I don’t really use facebook anymore so couldn’t care less; but so happened to log in today to change my password and saw this on my front page.

    • Uranium3006@kbin.social
      1441·
      11 months ago

      if ads were just static PNGs with a link you went to if you clicked I wouldn’t have ever bothered. but ads became a major malware and tracking risk so plugging that security hole became mandatory.

      • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        26·
        11 months ago

        I tried finding that website, but I can’t remember what it is. I’ve seen it use the static image advertisement. It changed on each reload too.

        But yes, that website had last update somewhere in the early 2000s.

      • rwhitisissle@lemmy.ml
        81·
        11 months ago

        People are gonna say I’m being hyperbolic or crazy, but I swear that the internet died the day the first line of production Javascript was ever written.

      • PM_ME_FAT_ENBIES@lib.lgbtEnglish
        5·
        11 months ago

        Even static PNG ads are purpose engineered to grab your attention. People with attention disorders like ADHD and autism don’t have as much attention to give, and when it’s gone we’re debilitated. We need to start considering cognitohazards a legally prosecutable form of violence.

    • monsterpiece42@reddthat.com
      551·
      11 months ago

      It’s true. I work in a computer shop and we see literally thousands and thousands of dollars lost from people clicking on ads that look like normal buttons (things like “Download”, “Next”, etc). And not just the elderly either. Everyone has a a combination of inputs to get scared and comply. Folks that are otherwise extremely competent and savvy can get scammed too.

      The best security you can have online is adblockers, only beaten by using trusted websites.

      Edit, fair points with sites being slimy these days. I meant using legitimate versions of websites rather than copy/fake websites designed to steal credentials.

    • viking@infosec.pubOP
      301·
      11 months ago

      Definitely. Ads are eye cancer at best, and infiltration channels for malware at worst. Compromised ad networks pumping out executable code via javascript (or back in the days, Flash) are still a major source of trojan infections.

    • Teon@kbin.social
      26·
      11 months ago

      And just to add to your important point, Ad Blockers are really Content Blockers. They allow the user to delete annoyances that have nothing to do with advertising. We should all start calling them Content Blockers.

        • Teon@kbin.social
          4·
          11 months ago

          I use it often for sites I rarely will visit again. It keeps My Rules file from getting cluttered.
          And it’s fun!!!

          • Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee
            1·
            11 months ago

            So fun! I think it gives me a tiny power trip when I feel like Bruce Lee karate-chopping away an annoying part of a website :D

    • stoy@lemmy.zip
      18·
      11 months ago

      I have said it before, snd I will repeat it as many times as it takes.

      Adblocking is security, untill website owners take legal and financial responsibillity for the harm that a hacked ad spreading malware or attenpting any kind of deception, I won’t even consider removing my adblocker.

      If this changes, I will consider it, but will still not do it, the risk to my data is too large.

    • NightOwl@lemmy.oneEnglish
      16·
      11 months ago

      Yeah, there’s no proper screening process and companies aren’t help liable for malicious advertisements. It’s the Wild west out there, and companies take money from anyone due to there being no consequences. Internet advertising has no proper screening process like network television.

    • Purple@lemm.eeEnglish
      701·
      11 months ago

      Oh yeah aunt Greta, I’m still friends with you, but it’s so weird how I can’t see your anti vax “facts”

    • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
      19·
      11 months ago

      I took a peek at my feed for the first time in years. It’s all junk lol, no one I care about is posting anything

      The only thing worth seeing is my local Buy Nothing group, but there are other services popping up which do something similar.

      • viking@infosec.pubOP
        9·
        11 months ago

        Yeah all my actual friends are messaging me elsewhere, facebook is more like a picture dump for old people. I only use it occasionally for joining various expat groups since I move countries frequently for my job, and they are rather resourceful.

    • viking@infosec.pubOP
      7·
      11 months ago

      It sure might be, but the one friend who got blocked is just casually posting stuff from his personal life, nothing spammy going on there. Either facebook is screwing with me, or they are playing out some friend’s posts in the ad-network stream so you are actually losing some genuine content. That would be evil (and totally something Meta would do), but I really couldn’t care less.

      • Sotuanduso@lemm.eeEnglish
        9·
        11 months ago

        I do think that sounds more like they’re hiding it and blaming adblock than pretending something was missed. Wouldn’t be surprised if it starts small and ramps up over time, but that’s just speculation.

    • Ronnie@lemmy.ca
      42·
      11 months ago

      My Facebook is hardly even friends these days. It’s basically ads, suggested posts, and posts in groups. Maybe because none of my friends really post anymore, I dunno.

      • Tippon@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        4·
        11 months ago

        I’m at the stage where I check it once a day, maybe twice, for things like birthdays and anything important that my friends post. 90% of what’s there is suggested posts, ads, or reposted shit. ‘What type of gemstone suits you best? Tap here to find out!’

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
      8·
      11 months ago

      Yeah, Facebook can not know when your adblocker is blocking those posts, unless they did it themselves.

    • thisisawayoflife@lemmy.world
      3·
      11 months ago

      Facebook has groups, and unfortunately, that’s a pretty important feature. The car groups I belong to are hardcore track drivers and DIYers that share knowledge (problems and resolutions, alignment specs, tire and wheel experiences, custom parts, parts swaps, etc) and independent manufacturers who make stuff that isn’t otherwise easily available.

      Until there is a solid replacement for that, I can’t get rid of Facebook proper.

    • figaro@lemdro.idEnglish
      17·
      11 months ago

      There are a few countries where Facebook is still pretty popular. The Philippines, for example

    • TangledHyphae@lemmy.world
      131·
      11 months ago

      One of my parent’s dozen+ facebook bots that steal their pictures/identity, because they are too dumb to know how to configure FB privacy settings. It’s disturbing how many of them just scour profiles, replicate, and impersonate to scam.

    • red@lemm.ee
      121·
      11 months ago

      Averyone who wants to have social life in my country

    • ComradeR@lemmy.ml
      4·
      11 months ago

      In Brazil, it is useful to contact people that you know in real life, family and friends…

      Plus, it sorta works like a Craigslist here. People sell and buy things from Facebook everyday, and people advertise their business and services here (e.g: restaurants, plumbing services, gift stores, etc)

      • Gallardo994@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        11 months ago

        I’ll be that sort of person to say that the change starts when you also start. When messengers weren’t a thing here, I started moving people I talk with to a messenger of my choice. Slowly after some time all the people I know were using it without giving any thought because turns out they just use whatever works. Several months go by and I safely use nothing but that messenger of my choice. Whenever a person asks if I use Facebook/Whatsapp, I just say “I don’t have it, do you have (that messenger of my choice) or do you prefer SMS?” - and it kind of works for me.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      4·
      11 months ago

      My ASD brother, who prefers to be contacted through it. I want to maintain what little relationship I have with him.

  • xenoclast@lemmy.world
    713·
    11 months ago

    I think people are underestimating how important the YouTube thing is.

    If they succeed, the entire ad funded internet are going to clone what they do.

    It will effect everyone everywhere, whether you run an adblocker or not.

    It will benefit the large corporations and choke out the smaller people. It will consolidate control and wealth.

  • M500@lemmy.mlEnglish
    682·
    11 months ago

    Other than YouTube, I’m basically off all of these centralized social media platforms and it feels great.

    I do need to occasionally use Facebook for market place and messenger for contacting business.

    Basically every business operates over messenger where I live.

    • viking@infosec.pubOP
      141·
      11 months ago

      Yes same for me, whatsapp is pretty much the only “genuine” communication channel. I only keep a presence on facebook since I have to move countries frequently for work, and the “expats in $city” groups are quite helpful to find people, and then move the discussions off-platform :-)

    • bluGill@kbin.social
      6·
      11 months ago

      I’m trying to encourage people to move to peertube. Not much content there, but i’ll reward what intersting content I find. You should too

      • M500@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Not really, I am in a third would country and if you call the landline, you still have to pay by the minute. Most businesses do not even have a landline to contact. Typically they give a viber number or messenger number.

        Even when I needed to get a rabies shot, my wife found a place on facebook. They did not even have a website of their own. Sadly that is how the internet works where I live.

      • M500@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        11 months ago

        Thanks! I always forget about that platform. I did see he made a video about that. I’ll watch it on odyssey now

  • spudwart@spudwart.comEnglish
    561·
    11 months ago

    So this is how it will start.

    First it will be a back and forth war of Anti-adblockers vs Adblockers

    Then when the Anti-Adblockers start to lose, which they will, then they’ll come crying to various governments with massic PAC campaigns among other insane garbage about how “Adblockers are Piracy!” and that they need to be banned.

    This will not end well.

    • phoenixz@lemmy.ca
      202·
      11 months ago

      It’ll end well enough. People will just stop using their shitty platforms. They’ll start looking for alternatives, from which there are loads, find that there are platforms that don’t require ads, and go there.

      Those that stay deserve the shit they get

      • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.mlEnglish
        181·
        11 months ago

        You’re massively overestimating the conviction of the average internet user. They’ll do whatever they’re told is cool to do, including visiting a site that is nothing but ads.

        • squidspinachfootball@lemm.ee
          4·
          11 months ago

          The closest thing I’ve seen is lbry, where some creators have mirrored their YouTube accounts. But it feels like a very small number of them uploading there.

          E to add: As with all alternative platforms, it’s also home to a lot of content that was kicked off of more mainstream platforms for one reason or another.

        • governorkeagan@lemdro.idEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          TILvidsis a peertube instance with a focus high quality educational content. There is vastly less content compared to YouTube but the videos that are there tend to be really good.

          This should help you get started with peertube

        • spudwart@spudwart.comEnglish
          24·
          11 months ago

          For desktop I use the FreeTube client. For mobile, there’s various options line NewPipe and Revanced. But these are all Android Only.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
      151·
      11 months ago

      The thing is, if they get really stupid with it I could just go ahead and install pi hole. I haven’t already because it’s a bit of a fiddle on and I don’t apparently don’t need it yet. There’s no way for the government to mandate against that, unless they actually want to ban me from owning a computer, Which obviously won’t really work.

      • AllOutOfBubbleGum@lemmy.worldEnglish
        231·
        11 months ago

        That only allows DNS-based blocking of domains, which isn’t going to be nearly as effective. A lot of modern ads are served up from the same domain that you’re visiting. Browser-based ad-blocker extensions are in a position to block domains, URLs, and specific parts of the HTML DOM itself. This is going to sound rude, and I’m sorry in advance, but when people bring up pi hole, I assume they aren’t very knowledgeable about how things work.

        • spudwart@spudwart.comEnglish
          162·
          11 months ago

          Pihole was once a good adblocker, but as more and more websites realize ads being served from an external domain are easily blocked, they too push their ads through their own domain.

          Pihole is still good for some pages, but mostly, its useless as an adblocker.

          • fat_stig@lemmy.world
            51·
            11 months ago

            I have 2 piholes on my network, mostly useless they might be but both block over 20% of the traffic, ublock origin and Firefox take care of the rest. Are you sure you set it up correctly?

            • spudwart@spudwart.comEnglish
              91·
              11 months ago

              20% is a far cry from what it used to be, and it also depends on your use case.

              I’m spend my time online 60% on lemmy, 30% on YouTube, and 10% elsewhere.

              • fat_stig@lemmy.world
                2·
                11 months ago

                The internet access on my network is much more varied, 12 clients including work laptops, an HTPC, Unraid server, smart TV, phones, watches, tablets, games console, VR headset. Several of these use VPNs so bypass the piholes, I used to see up to 45% a few years ago, but I see no reason to switch them off just because other systems are taking up the slack. Seriously, I can’t remember the last time I saw an ad.

          • ebits21@lemmy.caEnglish
            1·
            11 months ago

            It’s definitely not useless, it blocks a ton.

            There’s only a few sites, like YouTube it doesn’t help much on.

      • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
        41·
        11 months ago

        Setting up a pihole takes minutes, and will block literally millions of ads on your home network.

        The biggest hurdle is teaching yourself not to click on sponsored links. Google will still show promoted results, but you’ll get an error when the pi blocks them from loading. This is annoying for new users, especially if some of the users don’t care that they are being manipulated and just want to see the thing google wants to sell them.

    • MuchPineapples@lemmy.world
      12·
      11 months ago

      Eventually they will just use server side authentication that the ads were displayed properly and the best an adblocker can do is draw a grey rectangle over it and mute your tabs sound.

  • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    52·
    11 months ago

    LOL, if you block ads they’ll hide a message from one of your friends that you never would have seen anyway because it would’ve been buried in ads.

    I think this is good though. I think this is just what a lot of people need to get them off FB. I mean… have you tried surfing the www without an ad blocker? I’d rather not use the www.

  • fosforus@sopuli.xyz
    48·
    11 months ago

    Oh no, I have to stop using Facebook too? Holy shit I might get something done

    You guys should implement that shit here on Lemmy too

    • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.mlEnglish
      10·
      11 months ago

      They also use all those uglified class names so you can’t easily target a class to block. They’re total bastards. The Facebook Purity plugin is hip to all these tricks though. There are some very dedicated and talented developers who have put in a lot of time and creativity to circumvent these assholes.

          • ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.de
            1·
            11 months ago

            If I inspect the element in Firefox, it’s a div with about 8 layers of randomly named nested divs inside, sometimes branching (but the mouseover border preview tool helps). It takes 10 careful clicks to reveal the final div and its background image URL. Maybe there’s an “Expand all” button, IDK.

  • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.mlEnglish
    35·
    11 months ago

    So they’re essentially admitting that their advertisements are indistinguishable from your friend’s posts which are the actual reason you visit the site in the first place. It doesn’t matter anyway anymore. Facebook has buried friends list content among absolute bullshit you have zero desire to see. I visited a while ago and 99% of what I was shown was ridiculous groups I tried to block. But there are millions of them. You can block a thousand groups and there’s 999 thousand more that are just like it, waiting to take their place. Facebook is supposed to have this super algorithm that determines what users want to see. If that’s the case, why are they incapable of detecting that I am actively opposed to certain types of content? Maybe they think they’re going to outrage me enough to engage on this bullshit? Nah, I’ll just leave. Bye, fuck-faces.

    • 44razorsedge@lemmy.world
      61·
      11 months ago

      The algo doesn’t determine what YOU want to see, it’s to determine what the ADVERTISERS want to market themselves to.