It's been a while since I realised I'd rather not be part of the Meta circus. In my daily life, the friction mostly manifests when exchanging contacts with someone: I'll use Signal for instant messaging, email as a fallback for longer-form (but in general, people don't really do long-form anymore), and I'll gladly give my phone number for worst-case scenario.

My stance is informed by many things – I don't yet have a non-exhaustive list of all – but find below a few thoughts from other people that lean on my aversion to the advertisement industry. It is a reaction to uBlock developers giving up on trying to present Facebook without advertisements:

We won't support facebook any more. It's a disgusting anti-user site. All it does is watching open-source projects doing everything in public and counter them to deliver the malicious ads. Yep, the devs that receive 7-figure dollar salary is just doing this.

Users should give the most harsh feedbacks to them. Being submitted to them and keep going to the site and support it is the worst thing you can do.

Sometimes, it's just easier to stop being a consumer, drop out of the network, and acknowledge the situation as it really is. My point is, precisely, that giving up their services is much easier – and saner – than waiting for any sort of regulation that most likely will never come. A few other comments from the HN thread:

This entire thread reads like a game of cat-and-mouse. People trying to block intrusive ads, and FB reaching into the depths of code and making it nearly impossible for anyone to do so en masse.

I've been there. Tried to uncheck all the boxes on their ad platform; used all manners of ad blockers, etc; used incognito mode; used Tor; etc. etc. etc.

At some point, you realize that the only way to not get served ads on Facebook – and thereby not benefit the company itself – is to get rid of it completely. Delete your account, get off that blasted site, and enjoy some moments of peace IRL.

Having been a very early adopter of FB (since ~2004), I deleted my account and am clean + sober + much happier since 2016.

(Not to say that I'm completely out of the FB ecosystem. Unfortunately, my fam is still on WhatsApp... and I've been trying to convince them to migrate to Signal...)

from HN

You don't actually need to click on an ad or purchase something from an ad site in order for Facebook to make money selling ad space.

The moment these ads are loaded on the page, real time auction occurs, where advertisers place bids algorithmically and automatically, based on your profile. Facebook makes it's money by selling this ad space. It doesn't particularly care whether you click on them or not. But if they don't load in the first place, there's nothing for Facebook to sell.

The real insideous part is that advertisers don't need to actually bid on the auction to participate, and anyone participating gets to havest your ad profile. This is one of the big ways data brokers are able to build profiles on you. They can then do whatever they want with this info, and you'd probably never know.