Like Facebook, But Not the Ads? No FAds!

eric — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:44:17 -0600

I like Facebook. I do. The problem I have is with the ads. I'm a happily married man and father and I don't want to see ads targeting me with large-chested women, scantily clad women with sports cars and risque mafia-related ads.

I know a lot of people would say, "Well, don't use Facebook, then. It's their platform and they can monetize it how they want."

I agree. Here's my problem, though.

Facebook misleads users into thinking that closing those ads and selecting one of these choices to classify the ad: Misleading, Offensive, Uninteresting, Irrelevant, Repetitive, or Other will mean you won't see those types of ads anymore. The dialog box states: "Thanks for your feedback. Over time, this information helps us deliver more relevant ads to our users."

Now, this may be true for the future, but it doesn't do anything to date as I still have the same ads showing up over and over no matter how I classify them. If I find an ad offensive or misleading and because of the form they have provided, I tend to expect that I'm not going to see that type of ad anymore. On the contrary, I seem to see them MORE when I do try to get rid of the offensive ones. (I believe this is part of the reson why so many have abandoned MySpace.)

No FAds!

To fix this for myself, I've been working on a stylesheet to load into their my browser to hide Facebook ads. Thus No FAds! was born.

Turn This:

Into This:

To Use

Save the nofads.css stylesheet to your computer
Open your browser of choice and load it as your custom stylesheet.
Viola! No more pesky ads

This is a work in progress and I welcome any ideas on this as I expand it.

To be clear, I don't have a problem with Facebook making money off of their platform. I just have a problem with misleading your users into thinking they have control over the types of ads they see (based on the dialogs Facebook provides). If this changes, I'm more than happy to ditch my NoFAds.css file.