredictable class name, tree structure and tag name obfuscation. But it won't be enough if the ad itself is not written with the same toolkit.
I wouldn't hate this, even if it's imperfect - the most common false positives would be brand-pushing content I don't want even if it's not actually paid advertising.
But you still have to identify features and use an algorithm that basically goes "users identify images with features A, B, and C as ads, and they identify images with features X, Y, and Z as not ads, so put positive weights on A, B, and C and negative weights on X, Y, and Z, and block anything with a negative enough score".
It's going to be hard for facebook because they're such a big target.
I think where ad-blockers will start to have problems is with the millions of lesser known sites. Once these publishers swap over to proxying ad-content through their own domains and using a handful of simple evasion tactics (random file name for the self hosted JS file that pulls in the ad, site specific pseudo-random DOM element names for the ad spaces, not using an obvious sub-domain to load proxied ad content from); stopping ads getting through is going to require a lot more effort than blacklisting a few ad-server domains.
Proxying ads would be a big security risk though since it means they would run within the same sandbox as the rest of the page, which might be why it hasn't often been done yet.
It'd also be a big risk in that it'd be easier to cheat the ads as they'd all come from the same connecting IP. I doubt advertisers would appreciate that much.
Indeed, proxying is basically pointless. At that point, it would be better for the site and for the advertisers (and users who don't block ads) for the site to simply self-report. At least then they avoid the extra overhead and load times (which might, btw, be detectable by ad blockers).
Alternatively, advertisers could host a server on the site's domain. A subdomain or specific path would be easily blocked, but a random path wouldn't be, e.g. http://www.example.com/626164776F6C66/ with identifier generated randomly. Plenty of existing content already looks this way.
Yeah, this is how I envisage it. Publisher gets a docker image (or whatever) from the ad-network and hosts it internally on their network. Then you just need to map a random path from nginx/haproxy. Client IP can be passed through too.
I can't see that working out well, it'd just be way too easy to cheat, you could fake any IP you wanted, pretend to be connecting from the regular consumer ISPs and generate fake hits, fake clicks and otherwise easily steal from the ad network. This will never happen, it's a non-starter. They have enough problems with fake clickers already. There's no way to pass it using a reverse proxy, docker image, whatever, where the hosting website doesn't have ultimate control over the data they provide to the ad network.
Basically if this happens I'm switching my career to stealing from ad networks for fun and profit.
True it would be an issue for CPC/CPM campaigns but less so for CPA.
Not sure what the solution would be for CPC/CPM - off the top of my head maybe a random CNAME that pointed to an ad-server controlled IP so they could cross-audit client IPs via a JS drop in file? Presumably ad-blockers would easily pick that up though.
It would also mean that when sites end up buying malware-laden ads, they'd be serving them off their own domain. I'm not sure what consequences that would have (legally or with search engines and browsers) but I'll bet it's not pretty.
Security is a problem but my guess is publishers will care about profit first and worry about security later.
Other than proxying I can't see how advertisers and publishers solve the ad-block problem without completely rethinking how ads are bought,sold,tracked and delivered.
Proxying seems to be one of the lowest-friction ways for them to continue business as usual, security be damned.
A question: once site owners proxy ads through their own domains, will they become liable when they serve malware?
Right now the usual defense seems to be "we just buy 'em", but that's going to be a lot less convincing once Forbes.com is actively serving malware from their own site.
No idea, I'm not a lawyer. Assuming liability is a real problem presumably this is fixed by ad networks improving their vetting and offering some sort of insurance to publishers in the event malware sneaks through.
Alternatively, as mentioned in another comment, proxying might mean simply installing a managed ad-server within the publisher's infrastructure. So from an end-user PoV it looks like it's coming from the publisher's server but in reality it's still being served from a third party managed box.
Until the adserver serves malicious ads (which has happened dozens of times on high profile sites in the past year or so), and then the website is sued.
Yeah but if the adserver is a black box that's managed by the ad network I would have thought the website could pass the liability on to them (and state this in their ToS somewhere)
They can just not send you the actual content until you've downloaded the advertising content of the page.
And in HTTP/2.0 they'll just switch to pushing the ads out to you.
In either case they can't guarantee it'll get on the screen, but they assuredly can make sure you download the damned ads.
Long term browsers will become more and more closed, DRMed, protected and such so that people have much less control over how stuff is displayed on screen.
I'm also pessimistic about where it's going. As if the segregation on the web isn't bad enough already. We might end up with two kind of webs- one independent and open, another capitalized and closed. Just the fact that indieweb.org needs to exist tells us what's waiting.
Tim Berners Lee would cry if we end up with 2 webs.
They will, once the "free money" of normal shitty ads stops working. Then, once the amount of work required to serve proxied ad-content through their own domains is more than the benefit of the "free money" of shitty ads, the force of human nature means that most publishers will move to that model. Personally, I think this will become a machine learning battlefield in the next handful of years.
> Personally, I think this will become a machine learning battlefield in the next handful of years.
Everyone will get their own personal AI stalker bot from the birth. I have such high hopes for humanity. When we at it maybe also replace politicians with AI, I'm sure they will do a better job than we mortals.
Which is interesting, because that removes about half the defense for using ad-blockers (third party ads are a security problem) when discussing the implications of consuming content while purposefully avoiding paying the cost (in space and attention) for that content. At least for the people that bother to accept content producers should get even the smallest consideration in constrol over how they allow their content to be consumed.
FB can't win this cat and mouse game. If the ads are to be distinguishable then there will be inherent properties that will lead to them getting blocked.
The logical end-game is that FB writes their own rendering engine in javascript and targets a single canvas element, handling all the interaction events themselves. In fact, I think it can go significantly further than that. Ad blockers will need to get much fancier to deal with that kind of weaponized ad delivery.
If FB tries this, the awful performance of their site will start putting a drag on their business.
But also, adblockers will keep up. If they have to use canned deep-learning neural nets to catch and crush advertising based on how it looks rendered, they will.
That's quite optimistic when you think about it. Most simple coding tasks are pure drudgery with no consequence to positive human values (other than “I have to do this to not starve”). Defeating most online advertising, on the other hand, is a noble community service to your fellow humans.
As long as greasemonkey is available, it won't be possible. If it gets too bad, then a custom jscodeshift script could manually edit the functions in question.
Ultimately, there isn't a good way to dictate what a user does when you're in a sandbox.
Facebook is such a big target that it won't matter what they do. People will write an adblocker for it because it's Facebook.
If there was a viable path, they would have already done it. I think Facebook has enough engineers there where they know going down some obfuscation path is futile.
Couldn't Facebook just stop serving ads on their own site, and instead only use FB to collect data which is sold to third parties? They have a goldmine for data that should be easy to monetize without having to show ads themselves.
FB is a too simple target for ad-blocking so FB should just admit defeat and sell the info for use in advertising elsewhere. (I have no idea of whether it's economically comparable as a business model compared to in-FB ads though of course).
Facebook, Google/YouTube, and Twitter to a lesser extent, command a large portion of the digital ad market due in no small part to the fact that they are also some of the largest publishers.
In other words, they make a ton of money selling ads on their own properties. Their publisher products (Adsense, DFA, Audience Network, Audience Platform) extend their reach to third parties certainly, but AFAIK each of them still make more money from their own inventory.
Or they can already do dom obfuscation like react-armor, it can make cryptographically unpredictable class name, tree structure and tag name obfuscation.
Ingenious, but let me try to counter that with another step up in ad blocking:
Run the page in a sandbox, then classify the pixels as ad/non-ad with a neural net and only present the non-ads to the eyes of the user. It would also be possible to reflow the page to fit to a different screen size if the words are clearly identified by their containing rectangles. User interactions would be sent back and forth to the sandbox.
Of course, best would be to drop FB altogether. Being a member on FB, even an ad-blocking one, creates an incentive for other users to remain on FB as well.
They don't have to win. All they have to do is stay ahead well enough to maintain a large target audience that can't be bothered to use the latest blocking technologies.
Absolute security is impossible but that doesn't keep it from being an arms race that has some sort of equilibrium. Ad blocking has the same qualities.
Adblockers automatically update. Users won't have to do anything, and as soon as someone figures out how to bypass the ads and the list updates, everyone using an adblocker will benefit immediately.
I thought most ad blocking right now depends on the fact that ads are served from different locations than the sites themselves. You can try to block native ads being served by the same stuff that serves the page, but it's reasonably more difficult and prone to false positives.
There's a separate issue that as they try harder to block ads they will also make it less clear what's an ad. For example many ad blockers don't work on google search results because they're fed back with the result content, but it also becomes less and less obvious what's an ad and what's a search result on google.
Compared to Amazon search ads, Googles are trivial to block. But I think that in both cases as well as with Facebook newsfeed ads, cosmetic filters are the way to go anyway.
They are welcome to try. And I am welcome to try harder to block them.
As long as they don't try to force some sort of legislation on how people can use their internet connection, and their internet browser to fetch and display content, there's no problem.
The real problem is Facebook is already full of advertising disguised as content. From sponsored posts to content from things you "like". So I'm kind of surprised they need to go out of their way to explicitly announce that they will be disguising ads. They already have the power to inject it in the middle of content invisibly.
> If FB decided to shut down some features to ad-blocking users, do you think that would be unfair?
I think "they're welcome to try" is exactly the right response here. Nothing is "fair" or "unfair", at least not in a way that advertisers or ad blockers care about.
No matter what they do it's entirely possible to trick their scripts into believing I'm displaying ads, because they run not on facebook's servers but on my computer. Where I get the control.
> No matter what they do it's entirely possible to trick their scripts into believing I'm displaying ads
I hope this is true. I still think Facebook can do much more devious things like having posts on your news feeds from friends which look like posts but are ads. Kind of like native advertising.
I'm just waiting for the day when websites are rendering themselves inside a DRM-protected container in an HTML5 page. That's where I see all of this inevitably heading.
DRM-protected media extensions are almost uniquely positioned for this. They're designed around the abilities to uniquely identify the user and resist tampering. The only thing that's missing right now is interactivity.
Ah yes, because who doesn't want to return to the days of AOL's "channels".
I think you're completely right, btw. After AOL, it only took a few years for websites to become rapidly Flash-based. It looks like we're going back to that again (not Flash, but same thing - black boxed).
In my case, I use social media to keep up with people I know, not to look at advertisements. Ads make me not want to be there (and I hardly ever am).
For the follow up, I assume I agree with the parent post by reiterating that what Facebook does on its own site is its own business, but if the company lobbied for legislation that required people to look at ads online, then that would be a problem.
Besides, if Facebook made the experience so detestable that people were willing to leave for another social network, then Google and every other college freshman would leap at the opportunity to be the next big thing.
You've got it exactly backwards. The service is free, ergo you are the product, ergo Facebook's problems are your problems.
You have three choices:
1. Stop using Facebook
2. Pay Facebook to remove ads
3. Look at ads
I've opted for option 1, though I'll happily revisit this choice if Facebook (A) finds a way to make money without serving ads and without requiring me to pay out-of-pocket (unlikely) or (B) Facebook starts serving ads I want to consume. (Welcome to native advertising.)
No it doesn't, exactly the point, you can't pay them so you have no transactional or business relation, in fact one SHOULD block the ads that are forced upon you.
Linkedin for example prohibit adblocking in their TOS, they can do this because you can pay them to get rid of the ads.
The point was that Facebook's problems are de facto the user's problems. Ad-blocking is, indeed, a solution, but one can't expect Facebook to (re)act in the user's interest.
I'd happily pay for Facebook, but then it shouldn't just be ad-free, I'd also want to be fairly sure that my info isn't sold to third parties either (not my existing data at FB, nor new data collected after I became a paying customer).
The only real reason need your personal data is so they can show you Ads with presumably more effective targeting so they can get a greater share of advertising revenue.
It pays to remember that most forms of media - TV, Net, Print etc. are basically funded by money from advertisers.
It pays their bills right. They would have to move the advertising into real world. Essentially "Minority Report" version of advertising. Unless users stop owning their machines there will always be ways to block the ads.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: "if you [Facebook] want me to consume ads, make ads I want to consume".
The thing is, this already exists and it's called native advertising. The trick is to create advertisements that, while endorsing a product, have real value for me.
A simple example: a tutorial on doing XYZ with Docker on Google Compute Engine might (A) be relevant to my interests and immediately useful, and (B) incite me to use GCE.
Ad-blockers block the scummy, bottom-feeder, AIDS-of-the-internet ads.
I actually run a local-interest blog for my small city, and whenever I talk to people about it they're amazed I don't have ads all over the place. "How do you make money", "why would you run this site without making money", "you should be getting something for it", etc. They don't immediately realize that 90% of the content on the site is advertising, and I actually am getting paid for it. I'll write an article about whatever I want, in whatever tone I want, for free. But sometimes businesses want to set their own tone, or want me to write about something that isn't immediately interesting to me. Sometimes they want me to run a story before I would otherwise do so. And they'll pay me for that. Not a lot, but it generally covers the cost of hosting at least. I have an entire section, accessible from any page, that goes into my advertising policy and how businesses can contact me.
Ads don't have to look like ads. And ads can give value, too. Did the local tavern pay me to run a story talking about their new 1/2 off drinks special every Wednesday? They sure did. But people clicked on it and read the article and then visited the bar and took advantage of the promotion. Not because they were tricked into doing so, but because it was interesting to them and they got value from it. And those people will come back to the site again tomorrow and read the next one, because my advertising provides real value to them.
Yes, I took the concept from Cult of Mac, and I run it exactly like they do. I have a page where I detail my ad policy and every sponsored post says "sponsored by..."
Honestly I'm not sure it is. Sure, it's deceptive, but he's not serving ads that annoy, distract and often serve as a vector for malware. It's not clear (to me) that it's worse than traditional web advertising, which tends to be deceptive, illegal, scummy and annoying, dangerous and distracting.
And again, the trick with native advertising is to provide valuable content for the users, otherwise it's just crap that nobody will read. I don't know if the poster in question is actually doing this, but if he is, I wouldn't be so quick to write it off as scummy; bear in mind that oftentimes such pieces are identified as "sponsored content".
I took the concept directly from Cult Of Mac, so I have a page detailing how I run sponsored posts, and every sponsored post says "Sponsored by Company X" in italics at the top of the post.
I reject your assertion of "my taboola ads". I don't run any kind of third party ad scripts. All my sponsored content is written by me and labeled as such. And I immediately turn down any ad content I myself would not want to see (I run adblockers, too), since it wouldn't provide any value to my readers.
No one is ever obligated to view ads. I'm not stealing from the billboard company because I keep my eyes on the road, and I'm not a bad person because I mute the television every five minutes when NBC runs ads for things I don't want during the Olympics.
The browser is our user agent. Facebook can serve whatever it wants, but we're under no contractual or moral obligation to look at it.
What makes you think that?
I recall reading previous articles linked from HN on this very topic that Facebook most strongly values the network size they can use in marketing sales pitches (i.e. the print circulation equivalent, the "reach"), not the ad impressions specifically.
He's saying that facebook feels entitled to my data, even if I'm not using their resources. Why shouldn't I, then, feel entitled to their resources without blocking ads?
Because they openly state: "It’s free and always will be.", not "It’s free and always will be if you view the ads we serve in your browser.".
Also my country's civil law (along with any other reasonable civil laws) throws out the three links below out of our contract, as they're neither at a reasonable length nor clearness when the context is considered.
> That some advertisers think they should pay by impression and not by click is their own stupidity.
It's not. Ads can be entirely successful without a click - sometimes it'll just be a reminder of the brand's name the next time you are shopping for their product. "Users running adblockers likely wouldn't click the ads anyway" is a pretty naive view of how the ad industry operates.
Assuming you're consciously aware of what's going on. Maybe you are, but you wouldn't know if you aren't. You can't really claim to be immune to subconscious tricks.
This isn't what usually happens though. If advertising drove negative value to a brand over time it just wouldn't be purchased.
Not many companies can take off purely on the quality of their product, especially in boring industries. I can't think of an insurance company which I learned about outside of widespread advertising.
For a lot of advertising, the key business objective is impression, not click.
Pretty much any advertiser who spends major money on TV is going for impressions - clicks have no real meaning and are merely a bonus.
For instance, think Coke ads - the objective is to create a certain brand association in your mind by showing you imagery in advertising. Your clicking and buying Coke the instant you see an ad is not an objective. They want to make sure you choose Coke when you buy cola, perhaps even think that you are a "Coke person" rather than Pepsi person.
A lot of money out there in the advertising business is ther for this kind of business objective.
When you allow targeted ads into your life, you're putting changes in your behavior on the market each time you touch a device. Those behavior changes are intended to make you give the buyer more money than they paid. The market will find every flaw in your psychology that can be used to take money from your pocket. These flaws exist: Las Vegas is built on them. Targeted ads are the Las Vegas of the mind.
That's all well and good, but a key distinction here is that you are using Facebook for absolutely no out-of-pocket expenditure. Going to Vegas costs actual dollars. I suppose a stark, diametric alternative to being forced to view targeted ads would be Facebook as a paid subscription service. It's the age old issue of 'Someone has to pay for this party.'
Facebook's profitability is not your problem. It's their job to figure out how to get paid. It's your job to protect your mind.
Targeted ads are worse than gambling. We made sure everyone's aware of the dangers of gambling, but everyone's in the dark about targeted ads. These companies know what they're doing. If people want to portray ad blocking as stealing, so be it. Steal from them. They deserve it.
No, but acting with honesty and fairness is. Facebook is asking you not to use their service if you are going to block ads. I think it's obvious that the "right" thing to do is to respect their wishes, not sneeringly defy them while using their resources and giving nothing in return.
You're giving them a lot, even if you don't click on ads or see ads. Is it not clear that your data is valuable? You're giving them personal information. Not that people that aren't developers care.
Yes. In a face-to-face interaction, if the other party is sneezing and coughing and spraying mucus on your face, it is not unethical to wear a surgical mask. There is no moral or ethical requirement to inhale someone else's possibly virus-laden mucus just because you want to have a conversation.
Facebook is a social-media advertising company. Their model, boiled down, is to extract the maximum possible value out of me in return for the minimum possible effort from them.
Why shouldn't I approach them the same way? And given how often the above describes the way businesses will treat me, why shouldn't I generalize that position?
Facebook will try to track me and my behavior, and tailor ads based on it, regardless of whether I'm a Facebook user and regardless of whether I'm logged in. In theory any link someone sends me might end up trying to connect to Facebook's advertising network and record information about my behavior.
At what point do I "agree" to this? What do I get "in return" for this? What if it's a crappy article that I close right away? Or the page load takes too long and I close it before it finishes (but, in true form, the ad code would already have run)? Since I don't know until I've loaded the page -- at which point you think I have an ethical duty to let Facebook serve ads -- whether it will have ads at all, or whether they'll be Facebook ads, at what point do I find that out and have an opportunity, in your model, to decide I don't want to be a party to that?
(in case you're wondering, the correct answer is "use an ad-blocker to pre-emptively ensure nobody can force ads on you without your agreement")
This is an overly specific distraction. Accidentally or unwillingly loading FB resources doesn't come with any ethical obligations, obviously.
I'm talking about being a Facebook user, as in maintaining a profile and logging on and using the site. My contention is that by affirmatively choosing to use their resources, an ethical obligation is created.
I don't think I have any ethical obligation to Facebook whatsoever. My browser is my agent, not theirs. I can and do already modify lots of sites to hide cruft (like "social recommendations") I don't want to see; do you think I have an ethical obligation to consume a site exactly as its creator intended it to look? Do I only have an ethical obligation if the creator stands to somehow make money from it? What if what I'm blocking isn't an ad but is a referral link where they'd get paid if I go there and buy something?
There is no coherent position which creates an ethical obligation to view sites in full and unmodified (especially given that one of the primary purposes of web browsers, historically, has been to mangle what a site sent to you into something that's actually a sensible and renderable document tree).
I do agree when these strangers are living and breathing human beings. But when the stranger is an institution whose sole purpose of being and the only ethics defined by the owners of the institution (and even law?) is to extract as much net value from me as possible, I have difficulties understanding why I should still play with the rule book for good guys. If this makes me a bad person, so be it. Can't say I am too ashamed of that...
Facebook, in a spirit of honesty and fairness, asks me nicely to look at ads when they send me HTML. I, also in a spirit of honesty and fairness, have the option of deciding what of that HTML I want to look at.
There is nothing honest or fair about dictating what happens on someone else's computer without user input. That's what malware does. Are you pro-malware?
I'm honestly surprised Facebook cares. They make billions per year. Are adblock users really a significant amount of users on the social network (I can't view the article at work)? Furthermore, it's not as if adblock users don't already help FB by using the platform, which increases content generation for other social network users to view.
I think you've overlooked the middle-ground: Stop engaging in tracking and spying and instead just show me adds. Many people who run ad-blockers (myself included) don't mind the ads, we mind the invasion of privacy.
I would be perfectly happy to pay Facebook a decent markup on their services I want to use (Assuming that I do not have to receive services I do not want. For following my friends' status, some groups and private messaging, on the Facebook scale, I would expect a few dollars per year to give Facebook a _very_ decent markup). Obviously, Facebook is not interested in this deal, but prefers keeping me their product instead of their customer. Which, in my opinion, gives me every moral right to game their advertisement machinery to maximize my personal wellbeing (or to be more precise, minimize the damage their machinery makes to my wellbeing.)
Are you against businesses being able to set their prices? They're asking you to pay the market price. If you're not fine with it, doing some unilateral haggling isn't exactly how exchanges work, just don't use their product. Using Facebook is not a right.
The fact of the matter is, most people waxing poetic here about ads infringing on their rights, will still use Facebook when their adblockers don't work. They are willing to pay, they just want to pay less.
This is a very hard position to justify ethically.
The problem is also that the content they serve is displayed on the consumer's property (computer). The owner of the computer has the right to select what portion of the crap he's been served will be displayed. If Facebook (or any other company that relies on targeted ads as a business model) do not like that, they have the right to not send their content to the consumer's property. But, once they send it, they do not have right to force me to look at it. (Not a legal opinion, I'm just giving my perspective)
Well, you're certainly entitled to your own opinion. But realistically, we all consume content that is ad-supported that we might be paying for otherwise. The fact that so many ad-or-pay services exist is proof of this (Youtube with ads, Hulu with ads, etc.) The are both business models.
If you don't like the service at the price, don't buy it. Honestly, no one is forcing you and tons of people get on perfectly fine without Facebook (some people would even say they are better off without it).
But advertising is already regulated, just like any other market. There is no ethics involved.
Perhaps one day we (society) come to the conclusion that advertising, as a whole, is doing more harm than good and we decide to ban it entirely. Or we decide set a limit on how much advertising is allowed.
Right now adblockers are not against the law (afaik) so I don't see any problem using them. After all, they're a product of the somewhat free market that facebook is part of and they accepted the market price (which is that some people choose to block ads).
That is akin to saying that shops have accepted the market price of shoplifting, and that hiring a security guard or secret shoppers is trying to interfere with it.
Shops have to accept the fact that shoplifting is going to cost them money.
I'm not arguing that Facebook isn't allowed to try to stop adblocking. Only question is what means they're allowed to take. Just like security guard isn't allowed to shoot shoplifters on sight.
> but a key distinction here is that you are using Facebook for absolutely no out-of-pocket expenditure
Here's my perspective: I would pay for an ad-free subscription, but they don't offer one. They literally will not take the money I have to offer.
Imagine walking into Stabucks and having them refuse to take your money but instead handing you a coffee and a booklet of ads. Is it bad to throw the ads in the bin? Would the barista become angry and start shouting ads at you too? Or, more likely, ask you not to come back?
Note: I don't use Facebook on the principle that they want to commoditise me instead of taking my money, but I see nothing wrong with blocking their ads should someone not hold that principle.
The real-world analogy I use is that of a brick-and-mortar business like Walmart.
Walmart is free to open a business and allow people off the street to shop there, browse their wares, and buy stuff if they want. They cannot force people to buy something for the privilege of visiting, and while they could require a "cover charge" to enter, they're probably going to lose most of their customers if they do this. It's Walmart's job to attract people into the store, and then attempt to convince them to buy stuff when they're in there.
Other shops are the same, and small shops are probably an even better example: while most people will probably buy something in a Walmart if they take the time to go in there, if you check out some weird little specialty shop you happen to walk by in a shopping district, it's quite likely you're not going to buy anything in there.
Someone has to pay for that little shop's rent and utilities and salaries, but that's the concern of the shopkeeper, not the customers. If the shopkeeper wants to stay in business, he'll figure out how to get enough customers to buy stuff to keep the doors open. If he fails, too bad so sad. It's not the customers' fault for not buying enough stuff, it's his fault for not having good enough stuff to buy, having too-high prices, having crappy service, having a poor location or operating hours, having an ugly or dirty shop, having annoying workers, etc.
It's no different with websites. It's their job to figure out how to make money on the site, not yours. If they want to show annoying ads, that's their right. If you want to block those ads (just like refusing to look at aisle displays in Walmart), that's your right. If they don't like that, they can ask you to leave, just like a shopkeeper can ask you to leave. But if your browser makes a request, and their website services that request, then they are not asking you to leave, they're inviting you in. As long as sites don't turn away my browser requests, I consider myself welcome at their sites, even with my ad-blocking. If they (like Forbes) refuse to show me the site/article because of my ad-blocker, then I either leave or disable the blocker, depending on my whim (usually I just leave).
A small shop has a sign, and a bucket. "Put $1 in the bucket and test how good you are at some_game."
There is no one there - it's an unmonitored booth.
Do you try your hand at the game and not put in money? They lose nothing, it's a repeatable game with no consumables. There is no one watching you, and there is no line behind you either.
Kinda bad analogy, really. Even if what you meant was that you should disable adblock on smaller blogs that want to get some compensation. You can't compare it to the service like a gaming machine, in your example I would see beforehand if I might like the game or maybe try and pay only if it was any good.
When I visit a website I have no idea what value I might gain from it so having adblock always on is just internet safety and privacy conserving measure, nothing else. If the website has a donation button or sells some services that I might be interested it becomes a whole other issue.
If you're on Facebook, they know what you're doing whether or not you're blocking their ads. Blocking ads from third-party sites makes sense for the reason you indicate, but blocking ads served up by the very site you're visiting does not actually help privacy at all.
It's that targeted ads are meant to manipulate your decision making. In order to do that, you're tracked, yes. You can prevent them from manipulating your decisions (put your blinders/Adblock on), which is really great even if you can't prevent them from tracking you.
It sounds like you're saying that targeted ads are bad because they influence you to buy stuff. But that's what every ad is for, regardless of whether it's targeted.
Your entire position depends on the unstated assumption that it's wrong for someone else to convince you to buy their product. And that sounds pretty absurd. As for targeted advertising, seeing ads that are relevant to your interests instead of seeing unrelated ads does not seem wrong at all. As long as you're being advertised to, isn't it good to have those ads actually be things you might care about? The part that's wrong is the fact that targeted advertising depends on violating your privacy in order to figure out who to target. So it's the tracking and privacy violation part that you want to avoid. But if you're talking about some site that you voluntarily gave behavioral information to (e.g. Facebook), then seeing ads based on that information isn't violating your privacy.
There are people, like myself, who believe that the information asymmetry at play with advertising these days is abusive or unethical.
Psychologists know that humans have certain exploitable weaknesses. I mean, think about any relationship. You become vulnerable when you expose yourself, and so a person has to earn your trust such that you expose yourself to them.
Today, advertisers have made you vulnerable without actually earning your trust. You could argue that "by using Facebook you're saying you trust them," and you'd be right... If humans all had the capability and willpower to understand systems as complex as ad targeting... One of our worst exploitable vulnerabilities.
Put another way, I would say that it's ethical for a team of scientists to sit down and interview you about everything you love/fear/want/need for the purpose of helping you to find more people like yourself so you feel less lonely. I would say that it's unethical for those scientists to radio down the street as soon as you walk out the door to tell street vendors to start hawking goods that play at your insecurities.
Not all advertising is based on exploiting people, but the most effective types are!
Re-reading your comment, it strikes me as extremely anti-capitalistic.
> Those behavior changes are intended to make you give the buyer more money than they paid.
That is literally the goal of every merchant everywhere. They need to sell stuff for more than they paid, otherwise they don't make money. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with this. They aren't forcing you to buy things, their buyers think that what they're selling is worth the amount they're selling it for (or they wouldn't buy it). This is the fundamental basis on which all commerce everywhere operates.
As for the Las Vegas angle, that's complete bullshit. Gambling operates very differently from commerce, and there's really no basis to make this comparison at all. Seeing an ad that's relevant to your interests has pretty much nothing in common with gambling beyond the fact that both of them involve money at some point.
An ad that's relevant to your interests is fine, but that's the best case scenario. How many people's lives were improved by clicking on "one weird trick" ads? Those ads sucked money out of people's pockets for no reason. Running experiments to find out the most effective ways to get people to hand over their money is a valid business practice, but that strategy in no way depends on the product adding value to your life. Anything that can be invented to get you as an individual to click on a buy button will be invented, whether it's good for you or not.
Profit-seeking has led to lots of progress in this world, but its record is decidedly mixed. Keep your eyes open.
"One weird trick" ads aren't targeted advertising, they're advertising based on psychological tricks. It's a whole different ballgame. Targeted advertising is based around "if we show ads relevant to the user's interests, the user is more likely to click them and buy stuff", which is a win all around. Ads based on psychological tricks is "can we trick the user into doing something that's harmful to them but beneficial to us?", which is of course not good for users. Conflating the two advertising techniques doesn't serve any purpose at all.
While they're welcome to improve their odds in our imperfect-information game, we should also be allowed to play in our interest by disallowing them information.
This is not about the total gain of both sides: Almost every transaction is positive sum. However; why should I simply accept the 90/10 distribution of the excess in their favor when I can aim for a favorable distribution for myself too?
Blocking Facebook ads on Facebook isn't denying them any information at all. As I already said in another comment, Facebook already has all this information. All you're doing by blocking their ads is refusing to see the ad, you're not protecting your privacy at all.
And I'm also confused by your talk about favorable distribution. Isn't seeing ads relevant to your interests better than seeing ads unrelated to your interests? The problem with targeted tracking isn't that it's targeted, it's that it relies on information whose collection is a privacy violation. But when we're talking about a company that you've already voluntarily given massive amounts of behavioral data to, then you've voluntarily given up your privacy so there's no violation going on.
tl;dw: Advertisers are untrustworthy and act in bad faith. Once we give them an inch, they take a mile. If you met a person like that, would you continue to socialize with them? I wouldn't
> They are welcome to try. And I am welcome to try harder to block them.
Technically, Facebook could insert news feed ads like a post from one of your friend (assume that the friend has liked some page or organization). It could be tough to distinguish between ads and posts much like native advertising.
Distinguish them to human viewers, not to computers. If the aggregate effect of all the CSS and element classes is to make ads look one way and non-ads look a different way (each with slight variations), it's an AI-complete problem infer an answer to "given these elements and this CSS sheet, which subset of them looks different and add-like to a human?"
Is it an AI-complete problem to do email spam classification? Why is determining if a facebook post is an ad or not so different than spam classification?
It's AI complete to do it with human level accuracy, yes. If you don't mind blocking random friends' posts, you can craft the ad blocker to remove them all.
I actually created a custom adblock filter to block the whole news section. They already show "news" about stuff like prime day sales, so it might as well be advertising.
I'd like to mention News Feed Eradicator here - not only does what its name implies, but it adds a motivational quote in the empty space. The quotes are usually about goals, procrastination, etc and it's saved me a lot of (potentially) wasted time.
here's my facebook filters. I don't really do this systematically, I just use the ublock element picker until I'm happy. I think you probably want the trending topics one.
! 7/5/2016, 11:08:51 AM https://www.facebook.com/
www.facebook.com###pagelet_trending_tags_and_topics > ._5mym > ._5spf._2sns
! 7/5/2016, 11:09:01 AM https://www.facebook.com/
www.facebook.com###u_jsonp_3_0
! 7/5/2016, 11:09:09 AM https://www.facebook.com/
www.facebook.com###u_jsonp_3_1
! 7/5/2016, 11:09:13 AM https://www.facebook.com/
www.facebook.com###rightCol > ._5v6d._5rzs > ._64a > div:nth-of-type(2)
! 7/5/2016, 11:09:23 AM https://www.facebook.com/
www.facebook.com###rightCol
That was what I was referring to here:
> Facebook is already full of advertising disguised as content. From sponsored posts to content from things you "like". So I'm kind of surprised they need to go out of their way to explicitly announce that they will be disguising ads. They already have the power to inject it in the middle of content invisibly.
> But Facebook doesn't get any cut of a sponsored post.
"Sponsored Stories" and "Promoted Posts" (one of which I expect is what was meant by "sponsored post") are the names of specific kinds of Facebook ads.
You wouldn't even even need that. Just a methods for identifying content and aggregating users 'votes' on them. Reach critical mass and start hiding it.
I worked for a company that got most of its revenue from online ads. When I started, adblockers were 20%. When it got up to 35% the boss decided to take action.
We hired a third party anti-adblocker, and it worked great. It went back and forth with the adblockers as they updated to block our anti-blocking.
Most adblock extensions use some standard rules-lists, similar to email spam lists like Spamhaus. I guess we pissed someone off enough and they introduced a rule to block all AJAX requests on our site. This pretty much ruined our site, so we finally relented and removed the anti-adblocking altogether.
It's really easy to get caught by basic lists. After use garbish/deceptive class names / ID's of DOM or file names, you get more popular and cat and mouse games start with block list maintainers.
We started off nice: "Hey, you are disabling ads, please turn them on" etc. Then we offered an ad-free subscription (almost worthless). And I think we played with another idea or two, before finally going through with the blocking adblockers.
I think you missed the point of the question - people install adblockers typically because they find the ads are intrusive (full-screen graphic overlays, etc), or their machine gets infected with ad network-delivered malware.
If you presented ads that were respectful to the visitor (i.e. weren't offensive) I expect the blocker escalation war would cease.
For example, when they visit, there are no interstitial pages, boxes covering the page when a user mouses out of the viewport, autoplaying audio/video, or any of that other obscene nonsense.
This is a trap. If you make your ads content-like, and integrate them into your content, then people will say your site is deceptive, hiding ads in content so people read them like factual articles.
You don't need to make them content-like. Have ad sections that are just text. I can't recall the name of the site but that one Mac-related site that does text ads seems to be doing pretty well at it. Please if someone does know the site I mean let me know it's on the tip of my tongue!
I'm not a mac user so I only ever visit the site when I double check he's still doing the sponsored feed thing before using the site as an example of non-ad income.
Unfortunately however I didn't notice it as uBlock Origin had blocked it.
I find his podcast relaxing (well, most of the time) to listen to even though I'm not a Mac user either. I think he mentioned Deck a couple of times, so I turned uBlock off to see, and hey, they really are reasonable and tasteful, so I left it open for them. They're not getting almost anything from me since I very rarely visit sites in their network, but I leave them on on principle. I don't mind ads, I mind being digitally and visually raped.
After they install an ad-blocker anywhere. The site in question could always been been nice and unobtrusive with their ads. It makes no difference for most users.
I haven't once seen an attempt by any site to show me a "this is what our ads would look like - we're clean, honest!" element when they detect I'm blocking.
My adblock policy (the same one I use on all friend & family systems) is extremely strict. I'm not going to whitelist your site, or any site for that matter, just to see if your ads are "safe". Your options are to show me they are DESPITE my blocking for a chance at an unblock, or prevent me from viewing your site altogether.
You're acting like the typical use for adblockers is targetted -- it's not. People browse the web with always-on adblock. Your site is likely not the one that tipped them over the edge, either.
> people install adblockers typically because they find the ads are intrusive (full-screen graphic overlays, etc), or their machine gets infected with ad network-delivered malware. If you presented ads that were respectful to the visitor (i.e. weren't offensive) I expect the blocker escalation war would cease.
This is absolutely incorrect. Users may install them because they find some amount of ads to be abusive, but damn near nobody (relative to all ad blocker usage) starts out on a white list basis, and the idea that they're diligent about unblocking sites that have "good" ads that get past their blocker is just absurd.
While this cliche is indeed very true, the ability to play games from a hard-drive in the PS2 was amazing. No ferreting about for disks, much faster load times etc. I didn't pirate a single one, and loved HDLoader.
Unfortunately I agree with you. I try to do that, but too many sites are abusive. If a site said "hey, we see you block ads, please unblock, we only use small text ads", I'd unblock right away. Most of the time though, after I unblock a site, I immediately have to re-block it.
Personally I find that "begging" annoying for sites that I almost never use, like Pastebin. I consider it for sites I use more often, but I agree with you that most of the time I end up turning it on again, ads just lag the site and are obtrusive.
I'm OK with being shown a moderate amount of ads, if they're relevant and not obnoxious. I realize the site needs ads to bring in revenue and that they don't always publish out of altruism. But over the last 5 years .. whew! I've started reconsidering following any links: "Do I really want to take the risk?"
Another issue is that many 3rd party ad networks have performance issues. Nothing like waiting for the ad network to catch up so you can view the site.
When 99.99% of ads on 99.99% of sites are horrible monstrosities of Javascript and browser tracking and fingerprinting scripts, they will all be blocked and stay blocked.
I'll look at an ad in exchange for viewing your website. I will not let you digitally rape me in exchange for viewing your website.
> They are welcome to try. And I am welcome to try harder to block them.
Well, you've given them permission to try. I doubt they are giving you any such permission, so you're actually presuming quite a bit when you say you're welcome to try as well. This actually matters, because as far as the law is concerned, you don't have any right to to the content beyond what they allow you (excluding laws specific to your submitted content, depending on locality).
I understand ads and ad-blocking stir visceral reactions in people, but really, if you don't like what they are doing, you shouldn't use their service. Anything else is just enabling the behavior you dislike, as even if you are not being marketed to, you are providing a reason for other people to want to use the site that are marketed to.
I don't understand this. It's your browser. It's not like it's illegal to, say, run a noncompliant browser that misrenders things. An adblocker is the same.
"I can do what I want with my browser" is irrelevant to the fact that you do not have a right to Facebook's content. They give out the content on their terms.
> It's not like it's illegal to, say, run a noncompliant browser that misrenders things.
Actually it may be, if their terms of service say you aren't allowed to use devices such as that. For example, lynx, or some programming language user agent.
That said, I wasn't really specifically addressing legality. There's a legal argument, and a ethical argument. The legal argument is quite clear IMO. The ethical argument is what's interesting in my view. People have justified actions that are clearly against the expressed interest of the content providers and producers in some cases, and I find it interesting to explore the reasoning. I myself do this, as I use an ad blocker, but I've drawn my own line and reasons for doing so, and have my own complicated feelings about it.
Having has this conversation multiple times here, invariable security comes up as a big reason for some people why they feel justified, when they do feel conflicted in other areas. Having a content provider serve their own ads weakens the position of security argument quite a bit, so I'm interested in seeing how people react in that case.
I also don't read all ads in print magazines, should I no longer buy print magazines?
If I rip out all ads in a print magazine, or throw away the flyers in a magazine - which I do first after buying a mag - then I shouldn't buy the magazine? (magazines are paid for by ads not by me buying them).
Ethically? Maybe not? I don't know, I'm just exploring the problem space. I understand nobody likes advertisements, but while whether I like something may affect whether I allow it personally, I try not to let it affect whether I think it's an ethical thing to ignore.
What this means in practice is that I use an ad-blocker, mostly for security reasons, but understand that it hurts the bottom line of every source it's effective for. In cases where a site puts up a small notice at the top asking me to not block the ads, I generally do so or choose not to consume the content. This wasn't always the case, but it's where I arrived at.
The whole system is broken, I understand that, but I don't necessarily think increased ad-blocker usage will lead us to the solution we eventually need. That will probably require some sort of legislation, but I'm honestly not sure which interest will get served first, and thus more favorably. I'm slightly afraid it will be the commercial interest, barring some really nasty massive breach of aggregated data from advertising companies that's used to very bad effect, and in that case we lose quite a bit as well.
"Jeff Raikes, head of the company's business group, said at a recent investor conference that while the company is against piracy, if you are going to pirate software, it hopes you pirate Microsoft software" (http://www.informationweek.com/if-youre-going-to-steal-softw...)
i.e, in the context of Facebook, a ad-blocking user is better than a non-user, since the non-user might then be using a competitor platform and encourage current ad-viewing users/developers to switch to it.
If Facebook wants a truly global network, then they best not alienate or piss off those that are technically inclined. If they take control away from their power users, they'll lose them.
It depends on your definition of "power users", I suppose.
But they certainly don't want to shrink their network. The moment I meet a fellow like-minded geek and "add me on Facebook" isn't the default way to stay in touch, they're in trouble.
And I'm already at the point where I have to ask if they're on Facebook first, since many tech people have already jumped ship due to privacy concerns.
Why does Facebook care about specifically geek usage behaviors? Geeky types constitute a small fraction of the population, only a subset of that already small cohort has the concerns you're expressing here, and only a subset of those care enough to stop using their services. If Facebook can increase add revenues 10% by a change like this, they couldn't care less about losing the maybe 2% of users who will be genuinely put off from them by it.
1. Facebook already is a truly global network.
2. Based on history, it's likely that most of the people who care about these kind of things have already left.
Are the 'technically inclined' really Facebook's power users? I don't think so. Their power users are teenagers using the mobile app for 10 hours every day.
Honestly, I don't really mind so long as the ads are being served by FB and not third-party networks, and their performance isn't abysmal.
The major reason I block ads in the first place is for usability reasons - ad networks are slow as all hell especially on mobile. They also make certain pages completely unusable either through ad overlays, interstitials, or just constantly causing layouts to change as you're trying to use the website.
If FB can eliminate all of these pitfalls (and the current model of FB ads is certainly way less intrusive than most web ads) I'm cautiously on board.
And if Facebook actually commits to having oversight over what they serve. The idea that websites rent space to ad networks who then sell space on their servers to bad actors who then upload viruses and other such malware which then goes into my computer and everyone in this whole chain just goes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is ridiculous. If someone added a billboard to a highway that caused every thousandth car that passed to blow a tire, there would be lawsuits. How they're allowed to get away with it so easily online is beyond me and maddening.
Yeah, the security angle is a big deal. The long and short of it is that ad networks and publishers are both apathetic to what a gigantic dumpster fire ad-serving is.
Publishers are eager to blame ad networks for the terrible performance, while ad networks just can't give enough of a shit to work on it. Publishers also are eager to blame ad networks when they're caught serving scams and malware, while networks just don't care.
I'm a huge proponent of making publishers serve their own ads from their own domains, so they are forced to take ownership of both the issue of technical competency and abuse.
Either that, or make the networks directly responsible for the content they're serving. I don't understand why that's not the case now, if websites allow downloading of copyrighted work without authorization, or distribute illegal digital goods, they're held accountable. What makes ad networks invulnerable to this?
In the first case they're held accountable because business interests are compromised. In the second, no business interest is compromised by screwing up Joe Public's computer (except Joe's, but he has no material social leverage, so...). Thus no accountability for ad networks, even if there logically and legally should be.
I may be in the minority here, but I don't mind Facebook ads particularly because they track me so much that the ads are very well-tailored. There's nothing annoying to me about relevant advertisements and I've found decent stuff before. The ads for crappy pay-to-win flash games in the sidebar, on the other hand...
Your tailoring from Facebook might be unique or mine is. I find the stuff they serve up just plain wrong. Or, it's one sided and I see the same ad over and over and over again.
Generally agreed, though the industry's obsession with retargeting makes this annoying sometimes. Facebook is much better targeted than most, especially when it comes to interests/hobbies/brands I'd be into, but it's still very crude if it tries to get any "smarter" than that, especially with retargeting.
Retargeting: the ad technology that believes my home needs 54 couches and 36 vacuum cleaners.
This is the biggest point for me. I don't block ads because I hate being advertised at.
I block ads because I hate it when a tab starts playing sound without being asked. I hate getting malware from ads. I hate having pages take 30 seconds to a minute to load because of ads. Or when the page loads fine, but then a minute later the article I'm reading jumps because an ad loaded. Or changed. Or popped up on a timer.
Agreed. One of the entertaining quirks of Facebook ads is seeing which of my "friends" are being invoked as supporters of this particular advertiser. There's a small tribe of people that cast ironic "Like" votes every now and then -- fashionistas who like WalMart ... that sort of thing.
I'm easily amused. Those nutty Likes tend to amuse me.
Unmoderated proxied ads sounds very interesting from a legal point of view. If a user go to facebook domain, talk with facebook server, and the data the user got back from facebooks sever was malware, what reasonable defense can facebook actually make that they shouldn't liable for damages?
From the article:
"From a technical standpoint, Facebook is able to circumvent ad blockers relatively easily because it loads ads into its service itself. Many online publishers and media companies rely on third-party companies to help display ads on their webpages and services, which can make them more easily identifiable to blocking technologies"
There's nothing stopping these other companies from doing the same thing Facebook is doing and then presenting the page with all ads integrated seamlessly into the page.
>“It just seems like a poor bargain to be forced to choose all or nothing. There’s a middle ground,” Mr. Bosworth said.
There would have been a middle ground if the user was actually involved in the discussion behind that decision. If the changes are as successful as facebook hopes, the user can either view ads as much as facebook wants or not use the network at all.
This doesn't just apply to this case but in general, you read about people tinkering with cool tools and coming up with great techniques whose only purpose is to track users in order to serve them ads.
I'm pretty sure the majority of the worlds finest minds work on other things. The majority of people at Facebook will most likely be above average craftsmen, but not geniuses.
> Facebook’s change will open up more online ad space for it to sell, although Mr. Bosworth said that wasn’t the motivation for the move. Facebook now garners 84% of its advertising revenue from mobile devices, which are less susceptible to ad blocking than desktop devices.
Something about it being difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on it seems appropriate here.
This is what happens when a company becomes big enough to not have to care very much about what their users think. Look at what Google has done on their search site. More than half the visible page is adds now.
Facebook now believes that users won't abandon them and they can really start to use/abuse their position to increase their revenue. They in essence have called their users bluff and said even though there is alot of talk about hating ads and leaving, they don't believe that users will really quit the site because of this.
I'm willing to bet that Facebook is correct here. I'm an investor.
Does this really generate anything for Facebook though long term? These companies seem to forget that the best blocking technology is the human brain, and serving us more and more BS we don't want/have any interest in isn't going to make the advertisers more money, just Facebook. That's fine for now but eventually they're going to catch on.
This has been a cold war arms race for years now, websites pile in more and more ads, ruin the experience, clutter the content and people just ignore harder and harder, either with actual ad blocking technology or just by knowing exactly what's an ad and what's the actual content and filtering accordingly.
My point is, eventually the advertisers are going to pick up on the fact that an impression to a pissed off reader isn't worth anything, even the rock bottom prices they currently pay. This model is dying and Facebook/Google are in hardcore denial about it.
I only have a sample size of one (me), but I left a couple of years ago and you're not getting me back with an attitude like this... I can't imagine I'm the only one, however, I'm also willing to bet that you're right often enough for this tactic to increase profits.
> Facebook now believes that users won't abandon them and they can really start to use/abuse their position to increase their revenue.
I read that Facebook experimented with injecting random crashes in their Android and iOS apps to measure how much app stability affected user retention and usage. The answer was there was no effect! People wanted to use Facebook so much that the experiment's random crashes did not deter them.
I already have a whole set of CSS rules I apply to Facebook now, just to make their UI less awful, remove the massive amounts of crud I never want to see, and resize the few things that I do want to see up from their stock postage-stamp sizes.
Blocking .ad-unit or #pagesYouDontCareAbout is easy.
It's a crazy idea, but it just might work. Hulu's getting a lot more from me per month for their ad-free tier than they could ever dream of getting from me for ads with my watching habits, probably at least an order of magnitude more.
I think that argument is aging fast; it dates from before ad blockers were the increasingly big deal they are now.
You've got two basic choices with a user who has demonstrated their passion to remove ads, spend money to play an arms-game race with the ad blockers to pound through their defenses, or directly make money from that passion, possibly an order-of-magnitude more money per user.
Is it really so obvious that the arms race is the correct solution?
If I were a major shareholder of Facebook, I would be asking this question in a pointed manner. There's an argument to be made that they're leaving billions on the table here, and the argument is getting better every month that goes by.
There is another basic choice: write a code that is intentionally incompatible with ad blockers.
They can name an important navigation element "ad", so ad blocker will hide it for example. Then, when a bunch of users start complaining that the website does not work, point out that it's all ad blocker's fault (because without it everything works).
I'm happy to continue to modify my ad blocker until it allows me to use enough of facebook to be happy. How I choose to render the data Facebook sends me, is up to me.
While I think that this is a very bad idea, one could dynamically name them in a defective way. The relevant information (blocking lists) are openly available.
<evil-mode> I'd imagine you - by which I mean morally void publishing execs - take money for reduced ads and then charge a premium for reaching the people who are paying to remove ads.
yep- and let me keep my privacy too. FB makes about $1 per person per month in revenue. I would pay more. The "free" tier is maybe good for those situations where the user can't afford it.
Oh well, I've been suggesting this for a long time to no avail.
Presumably because it rather directly puts the question of just how much the use of Facebook is worth into user's minds. Compared to alternative monetization schemes it's limited and sticky.
Facebook might even be okay with that, because they'll be making the same amount of $$ and could potentially charge you a premium. But it will be hard for Facebook to sell it's advertising customers on a reduced pool of eyeballs; and I bet statistically people willing to pony up $10 to avoid ads are also likely to buy the products advertised on Facebook (i.e., I think people like you or I and many others on this site are outside the norm).
Even if FB were to try this, I don't think people would trust that their information is not being used for other (devious) purposes or that there wouldn't be some ads in the future even with the payments coming in. Trust has to be earned, and FB, in my opinion, has dug itself into a deep hole on that front.
The only reasons I see some people who're concerned about privacy using FB are because there is no better alternative and it's hard to move your network out, even if it's only for specific circles of people in your life.
I think they're holding out hope that they can continue to grow revenue through advances in adtech when their subscriber numbers hit the inevitable plateau. Even offering an ad-free subscription option would eat into their ad platform, and Netflix has recently demonstrated how tough it is to raise the price of a subscription (or expire a years-old discounted rate). With ads, they can at least hope to grow per-user revenue in the future.
I'm a little surprised they would announce this as a thing they will do in the future, rather than something they've already succeeded in doing.
Either they're arrogant about their ability to implement this (which may be well founded), or they're really doing it to assure less savvy advertisers that they're trying as hard as they can...
Rules of acquisition 392: Never announce that you intend to do something until you already did it. Asking for forgiveness is better than asking for permission.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 364 ms ] thread[1] https://messengerfordesktop.com/
If true I believe that this would actually be an important improvement. This removes some plausible deniability regarding malware and other abuse; Facebook (or whomever else adopts this scheme) must guard more carefully against abuse when the content is coming from their own domains, as opposed to some third party.
I expect them still manage to hide behind "common carrier" arguments.
Which is apparently a usage pattern nobody at twitter gets.
I'd love it if the infinite scrolling shit went away and I could look at tweets by last hour, last 12 hours, last 24 hours, etc, and then paginate by day after that.
You're not going to please everyone. Even people who will like it a month down the line will hate it when you first roll out the change. And we should you have to support (|feature|!) different websites?
Like or is being exploited based on genetical brain responses to like because of the result of the "quest for new information" ?
This behaviour is psychologically engineered to trigger more dopamine fueled hits and with it fueling site engagement.
I hope you don't like music, movies, amusement park rides, love, etc., because I have some bad news for you.
That's why I have been beefing up the DOM filtering code in the latest versions -- there are already sites doing this.
There is a lot of untapped potential with the new operators, I am waiting for opportunities to put them to test, and fine-tune them if needed.
If you can't filter on classes or id's, what else? Dom element ordering? Image size properties? Structure of ad text?
> That's why I have been beefing up the DOM filtering code
Isn't it all done through CSS selectors? Could you share more?
How about leveraging other heuristics such as HTTP headers (response cookies for starters) or timing information?
https://github.com/elierotenberg/react-armor
https://youtu.be/n63XXHY4A7I
But you still have to identify features and use an algorithm that basically goes "users identify images with features A, B, and C as ads, and they identify images with features X, Y, and Z as not ads, so put positive weights on A, B, and C and negative weights on X, Y, and Z, and block anything with a negative enough score".
I think where ad-blockers will start to have problems is with the millions of lesser known sites. Once these publishers swap over to proxying ad-content through their own domains and using a handful of simple evasion tactics (random file name for the self hosted JS file that pulls in the ad, site specific pseudo-random DOM element names for the ad spaces, not using an obvious sub-domain to load proxied ad content from); stopping ads getting through is going to require a lot more effort than blacklisting a few ad-server domains.
Alternatively, advertisers could host a server on the site's domain. A subdomain or specific path would be easily blocked, but a random path wouldn't be, e.g. http://www.example.com/626164776F6C66/ with identifier generated randomly. Plenty of existing content already looks this way.
Basically if this happens I'm switching my career to stealing from ad networks for fun and profit.
Not sure what the solution would be for CPC/CPM - off the top of my head maybe a random CNAME that pointed to an ad-server controlled IP so they could cross-audit client IPs via a JS drop in file? Presumably ad-blockers would easily pick that up though.
Other than proxying I can't see how advertisers and publishers solve the ad-block problem without completely rethinking how ads are bought,sold,tracked and delivered.
Proxying seems to be one of the lowest-friction ways for them to continue business as usual, security be damned.
Right now the usual defense seems to be "we just buy 'em", but that's going to be a lot less convincing once Forbes.com is actively serving malware from their own site.
Alternatively, as mentioned in another comment, proxying might mean simply installing a managed ad-server within the publisher's infrastructure. So from an end-user PoV it looks like it's coming from the publisher's server but in reality it's still being served from a third party managed box.
And in HTTP/2.0 they'll just switch to pushing the ads out to you.
In either case they can't guarantee it'll get on the screen, but they assuredly can make sure you download the damned ads.
Long term browsers will become more and more closed, DRMed, protected and such so that people have much less control over how stuff is displayed on screen.
Tim Berners Lee would cry if we end up with 2 webs.
Do you know anyone who is doing this already?
Everyone will get their own personal AI stalker bot from the birth. I have such high hopes for humanity. When we at it maybe also replace politicians with AI, I'm sure they will do a better job than we mortals.
The logical end-game is that FB writes their own rendering engine in javascript and targets a single canvas element, handling all the interaction events themselves. In fact, I think it can go significantly further than that. Ad blockers will need to get much fancier to deal with that kind of weaponized ad delivery.
But also, adblockers will keep up. If they have to use canned deep-learning neural nets to catch and crush advertising based on how it looks rendered, they will.
Ultimately, there isn't a good way to dictate what a user does when you're in a sandbox.
If there was a viable path, they would have already done it. I think Facebook has enough engineers there where they know going down some obfuscation path is futile.
FB is a too simple target for ad-blocking so FB should just admit defeat and sell the info for use in advertising elsewhere. (I have no idea of whether it's economically comparable as a business model compared to in-FB ads though of course).
In other words, they make a ton of money selling ads on their own properties. Their publisher products (Adsense, DFA, Audience Network, Audience Platform) extend their reach to third parties certainly, but AFAIK each of them still make more money from their own inventory.
https://github.com/elierotenberg/react-armor
https://youtu.be/n63XXHY4A7I
Run the page in a sandbox, then classify the pixels as ad/non-ad with a neural net and only present the non-ads to the eyes of the user. It would also be possible to reflow the page to fit to a different screen size if the words are clearly identified by their containing rectangles. User interactions would be sent back and forth to the sandbox.
Of course, best would be to drop FB altogether. Being a member on FB, even an ad-blocking one, creates an incentive for other users to remain on FB as well.
Absolute security is impossible but that doesn't keep it from being an arms race that has some sort of equilibrium. Ad blocking has the same qualities.
There's a separate issue that as they try harder to block ads they will also make it less clear what's an ad. For example many ad blockers don't work on google search results because they're fed back with the result content, but it also becomes less and less obvious what's an ad and what's a search result on google.
Those add css properties to page elements that make the element disappear. Here is an example for advanced cosmetic filter options: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#...
edit: nvm my amazon comment. I spent the last hour vaguely understanding xpath to create a filter for (German) Amazon sponsored search results.
As long as they don't try to force some sort of legislation on how people can use their internet connection, and their internet browser to fetch and display content, there's no problem.
The real problem is Facebook is already full of advertising disguised as content. From sponsored posts to content from things you "like". So I'm kind of surprised they need to go out of their way to explicitly announce that they will be disguising ads. They already have the power to inject it in the middle of content invisibly.
And follow up: If FB decided to shut down some features to ad-blocking users, do you think that would be unfair?
I think "they're welcome to try" is exactly the right response here. Nothing is "fair" or "unfair", at least not in a way that advertisers or ad blockers care about.
No matter what they do it's entirely possible to trick their scripts into believing I'm displaying ads, because they run not on facebook's servers but on my computer. Where I get the control.
I hope this is true. I still think Facebook can do much more devious things like having posts on your news feeds from friends which look like posts but are ads. Kind of like native advertising.
DRM-protected media extensions are almost uniquely positioned for this. They're designed around the abilities to uniquely identify the user and resist tampering. The only thing that's missing right now is interactivity.
I think you're completely right, btw. After AOL, it only took a few years for websites to become rapidly Flash-based. It looks like we're going back to that again (not Flash, but same thing - black boxed).
For the follow up, I assume I agree with the parent post by reiterating that what Facebook does on its own site is its own business, but if the company lobbied for legislation that required people to look at ads online, then that would be a problem.
Besides, if Facebook made the experience so detestable that people were willing to leave for another social network, then Google and every other college freshman would leap at the opportunity to be the next big thing.
You have three choices:
1. Stop using Facebook
2. Pay Facebook to remove ads
3. Look at ads
I've opted for option 1, though I'll happily revisit this choice if Facebook (A) finds a way to make money without serving ads and without requiring me to pay out-of-pocket (unlikely) or (B) Facebook starts serving ads I want to consume. (Welcome to native advertising.)
No it doesn't, exactly the point, you can't pay them so you have no transactional or business relation, in fact one SHOULD block the ads that are forced upon you. Linkedin for example prohibit adblocking in their TOS, they can do this because you can pay them to get rid of the ads.
The point was that Facebook's problems are de facto the user's problems. Ad-blocking is, indeed, a solution, but one can't expect Facebook to (re)act in the user's interest.
The only real reason need your personal data is so they can show you Ads with presumably more effective targeting so they can get a greater share of advertising revenue.
It pays to remember that most forms of media - TV, Net, Print etc. are basically funded by money from advertisers.
Because I dont like looking at ads.
The thing is, this already exists and it's called native advertising. The trick is to create advertisements that, while endorsing a product, have real value for me.
A simple example: a tutorial on doing XYZ with Docker on Google Compute Engine might (A) be relevant to my interests and immediately useful, and (B) incite me to use GCE.
Ad-blockers block the scummy, bottom-feeder, AIDS-of-the-internet ads.
Ads don't have to look like ads. And ads can give value, too. Did the local tavern pay me to run a story talking about their new 1/2 off drinks special every Wednesday? They sure did. But people clicked on it and read the article and then visited the bar and took advantage of the promotion. Not because they were tricked into doing so, but because it was interesting to them and they got value from it. And those people will come back to the site again tomorrow and read the next one, because my advertising provides real value to them.
In most jurisdictions, it's a priori legal unless it falls under some special category (e.g. a political campaign ad).
FTC will regulate undisclosed native content advertising content in US: https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/nat...
https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/ftc...
The Advertising Standards Authority regulate it in the UK:
https://www.cap.org.uk/Advice-Training-on-the-rules/Advice-O...
About vlogging, but clearly applies to blogging and traditional print media: https://www.asa.org.uk/News-resources/Media-Centre/2014/Maki...
http://blogtacular.com/sponsored-posts-ads-reviews-the-asa-a...
Honestly I'm not sure it is. Sure, it's deceptive, but he's not serving ads that annoy, distract and often serve as a vector for malware. It's not clear (to me) that it's worse than traditional web advertising, which tends to be deceptive, illegal, scummy and annoying, dangerous and distracting.
And again, the trick with native advertising is to provide valuable content for the users, otherwise it's just crap that nobody will read. I don't know if the poster in question is actually doing this, but if he is, I wouldn't be so quick to write it off as scummy; bear in mind that oftentimes such pieces are identified as "sponsored content".
I reject your assertion of "my taboola ads". I don't run any kind of third party ad scripts. All my sponsored content is written by me and labeled as such. And I immediately turn down any ad content I myself would not want to see (I run adblockers, too), since it wouldn't provide any value to my readers.
The browser is our user agent. Facebook can serve whatever it wants, but we're under no contractual or moral obligation to look at it.
Btw. the Black Mirror TV series is awesome.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/27/11795248/facebook-ad-netwo...
Also my country's civil law (along with any other reasonable civil laws) throws out the three links below out of our contract, as they're neither at a reasonable length nor clearness when the context is considered.
That some advertisers think they should pay by impression and not by click is their own stupidity.
It's not. Ads can be entirely successful without a click - sometimes it'll just be a reminder of the brand's name the next time you are shopping for their product. "Users running adblockers likely wouldn't click the ads anyway" is a pretty naive view of how the ad industry operates.
All it does is make me avoid the product out of spite.
Not many companies can take off purely on the quality of their product, especially in boring industries. I can't think of an insurance company which I learned about outside of widespread advertising.
Pretty much any advertiser who spends major money on TV is going for impressions - clicks have no real meaning and are merely a bonus.
For instance, think Coke ads - the objective is to create a certain brand association in your mind by showing you imagery in advertising. Your clicking and buying Coke the instant you see an ad is not an objective. They want to make sure you choose Coke when you buy cola, perhaps even think that you are a "Coke person" rather than Pepsi person.
A lot of money out there in the advertising business is ther for this kind of business objective.
Targeted ads are worse than gambling. We made sure everyone's aware of the dangers of gambling, but everyone's in the dark about targeted ads. These companies know what they're doing. If people want to portray ad blocking as stealing, so be it. Steal from them. They deserve it.
No, but acting with honesty and fairness is. Facebook is asking you not to use their service if you are going to block ads. I think it's obvious that the "right" thing to do is to respect their wishes, not sneeringly defy them while using their resources and giving nothing in return.
You're giving them a lot, even if you don't click on ads or see ads. Is it not clear that your data is valuable? You're giving them personal information. Not that people that aren't developers care.
Why shouldn't I approach them the same way? And given how often the above describes the way businesses will treat me, why shouldn't I generalize that position?
Practically: because it leads to a race to the bottom, lowering to their level, the world just gets worse and worse
Philosophically: because ethics are a fundamental part of who you are, and strangers acting unethically does not relieve you of their burdens
Facebook will try to track me and my behavior, and tailor ads based on it, regardless of whether I'm a Facebook user and regardless of whether I'm logged in. In theory any link someone sends me might end up trying to connect to Facebook's advertising network and record information about my behavior.
At what point do I "agree" to this? What do I get "in return" for this? What if it's a crappy article that I close right away? Or the page load takes too long and I close it before it finishes (but, in true form, the ad code would already have run)? Since I don't know until I've loaded the page -- at which point you think I have an ethical duty to let Facebook serve ads -- whether it will have ads at all, or whether they'll be Facebook ads, at what point do I find that out and have an opportunity, in your model, to decide I don't want to be a party to that?
(in case you're wondering, the correct answer is "use an ad-blocker to pre-emptively ensure nobody can force ads on you without your agreement")
I'm talking about being a Facebook user, as in maintaining a profile and logging on and using the site. My contention is that by affirmatively choosing to use their resources, an ethical obligation is created.
There is no coherent position which creates an ethical obligation to view sites in full and unmodified (especially given that one of the primary purposes of web browsers, historically, has been to mangle what a site sent to you into something that's actually a sensible and renderable document tree).
No they aren't (at least, not yet). Where do you think it says this in their terms & conditions?
There is nothing honest or fair about dictating what happens on someone else's computer without user input. That's what malware does. Are you pro-malware?
Keep trying.
The fact of the matter is, most people waxing poetic here about ads infringing on their rights, will still use Facebook when their adblockers don't work. They are willing to pay, they just want to pay less.
This is a very hard position to justify ethically.
Ads are like a donation box, not like a price tag.
Am I being forced to donate?
Well, you're certainly entitled to your own opinion. But realistically, we all consume content that is ad-supported that we might be paying for otherwise. The fact that so many ad-or-pay services exist is proof of this (Youtube with ads, Hulu with ads, etc.) The are both business models.
If you don't like the service at the price, don't buy it. Honestly, no one is forcing you and tons of people get on perfectly fine without Facebook (some people would even say they are better off without it).
Perhaps one day we (society) come to the conclusion that advertising, as a whole, is doing more harm than good and we decide to ban it entirely. Or we decide set a limit on how much advertising is allowed.
Right now adblockers are not against the law (afaik) so I don't see any problem using them. After all, they're a product of the somewhat free market that facebook is part of and they accepted the market price (which is that some people choose to block ads).
I'm not arguing that Facebook isn't allowed to try to stop adblocking. Only question is what means they're allowed to take. Just like security guard isn't allowed to shoot shoplifters on sight.
Here's my perspective: I would pay for an ad-free subscription, but they don't offer one. They literally will not take the money I have to offer.
Imagine walking into Stabucks and having them refuse to take your money but instead handing you a coffee and a booklet of ads. Is it bad to throw the ads in the bin? Would the barista become angry and start shouting ads at you too? Or, more likely, ask you not to come back?
Note: I don't use Facebook on the principle that they want to commoditise me instead of taking my money, but I see nothing wrong with blocking their ads should someone not hold that principle.
Walmart is free to open a business and allow people off the street to shop there, browse their wares, and buy stuff if they want. They cannot force people to buy something for the privilege of visiting, and while they could require a "cover charge" to enter, they're probably going to lose most of their customers if they do this. It's Walmart's job to attract people into the store, and then attempt to convince them to buy stuff when they're in there.
Other shops are the same, and small shops are probably an even better example: while most people will probably buy something in a Walmart if they take the time to go in there, if you check out some weird little specialty shop you happen to walk by in a shopping district, it's quite likely you're not going to buy anything in there.
Someone has to pay for that little shop's rent and utilities and salaries, but that's the concern of the shopkeeper, not the customers. If the shopkeeper wants to stay in business, he'll figure out how to get enough customers to buy stuff to keep the doors open. If he fails, too bad so sad. It's not the customers' fault for not buying enough stuff, it's his fault for not having good enough stuff to buy, having too-high prices, having crappy service, having a poor location or operating hours, having an ugly or dirty shop, having annoying workers, etc.
It's no different with websites. It's their job to figure out how to make money on the site, not yours. If they want to show annoying ads, that's their right. If you want to block those ads (just like refusing to look at aisle displays in Walmart), that's your right. If they don't like that, they can ask you to leave, just like a shopkeeper can ask you to leave. But if your browser makes a request, and their website services that request, then they are not asking you to leave, they're inviting you in. As long as sites don't turn away my browser requests, I consider myself welcome at their sites, even with my ad-blocking. If they (like Forbes) refuse to show me the site/article because of my ad-blocker, then I either leave or disable the blocker, depending on my whim (usually I just leave).
A small shop has a sign, and a bucket. "Put $1 in the bucket and test how good you are at some_game."
There is no one there - it's an unmonitored booth.
Do you try your hand at the game and not put in money? They lose nothing, it's a repeatable game with no consumables. There is no one watching you, and there is no line behind you either.
When I visit a website I have no idea what value I might gain from it so having adblock always on is just internet safety and privacy conserving measure, nothing else. If the website has a donation button or sells some services that I might be interested it becomes a whole other issue.
It's that targeted ads are meant to manipulate your decision making. In order to do that, you're tracked, yes. You can prevent them from manipulating your decisions (put your blinders/Adblock on), which is really great even if you can't prevent them from tracking you.
Targeted ads are insidious - as natrius says, they prey on your psychology. By comparison, non-targeted ads are generally just an eyesore.
Psychologists know that humans have certain exploitable weaknesses. I mean, think about any relationship. You become vulnerable when you expose yourself, and so a person has to earn your trust such that you expose yourself to them.
Today, advertisers have made you vulnerable without actually earning your trust. You could argue that "by using Facebook you're saying you trust them," and you'd be right... If humans all had the capability and willpower to understand systems as complex as ad targeting... One of our worst exploitable vulnerabilities.
Put another way, I would say that it's ethical for a team of scientists to sit down and interview you about everything you love/fear/want/need for the purpose of helping you to find more people like yourself so you feel less lonely. I would say that it's unethical for those scientists to radio down the street as soon as you walk out the door to tell street vendors to start hawking goods that play at your insecurities.
Not all advertising is based on exploiting people, but the most effective types are!
> Those behavior changes are intended to make you give the buyer more money than they paid.
That is literally the goal of every merchant everywhere. They need to sell stuff for more than they paid, otherwise they don't make money. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with this. They aren't forcing you to buy things, their buyers think that what they're selling is worth the amount they're selling it for (or they wouldn't buy it). This is the fundamental basis on which all commerce everywhere operates.
As for the Las Vegas angle, that's complete bullshit. Gambling operates very differently from commerce, and there's really no basis to make this comparison at all. Seeing an ad that's relevant to your interests has pretty much nothing in common with gambling beyond the fact that both of them involve money at some point.
Profit-seeking has led to lots of progress in this world, but its record is decidedly mixed. Keep your eyes open.
This is not about the total gain of both sides: Almost every transaction is positive sum. However; why should I simply accept the 90/10 distribution of the excess in their favor when I can aim for a favorable distribution for myself too?
And I'm also confused by your talk about favorable distribution. Isn't seeing ads relevant to your interests better than seeing ads unrelated to your interests? The problem with targeted tracking isn't that it's targeted, it's that it relies on information whose collection is a privacy violation. But when we're talking about a company that you've already voluntarily given massive amounts of behavioral data to, then you've voluntarily given up your privacy so there's no violation going on.
tl;dw: Advertisers are untrustworthy and act in bad faith. Once we give them an inch, they take a mile. If you met a person like that, would you continue to socialize with them? I wouldn't
Besides scrolling through your feed, is there much you do on FB? It's just a news aggregation site now.
Technically, Facebook could insert news feed ads like a post from one of your friend (assume that the friend has liked some page or organization). It could be tough to distinguish between ads and posts much like native advertising.
(not that I use Facebook, but Tumblr for example, has extremely annoying repetitive offensive ads)
And people still go on about blocking ads being unethical
"Sponsored Stories" and "Promoted Posts" (one of which I expect is what was meant by "sponsored post") are the names of specific kinds of Facebook ads.
We hired a third party anti-adblocker, and it worked great. It went back and forth with the adblockers as they updated to block our anti-blocking.
Most adblock extensions use some standard rules-lists, similar to email spam lists like Spamhaus. I guess we pissed someone off enough and they introduced a rule to block all AJAX requests on our site. This pretty much ruined our site, so we finally relented and removed the anti-adblocking altogether.
If you presented ads that were respectful to the visitor (i.e. weren't offensive) I expect the blocker escalation war would cease.
0: http://decknetwork.net/
http://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/
Unfortunately however I didn't notice it as uBlock Origin had blocked it.
My adblock policy (the same one I use on all friend & family systems) is extremely strict. I'm not going to whitelist your site, or any site for that matter, just to see if your ads are "safe". Your options are to show me they are DESPITE my blocking for a chance at an unblock, or prevent me from viewing your site altogether.
This is absolutely incorrect. Users may install them because they find some amount of ads to be abusive, but damn near nobody (relative to all ad blocker usage) starts out on a white list basis, and the idea that they're diligent about unblocking sites that have "good" ads that get past their blocker is just absurd.
> United Kingdom Not yet available here
Was nice, and I actually started watching videos on my phone / chromecast more. Ads being back is annoying.
Because that seems reasonable.
I'll look at an ad in exchange for viewing your website. I will not let you digitally rape me in exchange for viewing your website.
Until then, they've screwed themselves over.
Well, you've given them permission to try. I doubt they are giving you any such permission, so you're actually presuming quite a bit when you say you're welcome to try as well. This actually matters, because as far as the law is concerned, you don't have any right to to the content beyond what they allow you (excluding laws specific to your submitted content, depending on locality).
I understand ads and ad-blocking stir visceral reactions in people, but really, if you don't like what they are doing, you shouldn't use their service. Anything else is just enabling the behavior you dislike, as even if you are not being marketed to, you are providing a reason for other people to want to use the site that are marketed to.
Actually it may be, if their terms of service say you aren't allowed to use devices such as that. For example, lynx, or some programming language user agent.
That said, I wasn't really specifically addressing legality. There's a legal argument, and a ethical argument. The legal argument is quite clear IMO. The ethical argument is what's interesting in my view. People have justified actions that are clearly against the expressed interest of the content providers and producers in some cases, and I find it interesting to explore the reasoning. I myself do this, as I use an ad blocker, but I've drawn my own line and reasons for doing so, and have my own complicated feelings about it.
Having has this conversation multiple times here, invariable security comes up as a big reason for some people why they feel justified, when they do feel conflicted in other areas. Having a content provider serve their own ads weakens the position of security argument quite a bit, so I'm interested in seeing how people react in that case.
Edit: s/moral/ethical/
If I rip out all ads in a print magazine, or throw away the flyers in a magazine - which I do first after buying a mag - then I shouldn't buy the magazine? (magazines are paid for by ads not by me buying them).
Ethically? Maybe not? I don't know, I'm just exploring the problem space. I understand nobody likes advertisements, but while whether I like something may affect whether I allow it personally, I try not to let it affect whether I think it's an ethical thing to ignore.
What this means in practice is that I use an ad-blocker, mostly for security reasons, but understand that it hurts the bottom line of every source it's effective for. In cases where a site puts up a small notice at the top asking me to not block the ads, I generally do so or choose not to consume the content. This wasn't always the case, but it's where I arrived at.
The whole system is broken, I understand that, but I don't necessarily think increased ad-blocker usage will lead us to the solution we eventually need. That will probably require some sort of legislation, but I'm honestly not sure which interest will get served first, and thus more favorably. I'm slightly afraid it will be the commercial interest, barring some really nasty massive breach of aggregated data from advertising companies that's used to very bad effect, and in that case we lose quite a bit as well.
"Jeff Raikes, head of the company's business group, said at a recent investor conference that while the company is against piracy, if you are going to pirate software, it hopes you pirate Microsoft software" (http://www.informationweek.com/if-youre-going-to-steal-softw...)
i.e, in the context of Facebook, a ad-blocking user is better than a non-user, since the non-user might then be using a competitor platform and encourage current ad-viewing users/developers to switch to it.
But they certainly don't want to shrink their network. The moment I meet a fellow like-minded geek and "add me on Facebook" isn't the default way to stay in touch, they're in trouble.
And I'm already at the point where I have to ask if they're on Facebook first, since many tech people have already jumped ship due to privacy concerns.
1. Facebook already is a truly global network. 2. Based on history, it's likely that most of the people who care about these kind of things have already left.
The major reason I block ads in the first place is for usability reasons - ad networks are slow as all hell especially on mobile. They also make certain pages completely unusable either through ad overlays, interstitials, or just constantly causing layouts to change as you're trying to use the website.
If FB can eliminate all of these pitfalls (and the current model of FB ads is certainly way less intrusive than most web ads) I'm cautiously on board.
Publishers are eager to blame ad networks for the terrible performance, while ad networks just can't give enough of a shit to work on it. Publishers also are eager to blame ad networks when they're caught serving scams and malware, while networks just don't care.
I'm a huge proponent of making publishers serve their own ads from their own domains, so they are forced to take ownership of both the issue of technical competency and abuse.
Retargeting: the ad technology that believes my home needs 54 couches and 36 vacuum cleaners.
I block ads because I hate it when a tab starts playing sound without being asked. I hate getting malware from ads. I hate having pages take 30 seconds to a minute to load because of ads. Or when the page loads fine, but then a minute later the article I'm reading jumps because an ad loaded. Or changed. Or popped up on a timer.
I hate ads because ads hate the user experience.
I'm easily amused. Those nutty Likes tend to amuse me.
There would have been a middle ground if the user was actually involved in the discussion behind that decision. If the changes are as successful as facebook hopes, the user can either view ads as much as facebook wants or not use the network at all.
Something about it being difficult for a man to understand something when his salary depends on it seems appropriate here.
This is what happens when a company becomes big enough to not have to care very much about what their users think. Look at what Google has done on their search site. More than half the visible page is adds now.
Facebook now believes that users won't abandon them and they can really start to use/abuse their position to increase their revenue. They in essence have called their users bluff and said even though there is alot of talk about hating ads and leaving, they don't believe that users will really quit the site because of this.
I'm willing to bet that Facebook is correct here. I'm an investor.
This has been a cold war arms race for years now, websites pile in more and more ads, ruin the experience, clutter the content and people just ignore harder and harder, either with actual ad blocking technology or just by knowing exactly what's an ad and what's the actual content and filtering accordingly.
My point is, eventually the advertisers are going to pick up on the fact that an impression to a pissed off reader isn't worth anything, even the rock bottom prices they currently pay. This model is dying and Facebook/Google are in hardcore denial about it.
And it hopefully does.
I read that Facebook experimented with injecting random crashes in their Android and iOS apps to measure how much app stability affected user retention and usage. The answer was there was no effect! People wanted to use Facebook so much that the experiment's random crashes did not deter them.
Blocking .ad-unit or #pagesYouDontCareAbout is easy.
With Facebook's paid reach, "regular stories" are often paid ads to start with.
It's a crazy idea, but it just might work. Hulu's getting a lot more from me per month for their ad-free tier than they could ever dream of getting from me for ads with my watching habits, probably at least an order of magnitude more.
You've got two basic choices with a user who has demonstrated their passion to remove ads, spend money to play an arms-game race with the ad blockers to pound through their defenses, or directly make money from that passion, possibly an order-of-magnitude more money per user.
Is it really so obvious that the arms race is the correct solution?
If I were a major shareholder of Facebook, I would be asking this question in a pointed manner. There's an argument to be made that they're leaving billions on the table here, and the argument is getting better every month that goes by.
They can name an important navigation element "ad", so ad blocker will hide it for example. Then, when a bunch of users start complaining that the website does not work, point out that it's all ad blocker's fault (because without it everything works).
I've seen a few precedents already.
Oh well, I've been suggesting this for a long time to no avail.
If they are making $10 dollars a year, then charge me $10. Up to me. I can get it for free with ads, or pay without.
The only reasons I see some people who're concerned about privacy using FB are because there is no better alternative and it's hard to move your network out, even if it's only for specific circles of people in your life.
Either they're arrogant about their ability to implement this (which may be well founded), or they're really doing it to assure less savvy advertisers that they're trying as hard as they can...