Social Fixer Blog

I have a multi-tiered adblocking environment at home and abroad.

At home, I have AdGuardHome installed in a VM acting as my home network's DNS. It's pretty effective and is an alternative to PiHole. This is a first-tier filter I have while at home for all my devices. https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardHome/

On the web browser, I have the AdGuard Firefox extension. https://adguard.com/en/adguard-browser-extension/firefox/overview.html

For my mobile phone, it's a little obtuse but relatively straightforward. I have a non-rooted Android phone. I've installed AdGuard for Android there as well. The way it works is it runs a local VPN on my phone, so all device traffic goes through a localhost proxy, which filters the DNS and unencrypted TCP traffic. For HTTPS filtering, it installs a local TLS CA to perform re-signing of websites (you can configure it to ignore EV certificates, as I have, which are more common with online banks and more secure sites). It works pretty well with exception to apps that have built-in ad platforms like Instagram. It blocks 100% of ads in apps like Wunderground, Reddit, and Firefox. https://adguard.com/en/adguard-android/overview.html. There's also an iOS version of the app on their website.

I have a Google Play Music subscription which comes with YouTube Premium. However, more and more YouTubers are diversifying their revenue, and have gone to completely sponsored videos with embedded ads. For sponsored clips in YouTube, SponsorBlock extension:…

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As the developer of one of the most popular Facebook customizers (Social Fixer / http://SocialFixer.com ), I call your bluff.

Facebook is the wild west. Their code is bloated and overly-complex, their approaches to UI designs are truly insane, and writing any kind of Facebook-customizing app is incredibly difficult. I think Google has been way more supportive of developers than Facebook.

The bottom line is, they offer a site and for many reasons (support, consistent brand image, etc), they want the same UI for all users. So they aren't going to explicitly support extensions that let users change how their sites work, fragmenting their users into lots of different UI's that might conflict and cause problems that are impossible for them to debug. And both Facebook and Google are huge operations, with much bigger goals than you know of. Tweaks to the UI are probably not even on their radar.

If this is your first UI redesign to endure, I say welcome to the club! I've had my stuff break on a regular basis as Facebook randomly tosses out new UI changes (and not even to everyone at the same time!). And they do it ALL THE TIME. That's the game we play. Frustrating, certainly, but also very challenging. It forces you to write better, more robust, more DOM-agnostic code, and pushes you to solve problems in better, more efficient ways.

If you don't like it, opt out and stop doing it. IMO, whining about it is kind of lame.

Very cool, I love this approach as it is very similar to how my (now defunct) unedditreddit app worked and how a clever app called socialfixer for facebook works. Two thoughts.

1. You are not unblockable. My app was removed from the chrome app store after reddit complained, no review process, no appeals, good luck even communicating with google. Installing an app not from the appstore is almost impossible for a non-savvy user. I suggest looking at a firefox app, their app story is much more democratic.

2. I think this fight is important because a lot of companies/organizations seem to be trying to establish the precedent that they own their website experience end to end, from database to the pixels on your screen. That idea taken to the extreme will lead to computers become opaque devices ala a TV, rather than the hackable playground they are now.

http://socialfixer.com/blog/2013/10/05/facebook-requires-social-fixer-browser-extension-to-remove-key-features/?r

Once having used an extension named "Unfollow everyone on facebook at once" proved to be a very effective way to cut down the amount of pointless stuff on FB. Apparently, the extension was too effective and successful to stay unpunished:

https://techstory.in/facebook-quashed-chrome-extension-that-lets-you-bulk-unfollow-everyone/

I stumbled over it back then due to the unavoidable Streisand effect and happily so. Combined with "Social Fixer" (see https://socialfixer.com for information), this made FB much more bearable.

Judging by it's CRX id, the code is still available via https://extpose.com/ext/pijkodjelolnmbehifeokihlodnajela/en (look for github on the page).

This is another similar tool:

https://socialfixer.com/

It loads 10 posts at a time and filters out all of the junk. Then you have to manually load more posts.

It's really eye-opening when you load 10 posts and it filters out 9 of them.

But besides that, the thing that's really pushing me away from FB is the pure hate, agression and stupidity on display in the comments section of local groups. It hurts to see the levels people descend to when they can comment without any repercussions.