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by supster 3600 days ago
That data and content is (near) worthless if they can't serve up ads against it.
1 comments

That's facebook's problem, not the user's.
You've got it exactly backwards. The service is free, ergo you are the product, ergo Facebook's problems are your problems.

You have three choices:

1. Stop using Facebook

2. Pay Facebook to remove ads

3. Look at ads

I've opted for option 1, though I'll happily revisit this choice if Facebook (A) finds a way to make money without serving ads and without requiring me to pay out-of-pocket (unlikely) or (B) Facebook starts serving ads I want to consume. (Welcome to native advertising.)

Facebook's problems, which are my problems, are solved by opting for choice #4: use an ad-blocker.
Now this seems going to end very shortly
Indeed. An oversight on my part.
4. Use Facebook anyways, and render its markup on my computer and my internet connection as I see fit.
I'd happily pay for Facebook, but then it shouldn't just be ad-free, I'd also want to be fairly sure that my info isn't sold to third parties either (not my existing data at FB, nor new data collected after I became a paying customer).
Is option 2 even possible at the moment?
No -- admittedly I'm mixing hypotheticals with existing solutions, but the point remains valid.
> but the point remains valid.

No it doesn't, exactly the point, you can't pay them so you have no transactional or business relation, in fact one SHOULD block the ads that are forced upon you. Linkedin for example prohibit adblocking in their TOS, they can do this because you can pay them to get rid of the ads.

That wasn't the point.

The point was that Facebook's problems are de facto the user's problems. Ad-blocking is, indeed, a solution, but one can't expect Facebook to (re)act in the user's interest.

And Facebook is acting on that problem.
I don't think that this was questioned here.