I have specifically gone out of my way to maintain a grease monkey script that hides all sorts of things from Facebook. Ads, yes, but also all the other “people you may know”, “suggested for you” and other garbage. It has substantially reduced the time I spend on Facebook, because it’s a lot harder for me to get sucked in, while still allowing me to see the things my actual friends are posting, rather than a post from a company that my friend liked.
This is enough to make me want to use a separate browser just for facebook, to make sure that facebook doesn't know anything about me that I don't consciously decide to tell it.
Hmm, startup idea: a browser designed specifically to keep facebook in its place.
I like this, but I've blocked Facebook from my life.
My /etc/hosts file directs all network requests to 0.0.0.0.
Sometimes I miss Facebook for these kinds of things, I wish there was a super popular open-source social network that all my friends would use. Or a free social network without all the nasty practices.
I can't use Facebook with all the ads and noise. I've blocked mine down to just the news feed, everything else goes away. Much cleaner and easier to use.
There's a greasemonkey script called UnFuck Facebook, which does exactly that - It hides all app things and auto ignores apps sent to you, hides all Facebook ads and makes it look very clean in general.
Here's a little hint that I've been preaching to everyone who complains that fb is unusable (I suspect due to all the farmwars and mafiaville junk): if you click the "hide" button next to the post you can choose to ban the application rather than the person. And this blocks all posts from that application from any friend. You do it once to block out every annoying app you don't care to see and then you only have to add a new one once every couple of weeks as they come out. As a result, my vanilla fb feed is as readable as the lite.fb version.
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