[dredmorbius]

Back in the early days of banner ads, a CSS-based approach to blocking was to target images by size. Since advertising revolved around specific standards of advertising "units" (effectively: sizes of images), those could be identified and blocked. That worked well, for a time.

This is ultimately whack-a-mole. For the past decade or so, point-of-origin based blockers have worked effectively, because that's how advertising networks have operated. If the ad targets start getting unified, we may have to switch to other signatures:

- Again, sizes of images or DOM elements.

- Content matching known hash signatures, or constant across multiple requests to a site (other than known branding elements / graphics).

- "Things that behave like ads behave" as defined by AI encoded into ad blockers.

- CSS / page elements. Perhaps applying whitelist rather than blacklist policies.

- User-defined element subtraction.

There's little in the history of online advertising that suggests users will simply give up.

[thrwaway69]

Some of those techniques will make the whole experience slow compared to the current network request filters and dns blockers.

And that will probably be blocked or severely locked down by your most popular browser, chrome.

I don't need to give advertisers data myself when someone else I know can. I really doubt it is easy to throw off chrome monopoly at this stage. I presume we will see a chilling effect before anything moves like IE.

[dredmorbius]

At this point, I'll take slow over shitshow.