ELI5: How are these massive adblock lists kept updated so regularly?
Do they get some kind of real-time feed that tells them "hey this URL popped up in the web today, but it is a tracker, so block it", or is this exercise is mostly helped by the crowd ?
As someone who runs a popular blocklist collection, I've come to find that most of the MASSIVE lists are people who collate a whole bunch of lists together and then promote their "one size fits all" solution alongside their donation link. There are very few original high quality ad-blocking lists maintained (where originality is defined as a sizeable amount of unique entries not shared by other lists) and almost all don't appear to openly discuss the magic sauce behind their lists, outside of the obvious case of user submissions.