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Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline

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550 points polskibus | 1 comments | 08 Feb 19 16:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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locklock ◴[08 Feb 19 16:47 UTC] No.19116039[source]▶
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.
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duxup ◴[08 Feb 19 17:49 UTC] No.19116769[source]▶
It sounds like a fun challenge.

It's just ads. If we're talking about some ad for a coffee maker, whatever.

Now their whole selling data to unscrupulous folks, taking money from parents via their kids, selling fake news that makes people hate other people (now that gets into the ad space...) ....

That's where I'd want to nope out.

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asdkhadsj ◴[08 Feb 19 18:10 UTC] No.19117002[source]▶
Thank you. I feel like ads have such a bad rap because of the state of the internet. Yet, what does everyone expect? Is it shocking that content providers want money for their product?

And yes, I know, some sites and ads do terrible things. The actively hurt viewership. BUT, isn't that the same with everything? Even my groceries are getting worse as companies seek ways to increase profits without pissing me off; they swap out quality ingredients with cheaper ingredients. They change the shape of the bottle to reduce volume and hope I don't notice that the price effectively went up. Etc.

My point is not in defense of these practices. Rather, I'm defending "no shit" in all of this; welcome to the real world. Everyone is going to try and take and make as much as they can before it starts to actively show a negative impact.

So who is to really blame? Us, of course. Consumers of these practices are largely okay with it as is.

So yea, I don't have a problem with ads. They sort themselves out because people will stop using the products. I do have a problem with selling out data though, as people are largely unaware of the consequences and severity of what is actually happening. Ads however though? Who cares.

edit: Sidenote, I imagine an argument could be made that all and any ads are terrible. I definitely could agree with that, but getting rid of all advertisements across all mediums online or offline seems a tall order, and out of scope for this discussion heh.

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1. danaliv ◴[08 Feb 19 19:30 UTC] No.19117798{3}[source]▶
Thing is though, the state of the internet—all that shady stuff Facebook does—is because of ads. Ads aren’t something you can pluck out of a social/technical context and talk about as though they’re in a vacuum. When a site’s existence depends on ad revenue, every single product decision becomes tainted by “how can we hook people?” I can’t find the article now but there was a great one a while back about this very topic. The thesis was that the environment produced by advertising—not the ads themselves, but their effect on everything around them—is nothing short of psychological warfare.

So it’s not just whether “ads” are good or bad. And it’s not enough just to block them. They are like a virulent symbiote. They seep into every aspect of the platform they live on, because the platform’s survival depends on them. And then the infected platforms poison their users, ad blockers or no.