
Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline - polskibus
https://twitter.com/wolfiechristl/status/1071473931784212480
======
locklock
I'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new
ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for
weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to
see ads now have to see ads.

~~~
spyspy
Ethics aside, this actually sounds kind of fun to me. It's the kind of clever
puzzle solving many of us love about programming - it's basically a cat and
mouse game.

~~~
armandososa
I worked on something like this (but at a very much lower scale, of course)
and it's fun at first but then I realized that my whole job was making users
experience worst and I was miserable for as long as I had that job. I swore
not to work on anything advertising-related ever again.

~~~
matz1
Yea of course it's not for everyone, everyone have different concern, but I
could see myself work on this if it paid well.

~~~
eropple
Perhaps reconsider.

"If it paid well" externalizes the ills it inflicts on other people. And _they
matter, too_.

~~~
matz1
sure, thats why I said what everyone consider 'matter' are different, for me
this doesn't matter that much.

~~~
eropple
...And I am lightly suggesting that _maybe it should matter_.

Hurting others unnecessarily is the only sin in the world. Don't ever, ever be
That Guy.

~~~
sonnyblarney
This is too much.

Nobody is 'hurting anyone' \- not even slightly, by ensuring that their _free
product_ also has ads.

If ads are unscrupulous, or if the company is doing shady things otherwise,
then yes - bad.

But there is no moral argument against making sure that decent ads work with a
free product, or when ads are part of any product wherein the social contract
is to that expectation.

Facebook has ads, just like CNN and Cosmopolitan, that's normal, ethical, and
within the expectations for user's experience. Again, shady things
notwithstanding.

In 2018, people can pay or see ads, or a combination of both, there is no
pragmatic way around this, and too many decent products depend upon ads for
their existence, that's where we are until someone comes up with something
better.

~~~
saagarjha
> Nobody is 'hurting anyone' \- not even slightly, by ensuring that their free
> product also has ads.

This isn't a convincing argument. As an extreme example, replace ads with
something that's clearly detrimental for the user: "nobody is hurting anyone
by ensuring that their free product also delivers a LD50 of cyanide" is
clearly bogus. While ads don't kill people, the way that they are distributed
currently has many negative externalities that the user must deal with.

~~~
sonnyblarney
So 'ads are bad' but 'cyanide is bad' therefore 'ads are bad'?

I'm not down with your logic.

The vast, vast majority of ads are just fine and have no negative
externalities.

Most 'food' is fine, but you can gorge yourself to death.

Cars are ok as well, even though they cause death.

~~~
saagarjha
> So 'ads are bad' but 'cyanide is bad' therefore 'ads are bad'?

More like "ads are bad" means that your free product with ads is also bad,
just as "cyanide is bad" makes your free product laced with cyanide bad.

> The vast, vast majority of ads are just fine and have no negative
> externalities.

The problem is that bad ads show up basically everywhere. Sure, 99% of the ads
on news websites can't infect me with malware, but there's that one that
Google hasn't gotten around to banning yet that is running on every
website…and even if this wasn't true, basically 100% of them track me or make
my web browsing experience slower.

------
ergothus
I interviewed at FB recently (didn't pass the in-person) and the one question
I asked each interviewer was "tell me about the parts of FB I don't see" \-
because they have an odd hiring process where you don't figure out what team
you'd be working with until after you are hired...and I had no interest in
pushing Ads, but understood that wouldn't be a great pitch from my side.

Turns out there is a LOT about ads at FB. Not everything, but a lot.
Particularly in the Seattle office.

I was surprised I hadn't passed the interview (thought I did well), but in
retrospect I'm glad. Whether that's sour grapes on my part, the fact the news
has been full of reasons to be glad not to work at FB, or that I was very
concerned that anything I did would end up pushing ads is something I can't be
100% certain of.

~~~
driverdan
> you don't figure out what team you'd be working with until after you are
> hired

That sounds like hell. I need to meet the team I'll be working with before
accepting an offer. It's the only way to know if they're competent, can
communicate, and are not assholes.

~~~
packetslave
> I need to meet the team I'll be working with before accepting an offer. It's
> the only way to know if they're competent, can communicate, and are not
> assholes.

This is _exactly_ how Facebook's onboarding process works (at least in
engineering). You spend 3-4 weeks in "bootcamp" classes (React 101, IOS 101,
etc.). After that, you spend another 3-4 weeks auditioning teams -- you sit
with teams that have open headcount for a week, attend their meetings, and
work with a mentor on a coding project. Once you decide which team is the best
fit, you "graduate" bootcamp and join them.

It's not perfect -- if there's no open headcount on your dream team, you'll
have to pick another, but it's the best onboarding process I've seen from an
employee standpoint.

~~~
nickv
Is this process for new college grads or senior engineers? I can't imagine
principals go through this process, do they?

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
All engineering hires go through bootcamp, period. The only engineering hires
that don't go through team selection are domain experts hired for a specific
team/role ahead of time.

~~~
saagarjha
> The only engineering hires that don't go through team selection are domain
> experts hired for a specific team/role ahead of time.

Is this a significant fraction of hires? Because I find it really odd to waste
the time of a say an embedded software engineer trying to teach them React
when they're pretty set on working on something else anyways…

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Generally speaking, the bootcamp process has a wide variety of different
"classes" to take, covering a broad range of the Facebook stack, and no one
engineer is ever expected to learn everything. So in this case, an embedded
engineer would likely attend primarily backend focused classes, and would then
choose from backend or embedded systems teams to work with, while someone
interested in mobile or web frontend technologies would each have completely
different experiences from everyone else. And ultimately, your experience
coming into Facebook has far less to do with which classes or technologies you
learn in bootcamp than what you're personally interested in. If you're
interested in mobile, but only have experience in backend applications, that's
fine – that's exactly what bootcamp is there for! We want to help you learn
the technology or context that you're interested in so that you can find a
role or team that you'll be happy to work on.

------
jordan801
Anyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is.
Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my
"for fun" scraper. It's also really not that difficult to write a smart
scraper that you say, "Look for these things in this post. However you find
them, replicate it for the others". Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp
scraper do.

If there's a pattern, I will find it, and I will exploit it. <3

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
Yep, seems like a total waste of time. The people scraping will spend the
necessary time to get around this (and then distribute that knowledge to the
masses) so it seems like a pointless arms race. Facebook employees could
better use their time on developing actual features that bring value.

~~~
matz1
How is this waste of time / pointless ? They do bring value for fb, they
reduce the loss of ad money.

~~~
eeeeeeeeeeeee
Because they are fighting the people that absolutely do not want to see
advertisements whatsoever (most normal people I know do not have ad-blockers),
which already makes them the least likely to be attracted by advertisements.
If anything, those brands are souring their reputation anytime they are seen
by those kind of people in a medium that those consumers find obnoxious.

You can make a similar argument that the RIAA/MPAA going after piracy is a
waste of time. Again, focus on delivering value to actual customers.

If Facebook spent more time on making a friendly ecosystem / community I would
be more open to signing back up again. Instead, it seems they are hyper-
focused on advertisements at the expense of everything else.

~~~
rchaud
"Delivering value to customers"? It's a website-cum-message board. There is no
further value to deliver via software features; all of that work is going
towards meeting the needs of advertisers.

And advertisers are asking them to show what they are doing to combat
adblocking. FB isn't doing this to target customers least likely to convert,
they're doing it to check a box for their ad sales team.

~~~
otabdeveloper2
Newsflash: Facebook's customers are advertisers, not the honeypot victims
stuck to their site.

~~~
tomatocracy
But there’s a trade off. Fewer ads better placed means fewer people likely to
block them and more people likely to actually look at them instead of skim
past. It’s also likely that the people who were blocking ads are less likely
to click on them and thus (for some advertisers) lower value impressions
anyway.

Revenue is (simplistically) the product of impressions and value per
impression. It’s not therefore immediately obvious that moves like this
actually do increase revenue for them, especially over the long term since one
potential side effect of doing this is giving more ammunition to the ‘delete
Facebook’ crowd.

------
minimaxir
This example is likely not specifically targeting ad blockers, but ad
_scrapers_ for transparency: [https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-
blocks-ad-transp...](https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-
transparency-tools)

> Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook
> added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the
> word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.”

That article also links to this tweet in that paragraph.

~~~
tvanantwerp
> We have collected more than 100,000 political ads in this way. But
> Facebook’s latest update blocks tools like ours from clicking on the “Why Am
> I Seeing This” menu.

> The company added code that prevents clicks generated by computers —
> including browser extensions — on just that one button. Web browsers make a
> distinction between a click generated by the computer and one generated by
> your mouse. Clicks from your mouse are marked “isTrusted“ and those
> generated by computer code are not.

~~~
megous
You can patch the browser to make isTrusted configurable, or to set it
unconditionally true.

~~~
the8472
In my opinion extensions should be able to synthesize clicks on behalf of the
user where isTrusted=true from the perspective of web content.

------
sly010
I wonder at which point will we just stream pages as interactive video content
with a text optimized codec. Most pages on the internet are bloated to the
point where it might just make sense. (I am not advocating, I am predicting)

~~~
bastawhiz
At a previous job in the not-too-distant past, we needed to support IE7 for
contractual reasons. I'd unironically floated the idea of launching a VM on
the server running Firefox, and starting a VNC session, streamed over frames
of a GIF. Clicks and keypresses would be transmitted with AJAX calls.

In a later project, we played with the idea of using an asm.js-compiled Webkit
to render SVG (with embedded HTML) into a canvas due to mixed browser support.

Long story short, it's not inconceivable.

~~~
dman
Write once, run everywhere promise of the web delivered like never before.

------
reaperducer
At first I thought that this might be another good indication that having
"Facebook" on your resume isn't the golden egg it once was.

Then I realize it's even better than before because it demonstrates for a
potential employer that you'll push whatever buttons you're asked to in
exchange for money, regardless of whether it's good for the user, the
internet, or society as a whole.

~~~
minikites
This is why I genuinely believe STEM majors should be required to take more
liberal arts (e.g. ethics) classes as a requirement to graduate.

~~~
tqi
Sure, we could all stand to be more well rounded. Liberal Arts majors should
be required to take more science courses so they don't fall for dumb stuff
like climate change denial or anti-vax nonsense.

~~~
RoboticWater
I can't seem to find any data which suggests that Liberal Arts majors are
significantly more likely to fall for climate change denial or the anti-vax
movement. I find that most studies correlate political leaning with these
beliefs, not area of study. Given that the Liberal Arts are overwhelmingly
liberal in the US, I'd say your claim is probably wrong.

If anything, a Liberal Arts educations ought to provide students a higher
degree of skepticism towards all expressions of ideology, and seek to find the
truth through critical research. Obviously, that's the ideal, note necessarily
the reality in all cases, but it seems your notion of Liberal Arts is more
akin to "hippy-dippy" nonsense, not critical study.

------
myroon5
If you don't mind getting rid of every post in the timeline, there's News Feed
Eradicator for Facebook:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-
eradicat...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator-
for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg)

~~~
subdane
At this point, maybe just delete your Facebook account?

~~~
Spivak
Look, I don't like Facebook, but it provides me tangible value sans the news
feed which I feel is bad for my health.

* Messenger is the hands down the best messaging experience that exists. It's super bloated which I'm sure annoys this crowd but it doesn't skip a beat.

* FB Events is the only thing I've ever been able to get people to use -- email chains and group messages aren't half as productive.

* Their real name policy, social graph, and blocking tools are essential for dealing with creepy people and stalkers.

* Local buy/sell/trade yardsale type things operate nigh exclusively on Facebook.

* Local professional networking and enthusiast groups also organize on Facebook.

~~~
pas
Messenger Lite feels pretty slim.

FB Events is something that could be a spin-off with FB login. But yes, at
least people use it.

------
mholt
A few days ago [1], I found this filter for UBlock Origin to be working for me
so far:

    
    
        facebook.com##[id^=hyperfeed_story_id_]:has([id*=feed_sub_title_]):has(span:has-text(/S.*p.*o.*n.*s.*o.*r.*e.*d/))
    

GitHub issue:
[https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/3367](https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/3367)

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1092191140168622080](https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1092191140168622080)

~~~
testplzignore
If I worked at Facebook and was evil, I'd put some text in that span that
caused catastrophic backtracking :)

~~~
majewsky
Regexes can be evaluated in linear time, so you'd have to send gigabytes worth
of text to cause any noticeable slowdown.

~~~
MapleWalnut
I believe with lookahead/behind a regex is technically not "regular" anymore,
so you can definitely DoS a regex without GB worth of text.

~~~
saagarjha
Sure, but that regex doesn't have lookahead/lookbehind?

------
agumonkey
meanwhile [https://text.npr.org/](https://text.npr.org/)

ps: thanks for the comments below, I was curious about similar websites

~~~
Kiro
Horrible. If this is what all the web primitivists advocate I rather just look
at ads.

~~~
agumonkey
Enjoy paradise then

------
underwater
Blame Adblock Plus and friends. They try to extort sites by asking for a cut
of ad revenue (up to 30%) to be whitelisted in the "acceptable ads" program.

Given that ABP have already determined the ads are "acceptable" when they
reach out, the demand for cash is mere extortion. FB obviously chose to not
give in and told ABP to take a hike by obfuscating the source code.

~~~
saagarjha
Both are pretty scummy, to be honest. I don't see why they can't share the
blame.

------
yason
I don't really object to ads per se. I'm used to ads in television and in
newspapers, magazines. I even remember reading ads very carefully in a couple
of computer mags when I was a teenager. Good ads can be entertaining and
informative as well. Stupid or simple ads you just skip over.

However, there are some traits I'd still like to see in ads:

\- they live in a dedicated box that doesn't make it harder to read the actual
content. I focus on one thing at a time. If it's the content, it's not the
ads. If you make a good ad, it might be your ad

\- they don't flash or animate to distract my eyes

\- they would ideally have some (textual) content I could pause to read for
details if I'm interested

\- they wouldn't necessarily change all the time: it would be nice to have the
same ad placed on a site for a week or two, so I could come back to it if I
find it interesting. Print media has this advantage. I still remember some
iconic ads from my youth. I have absolutely no idea which ads, brands, or
names I've happened to see online today

\- they don't hog my cpu, my gpu, or my battery; they don't get to execute
code or try to spy on my online life: just a nice image is enough

\- youtube and other video services wouldn't serve ads longer than 10 seconds:
it is about the time I can still hold my attention to continue with the video.
Placing two-minute ads in youtube episodes just causes me to mute the ad and
continue watching some other video. I wouldn't mind a few 10 second clips of
reasonably well-matched ads in a programme that lasts half an hour.

I understand someone has to pay for the bandwidth and service but the only way
an advertiser can get to visit my head is to ask gently, humbly, and make it
worthwhile for me. Flashing, popping, intruding or forcing is not going to
make it. This is why we have adblockers.

~~~
underwater
You do realise that you've described Facebook ads (with a few minor
exceptions)?

The commercial ad blocking companies still try and block FB ads because FB
won't give them a cut of the revenue.

The non-commercial projects try and block FB ads because they are not
interested in incentivising ad companies to behave. They just want to block
all the things.

------
black_puppydog
I tried around with the twitter homepage yesterday, and figured that the
transferred html, js, images etc when just pressing F5 on twitter (with a hot
cache!) was way bigger than a png (!) screenshot of the same page.

My prediction: the next step will be to move rendering server-side, just send
pixels, and the only thing ad blockers will be able to do (after moving to
deep learning or some similarly ridiculously expensive way to combat this
idiocy) is to place literal black bars over all ads.

Now that I wrote it down, I'd actually like to have that in uBlock now, so I
can see which sites are horribly ad infested, and make my choices accordingly.

~~~
evgen
Why bother covering the rendered ads when you can just use a bit of machine
learning on the client side to recognize the text, yank it back into a decent
layout and then filter it and present it back as HTML. When it comes down to
it all web sites still need to present something to the user that their eye
and brain can understand, so just intercept before final presentation and
treat it like an OCR problem to solve.

~~~
black_puppydog
I'm not saying it's impossible, I just don't want to tell any dev that that's
what they should be spending their time on. It's the ultimate late-capitalism
job description: fighting the adblocker wars. :(

Personally, when a page gets too annoying to surf with adblocker, I just drop
the site. The web is big enough (so far) that I don't have to be bored.

------
pastor_elm
All we need is for the EU to pass a law that says paid content must be clearly
laid out in the HTML not just final presentation.

~~~
tomatocracy
My bet is that if and when this happens, it will be a side effect of rules to
facilitate accessibility for people who are partially sighted or blind.

------
guest2457533
Does this meet the required standard for accessibility users? Do they have any
such obligations?

~~~
ionforce
No one cares about accessibility when ad dollars are at stake.

~~~
ceejayoz
They do when regulators come calling with significant penalties.

~~~
ahoy
There are no significant penalties at this time.

~~~
strictnein
They're not focusing on sites like FB, because using them isn't a requirement
of any meaningful task.

Lawyers are definitely going after things like companies' job sites. Applying
for a job is a protected action and no discrimination is allowed, either
intentional or not.

------
b123400
I read it somewhere that Chinese websites are taking this kind of obfuscations
to the next level. The simple ones are randomly ordered divs re-layouted by JS
at runtime. The complicated ones include custom font files which characters
and glyph don't match, so for example <div style="font-family:custom-
font">abc</div> would look like "123".

~~~
MiddleEndian
The font one seems like it's pushing it too far even for regular users since
it breaks copy and paste.

Also this all seems like it would break accessibility regulations.

~~~
jandrese
China has accessibility regulations?

~~~
davb
Yes. See [https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/](https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/)

I know it's currently trendy to make digs at China (increasingly common in HN
comments) but it's a huge country with plenty of talented engineers and
accessibility advocates. With an aging population [0], such accommodations are
becoming increasingly important.

[0] [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-
asia-19630110](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19630110)

------
tareqak
I'm surprised that companies don't create packaging materials that are
actually also ads and have them be stuffed in all the packages that say Amazon
sends.

I'm resentful of advertising in general, so the comment above is a morbid
expression of "how low can they go". There are some kinds of ads that I do
like for their entertainment value e.g. the Squatty Potty ads by the Harmon
Brothers or the Apple Cookie Monster ad [0][1][2].

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q)
[1] [https://harmonbrothers.com/](https://harmonbrothers.com/) [2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF6OYq_2Ooc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF6OYq_2Ooc)

------
albemuth
Ironically, at a failed onsite I was asked to design some visual component
with as few DOM elements as possible.

------
splatcollision
Kind of explains why React came from Facebook. If you're abusing the DOM to
obfuscate the nature of your content, and running into performance issues....
hmmm

------
kevin_b_er
Wonder if this breaks screen readers and if someone could go after facebook
for accessibility violations in the EU where public protections are strong.

~~~
Someone1234
I just tested it, it does not.

Most of the nonsense is "Display: None" so screen readers ignore it entirely.
These elements seem to exist to stop simplistic HTML element matching, screen
readers obey CSS.

------
kungfugz
All of this talk about decieptful advertising; this only applies if you are a
stupid person, or a young child that hasn't been taught differrently. A person
who believes what they see on TV is real.

Most rational people 10 years old or above know enough to know that you should
research a product before you buy it. What is the commercial/ad actually
claiming? What does the fine print say? warranty? If a person is buying a
product based on advertisement claims alone, that person has an issue, not the
advertiser.

To be honest, I like that these companies are spending so much time trying to
identify products that I might be interested in, but haven't had the time to
research enough about it to make an educated choice. Google turns my searches
into ads embedded into email, or searches themselves. I ask Alexa about
something or the Alexa wikiHow app, and the next time I'm shopping on Amazon,
I have targeted ads for those same items I had begun research on.

It's a beautiful time saver in my opinion. Once you've narrowed your search
down to a specific item, you can read reviews, compare it to similar items, do
a search on that same item.

That's the same tactic with selling data; the company purchasing the data is
trying to connect consumers with product. If the consumer doesn't do their
research and buys a shitty product, there are still several layers of consumer
protection where the customer can be reimbursed.

As far as predatory gaming ads and games geared towards kids... don't give
your kid access to your credit card, buy them a gift card. It's not that
difficult. There are too many stupid people on this planet because technology
has broken survival of the fittest; allowing stupid people to live long enough
to breed more stupid people.

------
ghostbrainalpha
I had to explain this story in a non technical way to someone in our office.

I said, Do you remember the "Pen Island" prank that kids used to pull in
school? For those that aren't familiar someone gets a sign on their desk that
they think reads PEN ISLAND, But its all in block letters without spacing so
it looks just as much like PENIS LAND.

This is what Facebook now does to the "Sponsored" text next to ads in order to
trick your Ad Blocker.

Well fuck you Facebook.... I am not writing PENIS LAND on my desk. Even if you
offer me a bunch of cool new jelly pens to be a part of your club.

And fuck you too Ms. Applebom, for letting me keep that sign on my desk the
whole day WHEN YOU KNEW EXACTLY WHAT IT MEANT!!!

~~~
ctvo
How about:

Facebook jumbles up the way it sends you advertising content so it's harder
for ad-blockers to identify and block it.

------
DanCarvajal
I saw this in the wild yesterday. It's beaten Ublock Origin so far.

------
IronWolve
I use mobile version in a browser. Its faster and less fluff. I should have
did this years ago. Facebook tries to make you use the mobile client for
msg'ing, I just hit desktop view, and use the webpage, but really, I hardly
ever use FB messenger anymore since they forced the requirement.

I was tempted to just use RSS feeds of groups I like, I dont like how FB
reorders the feed for their purposes either.

Make your site crap, and I'll just strip it and view it the way I want.

------
wrestlerman
I don't understand that surprise. It's their business model, what do you
expect? They need to earn money, right? If you don't like them, stop using
them.

------
nomel
Is it safe to predict that the world will eventually move to drawing to canvas
rather than DOM, preventing the ability to block ads altogether?

------
tbodt
This tweet was originally posted two months ago.

------
fahrradflucht
I'm not sure this has anything to do with adblockers. It could just be that
they generate class names which is common in modern frontend build chains,
wrap things in a lot of divs because they compose the styles in some kind of
design system and have some kind of <span>S</span> hack to let UI text wrap at
syllables.

------
untog
I'm curious to know what the actual overhead is of doing this. Not that I'm
defending the crap Facebook pumps into our computers, but is "5 divs, 9 spans,
30 CSS classes" actually a useful metric in measuring the performance of a
page? If it was 4 divs how different would things be?

~~~
sosuke
Well take the gzipped amount of data that adds up too then the average cache
time it lives in the browser times the number of impressions and additions and
you'll get a good metric for wasted bandwidth at least.

------
aaaaaaaaaaab
WebGL and WebAssembly will be the killer combo against adblockers. I’m very
bullish on both!

------
iamleppert
Is it that hard to find the sponsored text and infer the structure from the
surrounding elements (regardless of what that structure is?) Some basic
knowledge of the DOM tree structure could make the algorithm very adaptive to
any changes like this

------
cfaacfaa
I wonder if this is a case where Facebook's past CFAA arguments will come back
to bite them.

Somebody who uses an adblocker has not authorized the display of ads on their
computer, and yet Facebook is bypassing the security measures the user has
installed.

------
coryfklein
Can someone explain why you can't just write a rule that filters every post
that has "SPONSORED" in all caps?

Heck, I'd be fine with even "Sponsored" regardless of case even if it means I
miss a few friends posts.

------
AndrewKemendo
I do the same thing, but instead I do it for putting plaintext contact email
on my websites that won't get scraped for spam.

It makes it copy pasteable when rendered, while not incurring any funky
processes or having to write new classes.

------
FilterSweep
If I were to rate my development ability to most HN devs, I would be rather
mediocre.

But isn’t this a bit juvenile a workaround for FB? It seem rather easy to
workaround this as an ad blocker. Just a little doc tree parsing and regex?

------
olivermarks
'Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 css classes to every single post in the
timeline to make it more difficult to identify and block 'Sponsored' posts, oh
my.'

Wondering what else is going on here, other calls etc

~~~
ourcat
If there is a dark pattern to create, you can be sure they've tried it.

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corry
Obligatory Hammerbacher quote: "The best minds of my generation are thinking
about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

Wonder what the opportunity cost of so many talented people spending their
time at FB working on stuff like. Or maybe I'm overreaching, and the business
model is a necessary evil for a powerful social good that FB provides by
"connecting the world".

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m3kw9
This is where applying AI to this can defeat it quite easily.

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dpedu
AI is overkill here. You simply need to look at the result of rendering the
page.

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dbtqgoat
Kind of their prorogative, isn’t it?

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papaman
it's a free service and they need to make money, so they need ads to survive.

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dpflan
C

L

E

V

E

R

(Edit: /s -- I do not endorse this concept at all.)

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PavlovsCat
Pennywise clever, pound foolish? By that I mean, for me someone who robs blind
people with a mechanical contraption [0] is actually _less_ clever than, say,
a teenager without major development issues -- who may not know how to build
that contraption (yet), but already knows why _not_ to build and use it. Okay,
maybe teenagers aren't a good example ^^ but you get the idea.

[0] I'm not calling sponsored posts theft, it's just an example for "bad thing
to do". Personally, I think this offends me on the HTML level way more than
even on the ad blocking level... "they can do what they want with their site",
but it still grosses me out to see stuff like this.

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crispytx
I got downvoted big time the other day for a very similar comment to this, but
it needs to be said: People that complain about ads have obviously never had
anything that they needed to advertise.

