I use Ad Block Plus (yeah, I know, but it just works and I don’t use only the default list, so anything whitelisted gets blocked anyway). I haven’t seen ads on Facebook.
I suspect in time this will escalate to something like Wired did, where they blocked users with ad blockers from visiting their site. Of course, I spent a few quality minutes in Firebug and fixed it for that site.
Honestly, if Facebook is doing this for revenue reasons, they need to just need to just charge $n/month or something and let the chips fall where they may. I am pretty sure I’d stop using it, because personally I have about half the people on my friends list unfollowed for various reasons like supporting Trump, sharing things from groups like “Proud to be a white American” or anti-vax BS already. I can’t say I’d miss it all that much.
The problem as I see it is that FB users have traded using FB for information about them and the people they know and are well aware of that fact. For them, FB forcing ads seems greedy and excessive without giving anything additional back to the user by way of compensation.
Brand blocking? Hmm…I wonder if I could create some sort of script that would respell internationally famous brands by changing their capitalization to an arbitrary style guide…
Let’s recall that The Zed “gave away” US$45Billion earlier this year. I think FB can afford to take a bit of a revenue hit. They certainly don’t need charity ad viewing from you or I.
I’m not even sure how that would work. And the ideas off the top of my head would be such colossal security risks, it’s worth deleting your facebook existence and never going there in the first place.
Google tried and Plus doesn’t have ads because everyone knows Google is datamining its users and theri content, then they fucked up by DEMANDING everyone use it by hooking Google+ into /ALL/ of their other services. I even stopped using it for awhile because ‘dude sthap.’ They’ve since scaled back and I honestly like Plus. It’s a different atmosphere than Facebook.
Well… It works in other cases for facebook, but only because trademark isn’t being heavily enforced, which allows for spoof accounts that are genuinely funny. In fact the indie spoof accounts are just as good for the brands if not better than real advertizing.
Cf: Campbell’s Soup Troll, who defended the gay fathers ad Campbells. That guy was on point with the sick burns pretending to be Campbells.
I don’t want to be tracked and data-mined, I don’t want to see ads, and I don’t want to pay for content. I want everything for free on my own terms and I want the internet to be full of high-quality content everywhere I look.
And that’s fine. And it’s also fine if websites can’t or won’t give that to me. Clearly my perfect world would end up being one in which the internet is basically a buggy alpha version of USENET.
Where I lose the thread in all this is when internet companies start trying to shame me for not holding up my end of the bargain we never made. I have no civic or moral duty to turn off Ghostery, enable cookies, or refuse to consort with ignoble ad-blockers.
Aside from technical feasibility, there’s the fact that our grim mobile future makes it trivial to embed the platform’s browser engine in your awful little ‘app’, while neutering any advanced features that may displease you, which effectively provides all the advantages of a tame web browser with minimal effort.
My impression is that Facebook’s browser-based market share is way too high for them to go nuclear on that one; but we’ve already seen a number of ‘phone-first’ outfits spring up that are accessible via browser as a distinctly second-class experience or not at all.
If want don’t want ads were are going to have to move away from facebook and other services. We can do it. New distributed software can make this possible and I think we will like it better.
I use Privacy Badger which is from the Electronic Frontier Foundation. AdBlockPro takes payoffs from advertisers to not block them. Goodbye Adblock. NoScript is nice as well. That and I look at the HTML sometimes to screw with advertisers just a little bit more.
