But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day. There is no analogy to interstitial pages with ads like in Forbes some time ago with the button Continue to your article: it would be infuriating if you had to view an ad before being able to use the subway ticketing system. You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen. You don’t have pinkertons following you to learn your habits and show you “relevant” ads. If you walk into a grocery store wearing sunglasses, the clerk will not stand in front of you and say “I am sorry, please remove your shades before continuing because ads support our store and you need to see them.”
But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well.
But they do. You have to mentally process the incoming data first, then discard it. It's a waste of attention, especially with mind-catching ads you can't figure out immediately. Sometimes they are as blocking as browser pop-ups, e.g.: logotypes (or even full ads) displayed before a responsive UI is shown to you, duty-free zones in the airports, and so on. I am pretty sure we will soon have real-life targeted billboards. Even with the current tech, what prevents a webcam with NN to recognize if you're wearing sneakers and tell the display along your way to show some beanie ads, especially if it's cold outside? If you walk into a grocery store you are bombarded with displays outright, and before checking out you are tasked with cross-sale suggestions. All this crap blocks your mind and steals your attention.
> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. … Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
-- Adaptation from a Banksy essay in defense of remixing ("vandalising") public advertisements.
Fundamentally, all these ads share the quality of showing people content they didn't ask for to lure consumers into spending money they otherwise wouldn't have. Why the wouldn't I block them everywhere? It's disgusting.
I know many people like to argue that they're a "necessary evil" to pay for content, but I have little patience for this argument because it assumes that vendors are entitled to the success of their flawed business models, and people should give up freedoms to support the industry.
>They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else.
wow, it is like they know me!
but anyway, I'm all for blocking ads when you go out, and hopefully once they can do that the technology can be extended to allow blocking of people who are not sexy enough, because imagine what I could do with the power of invisibility!
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girifriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers" and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them
any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
If browser ads had a real-life equivalent, they would be more like that creep who suddenly pops in front of attractive women in the street trying to grab their phone numbers, and no matter what you do you'll never get rid of him and he'll be following you on your way back home (probably to provide you with a "better user experience").
If all web ads were limited to a static gif here or there in the corner of a web page, I don't think adblock plus would be a thing at all.
ad blocking would absolutely be a thing still. Fundamentally an ad blocker is just a filter on what portions of web page get loaded. It is my intention to increase the signal to noise ratio on the things I experience, so I would filter these things out myself at the brain level. I'm just automating the process and offloading it to the browser, and there will always be strong incentive to automate things.
If ads were just gifs or pngs that loaded from the same site, did not noticably impact page load times, and were displayed alongside the main content (analagous to ads in a magazine) I would likely not bother blocking them (and blocking would be more difficult: how would the blocking software know that they were ads and not part of the main content of the page?)
I block ads when they do things like take over focus, are distractingly animated, slow down the page, overload my CPU, etc.
I would also not bother blocking them… I intentionally tolerated ads for years, the flash era was pretty bad… but almost quaint compared to the onslaught of ads that know everything from who your friends are, how much money you make, and what dandruff shampoo you use… (plus that one time you googled “butt plugs”)
and for what? so they can still occupy the majority of screen space and intentionally distract me?
yeah give me the buzzing “swat the fly” ads instead please
They definitely do. Ads in the subway carry an outstanding cognitive load. A simple experiment helps understand this: just walk through a super ad-heavy subway (Paris or London) then through a much lighter one (Vienna). The difference is significant. The mental experiment is literally different.
The only reason ads exist is to reprogram our brains and make us want things we didn't previously want. It's brainwashing. People who say ads in public spaces do not bother them might be easier influenced than they understand. I often hear people say ads don't work on them but we're all susceptible to being manipulated.
Indeed, ads aren't charity. If companies are spending $1,000 per adult in the United States for advertising (which the are, from the figures I can find), that's because they either:
A. Expect the ads will manipulate spending habits to bring in more than $1,000 of profits per adult on average (with the actual spending needed to reach that profit being far in excess of $1,000, considering profit is only a fraction of revenue).
B. Don't expect the ads to manipulate spending habits, but are stuck in game theory hell where companies waste a vaste amount of resources (10x the budget of NASA) merely to maintain the status quo, because any company that doesn't will fall behind its rivals.
C. Some mixture of A and B.
The cost to the public is mental intrusion (if mental intrusion didn't work, companies wouldn't buy ads), financial (in case A), and also the bad habits that advertising companies and the companies that deliver them push on us so that we can consume more (sedentary culture of watching TV to consume more ads, mindless browsing to consume more ads, encouraging political fights with family to increase engagement and consume more ads).
It's hard to not come to the conclusion that advertising is a huge blight on modern society, and exactly the kind of thing collective action by a society should be fighting against.
Unfortunately the ticket covers much less than the infrastructure cost. Then public spending covers some of it but ads are needed to fill the gap. Public money that would be spent to cover the ad revenue would not be spent elsewhere (in a hopefully useful way). I hate subway ads just as much as you, but wanted to make this reality check.
Good point, but I wonder what % of say, the NY MTA’s operating budget is funded with ads. I feel like these things are sold for way cheaper than they should be.
I think I remember reading that the naming rights for Citibike were sold for like 40 million dollars. Seems like an incredible bargain for literally thousands of mobile ads all over the city.
I remember being blown away by how much a subway ticket costs in London (2.5£). One would think it should cover a substantial chunk of the cost of running the whole thing. Still, there are ads, everywhere, unending craploads of 'em.
we stopped watching tv in our home a few years ago, coupled with pi hole and ublock origin across all browsers, i personally do not see ads and neither does most of my family. if i do see them at a friends house or somewhere, it is a really jarring experience.
i was at a friends house recently and they were watching tv. i found the ad break as a horrifying experience. the volume is turned too high, you can't skip it and it becomes irritating after the third ad break in an hour.
In 2012, USA tried to implement the CALM act, which mandated content and ads to be at the same level (“A/85”), but it didn’t play out because ads are measured individually whereas a program is measured as a whole. Complaints to the FCC are still about the loudness of ads… See https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudnes...
A while back I built an ad/not-an-ad classifier for TV frames based purely on pixels (i.e. not prior knowledge of specific ads). One of the interesting findings -- perhaps obvious in retrospect -- was that ad frames were on average brighter than content frames.
I’m sure it’s out there, but I had a similar idea to make an audio device plugin like soundflower to pipe audio through and automatically mute when it detects an ad. We really need an OpenWrt-like project for smart TVs so that you could run something like what you created to mute the sound and display art during ad breaks.
How accurate did you get? Are frame-to-frame probabilities pretty independent? I wonder if you can hit some arbitrary threshold by implementing something like "n frames in a row."
The time series of frame probabilities is of course highly autocorrelated, but I never bothered to model that due to lack of interest. From memory, a simple single-frame classifier was >95% accurate (this was quite a few years ago, mind you). In my small-sample and not very rigorous testing, this was higher than human rates. Turns out that on average it's pretty hard to tell an ad from content just by looking at the pixels of a single frame.
I am quite confident that it wouldn't be too hard to build an ad detection ML model that would have near-perfect accuracy. That said, an approach based on algorithmically detecting repeated segments of lengths consistent with ad spots would work just as well, if not better.
P.S. One thing I thought was really interesting was that the classifier -- that was only ever shown a binary label (ad/not-an-ad) -- learnt an embedding that grouped together entire categories of things across TV networks and geographies (studio news, weather, traffic reports etc).
I don't know much about TV broadcasting, so sorry if this is dumb, but what's a segment length? I assume it is either: lengths of a particular shot, or (probably more likely) it is some extra information that is broadcast with the TV signal about how long a chunk of broadcast is?
I like the idea of looking at pixels, just because that's the sort of info that gets sent down the HDMI cable and will always be available.
There exist inline insertion signalling standards (e.g. SCTE-35). These could be used for the insertion of ads. However, none of this signalling typically makes it into the final over-the-air or cable broadcast and so is not useful for ad detection.
To your question on segment lengths, ad spots have specific, predefined duration. In the US these are typically 15s, 30s and 60s (sometimes 45s). This property could be exploited to detect ads. Consider, for example, a video segment that's exactly 30s in duration and is repeated many times over multiple TV channels. It is very likely to be an ad.
We do have real life targeted ads. The NYC Link terminals, for example, can detect tons of data about the devices people carry, and the comings and goings of the owners, and sometimes link them to their ad profiles. ads for display can then be selected accordingly.
This isn't even particularly new tech, they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to, and this was in the early 2000s
> they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to
Any idea how this was supposed to work? I don't know how that information would leak out unless it was just listening for the audio from a car with windows rolled down.
An archive of the company behind that tech [1], has this to say:
> Each car radio sends out a signal at a frequency higher than the one it is receiving from the radio station. When a car passes by one of the MobilTrak sensors, the sensor picks up on the signal to determine what the driver is listening to on the radio
And US6813475B1 seems to be the patent behind the tech.
If they ever really could find that sort of signal in the noise of the real world, I've got to imagine that improved tech for in-car radios, not to mention people listening to their phones via Bluetooth and SiriusXM, has rendered it even more broken.
Most radio receivers transmit a very weak signal slightly higher than the carrier frequency of the station tuned as a result of how they enhance received signals. Look up superheterodyne for details.
It's a side effect of how tuning works (local oscillator), and the signal is extremely weak, very little of it radiates out due to some components / PCB traces behaving as an accidental (poor) antenna.
Still, with good enough equipment it can be detected even from some distance.
What annoys me most is advertising on highway and in traffic. I am not allowed to use a smartphone because it distracts me; fair enough. What about safety on the road though? All these signals are pure noise, irrelevant to traffic.
Safety takes a back seat to corporate profits of course. Who cares if some schmuck crashes his car because he was looking at a billboard depicting a nearly nude woman, right? The need to sell products to these people is all consuming, they just gotta do it and all other concerns don't really matter to them.
I would say the same about anything on the road that isn't specifically for safety/traffic shaping.
> They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways.
Even some of traffic shaping signage are specifically designed to be that way.
More importantly, this is about a freedom of expression. If I want to yell about my fruit farm or hold a sign for your product; is that different? How does the freedom to express yourself contend with some idea of limiting "commercial advertisement"?
Safety on the road is more important that the freedom to annoy drivers. Also, you can express yourself elsewhere instead of on the road. And, on top of that, a driver doesn't have the freedom to completely ignore the expression (not yet). I can ignore some yelling fellow on a market (never liked that annoying, noisy shit either btw) with noisecancelling earplugs. One can't drive with a blindfold. I'm sure there is gonna be QQ over AR in driving, partly justified. However, less is more. Plus, AR could allow you to get traffic signs in a HUD. Can't miss them.
> Safety on the road is more important that the freedom to annoy drivers.
That wasn't the point, although you are tacitly advancing the idea that annoying signage is acceptable whenever you think it's fine AND what you "watch" is voluntary. You're halfway there. There's not much to be gained from logically stepping you through it.
> Also, you can express yourself elsewhere instead of on the road.
Given the kind of answers you are providing, I don't think you've thought any of these things through. GL with whatever.
I have thought it through very well, and my logic is consistent. Acceptible or not depends on 1) if it is useful in the situation (traffic signs are, for driver safety; advertising isn't) 2) whether the receiver can block the ad with technology (not yet possible on road with advertising). You can ridicule me all you want. 33% of all internet users decided to use an ad blocker. They do not want to get distracted by silly skyscrapers, popups, flashy sounds, large irrelevant banners, and so on and so forth.
> If you can be materially distracted from driving by a banner on the side of the road, then you shouldn't be on the road in the first place.
So if I browse a website and get distracted by all the ads, it is my own fault? This is victim blaming, as well as a dishonest take on the matter. There's not one banner on the road. Its distraction upon distraction upon distraction. Its like with smartphones. The problem isn't that someone quickly glances on their smartphone once. It is continuous distraction, on the wrong moment.
> If you are annoyed by a passive banner on the side of a road, then I wonder if you must be annoyed by someone saying Hi passing by. Noisy shit, eh?
This has a social function, its a two way benefit. Advertising isn't. Its a one-way communication. You can't talk back. Also, I already explained we can filter sound completely.
> So if I browse a website and get distracted by all the ads, it is my own fault?
At a certain point, yes - if the ad doesn’t take a major portion of your screen and is non-interactive. You are not a victim - there are reasonable boundaries of being “annoyed”.
> This has a social function, its a two way benefit. Advertising isn't. Its a one-way communication.
Not really. You could’ve easily claimed “I don’t GAF who you are and don’t say Hi to me”. The one-sidedness is an arbitrary constraint you’ve put to try to reject this scenario - it should have no bearing on the annoyingness of the sound waves.
> At a certain point, yes - if the ad doesn’t take a major portion of your screen and is non-interactive. You are not a victim - there are reasonable boundaries of being “annoyed”.
That's a too liberal definition. Consider our boundaries getting broken. I am not talking about one ad banner on the a website. I am talking about skyscrapers, pop-ups (actually banned by default on modern browsers), multiple flashy GIFs as banner (like in the 90s), sounds in ads (working on a tab you're not even on!). These are all examples of annoying ads. I'd care less for an ad which is obvious like how Google text Ads used to be on Google Search.
> You could’ve easily claimed “I don’t GAF who you are and don’t say Hi to me”.
Yeah, its funny how in USA its normal that if I go in a grocery store, people ask 'how are you' but they don't care about the answer, they're obliged to say it. I'm glad we don't have that nonsense dishonesty here in my country.
'Hi', however, is fairly neutral, in this example is person to person (instead of tech to person), and means no harm. Its a greeting, supposedly to start contact, or to initialize a business transaction (such as payment). Its as honest and functional as it gets!
> Yeah, its funny how in USA its normal that if I go in a grocery store, people ask 'how are you' but they don't care about the answer, they're obliged to say it
Wow, in most cases this just isn't true. Granted some employees are ordered to use it as a greeting, but most people who ask genuinely care, and there is no social expectation to ask. Perhaps the culture in the USA is just a bit more personable than you have a theory of mind for? If you really don’t believe me, try answering the question in the negative, theres a reason why its like a joke that you have to respond positively. You’ll instantly be asked whats bothering you, and most people won’t let go easily. They genuinely want to try to cheer you up if you aren’t doing well and if they think they can reasonably help you, generally will.
Been there, done it (Southern Bay Area 2005-2007). I am honest by default when it comes to questions. There is practically no interest in a conversation. You are supposed to say 'fine, how are you'. Its like regarding tipping culture as voluntary: fake.
> I am talking about skyscrapers, pop-ups (actually banned by default on modern browsers), multiple flashy GIFs as banner (like in the 90s), sounds in ads (working on a tab you're not even on!).
The issue was about the real world anyway; in the case of a website, you were the one who request the website be displayed on your computer (that's what the browser does).
In the real world, however, ads are simple banners like the Google text Ads.
> I'm glad we don't have that nonsense dishonesty here in my country.
It's not dishonest even if your interpretation were true, because both parties know it's just another form of greeting.
There's something different about streets and web. I'm not sure but on my laptop i kinda expect things to go to the point, fast. A street is not a mean to an end. So a bus stop with some ad.. doesn't really changes everything.
Consider web ads more like annoying bus boys trying to get you to order something in their restaurant by stepping in front of you and mirroring every move.
A street is as much a mean to an end as a laptop. I use streets to get from point A to point B, much like you use your laptop to arrive from state A to state B. I never have an intention to see ads when I go outside. Sometimes I use streets for fun, to stroll without aim, but never I go outside to "see some ads," much like you likely never open your laptop with an intention to see an ad.
These are not arguments but additional trails of my thoughts on the topic:
You went outside, you motivated yourself, and passing by a sign is not much now. My laptop is a bit of a promise of lazy direct access, which is more at odds with the ads.
Also street ads have been planned, there are usual spots and looks. Web is a bit wilder.
I don't know if I would call it an accessibility problem for me personally, but yeah as someone who has trouble staying focused, a moving screen or flashy ad is almost impossible not to look at, and extremely intrusive. Using the web without an ad blocker is an absolute nightmare for me.
Most cities do limit the sorts of flowers they plant.
> We cannot make the entire world ideal for everyone.
Huh? So just f** accessibility and leave everyone on their own? I'd understand if you'd argued that it wouldn't be feasible to do a particular thing, but such general statements leave a very bad taste.
Yes!! It's hard enough to maintain attention as it is. Last thing we need is entitled corporations stealing it every chance they get for the sake of profit.
I have ADHD and as long as my wife insists on talking to me while I'm driving billboards are a rounding error (and to be honest I'm more likely to be distracted by interesting architecture than advertising)
I think it makes navigation harder for me; I notice that it's a lot harder for me to parse out actually relevant information in busy spaces like airports/cities. Particularly while doing something like driving, because I'm juggling a lot of information in those situations and paying more attention to the people around me, rather than just focusing on signs.
For a long time I thought that was all just due to crowds/stress and nothing else, but I'm increasingly convinced that part of it is just that it's harder for me to pick out when scanning a room where the signs are the indicate where I'm supposed to be. Also seems to make it more likely that I'll walk past an indicator or miss something while I'm trying to navigate the space. I'm always paranoid inside of these busier spaces about whether I'm going to miss something important and end up walking in the opposite direction of where I need to go.
It may depend a lot on not just the area but also what you're personally used to; navigation in these spaces are a skill that people get better at over time. I suspect that some of the difficulties become less difficult as people's brains get better at filtering things out or recognizing indicators that they need to zero in on. In the same way that after a while playing a game you start to instinctively zero in on certain UX choices or indicators in a level, people also instinctively start to zero in on how a city indicates important information (is the sign always green, does it tend to show up in a specific place). So this might also be more of an early-user UX problem for people who don't go into the city all the time or who are particularly susceptible to getting distracted by motion/colors.
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There's a lot of research that brains are really good at learning to filter out advertising; part of the arms race in advertising isn't just with ad blockers, it's figuring out how to present ads in increasingly unusual ways where your brain won't just do pattern recognition and literally just refuse to process or register them. Human brains are heckin good at pattern recognition.
But that means that there is an arms race with advertisers trying to figure out what the next evolution is with billboards or how to trick your brain to register things, and it means that people who are less equipped to do that filtering or are just unfamiliar with the space often end up getting thrown in the deep end because their brains aren't trained to do that filtering yet, or are trained to filter different things.
It very much depends on where you live of course. Thankfully, most places regulate public advertisement to some extent, but the level of regulation will differ from place to place.
Everybody draws the line somewhere else, but I hope you agree that "stealing your attention" is different from requiring an active action to be able to continue onward towards whatever task you were trying to accomplish (even if you might consider both unacceptable).
I strongly disagree, his comment is not an ad, it is content. We all came to this page looking for comments like that. Every single experience in life changes the way I think and feel, that doesn't mean everything is an ad, the defining characteristic of an ad is the fact that it is unwanted, that it is imposed on people as an attention tax imposed on some other experience we actually want.
Another difference not mentioned by sibling comments is that ads are purchased. They are necessarily the domain of the well-funded and therefore already-powerful, and whose purpose is to typically to enhance their purchasers wealth or power. They are a tool for inequality.
Not really. Comments are comments. Not ads. You came here to read the comments. Nobody paid some ad company to show it to you and force the ideas into your head. The fact you agreed with the comment doesn't mean it's an ad, it means you found it persuasive.
The difference is that his "ad" is relevant; you are on a comment thread about ads reading his (relevant) reply, similar to seeing an ad about a phone in a phone store.
In contrast, ads in most public places are completely irrelevant and unwelcome.
> But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day.
If I run around you all day shouting expletives at you, you might consider that there's nothing that I do that fundamentally gets in your way for as long as I keep a certain distance. But it will be annoying, exhausting and likely detrimental to your mental health in the long term.
There's nothing inherently offensive about advertisement, IMO. Display the products you can sell me and their prices in your storefront window. Publish informational ads in categorized directories. Advertisement insofar that it lets consumers stay aware of the available alternatives for the products they need and use is a good thing, but when advertisers are no longer content with my demand for consumption and feel like they should create that demand through manipulation, they've outstayed their welcome.
>If I run around you all day shouting expletives at you, you might consider that there's nothing that I do that fundamentally gets in your way for as long as I keep a certain distance. But it will be annoying, exhausting and likely detrimental to your mental health in the long term.
But that's different. Ads in real life are passive. They are part of the environment like the color of the house. They don't actively interact with you specifically.
>Advertisement insofar that it lets consumers stay aware of the available alternatives for the products they need and use is a good thing
And the vast majority of people will never ever check that to find relevant things to them.
> But that's different. Ads in real life are passive. They are part of the environment like the color of the house.
So let's say that the "color of my house" is obscene and disturbing imagery designed specifically to elicit an emotional response in viewers for the sake of making them feel bad. Point still stands; you don't have to actively get in someone's way to be a nuisance that's detrimental to the quality of life and leaves people worse off than without it.
It's also worth mentioning that advertisement overwhelmingly refers to its targets in second person exactly to create the subtle illusion of addressing you specifically. To some small degree our brains probably don't recognize the difference.
> And the vast majority of people will never ever check that to find relevant things to them.
If I'm not actively looking for things that will improve my life, perhaps I am already content with my situation, and the things in question actually aren't that relevant to me.
* In a mall touchscreen navigation kiosk, an ad is shown when you first wake up the device by touching it.
* At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow.
* On Starbucks screen menus, the whole menu is periodically replaced with a video ad, forcing you to wait until its end to finish making your choice.
> You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen.
In the biggest international airport in my country, there are now periodical Covid-19 "info spots" interrupting the display of timetables, check-in desk and gate information screens.
> * At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow.
And they've only added (most of) these recently. What they've done for me is is increased the time it takes to check out by at least a third. They're paying for the ads with lengthened lines, which is a little shocking when talking about the automated option, because customers choose the automated option to save time.
It might be a bad expectation for us to have. McDonalds might find it more profitable to start ripping out seats (especially with covid), and adding more automated checkout stations. Have us spend 5-10 minutes ordering. Offer discounts if we spend 10 additional minutes ordering and watching ads. Enter us into a sweepstakes while we order that pays every half-hour in free food.
You could cram a lot of 2-sided touchscreen stations in the footprint of a McDonalds; people standing everywhere like a pachinko parlor, or a storefront full of video poker machines.
They probably did the math: they don't need the order taking machine to take less time than making the meal itself. If they made it so you could place an order in 1 second you'd still be in their store for a while. "Might as well bombard them with ads!"
They can even do A-B testing on the ads. Even if they lose some customers in line they can know they make more sales to compensate. Also they only really care about the 10% of customers who are totally addicted to the product and buy 90% of it. Those ones aren't leaving the line.
Don't know what mcdonalds you're in, but most of them combine the kiosk revamp with cuts to the amount of staff hours. It's definitely not faster to join the single line in 5th place than use one of the 3 (of 5) vacant kiosks.
Ah, but the KPI the execs are measuring for the kiosks is probably "self serve orders" so the more awkward they make the alternatives the better the numbers look
The McDonald's nearby doesn't allow counter orders anymore. You can only order through the kiosk, or using the phone app.
Both of them have numerous problems, and it's more time-efficient to order Uber Eats. But that has massive added fees.
I considered signing up to be an Uber Eats driver and filtering for anyone within 1 meter of me so I could pick up my own orders and save time(Uber's app is better), but there's not enough precision to do that.
So I ditched McDonald's and mostly drink Soylent nowadays.
These pumps with “Gas Station TV” are so annoying that I go out of my way to get my gas at a different station. I’ve wondered if it actively drives other customers away too or if I’m just very sensitive to it.
Yep, me too. A new gas station was beng built and I drove by it many times. When I noticed it opened, I got gas there, and they had ads on the pump! Shocking at the time. I decided never to go there again.
I've found you can often mute those screens if you press one of the buttons beside the screen. Apparently it's different depending on the machine, so just mash them all I guess.
I've seen this too. I don't think you can find the option unless you keep swatting at the screen like a crazy person, so irritated at the ad that you're barely paying attention to the slightly dangerous act of fueling your vehicle. I think I've found it on every one I've used. I recall one having a mute that wasn't a proper mute, but instead would unmute itself after about 30 seconds, causing you to have to remute it. I think I screamed.
The gas station tv has never bothered me but I'm also able to tune it out completely. As I think about it, I struggle to even know which gas stations use it around me.
The fist time I saw that my first instinct was to set the pump on fire. Pure rage. I'll leave with only fumes when I see that. Fortunately it's not that popular here.
If it ever becomes ubiquitous, something's going to have to be done about it. I'd never convict anyone of destroying one of those ad screens.
> * At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow.
Yeah lately this is really bad. Are you sure you don't want to order another side? And then you have to scroll to the "nope" button which is obviously off-screen. Am I sure I don't want to give 50 cents to the Ronald McDonald stuff? Piss off. I don't trust them to keep most of it themselves for 'overhead'.
> In the biggest international airport in my country, there are now periodical Covid-19 "info spots" interrupting the display of timetables, check-in desk and gate information screens.
Yeah this is really annoying in shops here too. Every minute or so they remind people to use the sanitiser or wear the mask. Yet some of the staff don't even do this. It just serves no purpose, other than virtue signalling. It becomes background noise. If someone doesn't know they have to wear the mask by now they have been living in a cave or something.
It's amazing really. There has to be a business school case study there in how you go from being the trail-blazer and biggest success story in fast food, to one of the worst and getting worse with everything you do.
McDonald's hamburgers and fries are way less greasy than most fast food joints, and the kiosk allows easily reducing the quantity of sauce in the burgers and salt in the fries. As such, it can be relatively healthy from a macronutrients perspective, while satisfying fast food cravings.
The vegetable salads are very fresh and pretty good, which can accommodate people on strict diets.
The kiosks also free workers to clean up tables more frequently and assist customers in various ways.
Of course this can vary from location to location, especially as so many McDonald's are franchised. But the actual experience at my local spots is enjoyable nowadays.
It's also a school case study in showing how regardless they've gone down hill in food quality, in service quality, etc, their customers continue to patronize them.
Maybe it's just me getting older, but I used to eat at McDonalds several times a week, at least. I have maybe eaten there once or twice in all of 2021, I'm not even sure I ate there at all. Same with my friends. It's just awful in every way now, from the experience to the food itself.
And in airplanes. Airlines like to use those screens in front of each seat as billboards. They're on by default and don't time out, so they keep cycling bright ads while you're trying to sleep. Sure, you can turn yours off, but most of your neighbors won't bother changing the default on state.
Has any American budget airline reached the depths Ryanair goes to make every last cent?
They don't have screens on the seats (too expensive), just a printed advert. But they do play audio adverts on the PA system a couple of times per flight, typically for things you can buy on board.
The fact that people have so much difficulty on identifying blocking ads that are actually in real life (like changing the shafts configuration of a market) is pretty good evidence that they aren't as much annoying.
Analog ads have an installation & maintenance cost associated with them. Digital ads don't - if you have a screen anywhere, it can be turned into an ad with little effort and will require no ongoing maintenance.
Exactly. Ads are basically pollution. Digital (and network-connected) ads drive the cost of polluting to near zero, so you see them everywhere: on transit, in gas stations, on your TV's UI, in your operating system, etc. Analog ads actually have a deployment cost, so they don't pollute the space as much.
Have you run into the IRL pop up ads? People walking in front of you, interrupting your UX for a quick "5 min conversation" about their chosen cause? These pesky ads get through my blockers no matter how often I update my filters.
Actually yes. There are these "tea promoters" on the main street in my city. They would get in your way, and sometimes even literally grab you, to "ask a question", which is inevitably "do you drink tea?". This is a scam scheme where the next step is to take you to their store nearby, offer you a sample of their tea, and then it surprisingly turns out that this needs to be paid for and costs an exorbitant amount. Of course, this breaks every consumer protection law possible, but way too many people are amenable to guilt-tripping.
I either ignore them and walk around them, or loudly tell them to fuck off. If only the police would act on this as vehemently as on anything even remotely related to opposition politics...
The local cable co. has set up shop in random places throughout the closest grocery store to me for a number of months recently. I can't stand it; it's like walking onto a used car lot to buy groceries.
An effective way of revenge could be to pretend (actually, if they're a cable company pretending may not be necessary) to have a bad experience with them and ask about your money back or why you've been overcharged/etc, especially if their colleagues are pitching to another mark within earshot.
Sounds like a typical stroll down Market Street. Never a shortage of people trying to get you to sign up and donate money to some cause, and they won’t take “no thanks” for an answer.
I actually find those pretty easy to block, by just not engaging with them at all. Being polite is only for gentlefolk, riff-raff have no requirement for it.
One big problem with your argument is that the word "yet" should be added almost everywhere. And in fact other responses have pointed out that there are plenty of places where ads are delaying interactive purchases. It's only a matter of time until it is in almost all the places you mentioned.
For as long as there's no good pushback/regulation, there'll always be someone willing to pay to insert ads somewhere and someone willing to accept their money, because there's almost no immediate downside and the amount of money offered keeps going up until you fold. It happens continually, everywhere, that more and more ads, and more and more intrusive ones, keep appearing, and defending the status quo won't help us.
I don't know if the "trend is going in this direction", because I would never go to that gas station again after seeing that once. I'm sure most other people would too.
In practice, not so much. Every gas station in my area installed these things, and they are busy as they've ever been. You would have to go well out of your way to avoid ads.
I think that most people don't recognize the harm that these memes can cause. Most don't see them consciously at all. I realized at some point that I am what I label a "compulsive reader". When I see a sign, it intrudes into my perception and I have to read it. Many people don't even consciously see these words/signs. It is important to realize that not all brains work the same when weighing the costs of allowing theses intrusions.
My best friend is a former smoker. He's quit many times. The biggest struggle he has is when anti-smoking commercials show up, being reminded of smoking makes him want to smoke.
They don't prevent going about the day, they make going about your day more difficult.
I guess the argument here is that those ads are designed for men, but they're designed to prey on an extremely primitive, kind of circular logic: "you would look like this if you bought this underwear." Sort of a "this man is desirable to women, please act like him."
I am pretty iffy about that kind of detailed psychological reading into people, it's not completely clear to me that people internalize those ads in that way, and I suspect a lot of people internalize ads completely differently from each other, so I question if any of those explanations are actually generalizable. But I guess it's somewhat reasonable, maybe, to make the argument that male model ads are trying to say something like, "this is the clothing that attractive men wear, and if you were attractive you'd buy this." Or even, "this man is attractive and thus obviously has his life put together, and maybe you'd feel more like him if you had his brand of underwear on."
But I'm much more sympathetic to and supportive of extremely broad statements like, "both sexy women ads and sexy men ads influence beauty standards in sometimes unhealthy/unobtainable directions regardless of the intent/purpose of the ad." I feel like getting super-specific about what exactly is running through a man's mind when they see an ad for underwear is when we start to get uncomfortably close to pseudoscience. But the much broader statement feels a lot less like pseudoscience, it does seem fairly clear that beauty standards are influenced by advertising (and by other things too, advertising is just one aspect of this).
I doubt there was a global women poll on this issue. And strongly suspect even if existed it wouldn't show that majority of women even care. You are welcome to change my mind
But ads in real life do mar the landscape, the real world, with their presence. You can drive through the countryside, and have the idyllic rolling hills scarred by a giant poster for the nearest McDonald's.
We don’t allow things on your property to emit all kinds of things without limitations. Smells, gases, smoke, radiation, etc. Why is visible EM radiation an exception? In fact it isn’t: try displaying pornography on your property.
Advertising is mind rape. Not a single person who looks at ads has consented to giving corporations their attention, much less have their minds violated when they insert their little brands and offers.
They are not entitled to our attention. Advertising should be illegal no matter what. Disruptiveness just makes this unacceptable practice even worse.
They should be illegal no matter what? How would commerce function? How would one make a new business known? I hate ads too, but I don't think your extreme stance stands a chance at popularity.
Word of mouth? Designated market places? Who knows? In the end it doesn't really matter. As long as it's not advertising.
Businesses aren't entitled to attention. They aren't entitled to being known. They aren't entitled to success. They aren't even entitled to existence. I simply don't understand how some business's concerns can possibly override everything else. Are we supposed to live in some cyberpunk hell with noise as far as the eye can see just so a bunch of corporations can make themselves known? If resisting this makes me extreme, then so be it.
I don't think you have thought this through. Businesses are peoples livelihoods. You have a lot of problems to solve with an intervention like you're suggesting. Based on the "I don't care, figure it out" attitude, I'm guessing you are still pretty young and can't see very far past your face with issues this complex. Not aiming to be rude, but this kind of half-baked, largely emotional argument detracts from the value of discussions, and drives away thoughtful commentators.
That's right, I didn't think it through. There's exactly one thing I'm absolutely sure of: advertising is unacceptable. Nothing emotional about it. I've recognized the fact these companies want to subject people to their ads without consent. I decided I won't accept that.
Also, I don't have to solve anything. Society decides the rules and it's the businesses who have to figure out how to adapt to them. It's literally their problem. The fact it's gonna make life harder for them is irrelevant. The fact advertising makes them money changes nothing about the inherent unfairness of it.
If you think there's more to it, you're welcome to elaborate. Saying "but how would society function" or "it's complex, you can't just ban ads" doesn't elevate discussion either. Of course it will function and of course we can do it, all we have to do is decide. There are places that actually have done just that and as far as I know they're doing just fine.
This is the biggest example, it's even been posted here on HN which is how I found out about it:
Businesses survived just fine before they started spamming people with their noise, they will keep on surviving once the noise gets banned. Since I've started researching this I've found there are so many cities in my country that have prohibited stuff like pamphlets, loudspeakers, signs and billboards. I have absolutely no doubt it led to immediate quality of life improvements. People here have suggested that I start getting involved in my city's government in order to try to improve the situation in my town as well, and I agree with them. I will give it my best shot.
Ads are everywhere you go on the streets. They lure your attention span with bright colors and LEDs which may create accidents. They reinforce a sense of need to consume and/or a feeling of being inappropriate as a person. Supermarkets will try very hard to "give" you their customer card so they can collect more detailed info about you and profile your habits.
Companies often place adverts illegallly [0] by recruiting precarious workers who are going to face the police, not them. They'll even go as far as to cover a cycling area with a slippery material for their ads [1], or to cover historical monuments in spite of architectural regulations [2]. A multinational like Amazon will even steal a wall reserved for artists and pay goons to intimidate the population [3] in order to promote its shitty services.
Also, i don't know about the current situation in regards to this, but more than a decade ago there was a "scandal" in which public French companies wanted to setup spy cameras in advertisement panels so they could target ads and study reactions. The tiny pinkertons following you around is, unfortunately and scaringly real: https://antipub.org/ecrans-de-pub-espions-du-metro-les-assoc...
Last time i was in a big city i had the occasion to see an advertisement panel graphed with a huge red "Adblock". It was heartwarming, and reminded me that pretty much every where local people organize to sabotage advertisement panels and companies, and you should do the same in your neighborhood! I'm personally lucky enough that there's no advertisement where i live, and i think nobody from the neighborhood would let such a trend emerge.
Your opening reminded me of this piece attributed to Banksy:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Telling "lure you attention" is just a way to frame it. There are plenty of evidence that visual monotony has negative effect on mind, and FWIW in most modern urban environments (blocky, and painfully uniform) ads often do a little bit of favor by providing variance. I've been to places where street ads are heavily regulated to the point it's noticable that there are less billboards and they are more plain. Unless those are full of historical baroque, gothic/art nouveau buildings it absolutely doesn't make it more attractive (I support restricting ads in historical towns).
As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?
Well, not every roof over a busstop bench needs to look the same. With ads it does. Plant (different!) trees inplace of the billboards. Or (god forbid) just let your local graffiti-guy spray there...
Btw.: a nice info-display emits over its life around 2t of CO2 PER YEAR! Most of it in waste..
> ads often do a little bit of favor by providing variance
If your neighborhood needs ads to have variance, it says something really sad about it. You don't need gray concrete everywhere in order to build dwellings. Some cities like Cuba overflow with city gardens to feed the locals.
> As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?
Murals are not a problem: they're part of the environment, not something designed to stand out of the street (literally). As for flashing or strong lights, they are indeed a problem in my view.
For starters, let's read as written: I didn't say beautuful. Second: ok, replace ads with landscaping. One note though: ads pay for themselves, will it work with landscaping?
> For starters, let's read as written: I didn't say beautuful.
Fair, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. But I would argue that “less monotonous or plain” is not that different from “more beautiful”. I doubt you want random variety. People want variety that is interesting and nice-looking.
> One note though: ads pay for themselves, will it work with landscaping?
I’m willing to enough taxes such that we can make the places where live nice. I think most people would agree. And we mostly already do this.
Parks, tree-lined streets, modest landscaping and art, all of these things make life better and more enjoyable. They also help people feel contentment, reduce anxiety, etc.
It may be economically beneficial as well, as people may be healthier and more productive by living in a city with these types of spaces. I remember seeing some research that supports this idea. One example was patients at hospitals having better outcomes when the hospital environment was more made pleasant and beautiful (I believe it was from a Kurzgesagt video on beauty).
Reminds me of the miniseries Maniac. It portrays an "alternate future" without Javascript, etc., where targeting advertising is in fact taken to these extremes, including the "Pinkertons" idea.
But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day.
They do, in a suffuse, incremental but no less inexorable manner, in fact make "that place", "out there" -- meaning the city in which I live -- all the more uninviting and inhospitable.
Like I don't even own the backs of my own eyeballs.
> But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day.
More common than you might expect, other people here have brought up checkout processes, etc... Beyond what they have said, I want to suggest though that some of the spacing and positioning and navigation around cities/roads is limited by needing room for advertising. There's a limit to how much information you can put along the side of a road in a city, and more of that space could be devoted to more obvious navigation signs at more regular intervals if advertising wasn't taking up some of that space.
Maybe this is a stretch, but I wonder how much less stressful it would be if the biggest visual indicator on a bus stop was the actual bus stop number and not the full-page ad. In my mind, that is kind of delaying information until after you've passed through this space where you can only see the ad.
> it would be infuriating if you had to view an ad before being able to use the subway ticketing system. You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen.
Another example that springs to mind, I ride publicly funded transportation. The trains have displays inside of the train that indicate what the next stop will be. Those get interrupted by ads, if you glance up and want to see how close you are to your stop, you will likely need to sit through an ad before that information will pop up on the screen again. And that's not even in a private establishment, this is ads showing up in public space that isn't owned by any company. It's not even a 1st Amendment thing, they don't have any right to that space, we just decided to sell advertising space to those companies.
Forcing people to view ads before they enter a subway or check out at a store is definitely something companies are starting to pay attention to and would be willing to try. A few physical stores have even started to roll out non-transparent glass in frozen sections that have ads overtop, so you can't walk through the isle and look to see what the store has, you have to open each section and manually check, and the glass screens just show you ads instead.
> You don’t have pinkertons following you to learn your habits and show you “relevant” ads.
This is also kind of a fun rabbit hole to jump down, there is a surprising amount of real-world data that gets processed for advertising; stores have experimented with tracking customers as they go through isles using facial recognition and/or tracking signals emitted from devices. Most loyalty cards feed purchases into a database so you can be tracked.
And companies have been for a while now experimenting with and kind of openly talking about doing eye tracking in billboard ads in cities. To the best of my knowledge this has not actually been rolled out anywhere, but it keeps on coming up in research papers/patents/etc... and I think it's likely it will become common practice at some point.
There's a connective tissue between digital advertising in physical spaces and digital spaces, and once you start to pick apart the links, it's hard to stop seeing them. A lot of digital tracking is augmented by physical tracking, and a nontrivial amount of digital tracking/profiles gets used in situations with real-world consequences.
Some of the systems I talk about above like in-store ads are really only waiting for ways to be personalized per-customer before they can linked back into the tracking systems, and for stuff like dynamic displays, ads pre-purchase, etc... there's potential there to personalize them, which I think companies are likely to start taking advantage of.
----
> But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well.
All that being said, I do think you're completely right, and I do think this is the slightly stronger argument: excessive advertising is just plain unhealthy period.
I get into the tracking/disruption aspects of things because people respond to those aspects, but there's a downside there which is that they suggest there's a way to do pervasive advertising everywhere that would be fine if only they were more private or had skip buttons, and I honestly don't think that's true.
I dislike abusive ads a lot, but I also dislike ads, in general. I think it's unhealthy for us to have this much mental energy devoted to basically fielding corporate propaganda all the time, I think this affects our ability to devote energy to responding to things like political propaganda or researching news articles and validating facts we see online, or being charitable to other disruptions or focusing in on the world around us.
That could be a much, much longer conversation, but I think you're completely correct to kind of step back and say, "does it really matter if the physical space is completely analogous to the online space?" There are negative outcomes related to having so much of urban space devoted to trying to trick people into buying things. And I do think there are healthier ways to do that advertising, and I do think some advertising is worse than other advertising, and there is definitely a spectrum and a continuum here in how I respond to ads, but I also just think that excessive advertising is unhealthy regardless of the form it takes and I worry that when I talk about eye-tracking and loyalty cards that I might distract people from the more primitive and basic argument of "it's heckin ugly to have giant ads blocking your view of the actual products in a store, and it's heckin ugly to have a bunch of billboards for Pepsi in the middle of a public park."
You do have to view ads on subways though. I guess people don’t mind because they are waiting anyway. That interstitial ad only stops you for 3 seconds, maybe the same time it take for the ticket gate to open.
I don't understand the hate toward cookie banners. It's like if the citizens of a surveillance state complained if civilian-dressed informants had to carry a big ugly sign. Sure, the sign is ugly and everywhere; but maybe the actual problem is that there are so many informants that you have to see so many signs, rather than their signs being ugly.
Shoot the actual problem (i.e. the dark patterns and malicious compliance of the concerned websites), not the messenger.
Both are a problem in their own right. Tracking visitors to make up for your lackluster business model is abusive, but cookie banners as usually implemented are but one way to comply with regulations aimed at curtailing this. And in my book, it's a form of malicious compliance, making it equally part of the problem.
Annoying consent flows aren't compliant, at least not with the GDPR. A compliant consent flow should make it as easy to accept as it is to decline, so pre-ticked checkboxes or hiding/burying the decline option doesn't comply.
Incompetent regulators that are asleep at the wheel and still haven't done anything to punish this (GDPR went into effect in 2018) are definitely a problem though.
Even if the regulators attacked more websites it wouldn't matter. You'd just have more and more websites that block European users.
You can't expect websites to give you a pop up that asks whether they can monetize your visit or not. Everyone's going to click "refuse" because ads are annoying. As a consequence your website makes no money. At that point why run the website at all?
Regulators don't want to regulate too hard, because it would ruin all the freely available websites.
> As a consequence your website makes no money. At that point why run the website at all?
Many European websites are now proposing users to either accept cookies or buy a subscription to the website. This looks like a very sane way to address the problem to me.
> You'd just have more and more websites that block European users.
Why should I care? Market changes, adapt or disappear.
> This is not the market changing, it's a law crushing a free market that already existed.
In that case, what’s the difference between a free market and a compulsory market?
If market participants must only participate by choosing to spend or to not spend, they are beholden to the economic system, and are unfree actors in the status quo “free market” economic situation.
And yet by exercising political freedom to make themselves (more) free, these unfree participants in the “free market” somehow make the market unfree, and instead of viewing that as a benefit to market participants, you view it as a loss of freedom in the status quo “free market” to the detriment of the unfree participants.
I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, just trying to understand where you’re coming from.
And those same “unfree” participants are free to legislate what websites may or may not do with information that websites collect. The websites are similarly free to not do things that are prohibited by law in a given jurisdiction, or else not offer services to users subject to that legal jurisdiction.
There was never any “free market” status quo in the absence of regulation to begin with, either in statute or in practice. There always are forces external to the market which act upon it, and some of those forces are individuals and groups of people.
To say the free market exists, did previously exist, or could one day exist, is a truth claim I don’t see the evidence to support. Advocating for a “free market” as opposed to the status quo is both an economic and a political position, and thus should address both economic and political aspects of the issue you present.
What about this would you rather be different, and how so? Or what about this would you characterize differently?
> This is not the market changing, it's a law crushing a free market that already existed.
The same could be said about outlawing slavery. Before you scream at me, let me take a step back: of course ad-tech is by far not as horribly bad as slavery. Still the practices they established in the last decades are a violation of human rights, in the european interpretation. They track and profile humans online to a level no private investigator could do offline. And we are at the beginning of what is possible: people place network active microphones and cameras in their homes or carry them around all day. Devices they no longer control, since "no root for consumers" became a security feature. Public spaces are increasingly surveilled by networked cameras, physical advertisements in public spaces and private businesses track wireless signals of nearby phones. Privatized mass surveillance became the norm in cyberspace and the same is happening in meatspace as well. And at the same time the algorithms that guess which content best manipulates individual people into buying, voting or believing something are getting better fast and are deployed at scale.
We are at a crossroads of how society will develop, and this mentality that corporations can collect and use personal data however they like (and they like to manipulate people) is no longer acceptable. And if these corporations weren't creepy enough with their systematic stalking, governments lean more and more towards also using that data. As long as the government promises it is "just for fighting crime" people are somewhat consenting, but on the territory of my country we had two totalitarian regimes in the last century that abused data gathering at scale to identify and oppress their political opposition, to terrorize and murder them. Horrors like the STASI must never happen again. Say no to surveillance capitalism while you still can, demand a constitutional right to the protection of personal data now! Because the freedom of governments and corporations must be limited, so the freedom of the people is preserved.
The market must change, it is necessary. What we want is that you can take your smartphone and tell it that it is ok if it connects to the supermarkets augmented reality and every ad-space you walk by becomes a personalized experience, if that is your choice. That is your freedom. Don't let the ad-provider of the supermarket make that choice for you. Don't let someone tell you that freedom means you could choose to not go to the supermarket and instead grow potatos in your one room flat. That is bullshit. Fuck that free market, give us free people.
> You'd just have more and more websites that block European users.
Great! It frees up space for more respectful alternatives.
However ads are universally disliked and the problems the current ad model brings (privacy, spam/scams/malware, inappropriate/illegal content, etc) are generally universal too, so it's just a matter of time before similar regulation is enacted outside of Europe too.
> because it would ruin all the freely available websites.
Laws against theft/robbery/carjacking ruin free/below-market-rate car rental websites too, yet nobody is complaining about those because society has decided that theft is bad even if it would technically open up new business opportunities that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Why should this be any different?
> I don't understand the hate toward cookie banners.
My main issue with it is that if I disable cookies, then every single time I need to accept it. If I enable cookies then I only need to accept it one time. I think this annoying thing actually reduces security, because people are more likely to just not delete the cookies at the end of the session to avoid this annoying popup. Makes the web totally unusable if you delete the cookies regularly without a plugin to hide the cookie banner.
We already knew cookies were being used everywhere. I dont need to be told the same thing 100000 times because it makes some people feel better and altruistic.
It didn't bring any benefits and has wasted excessive amounts of my time.
First-party, non-tracking cookies do not require a cookie banner.
I'm always flabbergaste how good the propaganda machines of ads agencies is that people are actively fighting protective measure on their behalf. Nihil novi sub sole I guess, but it's fascinating to see this process happen first hand.
That's just plain false. I know many people, especially in the older, less technically literate people, who now systematically disable such analytics thanks to these banners – people who had never realised the real dimension of users tracking before this law.
It's not propaganda by ad agencies. Why make it into a conspiracy? There are pretty great tools out there that you can use for websites, such as Google analytics, but the moment you use that you're implementing a cookie banner.
Want to have ads? Cookie banner. Want to have YouTube/Twitter/whatever integration? Cookie banner.
europa.eu has a cookie banner. A website that doesn't even need to pay its own bills!
>I don't understand the hate toward cookie banners.
Because they fundamentally don't work. The EU politicians had to have known that they didn't work from previous experience, but decided to inflict us with these pop ups anyway. Their own damn website has this pop up.[0]
Reasons why cookie banners don't work:
1. They need to be implemented by the website. This means that if a website decides to ignore the cookie law they can set all the cookies they want and you won't be notified. If they are outside of the EU's jurisdiction they won't even care.
2. Targeted advertising is how a lot of websites pay the bills. This means that websites will use every trick in the book to get you to not click on the "refuse" button. Why wouldn't they? You're using their server time, but generating no revenue if you refuse. Websites will fight this process. They'll eventually lose, but the internet will either turn into a splinternet or cable TV. Ads are what make free websites work and cookies is how it happens right now.
3. Websites are made by people who aren't always well-versed in legalese and can't just hire a lawyer for everything. They don't always know whether they need a pop up or not. The safer option is to put it up there. If the EU's own website has one then probably so does yours.
4. Popups are annoying.
Cookies should be handled by the browser. Not some harebrained JavaScript.
At least twenty years ago the popups had voluptuous women for me to look at before before I closed them in annoyance. Now they're still spying on me same as before but they're irritating me while they do it.
I have never given correct information for those. I always sign up with the name of a president and the address of the White House. I’ve been using a phone number from 15 years ago for those.
>I have never given correct information for those. I always sign up with the name of a president and the address of the White House. I’ve been using a phone number from 15 years ago for those.
I believe +1 (202) 456-1414 is the number[0] you want to use.
I don't have a problem with accepting some ToS when I sign up to a service. My problem is this new law where you have to accept the ToS of every single website on the internet before you can use it, then the ad networks, the analytics services, etc. It would be like having to sign a ream of papers every time I enter a store.
The sites wouldn't need to get your consent for justifiable usage only. They actively decide they want more than that, they want to sell your data. So it's on them, the law itself is fine.
I have zero problems with ad-supported shit going out of business and making space for good, paid content. Imagine a world where content has to be so good as to convince people to take out their wallet. No more clickbait, "this video is sponsored by ShitVPN", chumboxes, etc.
Fully with you on that one. The fact of the matter is that most "free" content is fast food style content - you eat it because it's designed to be addictive. Consumers may feel like they want it, but that's just because it's there, prodding you, calling out to you, autoplaying the next video out of "convenience". If it were to disappear tomorrow, I'd likely spend more time reading old books, practicing programming for my entertainment
There was a time when the likes of YouTube and blogging were just a hobby, not a job for pseudo marketers. Replacing paid "influencers" and "content creators" with plain hobbyists again would be a wonderful thing.
I can imagine such a world. It would be cable TV with heavy region locks. The poorer parts of the world wouldn't be on it at all.
Paying for things online is still a terrible experience. You need a credit card, which isn't always easy to get outside of the rich western countries. I would never have used websites like reddit, HN, Twitter, YouTube or Google if I had had to pay for it. As a kid I wouldn't have been able to pay even if I had wanted to.
>No more clickbait, "this video is sponsored by ShitVPN", chumboxes, etc.
No, you would have even more of this, because this type of monetization is not linked to cookies.
Advertisers usually buy ads to encourage the purchase of a product/service. It is not sustainable to spend more on advertising than what the revenue you get back from it in the form of purchases - over the long term, the ROI has to be positive. Ad-supported services still exist in poor parts of the world despite the advertisers only being able to pay very little (as it has to be relative to the local price of the advertised goods/services), so the prices of paid services can similarly be adjusted to compensate.
> heavy region locks
This is already done, I'm pretty sure Netflix in India costs a fraction of what you'd pay in the US for example. While it's not an ideal solution, it's mostly a solved problem.
> Paying for things online is still a terrible experience.
Agreed on this one, but again the reason it isn't is because currently ads are a "good enough" model that there is not enough market pressure to develop something better. If ads become unsustainable, the content industry will have no choice but to either die out or compromise and collaborate to develop a payment model that has better UX.
> you would have even more of this
Only if it's allowed. If ads are nuked out of existence due to enforced regulation (promoting products makes you a reseller from the eyes of the law and you need to assume liability and provide support & warranty) or even just platform rules (posting commercial content on YouTube requires a costly subscription - shilling sponsored products without it will result in a ban) you wouldn't have it.
Outside of email (which I do pay for), I can't think of an online service I'd pay for. HN is about as close as it gets, but I wouldn't pay for what it is today.
You don’t, that’s the point of the law. As in, the old “EU cookie law” focused on you knowing the terms, but that proved ineffectual where every website operator said “accept or GTFO” (you’d think that would end up an unstable equilibrium, but it didn’t).
Thus the “new” GDPR is predicated on the idea that consent given under “... or GTFO” terms is invalid, given the imbalance in negotiating power, and said consent (where required) had to be voluntary by that definition. The result is cigarette-labelling-level malicious compliance on part of website operators (and compliance-in-a-box vendors they use).
Many of the things you see, such as requiring you to turn off every single “purpose” or “partner”, are manifestly illegal (or rather, don’t legally constitute voluntary consent, so showing them is legal but tracking you afterwards isn’t), but enforcement has been lackluster so far. We’ll see where we end up I guess. (I genuinely don’t know how I want this to go.)
The people writing articles at Forbes are on payroll. Ad blockers take food off their plate just to avoid a minor inconvenience. All you're doing is pushing these companies to either go subscription only or go bankrupt. Watch the level of entitlement of the people who will inevitably try defending their content theft. They can't win the argument and they always appeal to false moral virtues. They act like targeted ads are the dawn of an Orwellian police state.
Honestly, going full subscription or bankrupt would be fine with me. It’s the publisher’s responsibility to find a business model that works. What exactly am I stealing by blocking ads? I have no moral or ethical oblication to view them or to allow them to follow me round the web… nowhere was I asked or consented to the exchange of my personal information and resources to view their content
I’m responsible for my computer’s configuration; site operators are responsible for theirs. If I configure my computer to not show me ads, that’s my choice. If they configure their computer to not show me content, that’s also their choice. If they decide to show me content even if I’m not displaying ads, that’s also on them, same as if I configured mine to show ads and was then dissatisfied with my choice.
I only visit Forbes when someone sends me a link and 9/10 times I get disappointed when I finish the article. When many of the resources I read put up paywalls, I ended up making 2 subscriptions to resources I trust/read most.
I think you are taking this in a wrong direction. The real-world analogy of what you say would be “look at all that food a person is getting for free, all they need to do is to watch ads for 1hr; watch the level of entitlement of people who watch those ads in sunglasses!”
Regarding theft: I don’t agree with the use of words like theft or piracy. Nobody loses an article and nobody is held at gunpoint to give one up. If you want, call it freeloading or schwarzfahren (literally black riding, ie riding without a ticket).
I cycle to work on an ebike. About 25 km each way. One of the major issues is the lack of proper infrastructure and awful attitude by drivers, in particular service drivers.
Advertisement company vans are a prime example. There are rolling advertisement posters in most bus stop shelters. These drivers will park up on the footpath blocking pedestrians and those using the bus to update the advertisements, often in the mornings during rush hour. They will park on the cycle lanes and force cyclists out into fast moving and unaccommodating aggressive traffic.
The same goes for delivery drivers. Legally they are permitted on double yellow ‘no parking’ lines on the street but the perception is no not hinder car traffic so they park up on the footpath instead.
During the pandemic there was a lot of temporary work on cycling infrastructure, mostly lazy efforts such as painted cycle lanes and plastic bollards. These drivers simply drive over the bollards or if wide enough down the protected lane. If you challenge them they are verbally abusive.
The attitude of all persons in a mechanically propelled vehicle is that this is not their fault. They are just doing their job. Their companies trot out the tired line that they take safety seriously bla bla bla…
So in regards physical advertisement is public space, for me this is a symptom of a wider problem of perceptions of ownership of our cities public space. We forget that cities are for people. We let cars dominate the majority of the available space. We let oversized vehicles make deliveries in medieval city streets. We use cars for short inappropriately short journeys such as for bringing our kids to school, often because it’s too dangerous to let them walk or cycle because there are too many cars.
We need to start treating our cities like parks with a focus people and figure out ways to remove ICE powered vehicles and limit the space all vehicles occupy.
> We forget that cities are for people. We let cars dominate the majority of the available space.
In my city it's especially bad. Cars on the road, cars on the road side, cars on sidewalks, cars on pedestrian crossings, cars chasing you while crossing the road on the designated crossing. And as you say, if you object they become abusive. It's a large Eastern European city that is living the American dream of going everywhere in a car.
I don't know where I heard it, but there was a story about a hammer-wielding bicycle gang that smashed up cars that weren't friendly to bicycles. Sort of like https://abc7ny.com/bikers-attack-car-bmw-attacked-flatiron-n.... When the police won't enforce the laws then I guess groups emerge that take matters into their own hands.
Advertising as it is done presently has at least three faults, which is just as much a fault with the ethics of society for allowing this to go on:
- adverts seeks to hijack your attention away from whatever you were doing, which is a mental burden resulting diminished performance (in the case of a work environment), is downright dangerous in the case of traffic environments and lessens the enjoyment in the case of leisure activities.
- there is little to no ethical restriction on content; the advert that gets displayed is likely not that of the best product: it is the one whose owner paid the most money, and the ad that gets the most traction is the one that tells the best story, so perfused with lies by omission and other forms of deceit that we don't even notice any more.
- the ubiquity of ads causes an perpetual escalation of the struggle for attention, to the extent that we might credibly expect to get ads implanted in our brains eventually if we don't say enough is enough.
The solution seems simple enough to me: we need to establish a code of conduct for advertisers which at the core means that they may no longer shove ads down our throats at every junction; instead adverts should be freely displayed in separate spaces (like a dedicated page on each website) where people voluntarily could look for products and services that they need (or just to browse), much like the ad pages in newspapers of days now long gone by.
All we need is a mechanism that promotes this behavior, and sanctions breaches.
This is true if it is a barter exchange (under U.S. tax law at least). However I have a hard time seeing this as a barter - what are you getting in exchange for your attention that has a positive fair market value?
"You can view this content if you also stare at these ads. If you don't want to see the ads then don't visit this webpage." Sounds like an exchange to me.
Edit: aren't "donations" received by a for-profit also taxable?
Edit2: items of value acquired by theft are taxable.
Yes, you are correct. I was still thinking of the content being "free", but it's not if you provide something to get it.
Of course to actually impose income tax on these transactions would be nearly impossible. For the business, they would at least have expenses to deduct against the barter income, but for the private individual it would hobby income, with no deductions available. Also, how would FMV be established? The attention of a high-wealth person inclined to spend money is obviously worth more than that of someone of more modest means who spends very frugally, yet they both receive the same content in exchange. And if the FMV ends up being on the order of a dollar or two, it's not worth anyone's time to track it and report it.
Re: business expense deductions, I think businesses already handle those.
Re: taxing private individuals' micro attention "income", could be handled like "use" tax. I think my state allows me to list purchases I made online and shipped into my state so I can pay sales tax for them, or to take the "I don't know, just charge me the average amount" option. Maybe YouTube needs to send me a W2 each March which itemizes all the "work" I've done for them?
Re: fair market value, doesn't seem hard when there is an option to pay dollars for a service instead of watching ads, you just found out how much your attention is worth. Attention FMV could be standardized by the IRS like milage reimbursement (58.5 cents/mile in 2022) regardless of the exact cost of /your/ miles.
Edit: I'm not suggesting this would be good or easy but it would acknowledge that an entire industry is dodging taxes and degrading our quality of life. Also, were I king, this tax would be quite high (to reflect the harm to society) and would be the responsibility of the advertiser.
Awesome. I never thought about it that way. Perfect counter argument to people who act like we're stealing from them when we block their mind hacking attempts.
Someone is being paid for it - the content provider/location you've given your attention to. They're just selling it off to third parties without your consent.
This is actually a nice little reductio argument against the notion that your attention has value (at least in the sense you imply). If the proposition "my attention has value" leads to an absurd conclusion ("hijacking my attention is a form of theft"), then the premise must be false.
Why is the conclusion absurd? Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Comparing it to theft is actually a very generous interpretation. To me advertising is more like mind rape for profit. Someone pays money to violate your mind and insert into it whatever noise they want whether you consent to it or not.
How could it not be completely different? We both came to HN. We saw this article about advertising. We clicked the "450 comments" link because we wanted to see what other people were posting. We wanted to participate. That's what we're doing right now.
I didn't pay money to put this comment on your screen to make you read it every time you try to do anything on your phone or computer. No, we're the ones who came here to talk about this stuff. Speech is not advertising.
Of course speech is advertising. In what meaningful way is what you're doing not advertising your own views, opinions, and values, same as any company might do so with a billboard?
As I said, I didn't pay money to bring this comment to you whether you wanted it or not. You came here looking for comments. You weren't advertised to, you simply got exactly what you wanted.
Discussing a topic in a place where people congregate for that specific purpose is not the same thing as spamming entire cities with audiovisual pollution that nobody wants much less asked for.
I live in the area of Grenoble, a french city leaded by ecologists than banned ads several years ago (since 2014 if I'm correct).
This is a pleasure, or, more precisely, I feel overwhelmed when I exit my city and am surrounded by so many ads!
Austin, TX long ago passed a law that said a billboard can be used to advertise only for the business on the parcel of land where the billboard is physically located. Thus, a car repair shop could have a billboard advertising themselves, but they are not allowed to lease it out to advertise, say, a tanning salon that is not on the same site.
At the time it was passed, any existing billboards were granted an exemption, and can be leased to show arbitrary ads. There has been a trend to replace those billboards with digital versions. Austin passed a law to prevent such conversions, but it has been challenged up to the Supreme Court, as the advertising companies which own all those "analog" billboards claim their first amendment rights have been violated.
Because corporations are people and so therefore have exceptional claim to Freedom Speeches™ denied us mere humans (natural persons).
The 5-4 podcast about the SCOTUS covers these (and other) pro-corporation decisions. https://www.fivefourpod.com Basically the ELI5 treatment for those of us completely ignorant of the law. Highest recommendation.
The state of Hawaii also bans most ads and billboards (they are considered to take away from the natural beauty, which, of course, is a big tourism draw). I find it odd that there is even much debate about it and that most places do not have laws like this:
How are ads freedom of speech though? Unless it's the old "corporations are people" again.
I invite any CEO to personally walk around my city with a banner of their choosing. Being allowed to spend millions of dollars to make kids addicted to smoking and drinking isn't free speech, it's legalized crime.
Just so you know, they didn't actually replaced them by trees. And they didn't stop ads in the bus stop even after 2019. But having no other ads is already nice !
I can’t stand ads on government property, particularly in spaces where I am captive. The best example is public transportation. There are ads all over the station and then ads all over the interior (and exterior) of the train/bus during your ride.
Why should I be subjected to this private noise while taking public transportation? Some city needs to stand up and fix this. Allow me to get where I am going in peace.
I think it's hard when our public transportation is chronically underfunded. Politicians and voters see corporate (advertising) funding as less onerous that citizen (taxes) funding.
Exactly. I can stand ads on the internet, I just block 'm. I can stand ads on private property. But just don't scream for my attention on (semi)public properties. The price of that sh!t is already covered by taxes. And if it's not, the officials are incompetent.
Transport for London (9000 buses, 985 trains, trams, hire bicycles, taxi administration, disabled people transport, some trains, some major roads in London, 755km of railway track) have a budget of £9.7 billion, of which £5.1 billion is from passengers (tickets etc), and £0.16 billion from advertising.
That is lower than I thought it would be, and lower than one would expect given the space TfL dedicate to advertising in their budget report.
I would pay 3% more on travel tickets to not have any advertising.
Even if it were all advert free at some point, someone with a huge advertising budget would probably offer hundreds of millions to be a 'sponsor' and get their logos all over the place, and then the advertising will start again. Even the £160 million they're getting now would likely be enough to persuade them, as it's not a trivial amount, even compared to their overall budget.
They accept ads because the city needs a way to pay for your trip. Faires can be raised but that shuts out a class of people who need public transit more than you who will gladly trade a few ads for a few dollars on each trip.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
– Banksy
Wery much in the spirit of make it personal from "altered carbon"
"The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal."
The “A plot” was closer to the book than the “B plot”, but the A plot was weakened too. The digital/virtual torture scene has the single most glaring omission. However, thematically the Hollywood version of Quellism is the single biggest change, as it alters the motives of many characters. Event by event the “A plot” is close to the book, but it tones down the raw anarchy of the book.
> Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
Funnily enough, you can say the same thing about Bansky's art:
> An artist who defaced several works of famed graffiti artist Banksy has been charged with the crime of vandalism -- which is pretty incredible since Banksy's collection is itself an act of vandalism
What are you gaining by arguing this? What point are you trying to make? Do you really think an artist who hand-paints pieces on walls is comparable to a corporation that copy-pastes their flashing, carefully targeted, profit-seeking message onto dozens of billboards overlooking a highway? Are their motives and the results of their work not wildly different?
Your second example is valid. But your first example is a complete strawman. Bansky didn't sue, the property owner did, because they liked Banksy's thing and didn't like what the vandal did.
Banksy is a commercial enterprise, though. There is a financial benefit to putting their work in places where the public is forced to see it. By raising their public profile, they're also raising the prices they can charge for other work. It is, in a very real sense, advertising.
I'm a fan, but there's still a point to be made here. Banksy works on public sites do function in part as ads.
I think it's critically different from advertising because the art is also the product itself. You're meant to enjoy the art for what it is. An ad on the other hand, is meant to encourage you to buy a separate product; this can be effective even if you absolutely hate the ad.
A more apt comparison would be a company giving out free samples. If you get a free sample of a delicious new cheese brand, you might talk about it to others and raise their public profile. But that only works if the cheese is delicious. On the other hand, an ad might just rudely scream "KRAFT MAC AND CHEESE" at you for twenty seconds in hopes of subconsciously leading you to buy their product when you see it in the store later that week.
Trolling as protected speech is an interesting perspective. I’ve often felt that trolling is part behavioral issue and another part free expression. I wonder how these lines blur as they cross over into the digital realm.
> “Though I find him as annoying as many others do, I find him equally and strangely compelling,” Belisle wrote. “He is, in his own way, a placeholder. He prompts me to remember that not all hear the same music I hear; or respond the same way.”
> In a phone interview, Belisle, who specializes in family and preventive medicine, said The Whistler is breaking down barriers that people put around themselves, forcing people to notice what is right in front of them. He is, she said, a reminder that everyone marches to the beat of their own drummer.
> “The best thing you can do is have compassion for other people whose songs are not the same as yours,” she said.
And his quote in the top post is hypocritical, at least the advertisers pay for displaying the ads, banksy appears to use the anarchist non payment approach.
Maybe all his revenue goes to charity but I sense an artist complaining about capitalism while laughing to the bank.
A lot of times people who loudly yell "fuck the system" are also quietly using the system when it suits them, that's my point. Bansky is no "dismantle the capitalism" hero or whatever pedestal people have him on.
I hear you; the copyright case especially shows that he is no paragon of anti-capitalism. But I think it's worth maintaining that (1) some things are worse than other things and (2) motive matters and (3) imperfect people can still make good points.
I have never, ever felt like a piece of Banksy's art, or any original piece of visual artwork for that matter, is being shoved down my throat. They're quiet, static, relatively low in number, and easily avoidable & ignorable. I've never felt distracted or distressed because my local coffee shop has a new mural on their wall, and nobody has ever forced me to walk through an art museum in order to get to the grocery store. On the other hand, advertisements are loud, moving, insanely numerous, and totally non-optional. My local subway and subway stations are plastered in advertisements; if I want to transit anywhere, I must endure them.
Plus, the motives are different! Sure, Banksy or $artist_name likely want folks to find their art appealing and then compensate them somehow, via buying copies, commissioning new art, spreading their reputation, whatever. But advertisers do not care if you found their ad appealing; they just want you to buy their product. In fact, many ads are purposely obnoxious or abhorrent just because it's an effective way to bring your attention towards their product. How dystopian is that?
And yes, there's some irony in Banksy, as someone who occasionally benefits from copyright law, to be making this point. But that doesn't make him wrong! And, it'd be far more ironic if, I don't know, Sergey Brin or someone else who use hugely benefited from advertising and copyright law were making the point.
Multiply it times a billion. One Banksy is tolerable, a million people graffiting their opinions everywhere would be truly awful. Therefore what Banksy is doing is immoral.
I disagree with the scale multiplier being a metric of morality. If one ice cream truck drives down my street, it puts me in a good mood even if I don't want to buy any ice cream from them. A continuous parade of ice cream trucks would be maddening. But that doesn't mean the ice cream truck driver who actually exists is behaving poorly.
One Jesus of Nazareth is tolerable, a million people preaching their opinions everywhere would be truly awful. Therefore what Jesus was doing is immoral.
>I hear you; the copyright case especially shows that he is no paragon of anti-capitalism.
Does it, though? The linked TMZ article suggests the lawsuit was filed by the Los Angeles DA on behalf of the property owner whose property lost value because of the defacement. It doesn't appear that Banksy himself is involved in the lawsuit.
It is similar to the logic of nations desiring peace but having an armed force for defense. If you are attacked and you refuse to engage in that system, disarming unilaterally, you may avoid violence, but at a loss of other values. Using the system judiciously can enable you to disengage from it in the longer term.
The tradeoffs for choosing this path will be different for different situations, but I don't think it's fair to say that taking advantage of rules you claim to hate is always clear-cut hypocrisy.
Proxy wars are a wrinkle in this logic whereby strong belligerents pick their battles so that they have plausible deniability; deniable wins and losses, deniable assets and capital, deniable aims and goals. Deceit and détente have a fractious relationship, but often serve complementary purposes - managing perception of reality and control of time and space via control of individuals and groups.
The personal is political. Weak sides challenge stronger opponents all the time, just usually not militarily. By situating yourself in opposition to power structures, you may reframe the debate and win it on its merits in the minds of the public, thus causing friction when status quo attempts to reassert itself.
Defense forces in some places serve in other defense capacities outside of military conflict. I would say they are quite desirable even in places you mentioned
This argument, most of the time, is just bad and not smart. "If you hate capitalism, why do you use iPads? etc." It's dreck and it should stop because it's rarely constructive.
Sometimes it's a necessary tool. Sometimes people are experimenting. Sometimes people do actually sell out.
The problem with this argument is that it tries to shut down the above questions.
Details matter, and bad arguments like the above rarely help.
All these points are doing the stupid thing of presuming a clear controllable definition of capitalism; when in reality, no "ism" is a controllable unified entity.
People will always and forever make mutually beneficial trades, probably with money.
Now, will people also always have the opportunity to freely invest sums of money in imaginary chopped up pieces of a corporation without fear of financial liability should they cause a great deal of harm? Maybe not, because Gamestop is teaching us a lot of things.
Regardless of what happens, the dumb thing is presuming that these two things are both the exact same thing called "capitalism."
>There is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
That's such a useless statement that even were it true, it proves the parent's point. That moral judgement doesn't lead us closer to a world without capitalism. Go to any haven of anti-capitalism and ask for a link to the manual they have for getting from HERE to THERE. Not even a theory on how to dismantle what we have.
FWIW personally I think capitalism is the worst system, other than all the others. Rein it in, set principles in stone for what we expect and demand from our system, but markets shouldn't magically disappear because we've lost control once.
So I'm not trying to defend Banksy specifically here...
>So you called that artist a "vandal". Would you also call Bansky a "vandal"?
He can be both, "vandal" and "artist" aren't mutually exclusive.
>Some people find unapproved grafitti objectionable. How do you feel about that?
I'm not answering for the person you're responding to, but for me, I'd say I feel fine about that. There are people who find nudity in art objectionable; who object to the Mona Lisa; to surreal art; to abstract art; to land art; to a specific artist; to an artistic medium. There's always going to be someone who objects to some form of art, so I'm not sure what you're getting at.
Objecting to unapproved grafitti is not about "is it art". it's about property destruction. If you disagree then I'll be happy to come over to your house and paint whatever "I want" on your house, your car, and TV, your computer, your sofa. If you'd be upset that I painted your stuff then you agree with the people who see it as property destruction. If you'd be upset for your own stuff but not when that stuff belongs to someone else then you're just being hypocritical.
Did you read the linked article? [1] The only thing that matters is if the property owner likes it. If the property owner likes it, it stays up, if they don't, they file a vandalism case with the city.
Banksy is a vandal, as I'm sure anyone would admit, himself included. I am equally sure that there have been times when property owners haven't liked his work and have tried to report him for vandalism. But given he doesn't make a habit of posting videos of his actions online and bragging about them, he doesn't get caught/attributed.
Yes. I like Banksy drawings, really. But Banksy was vandal when Banksy drew his thing on the same wall again and again, while owner quite clearly did not wanted that and kept repainting the wall again again. And to be frank, he was also asshole about it.
If someone tagged my front door I'd be quite angry about it and clean it off.
If someone spent 6 hours with a ladder carefully painting the entire outside of my house with a beautiful mural I'd still be upset that they painted my house without my permission but I'd probably leave it there.
advertizers vandalize the sensory experience across the board, they pollute our cognition with conditioned and conditional thinking, they remove our choices in a clandestine style, they reduce the world to a penny mill so the lunch is free while the consumers back is the table for a feast by candlelight
Your TMZ article is about the Los Angeles DA filing a lawsuit on behalf of the property owners who lost value on their property when Banksy's work was defaced. It doesn't appear that Banksy, himself, is involved with the lawsuit at all.
You can follow his own advice and deface any of his pieces you're forced to see until he stops doing it to you, morally. I wouldn't touch the legality of it with a 10 foot pole though.
Fuck that indeed. Very strong message here, and I love it. I wish I could take all those ads and shove them into their asses. But what is being suggested here? What's mine to take? If I see an ad, can I reuse the artwork? No. If I see a car, I can't just copy it's design. Can I just paint over it, or rip it apart? No, that would be vandalism. As much as I hate ads, THEY have re-arranged the world by paying for it in a free market, and we must respect that. Soviet Union had very little ads. So, yes, we must ask permission until we figure out a better way.
You shouldn't do it publicly and with your name and face with it. You aren't legally allowed to.
But that is far away from "can't". Hardly anyone is going to stop you from drawing a moustache on a poster or from stickering a snarky remark over an ad or from spray painting your opinion about some advertised product on said ad.
It's not just a word, it's a law, from UK's Criminal Damage Act 1971: "A person who without lawful excuse destroys or damages any property belonging to another intending to destroy or damage any such property or being reckless as to whether any such property would be destroyed or damaged shall be guilty of an offence."
But whether we should change that law is probably an off-topic here. All I am saying is that we must respect the law. If we don't agree with the law, we must try to change it, and not just go about destroying each other's property.
They manage just fine. About 8-9 months ago they were used to find a couple of vandals who were destroying bus stops at night. The cops traced them from camera to camera and sent a patrol car as a welcoming party.
There are still ways around that. A small act of sabotage is not worth the enforcement for most police agencies, unless you live in a very fascist country. So a small precaution might be enough to avoid it.
Most cities have mask requirements and many cities like SF won't even followup on these types of crimes. The more cameras exist on street corners the less likely the police will get involved.
There's no "logic" at all here. All I did was point out how the other person didn't even make an argument.
Nor did you. You just appeal to some popular notion that everyone already agrees with ("treat humans like humans"). Then you suggest this is the same as the other thing, again giving no reason.
Maybe you really can give reason to someone, who abuses people, not to do it. To treat humans as humans. But you would have to delude yourself to think you already did it here.
You are making an argument here, that the other person didn't make an argument; that means you were applying logic.
Your logic is that there's nothing stopping you from breaking societal norms and doing whatever you have the physical capability to do. Therefore, you can destroy property you don't like (advertisements). You can extend that logic to say that you "can" abuse humans.
But your logic totally misses societal context. When someone says "can", they aren't talking about pure physical capability. That's why no one in their right mind will say "I can stab you".
Social norms can be accepting of such activities if you surround yourself with a like minded group.
Living within whatever social norms exist is common but progressives and activists try to break the social norm. Taboos are real and get broken everyday.. cousins date, 70 year old women and getting together with 20 year olds, there are mothers who hate their kids.
Each social rule broken can have punishments.. wearing white after labor day can get you not invited to a social event. But that doesn't mean you should imprison yourself trying to live within other people's rules. Drawing a funny face on an ad has a low punishment rate, low chance of being cast out of society vs stabbing someone randomly. You can reject some rules and follow others. It has always been your choice.
Sorry to say, you have failed to comprehend the thread.
> Your logic is that there's nothing stopping you from breaking societal norms and doing whatever you have the physical capability to do. Therefore, you can destroy property you don't like (advertisements).
Who said anything about "societal norms"?
You are just inventing things. You invent an appeal to social norms, then you invent a reply to it.
In fact, all I did was point out how no justification was even given for a claim.
I didn't make any logical response to the non-argument (which wouldn't make sense to even try), instead I made a meta-response ABOUT the fact of non-argument.
The parent comment, by context, was inferring from societal norms. You yourself now say you pointed out how there is "no justification was even given for a claim." That means you are ignoring the parent comments context, which is societal norms. The justification is implied to be societally defined normal behavior. You can ask anyone why they shouldn't steal - it would be related to societal norms / morals. But then your answer, by analogy, would be to discard those arguments.
> I didn't make any logical response to the non-argument (which wouldn't make sense to even try), instead I made a meta-response ABOUT the fact of non-argument.
The assertion that it was a non-argument is based on the rejection of its context.
Are you saying that the only reason to treat other humans well is because the law says you must?
I would say that is precisely backwards: one should treat other humans well, for a variety of reasons. We write that down in law as a shared agreement. But the law is not itself the reason -- it springs from the reasons.
Well the OP's post was based on rejecting all those "reasons" you're talking about. Those reasons can also apply to other things like not doing theft, not burning down other people's properties, etc.
I don't understand you. You're saying we can go about, say, murdering people and we are fine with that as long as we don't get caught? Is breaking social agreement acceptable if enforcement fails? If my personal ethics allows me to break the law, but enforcement fails, can I still claim to be a positive element of the society?
What I am saying is that society has agreed not to damage each other's property, has agreed to a certain principle. The society has, basically, agreed that enduring outdoor ads is acceptable, while enduring random property damage is not, as there are no exceptions for ad vandalism -- that's what I call to respect here -- agreed principles. If we don't agree with that, we must change the law. If society we live in is ripe for the change, then it should be possible. If not, we have no moral right to do property damage while leveraging all the benefits of living in that society.
Well, if we can't agree with the rule of law then what, we're back to a primitive society? I don't think homo sapiens culture is, at this stage, advanced enough to thrive in a primitive community, how attractive that may sound. In a few hundred or thousand years, perhaps?
You are fundamentally mistaken about what "the rule of law" is. The rule of law is not based on "agreement" but enforcement. Even the veneer of agreement is based on enforcement. Historically, this has taken the form of enforced religion. Today, enforced school attendance serves a similar role.
If you're saying that everyone should/must follow the law in all circumstances, that's an extreme position few people would agree with. This would mean inform on Jews to the Nazis or returning slaves to their owners under the Fugitives Slaves Act, to take an example from a democracy. That's even without considering that many laws are somewhat indeterminate, internally inconsistent or at odds with other laws.
If you're saying that there is an a priori moral presumption that laws should be followed, maybe because they represent (possibly) some sort of societal consensus, than that is a closer question, but it doesn't resolve the question of whether the legal rights of the advertisers ought to, in a moral sense, be respected.
Note though that even the US judiciary doesn't make much of a legal mandate with no penalties attached (see the last Obamacare case to reach SCOTUS).
Interesting examples. I would say that Germany at that point was a rather undemocratic society, with all the terror by the Nazis. Can we consider slave-owning society democratic if it includes slaves? This makes me wondering if the position of respecting the law as a form of social agreement is untenable in an undemocratic society. But then again, democracy is a spectrum...
Coming to your question, I don't know. When do legal rights end and moral rights begin? Something I'd really like to read more about. I remember enjoying Michael Sandel's lectures online and then reading his book. Would really like to find something in his style on this topic.
Or painting flowers, which could indeed be treated as vandalism, but that way would also attract too much public attention to the cause, which is something the higher powers would avoid as much as possible.
Banksy is talking about moral right, not legal right. This is obvious unless you're being intentionally dense. He is saying that you have cosmic permission to perform acts of vandalism to advertisements. As long as you don't get caught, you're alright with your chosen deity or whatever.
It's a pretty strong philosophical argument in that direction, in my opinion.
If you're disagreeing with that point, you should be explicit. You're arguing that these companies are paying for the advertising, but they aren't paying you to throw the rocks at your head, they're paying the building from which they obtain their vantage point. I don't think that actually qualifies as "paying for it", morally.
I am afraid extending personal "moral rights" to the domain of property damage is a risky avenue to pursue. Who defines what's moral? I also don't agree with that the failure of enforcement by the society automatically grants anybody a moral right to break the law. What about all uncaught murderers? Actually, it is interesting we transverse to physical damage here. I wouldn't equate seeing outdoor ads to receiving bodily harm, to a theft of a piece of "consciousness" or attention - eh, maybe...
I don't know much about philosophy, but what if we can assume that legal rights end and moral rights begin only when we deal with someone's natural rights, is this tenable? If we take the Declaration of Independence as a starting point, as long as there is no danger to our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, we should not deem ourselves as being in the power to judge what property we can damage ourselves. Sounds like something I could live with.
You are not arguing the point. Billboard advertisers do not transact with you for your attention. They are trampling all over your property without consent. The argument is that you have a right to prevent that from happening. That doesn't extend to a moral right to burn the building down, I obviously have no moral right to go no further than what is necessary to reverse that.
Thank you, this pretty neatly covers what I would have liked to add but couldn't find words for.
I find it pleasing to approach his approach as works and displays of art. Are they explicit calls to aggressive, rebellious arms? Maybe. Is he selling out from commercializing on his art? Perhaps. I don't really care to respond directly to either of those questions here.
Mainly want to give a shoutout to his Barcode stencil, which made a really big impression on me so far (I haven't finished the Banksy book that I found it in) and that I think is pretty fitting here. Looking around on the web, it seems there are variants, but the one with the leopard is great.
Breaking laws comes with punishments but we are still free to break laws. In some situations, there may even be an ethical imperative to break the law.
Seems like perfectly curated marketing. But I do admit I am outraged when a row of stupid fucking scooters blocks my entire running path, when it’s clearly a location no one would ever rent a scooter, rather they are there to deliberately block the path for no other purpose than obnoxious exposure of their brand.
I’d love for there to be DAOs to combat those scooter companies, say for example by blocking the executives’ front doors, cars, garages, offices with giant billboards or vending machines.
Scooters are great. No scooter every meaningfully impacted my life in a city. Cars, on the other hand. Boy, if you hate scooters laying around just wait until you hear about these things clogging up every road. Drivers leave them on the street over night! Their personal property and they just...leave them parked all over the city. And they're way bigger than scooters. They block the roads. They're loud. They pollute. And they actually kill people! It's crazy! Tens of thousands of people every year!
The only reason you're commenting here about how much you hate scooters and not how much you hate cars is that cars were here when you were born, so they look to you like a natural feature of the universe, while scooters are new, so there's a lively debate about them. But there's really no comparison. Cars are the much bigger problem.
Is you best argument "what about cars"? Scooters are a problem because they go fast among pedestrians. Cars usually don't, and when they donit is usually labelled terrorism.
I think a good comparison is a bike:
Bikers usually stay either on the road or on a bike path. When they go in pedestrian zones, their rather bad manouverability make bikers go slow or get off.
Just one week ago I was hit by a scooter going over 20km/h in a crowded pedestrian zone. Shit like that has become common, whereas the number of times I have seen someone do that on a bike can be counted on one hand.
Yes, because cars and scooters occupy and compete for the same space and the difference between them is so large that anybody who thinks scooters are the bigger issue is in my view either totally blind to the problems with automobiles or lying. I don’t acknowledge a third possibility. Cars are orders of magnitude more problematic in cities than scooters. That’s not hyperbole. They are literally orders of magnitude more problematic.
If you’re locked in a room with a lion and a kitten and I hear you complaining about the kitten, then I’m going to think you’re either very confused or lying.
Of course cars are more problematic. That doesn't diminish any problems with scooters. The thing is they are regulated. A car driver has obligations written in law.
In my home country they can't even decide what to classify e-scooters as.
If I were to try to ride a bike as people do with scooters I would be stopped - not unlikely by the police. Would I park it the same way some responsible (and presumably drunk) citizen would throw it in the river.
I think the reason why this space is unregulated in my home country is because bikers use their common sense, because biking is a lot harder than using a scooter. I wouldn't go 25km/h in a pedestrian zone because sooner or later I would probably hit someone. When I am on a scooter I have to really think before I drive.
I don't think cars and scooters compete for the same space. Pedestrians, bikes and scooters compete. The vast majority of people going on scooters do so instead of walking, biking or going on public transport.
If I could decide all city centres would be void of cars and people could bike and scooter on the old car roads to their hearts delight. Until then I would prefer scooters to be driven responisbly, either through regulation or common sense.
In my 34 years alive I have never been hit by a bike, yet in the last 3.4 months I have been hit by a acooter twice. Once in the back on a pedestrian street when the driver turned a corner and wasn't expecting me to stand at a bus stop. The other time on a bike because the scooter driver did not follow the most basic traffic regulations ("the rule of right" - the obligation to let someone coming from the right to pass if no other instructions are given).
this might not be the best site to start that particular argument on because you will find a lot of people who would sign exactly what you're trying to say sarcastically, namely that cars are a menace to urban life and cities that get rid of them should be applauded.
And if you've never been annoyed by scooters you are lucky, because when that craze started in my city not only were people driving them like maniacs, they left them on sidewalks to the point where people were so pissed off they just started to throw them into the river.
> if you hate scooters laying around just wait until you hear about these things clogging up every road.
I love whataboutism.
I’m very fascinated to know how you live in such a fashion that you purchase food and other products that sustain your life that in no way utilize roadways. Or are you just virtue signaling and personally contribute to this road traffic you hate so much and is the real “problem” by purchasing things from the supply chain?
Roads are made for cars, so it’s expected cars use them for legal purposes like driving. What wouldn’t be expected is if companies began littering roads with their shit products and marketing which blocked the roadways and put drivers at risk of accidents. If I saw companies creating traffic through illegal littering and marketing that obstructs the roadway, that would bother me.
Side walks, running/bike paths are also made for specific purposes, those lawful purposes don’t include companies littering them with their commercial products and marketing.
As a meta point “whataboutism” is a very stupid concept. We obviously evaluate things by comparison to other things and by their relationship to other related issues. Cars and scooters compete for public space and are directly comparable. If you’re locked in a room with a kitten and a lion and I hear you complaining about the kitten, then it’s not “whataboutism” to explain to you that you’ve got bigger problems.
Second, roads predate cars by thousands of years, so, no, they weren’t “made for cars.” Some actual roads existing today predate the cars on them by hundreds of years.
Third, the supply chain argument is very lazy and easily refuted. Most of the problematic car usage in my neighborhood has nothing to do with the supply chain. We can get your products delivered without building cities primarily for individual automobile traffic.
The most important detail in this discussion is that cars existed when you were born and you were raised in a society where they were normalized. Therefore, you regard them as a natural, unchangeable feature of the universe. Scooters are new, so you expect a lively debate about their use. This is the detail that informs everything about our disagreement.
> Cars and scooters compete for public space and are directly comparable.
You seem to have a very difficult time understanding nuance.
I didn’t complain about scooters, I complained about companies dumping their commercial scooters on pedestrian paths specifically for obnoxious marketing purposes.
A scooter is fine if you want to own one and you don’t use it to obstruct pedestrian paths for commercial/marketing purposes. But to start dropping your commercial products and commercial marketing in the middle of paths (or roads for that matter) is the problem.
You brought up roads and cars and traffic as the “bigger problem”. Now you're suggesting the roads you are talking about were not built for cars. Are the roads you brought up with all those cars and traffic not made for for vehicles? Or you are taking about vehicles clogging up ancient Roman roads?
I’d like to engage you but you seem like a troll. Good luck with that.
In one Dodge Charger ad they literally show a sign that reads “share the road” impaling a tree as their car blows past at a speed that’s not legal on any road in the country you’d find that sign on.
The fact that their automobiles kill and maim pedestrians and cyclists at a regular clip is a feature of their marketing campaign. It’s so preposterous and brazen that I still sort of can’t believe it exists.
The automakers know their cars are used irresponsibly and they literally feature that in their marketing. I’m sorry I just can’t get upset about a scooter lying on the sidewalk by comparison.
The road outside my house was there on the oldest deeds I have, from 1830. Was that built for cars? What about the roads in town that were mentioned in writings in the 1400s?
You tell me are cars and traffic a big problem on that road? Would it be a problem if companies started dumping their products/marketing on that road to obstruct it?
The main problem on the road in town is parked cars obstructing it. They closed the parking spaces for covid so people could walk along it without being squished and things were far far better.
Sadly they have reintroduced the ability to litter the road with your car and it’s gone back to being rubbish. I don’t go to that part of town any more.
You specifically brought up the road in front of your house. I find your claim you don’t go to your house anymore because of cars entirely disingenuous.
I mentioned two roads. One which doesn’t allow parking and is great (in front of my house, not designed for motor vehicles, takes about 50 cars a day), one which is town which was great when parking wasn’t allowed but is now rubbish.
> I’d love for there to be DAOs to combat those scooter companies, say for example by blocking the executives’ front doors, cars, garages, offices with giant billboards or vending machines.
Interesting. I don't think one can legitimise just about anything with DAOs. But DAOs do represent a form of group think, an in-group, a collective, so that's there too.
I wonder if GreenPeace / Amnesty / XR / Anti-FA et al have experimented with DAOs.
Well crowdfunding makes sense, but as a DAO members could use the token to apply their own adverts on the billboards attached to the scooter executives’ houses, cars and offices. Not sure what type of utility those non-profits could build into a token.
Still I’m not opposed to it being a traditional non-profit, it might be possible to obtain 501(c)(3) tax exemption as a charity under the purpose of “combating community deterioration.”
There would be noting wrong with ads if they were always opt-in. Even if that included all the privacy-invasive tracking. You want ads, you turn them on.
What is infinitely more invasive are ads that are on by default, that do not give you the choice of not seeing them in the first place. The audacity to push an idea on to you feels like a shovel across the face. If you are lucky you can opt-out (on the web usually with an ad blocker) and in the case of ads in public spaces you are just out of luck.
Then why is Coca Cola allowed to promote their proven harmful sugar juices in that space, but am I not allowed to oppose that promotion in the same space?
What is allowed and tolerated in that public space is skewed, an unfair. Certainly not balanced.
> Then why is Coca Cola allowed to promote their proven harmful sugar juices in that space, but am I not allowed to oppose that promotion in the same space?
You are certainly allowed to. Pony up for the ad space if you want to promote the opposite, or advertise something else entirely.
Selling harmful things is profitable. Opposing harmful things is expensive. Because of this asymmetric warfare, and because we are human beings more concerned about other human beings than concepts like brand awareness, it seems like regulating the messaging in pubic spaces makes sense.
> Selling harmful things is profitable. Opposing harmful things is expensive. Because of this asymmetric warfare, and because we are human beings more concerned about other human beings than concepts like brand awareness, it seems like regulating the messaging in pubic spaces makes sense.
Nothing I stated made any sort of judgement about whether or not something should or should not be advertised. The original statement (quoted in my previous response) was that someone opposed to an advertisement was "not allowed" to oppose that promotion.
Quite frankly, nobody should be in charge of regulating the messaging. That sounds like top-down control which does nothing but solidify the positions of people/organizations that are already in power and can afford to lobby for such regulations. It's often known as regulatory capture.
There are clearly groups of people that "oppose harmful things" (which is quite vague, but I digress), and have carved out parts of the market that agree with them (e.g., organic foods) and are quite profitable.
I am not allowed to use Advertising Channels to defame a brand. I am not even allowed to mention a brand. At least, this is how it is in my country ("enforced" by Reclame Code Commissie) where a committee that oversees the Ad industry can prohibit advertisers from using that infrastructure.
Basically: if you propose a billboard saying "Coca Cola Is Proven[cite] Bad For Your Health" you won't be granted any space.
And even if you find a space not monopolized by such committees, you'll be taken to court by expensive lawyers over defamation or trademark infringment or any other silly thing.
> I am not allowed to use Advertising Channels to defame a brand. I am not even allowed to mention a brand. At least, this is how it is in my country ("enforced" by Reclame Code Commissie) where a committee that oversees the Ad industry can prohibit advertisers from using that infrastructure.
Perhaps you should reassess your messaging.
It seems to have become very en vogue over the past 5-10 years to just simply attack someone/thing that one doesn't like, as opposed to providing useful information and allowing people to make up their own mind, or putting the effort in to develop/provide an alternative.
Ultimately though, if your speech is being restricted, you have a government problem.
If I sounded like that, I should have spent more effort. Sorry.
What I was trying to bring across, is that it is "public space" which implies it equally belongs to everyone. But that this is not the case for what you are allowed to advertise. Corporations, or at least "those with connections and/or money" are allowed to be heard a lot more than anyone who lacks these connections or funds.
I call that "skewed". A fair and level "public space" would give anyone, regardless of how much money, connections or lawyers they have, the same ability to present their message.
I am not saying that this would always be a good thing; because this probably means far more advertising noise. It would probably turn our streets into a printed version of twitter. Ugh.
I am trying to say that in order to make this less skewed, "those with money, connections and/or lawyers" should also not be allowed to use that public space to deliver their messages. That is a level playing field too!
A paleo fan will think the same about a vegan/carbs ad, and so would an anti-vaxxer about a conventional health poster.
Harmful ideas can, and will reach those who are susceptible to it. I think the right way to oppose harmful ideas, is by gaining the education that would allow you, and others in society to judge such ideas.
The alternative of forbidding ads in public, is essentially censorship and making society even weaker as one way or another, harmful ideas will reach each and every one of us, and when they do, the less susceptible we are, the better.
Because whoever owns the space where they're placing the billboard lets them?
What if coca cola decided that they didn't like the color of your house, should they be allowed to change it because it can be seen from the public space?
> What if coca cola decided that they didn't like the color of your house
I'm quite certain that if I painted my house white and red with silver curly letters on it spelling "Cola is Sugar" there'd be multiple laws that expensive lawyers can help enforce.
Those laws (trademark, libel, etc) practically grant large corporations from taking over public space. In my country there's committees (seated by advertising industry) that monopolize the space and enforce this in even greater detail. Hell, we even have committees that tell what color you are allowed to paint your front-door (Schoonheidscommitee). This latter, however, is democratically ruled (local govts) so something that Coca Cola has no seat in.
So the answer to your question is: yes. They already can, while the opposite is not possible.
But the question itself is actually a false dichotomy. Me being able to oppose Coca Cola on their own turf: by running a campaign against them, does not imply that Coca Cola can automatically then decide the color of my house.
Sao Paulo made all billboards and ads illegal. It's a thing. People can do it if they want. I'm pretty sure they don't allow billboards in some states in the US.
I live in Israel where there are constant conflicts about what is OK to be shown in public, especially between the religious and non-religious.
In Jerusalem for example, some ultra-orthodox often vandalize any kind of poster that shows a woman in it. They just tear-out/spray over the women on the poster. Some are ridiculous cases where they defaced a poster of an old woman who survived the holocaust:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/female-holocaust-survivors-por...
Even other groups could be pissed by posters that include things about women's hygiene or show models in swimsuits. In their eyes these are things they make a lot of effort to block from the eyes of their families, and having it in public breaches the culture and education they try to maintain. This is by itself interesting as public adverts can penetrate the most strict censorship that religious groups and cults maintain.
Seculars on the other hand can also be pissed about anti-abortion adverts, religious propaganda, scientology, etc. and ask for them to be banned.
As someone who's trying to be a "free-thinker" and tries to promote it, I think there's no point in hiding in a bubble, blocking yourself from seeing other ideas, even if they're crappy advertisements. All of this as long as the adverts/ideas fit within the aesthetics of the city they're in.
The risk of doing so is essentially losing free-thinking and some sort of communication with isolated social groups.
Can we make a distinction between postings for different purposes, though? For example, commercial, political, and public education. Do a Coca-cola billboard, a sign advocating a piece of legislation, and a poster about the local library all get the exact same level of deference?
Yes. There are laws in some countries for example that make the advertising of Tobacco illegal. That's a form of censorship people can say is reasonable, but it can also be a slippery slope towards harsher censorship around other things people might find harmful - the female body, sugar, gambling, abortion, meat, etc.
The question is if you want to give the government such a broad spectrum to censor, in which they'd start judging whether or not a product might be deemed potentially harmful.
Without getting into the politics of the personhood (or lack thereof) of corporations, we can say at least that it's not quite that simple since there have been places (is Sao Paulo one?) that have banned outdoor advertising. That means the representatives of the people there came to a consensus that corporate marketing is not on equal footing with the expression of other ideas.
I really, really love quotes like this, which make me look at a prior belief in a different way with more context and nuance, and I really like comments that introduce me to them, so thanks for that.
For a long time I've defended the concept (if not the implementation) of advertising on websites as a contract between someone getting something (the user's use of the site) and what they're paying for it (attention bandwidth), with the only caveat being that the current way we serve ads is horrible for both privacy and security. That latter point is how I have justified to myself running an ad blocker.
Often I've equated online advertisements to physical ones, and also noted that what we consider "ads" online is fairly narrow and in a way that helps us justify vilifying them. Advertising can be helpful, and not just in the "I didn't know about that product until I saw the ad" way, but in the way that every store name above or on the door is an advertisement, and in it's most minimal form, a purely useful informational one (the sign advertising restrooms is "advertising" that). There is, necessarily, a spectrum along which advertisements run, from informational or coercive and manipulative, but it is a spectrum, and it is important to note what it is we object to, because "advertisements" is a poor substitute for what that is and unless we identify it, we're doomed to inadequately deal with it.
The idea that very public advertisements in the real world is an interesting one, because we're often presented with them even when using only public resources. Going into a store and seeing advertisements is one thing, you chose to go there and they control that area, but to be confronted with something while on public thoroughfares is another thing entirely. In some respect I totally agree, why should they be allowed to push these images and sounds towards me?
On the other hand, this makes me think of Home Owners Associations and people trying to control their environment (if we assume this is something to be prevented, and not just something we can assume is public domain to remix and use at will if presented in that public manner). In any case, it's an interesting additional context to the idea of advertising in physical and digital ways and how they relate and I'll be thinking on it in the future, so I thank you for sharing it.
Highly debatable whether the policy has achieved its goal of a "clean city". The city is uglier and dirtier than ever, especially downtown. A least billboards covered the decay (and were a source of income to buildings).
A very effective way to solve problems in a community resource is to demand maintenance from a private party in exchange from exploiting it in a sustainable way. São Paulo just closed that possibility.
Yes, there are other possibilities. By nature those are more bureaucratic and jittery. Maybe they are closer to a solution now, but if that's the case, it's because it easier to make that law more relaxed than strict.
I consider solving a problem directly to be less bureaucratic than solving it indirectly by involving even more parties and hoping they do what you want them to do and having to negotiate with them on how much they will do in exchange for what they are getting.
Taxpayer pays x to government which pays workers to clean.
Taxpayer pays x-y to government which pays x-y to government workers who need to go out and negotiate without private businesses and inspect to see if they are doing their job and then punish them if they are not and then deal with disputes. And it is very possible for y>x.
There are unavoidable inefficiencies for a government to perform any action.
The idea that a government can maintain all the surfaces of a large city in a pleasant situation is completely unrealistic. It can at most decentralize to to smaller bodies (and get a huge variance of outcomes, what is quite an ok solution too), but São Paulo doesn't have those bodies and is organized in a way that makes them almost impossible to create.
Yeah, maybe the best policy for the city is pushing governance into smaller bodies. But if your goal is to make the city visually pleasant, that's the solution that will take decades instead of years from the alternatives.
The solution should be simple: allow billboard ads, but tax them based on surface area. Use the tax revenue to hire more street sweepers. This shouldn't be hard to implement, as the city is already quite effective at fining businesses that do not comply with Cidade Limpa. Want to turn a building facade into a giant LED billboard, Shenzhen style? Fine, just pay up. Everybody wins.
This kind of policy would make sense for a quaint old European town, but here we're talking about the largest city in a developing country. Generally as a developing country your first priority should be to, well, develop. The last thing you want to do is stifle economic activity.
Ok, I could agree with that tax. But it's not the sweeper service that will make the city beautiful, sweeping is a bare minimum.
But anyway, how does advertising relates to development? Do you have a clear answer to this? Because not every economic activity feeds the development process, some even slow it down.
> But it's not the sweeper service that will make the city beautiful
Sure, but you can't force by law those decrepit buildings along the Minhocao to renovate. At least with advertising income they would be able to afford a paint job.
> how does advertising relates to development?
Everyone hates advertising, but it's an important driver for competition. A new business has no chance of breaking into an existing market without advertising, for instance (though I guess the internet has made outdoor ads less important). Not to mention the direct jobs that were lost with Cidade Limpa.
> Sure, but you can't force by law those decrepit buildings along the Minhocao to repaint.
Hum... Technically you can. The fight would really not be worth it, but the city can pass a law that fines eye-sores.
Anyway, you seem to want something aligned with my first comment up there of conditioning ads on a well maintained structures. That would very likely work too.
About advertisement, it is one of those industries that look like if they reduced by orders of magnitude the value they provide would increase. If that's the case, the right thing to do is to allow it, but tax it heavily (so all of those proposals are quite good). But "looks like" is a bad basis for actual policy, real data would be much better.
>Yes, there are other possibilities. By nature those are more bureaucratic and jittery.
Not really. The biggest corruption, waste of money and worst outcomes are when private and public sector intersect. Pure public (like healthcare systems outside US) or private (like food distribution) segments work best.
I strongly believe that advertising by definition is unethical in all of it's forms and "block" ads to the best of my ability, in real life as well. I do not view ads that reach me by mail, and as for billboards and posters I see around town, I make a note to avoid the products they advertise. I know this doesn't make a difference but it's an ideological thing. If my actions could in theory cause a tiny little dent in a graph somewhere, I make a point to do it.
Junk mail is particularly frustrating because companies are generating so much paper waste only for someone to deliver it to your door, and you to put it directly in the bin. No, Dominoes, I don't give a fuck about your shit pizza, and sending junk through my letterbox 5 days a week isn't going to change my mind.
Sports Illustrated recently started sending me their full monthly magazine with my name on it, without a subscription. It also goes straight into the trash.
(For anyone thinking once a month doesn't sound too bad: Sports Illustrated has so many pages it stacks up to almost a centimeter thick)
> I strongly believe that advertising by definition is unethical in all of it's forms
So, you think “Show HN” is unethical, too? If so, how are people with a new product going to find customers? Word of mouth? How do they find their first customer?
I suspect your opinion on advertising is strong, but not that strong.
"Advertising is a huge business predicated entirely on manipulating people to make purchases they otherwise wouldn't, surgically exploiting weaknesses in our psyche."
I wonder why society decided that advertising was so important, it was willing to let it completely dominate (and in my opinion destroy) our public spaces. People who need something will find it just fine without billboards. And people buying things they don't need is not exactly in the interest of society. So why should society pay for it?
I've been working on a policy paper idea for my home country - Slovenia. Complete ban of all outdoor advertising except shopfronts and limit those.
Now, since you can't just ban it outright, there's still need for advertising, a different solution should be offered:
Every community needs to have a public billboard, setup and maintained by the local government, one per 500 residents, where 25% of the area is auctioned to commercial ads, 25% is awarded with a lottery system (to prevent money dominating too much), 25% for cultural events and 25% for nonprofits and charity.
The advertising space should be place in a crowded area (like a square). It needs some extra rules for high density area, so that space can be grouped, but not too much.
All other outdoor advertising is banned. Since a lot of companies would be effectively banned by this move, some sort of (small) compensation should be paid to them and time given, so they can pivot.
Costs of removing the advertising should be subsidized for the same reason. Any advertising facades or roofs (i.e. different colored tiles used to make the roof) can stay, but the ad has to be removed when the roof/facade is replaced.
Money coming in from the ad actions should more than cover this expense.
Possibly add an exception to "shopping center", where such advertising is permitted, but with strict rules to what such a center is (i.e. has no residents).
I know most Americans will balk at such "government overreach" but I think it could pass here if someone actually put some effort in.
That's amazing, I have pretty much exactly the same ideas. Advertising is a huge business predicated entirely on manipulating people to make purchases they otherwise wouldn't, surgically exploiting weaknesses in our psyche. It's immoral, and it's economically wasteful.
Presumably selling ad space on things like buses and bus stops helps pay for those services. I’m much more sympathetic to physical ads. I can just ignore it instead of waiting to click a skip button.
This is the obvious spin, that anyone trying to undermine such ideas would do. So I just checked the yearly (pre-pandemic) financial report for our bus service - the buses are COVERED in adverts. From what I can tell, those ads bring in less than 2% of all income.
The ads on bus stop were given in exchange for running the bike rental service, but that service isn't free to use, so the income can't be that great.
(2) Ignoring ads
I have a feeling that "I can just ignore it" is the critical fallacy that will undermine ideas such as mine.
To know just how much they are affecting you, you have to go to a place with no ads.
Honestly, if you're using ad blocking on your computer - turn it off completely. The difference in physical ads is not as big (since action blocking popups are not a thing), but even discounting those, just the saturation of "things going on" is tiring. Ignoring things is an active action that requires energy and focus... why you are giving that away freely to someone trying to manipulate you ... I do not understand.
The fact that you use "waiting to click a skip button" as a comparison shows how normalized ads have become.
The alternative to "fewer ads" isn't "ads being forced down your throat" but "no ads, at all".
Curious, I checked the revenue that bus ads bring in where I live. I can't find a specific line item, but it's definitely not one of the major income streams. I assume the return:reward ratio is good. They probably outsource the management of the ad space and get some millions trickle in for no effort.
To know just how much they are affecting you, you have to go to a place with no ads.
Honestly the only ads I ever see in real life are bus and bus stop ads. Maybe it's terrible where you live, but here, I can barely remember the last one I saw. If anything I wish the local government would have more ads. They have a bunch of activities on sometimes that I don't hear about or forget because their advertising is so poor.
>I wonder why society decided that advertising was so important, it was willing to let it completely dominate (and in my opinion destroy) our public spaces.
Because advertising is a form of speech, and society has decided that speech is important?
All freedoms are limited by the freedoms of others. You may speak what you wish, but when and how you speak it is limited.
You can not scream about it in the middle of the night, since doing so bothers your neighbors.
Letting anyone and everyone do what ever they want would lead to anarchy. So no society, USA included, does this.
But some actors in societies have convinced the western population, especially Americans, into the fantasy of "freedom without limitation", which, just so happens to only apply to the rich and powerful, while everyone else has to contend with limitations on their freedoms.
I think you mean chaos rather than anarchy. Anarchy involves maximizing freedom for everyone, not just one's self, among other things. The strong doing whatever they want is the exact opposite of anarchy.
Perhaps if we did that for, say, 80 years, then after the last advertiser has dropped dead of advanced age, we could cautiously re-enable the legality of purely informational, manipulation-free adverts.
Yeah, good luck defining what an ad is. And adverts will always try to manipulate their audience. It would take 3 seconds for them to start doing that again.
That neener-neener attitude is a great example of why advertisers need to be told "just no, for the entire rest of your lives, without exception".
What fraction of your lifespan spent behind bars do you care to wager that you can wiggle and sleaze around the rules? Especially ones that are applied by judges with common sense, rather than algorithms?
Yes. Find another avenue for virtue signaling that contributes on a local level. Paying for the right to be a roaming advert is what has been advertised to you, hence you are repeating the cycle.
I do wear these brands, but try to subdue any labeling. i.e. black sharpie on the nike logo.
Paid online services have been a thing long before internet advertising took over. People used to have search, email, GPS navigation, business directories, news, weather and lots more before Google was even an idea. Why do people suddenly think giving up your privacy to look at obnoxious ads all day is the only way technology will progress further?
They don't wanna pay. If you don't like ads, stay in your home or in sandboxed areas you control or approve. You don't get to control other peoples' property.
How will anyone know about search, email or GPS navigation? If its word of mouth, isn't this a form of advertising? How will they pay for them without a credit card; which will be issued by a bank that can't advertise them. Does that also rely upon word of mouth? How can a new entrant arrive in the banking industry without being able to advertise its services?
Without advertising new companies can't develop new services because only the existing ones will have customers.
A public information service would solve all of these issues. The UK has the Citizen's Advice Bureau. Also public libraries can contain informational bits.
In both of the above cases you as the consumer have to actively seek them out. But I'd be OK with public services being 'advertised' on TV, billboards etc as there would be no profit motive.
Ads should actually be blocked in your city. Advertising as such should be something done in catalogues for this specific purpose. If you are looking for "random things to buy", there is a section for that in the catalogue.
Outside of my office's window I can see a billboard about 2 blocks away from my apartment. For about 30 minutes every couple of hours it flashes red, blue, white and purple at about 3 different colors per second, with the following text in the middle: "You should advertise here!"
It honestly blows my mind how someone can look at it and think it's a good idea, instead of how absurd that someone is allowed to put up a giant seizure machine in one of a city's busiest streets.
I used to think that advertisement had gone too far when it was used to track people online, but a literal real life recreation of the iCarly episode where Spencer causes a traffic accident using a billboard caught me by surprise.
If it is three times per second, it's unlikely to induce seizures in those with photosensitive epilepsy. Though, depending on where you live, there may still be rules against it (some places set the limit at 2Hz), so it may be worth reporting it.
Flashing signs like that are still very rude, though.
My wife and I were talking about this a few weeks ago.
I've basically stopped listening to terrestrial radio because it seems like the majority of it is ads.
A trend I've noticed over the last few years is that gas stations specifically. As gas stations have replaced older pumps with newer ones, the new ones feature LCD screens that, as soon as you are done selecting the myriad of options it now requires just to put fuel in a car, you are suddenly bombarded with videos and very loud advertisements.
I have been walking away and sitting in my car but, a few weeks ago I got yelled at by a pump attendant that I had to stay next to my fuel door while it was filling for "safety reasons." So now I have to stand there and be bombarded by this thing screaming at me about what is for sale while filling up and it is very, very annoying.
Another one is a restaurant here in town that has one of these new LED signs that is so bright at night that it actually hurts my eyes. It is so bright that you can't make out what is in the road beyond it. Multiple people have complained about it my city's subreddit and it has lead to at least one traffic accident that I know about. I even went to file a complaint with the city zoning board about that one but was told there was nothing they could do as there were no regulations regarding the brightness of signs. They suggested I complain to the owner.
And it's so manipulative. "Hey, you're not good enough because you're too fat, or your hair is thinning, and no one will ever love you." "Look at these starving abused puppies, just LOOK AT THEM and donate now."
In the ever increasing war for our attention, it really does feel like physical advertising is becoming louder, more aggressive, more insulting, and just so much more ubiquitous that it is almost impossible to get away from it. We have got to find a way to start to reign in some of the more annoying - and dangerous - advertising going on out there.
Do you vote in any in your city? Mayor/councillor? Tell them and tell them you represent other voters for greater pull. The city can regulate if you can get a rule on the books.
Static ads I can look at or ignore at if I so choose, both on the web and on the street. For reference, just some decades ago static ads in, for example, a computer magazine used to be as much valued content as the magazine articles themselves.
Ads become a problem as soon as they become interactive, illuminated, or moving images. Those remove my option to consume the ads at my own pace and choice. Instead, they become attention magnets primarily to be fought against.
Just as pop-in ads or flashing/screen-estate-hungry ads are bad on websites do large, bright digital advertisement screens make a horrible streetscape and in public transit video screens totally kill your ride. You can no longer walk or sit in your own thoughts as you're kept occupied to avoid looking at the flashing, moving footage.
Google search still mostly does ads right. Not only are they sometimes even relevant but firstly they don't stand out so badly that I'd refuse to take a glance at them.
(Not that I ever click on any of them because that would support the ad-business. If I see something interesting I open an incognito window and browse the corresponding company's site directly and look for the bargain/offer - they might still be able to track me, even if partially, but at least there's no direct link via the clicking the ad.)
Bangalore did this for the last 2 years, albeit for a different reason. BBMP (the civic body) took down thousands of billboards and hoardings over weeks, and while there were violations, Bangalore was (for the last 2 years or so) a city with adblock.
Unfortunately, the ban was struck down by the court this year in August, so we're going back.
For what it's worth, the ban was called out as great by various citizen activist groups[0], even if the reason it happened was quite political.
I live in bangalore. I found the ad ban extremely irritating, because they took down the billboards, but left torn cloth or plastic sheets in place! It even empty boards. It was looking so ugly everywhere. I'd rather see the ads. At least advertisers try to make their billboards look aesthetically pleasing. I do agree that it becomes excessive in some places. I feel that public (taxpayer funded) infrastructure should not have any ads.
The amount of ads packed into an NBA basketball game on TV is startling:
- each player's jersey
- arena walls
- courtside walls
- projected onto the court floor (updated each minute)
- on the side and top of the backboard
- most TV graphics ("Taco Bell play of the day")
- split-screen ads during free-throws
- traditional commercials during time-outs
Don't forget one of the most obnoxious phenomena: making the name of the sports venue itself into an advertisement (e.g., "Regional Bank Stadium," "Big Telecom Co. Arena," etc.)
Absolutely. I don't much care what people do with their stores but billboards are even worse than online ads because they're entirely non-consensual manipulation since you can't avoid them at all. It really should be considered a form of psychological violence.
I think this will be a whole new issue when AR becomes standard. In fact, it's the whole reason I don't want AR. I just see ads for days coming out of it. Everyone putting little ad starting QR codes (or whatever they settle on) everywhere so every time I turn my head there's a gecko on a coffee table in the random store I'm in trying to sell my car insurance.
> When you’re reading in the hypothetical yellow pages, that’s advertising.
> Or when you’re walking down the high street, looking in shop windows; advertising again.
The important fact here is in this case we asked for it. I opened the online store app. Go ahead and show me the products. That's what I came for. I wouldn't even call that advertising, to me it's just information.
Totally different from shoving those products in my face every time I try to do anything. Now I don't care about products, I don't want to see them or hear about them. But these advertisers insist on subjecting me to their ads.
One of the worst examples is we (still) have PLANES flying with banners behind them in California. They make noise, pollute the air, and assault your eyes when you could be looking at a beautiful blue sky without them. And I don’t know why it’s OK to “rent” this “space” to advertisers because, unlike something like a billboard, it’s not like someone went to the trouble of erecting a sky board with limited ad space.
The town I live in (Santa Barbara), does not allow billboards, and it's amazing. It's easy to forget that billboards exist, but every time I travel I am reminded how nice it is to not see them in daily life.
It's pretty crazy that we allow ourselves to be bombarded with the psychological attacks that are advertising. Ads use pictures of food or sex appeal that manipulates our lizard brains or social attacks to convince us to buy products we don't need. If you pay close attention a large percentage is for negative sum products like unhealthy and addictive fast food.
"Don't need" is relative though. Just like the term lizard brains. They're both simple models. There are lots of cases where ads will sell you things you will need, just like there are lots of cases where humans make wiser choices than lizards.
If you want to defeat advertising, you have to acknowledge this side, otherwise you underestimate its brilliance and role in human wellbeing and productivity. Until you can carry its strengths forward without its weaknesses, it will keep propagating as the solution with no end in sight.
"They don't have your best interests in mind" is also relative. Keep in mind the diversity of clients who have or receive money to buy ads, from advocacy groups to attorneys involved in ecological litigation to your local bookstore to a new credit union in your area to a fast food chain to a complete out and out scammer running worthless seminars.
Part of the deal is that they still get to work from incentives on their end. But this alone doesn't rule out your interests or even your best interests.
The subjective beauty of this is that depending on who you are, even the seminar scammer might be both obvious AND the best news you've heard all week, because you have been waiting for a specific opportunity.
BTW I really recommend watching Harrison Ford in The Mosquito Coast. There's a bit of a diamond of truth buried in the story, kind of an anti-anti-ad message that is really important to consider.
My city replaced the old billboards ( primarily in bus stops, but there are freestanding ones as well ) by electronic billboards. It is like there are giant 2 meter tall Phones everywhere, but this time they only show ads.
I go out of my way to be offline when I am out of the house and now the city council has shoved these screens right in my face. No escape.
Like almost everyone else on HN, I believe everyone should have the right to block ads in any city, and it should be possible with VR technology in the not-too-distant future.
That said, I would always want to live in a city in which advertisers are constantly fighting each other to get everyone's attention with ads, in every possible way, to the extent permitted by reasonable zone/cosmetic regulations[a], because the alternative is often symptomatic of economic stagnation or even disaster.
Anecdotally, a city without ads is a city without economic growth. Compare:
[a] For example, in the US it is virtually impossible to display ads on residential streets, because doing so requires getting explicit permission from local government bodies like a neighborhood commission.
The author’s suggestion to go to the government can work. In the 1960s, the president’s wife rallied support for a “Highway Beautification Act” to remove billboards from much of the federal highway system. It largely worked.
There are some cities and places that do reduce intrusive real life advertising by banning billboards for example, or putting up a billboard tax to reduce them and divert the visual pollution cost into the city budget. Same with regulations reducing the loudness of audio ads, or banning them, or changing how storefronts can put their names up. That is more like a HOA regulating what kind of house style you can have although. It's definitely possible!
I am hoping for a membership service (think Clear vs TSA PRE) that allows you to avoid ads on all (digital) platforms. YouTube and Twitter are becoming so terrible with advertisements these days. I don't want to complain about it though - I want to just pay some $$$ to not see them anymore.
We went all-in on this advertising based economy and no one really wants it but the advertisers.
You can do exactly that on YouTube (with Premium). It is one of the highest value memberships I can think of, considering how much time I (and the rest of the world) spend on YouTube every day.
Ultimately though, all such solutions turn into yet another money grab. Cable TV was supposed to be this premium ad-free experience, but media conglomerates realized hey, why not get money out of both subscriptions and ads?
> media conglomerates realized hey, why not get money out of both subscriptions and ads?
This is exactly the reason why I advocate against YT Premium. You're still providing data to Google (and you need to provide real data otherwise the payment may fail) who has proven their bad faith several times with dark patterns and their non-GDPR-compliant "consent" flow.
The giant ad billboards always remind me of the giant portraits of the supreme leader they have in authoritarian world states. Instead of his image dominating the public sphere, we have the Coca Cola company, or some clothers retailer or what-not. There's also that scene in Blade Runner with the giant ads about a new life in the other colonies.
I just came back home to Europe after a month long stay in a village in Africa, I was baffled by how oppressing the amount of advertisement is in Western cities. It's the first thing I noticed when I got back. It never really occurred to me before that, but now I see it everywhere and it's sickening. Especially most of it is for low-quality/unhealthy products. I developed a particular hate for attention grabbing digital advertising displays.
The anti-billboard movement, adopted by a few cities such as Geneva[0], is a good step towards less visual pollution.
About online ads, is most of the tracking and code that runs to identify my preferences or is some kind of anti=fraud shit,that will get even more complex and invasive as bad guys will try commit fraud.
I am thinking at a partial solution(emphasize on partial), offer the users a non-tracking account(Free) , you still give them targeted ads but using a non tracking method like a survey at account creation, options for the user to tell you that he does not like this type of ad, options for the user to tell you what kind of ads he wants to see (like I could accept non-animated ads, software related, local business related, technology related, and article related ads).
But all of this would be impossible if most of the tracking is for anti-fraud , then you would need some DRMed browsers to confirm you probably are a human.
What if we could have free public transportation in exchange for an advertisement bombardment? That actually sounds like a great idea (to me). Sure getting on a metro train would make you dizzy and overwhelmed. But we would actually have a metro train!
I wouldn't mind ads in my browser if they behaved inobtrusively. What makes me block them is their infuriating attempts to hijack my attention even at a cost of preventing me from reading / listening / watching the real content.
> The center post was cut all the way through. The outer posts were each cut more than two thirds through. The great sign rested mostly on its own weight, precariously balanced. A south breeze would make it totter. A child could push it over. Within its gravitational time-space continuum, the billboard’s destiny was predetermined, beyond appeal. The arc of its return to earth could have been computed to within a tolerance of three millimeters. They savored the moment. The intrinsic virtues of free and worthy enterprise. The ghost of Sam Gompers smiled upon their labors.
It’s gotten so bad online that I do everything in my power to block them, prevent them, avoid them, and ignore them. I mute YouTube videos, I use adblock, and scroll right past the ads. I refuse to even look at them.
I got stuck in traffic last week next to a mobile light-up advertising truck. The lights were so bright it hurt my eyes. I had to drive with one hand up blocking as much of it as possible. Welcome to the future.
We are building an app for that, it's called Bitfari. It pays people to disclose preferences and customizes city ads as they go about their day. It also blocks ads the majority of people don't want to see and routes them to different locations, so that public ad space is better allocated. The service has integrated over 200K screens globally and its currently valued at 25M+. You can learn more about it here https://bitfari.org/whitepaper/
It always struck me as bizarre that distracted driving is illegal, but it's fine to put giant billboards next to the freeway, specifically to attract your attention while you're driving.
Why stop at ads though? I should just have a personalized algorithm that filters all real-world content I see, or otherwise sanitizes it for my consumption. For example, apply beauty filters to everyone around me so I don't have to deal with the unpleasantness of ugly people. Block out any noise that might trigger discomforting thoughts, like political opinions that I disagree with.
If it sounds dystopian, well.. once we're used to it, having to experience the ugliness of an unfiltered world would surely seem more dystopian. Right?
> Blocking ads may work online, but unless you spend your life in VR goggles, one cannot apply technical solutions alone.
The VR goggle / IRL ad blocking is an interesting idea. I immediately jump to fear that something politically sensitive could be censored. However, I suppose we still have that issue in online ad blocking.
Are there any known examples of censorship of content critical of $GOV being applied to an ad-blocker? Any crowd sourced list could in theory be vulnerable to censorship.
Yeah the garage in front of my house often leaves their sign on after 8pm (when it's supposed to be off) and it's super bright. Really annoying in summer when I have the windows open.
It would be nice once AR glasses come. Although they probably won't be able to black things out (unless they also have an LCD layer to darken certain pixels) as well as a colour layer.
Life online has improved so much with adblockers. I literally rarely see ads anymore online or on TV.
I always thought that I at least should be entitled to be paid by companies who are using my mental bandwidth for their profit, without even asking for my permission.
Marin County CA has banned outdoor advertising billboards since the 1930s[1]. This results in a noticeable reduction in night time light pollution compared to surrounding areas, and -- of course-- a lack of obnoxious outdoor adds.
I block ads in my browser primarily because I want to block the ad networks from collecting information about my browsing habits. Doesn’t really apply here.
Iowa seems to have a law that forces billboards to be further away from the interstate. They occupy a much smaller slice of your visual field. It makes a difference.
It also makes a difference that they can't put too much text on them, because they're too far away for you to be able to read that. So you have visually smaller billboards with simpler messages on them. Driving across Iowa is more pleasant because of this.
My city (and several others I've lived in) strongly restrict the amount of advertising that can be put in its center and is thus a much more pleasant place than many other cities I've visited.
So there are "adblocks" in cities, they're just done in a much better way than on the web: the ads aren't created at all instead of forcing citizens to spend time fighting an individual war against them.
There's an important distinction between prohibiting speech or commerce you dislike and refusing to consume or participate in what you dislike.
If the equivalent augmented reality technology were developed, I'm unsure of what grounds objections would stand on. If someone wants to go about with video goggles which replace billboards with waterfalls or wildflowers, go for it. Develop the technology and release it.
Billboards are interesting because in spite of their near-universal hate, they are about the only remaining form of advertising in print media. I don't especially mind advertising in cities, the subway ads are part of the experience. The terrible billboards in unincorporated areas along the highway are much more annoying, but of course those are much harder to get rid of.
> The good citizen in real life fights the planning applications for new adverts; they tell their local politicians about the damage badverts cause; they fund campaign groups to tell others the same. Make a conscious decision to avoid adverts, and enjoy your life more.
The analogue of blocking ads in real life is physically removing, destroying, or defacing them.
I like ads. Ads support the websites and people that I like. Sometimes I find cool things through ads. I still use UBlock Origin though because ads have broken my trust. They don’t vet them enough, so malvertising happens sometimes. And they absolutely destroyed the concept of privacy across the web.
just read a guardian article about that, they brought back advertising in a controlled way. This seems fair. Also Googled before and after pics of the city, can't say there was much of an improvement. I live in the UK, advertising is probably controlled by planning laws here, I live in a very historic touristy city, there's advertising but it doesn't impact the beauty at all.
It's interesting how the author of this piece uses "badverts" and "badvertisers" because it implies that there are "goodverts" and "goodvertisers" in the settings he's speaking of.
As the author, yes. Some parts of the city are innately commercial spaces, and commerce requires advertising. But let it stop at colourful shop signs (even neon is fine, in a shopping centre!), signwritten vans for trades and deliveries, or the circus' sign on the fence of the public park. The badverts are the billboards covering up entire buildings; the LED pedestals that block your way as you walk and distract drivers; and the incessant advertising for unethical investment companies on public transport.
I mean, the simplest answer is that "your browser" implies actual possession of the browser, whereas "your city" implies only a metaphor of possession of the city, so the question is deliberately misleading.
Physical ads do actually track you in a lot of cases. Street level ad screens with cameras are widely available, though the ad companies promise they they only use those to profile you, not to track you.
Traffic billboards have even begun reading license plates for personalised ads.
The days where a billboard was just a billboard are over, ended by the ever scummier advertising industry and their lust for data.
Vermont has essentially banned some kinds of public ads. No billboards allowed alongside roads. Business signs must fit in with the surroundings and rural character of the area.
There are a few LED billboards around my city. At night they are absolutely BLINDINGLY bright. Who thought it was a good idea to have these high-bright LEDs facing the roads?
I think thats going to be one of the early successes of AR glasses. Its trivially easy to make, and freemium versions will replace generic ads with ones tailored to you.
I have no problem with seeing ads in person, I think I'm not against height limits on signs for stores though, because they can really remove the beauty of a city.
As soon as AR glasses take off some bright fellow will make an adblocker for it. And as soon as that happens I will want AR glasses and reward the dev for their work.
Ad based services have empowered the poor at the expense of the rich who would gladly pay more to hide ads where the poor gladly trade ads for free or reduced price services.
If getting rid of ads means the poor will be worse off why do so many well intentioned people support this position?
Have any examples of ads benefiting poor people? This is the first time ive ever heard anyone make an statement like this and its really blowing my mind that people think this.
If google, facebook, instagram, youtube required a 7 dollar a month subscription you would cut access to the poor. A netflix subscription in india is a dollar but even at that price it shuts out people and most don't use it.
You are being targeted and identified because people will pay more to show ads to you compared to a poor person. You will get ads poor people won't. The fact that you are willing to allow ads means you end up paying for that poor person's usage. If all rich users decide to adblock the company will be forced to go to a pay model that will shut out the poor.
For the richer users it may be in your best interest to pay. For poor users who cannot afford to pay, don't have a credit card, etc ads are in their best interest.
I own a website www.Photopea.com, visited by 3 million people a month.
Once in a while, I enable adblock detector, and do not allow usrers with adblocks use the service. I wish everyone was doing that.
When you see someone willing to give you a car (or anything else), but they want money in exchange (i.e. sell it to you), you understand, that it is wrong to take the car without giving them money (i.e. stealing).
But when you see someone willing to give you an article, a poem, a song, a funny video, but they want you to watch the ad in exchange, lots of people think it is fine to break their conditions.
It is extremely easy to detect ad blockers on the web. I wish website creators stopped tolerating ad blockers. People would finally learn to watch ads, or pay for stuff, and the creators would be able to create much better content.
> When you see someone willing to give you a car (or anything else), but they want money in exchange (i.e. sell it to you), you understand, that it is wrong to take the car without giving them money (i.e. stealing).
Someone selling goods has to abide by some laws - typically, lies/false advertising is prohibited, they might have to provide a warranty, and most contracts can be cancelled within 14 days by returning the goods. This means that the car's specifications will be made available to me, the terms of the deal throughly detailed in a legal document I'd have to sign, and I might get to test drive the car before committing.
Ads in contrast don't have any of this. In your example of articles/poems/songs/funny videos, I don't get to check out the content beforehand, I have no recourse if it turns out to be defective/fraudulent/etc (such as clickbait, or a video with 2 mins actual content and 8 mins filler to get to the 10 min threshold for a second ad) after I "pay" by viewing the ad (and parting with my personal data) and I don't have any recourse either if the advertised product turns out to be a scam or malware.
Nobody cares what your opinion about the ad is. If you do not like the "cost" of the item (watching a minute of an ad, to see a 10 second video), just go somewhere else to find an alternative. Or buy it once and never again.
What you are saying is, basically, if someone is selling bread for $100, and they dont let you taste in advance, you are allowed to steal that bread, because $100 is not a right price for the bread.
Not liking the cost implies knowing the cost in advance. Does your website disclose that it's ad-supported, which data will be collected and how it will be used (which is required if your are based in the EU or offer service to EU-based customers) and whether you take responsibility for any ill effects from executing the ad code? Because otherwise it can be argued you are also "stealing" people's computing resources and personal data before they could make a conscious decision to "pay".
> steal
Theft implies that you are deprived of the item once it's stolen - this is not the case here, and the costs should be taken into account either way. You're comparing fractions of a cent from an ad view with $100. I'd feel much better about stealing the former than the latter even in case of actual, physical theft.
> they dont let you taste in advance
It doesn't have an impact on the "theft" scenario, but in case of a paid product I would still expect a refund if the bread is defective (moldy or fake) or was mis-sold with false advertising.
"Theft implies that you are deprived of the item once it's stolen - this is not the case here."
Yeah, exactly. If I write a book, and one person buys it, and a billion people copy it from that person (and I sell just one copy in total), there is nothing wrong, because I still have my book.
I am glad that most of people dont think this way, because we would not have any books in our world.
> I am glad that most of people dont think this way, because we would not have any books in our world.
Piracy has been around for decades, may be making a resurgence thanks to the balkanization of media streaming services and yet we still have movies, music & TV.
You aren't just charging your users "ad views". You are also facilitating 3rd parties tracking their online behaviour, and they certainly aren't agreeing to those terms when they first land on your site.
Could you be more specific? What "3rd parties" are tracking what "behaviour" of yours, and why exactly is it worth so much? And what do you mean by "you" in "tracking you"? Do they know your name?
In the case of photopea - as soon as I land on the homepage and before i consent to ANYTHING:
github
google analytics
facebook
stackpath
wikimedia
google adwords
google fonts
amazon ads
(a few others I dont recognise)
and, of course, the companies that you use to collect "consent"...
Even if i disable ALL the options on the "consent" module and reload the page, it STILL loads ALL of these. In fact, it seems to load even more! For example, I create a document, then it loads (in ADDITION to the above):
They are at the very least tracking that i visited your site. They are tracking the URLs that are active. As I click around and use the app, it is triggering more interaction with those services - so clearly they are monitoring actions/events too. This is just on YOUR site.
These networks are able to identify me by a cookie (and other techniques), so they can compile my activity on YOUR site into a log of my activities across multiple sites which they "provide their ads" on. They can absolutely identify you as an individual - google, facebook, etc, are ones that people have INTENTIONALLY given their names too, and many of these other networks sell/lease the data to others to allow them to provide their own identity link.
Furthermore, these 3rd party "scripts" have access to the entire page content too. They can read my email address should I register. They can even capture my password if they were so configured (or were in themselves hacked to do so).
Bear in mind i did NOT consent to any of this when I landed on your site, and even when i specifically removed "consent" via the form on your landing page, i was STILL being tracked by ALL those I mention above.
THIS is why people have blockers, etc. I dont mind if you have an image with a link to some advertisers product/service/whatever. What I care about it that my every action on your site is providing additional data for these companies to mine and build a secret profile of my browsing habits.
EDIT: I browsed without an ad blocker to compile this behaviour. I feel dirty.
The behaviour is what websites you visit. It is worth money because websites have topics which hints how they can better target advertising at you. Yes, they know our names because they can track us across every website we visit.
Out of curiosity, I decided to check your website with adblocker turned off. After rejecting (!) GDPR consent, the website decided to send my personal information to the following companies: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Ad Lightning, Setupad, UniConsent, Adagio, ID5, Criteo, Magnite, RTB House, Casale Media, EMX Digital, Adform, Pubmatic, Between Digital, Lijit Networks, AppNexus, 33Across, Adx Premium, Sharethrough, Smart Adserver, OpenX, BRealTime, bumlam.com (couldn't find information about owner of this domain), BidSwitch, Getintent, Yahoo, and more - at some point I gave up trying to figure out who owns given domain names.
The privacy policy which is quite hidden on the website (https://www.photopea.com/privacy.html) says nothing about that. All it says is the following:
> We use third party tracking tools to improve the performance and features of the Service (e.g. Google Analytics). Such tools are created and managed by parties outside our control. As such, we are not responsible for what information is actually captured by such third parties or how such third parties use and protect that information.
This won't fly under GDPR, just saying. Not only you are responsible for third party behavior, but you didn't even mention all tracking scripts that are directly used (I see Facebook Pixel Code right in the source code for photopea.com). You are in Czech Republic, right? I think it is in European Union.
GDPR still applies in the UK via their "equivalent" UK GDPR, as does the PECR (which is their implementation of the ePrivacy Directive, which covers cookies).
If you know how the web works, you must know, that websites do not have access to your device. You do not tell Photopea your name or your address.
The only thing a website can know, is, that "someone with a screen resolution of 1920x1080 pixels visited www.Photopea.com at 18:37". It can be useful to know the number of visitors, or the usual screen resolutions.
> Google, Facebook, Amazon, Ad Lightning, Setupad, UniConsent, Adagio, ID5, Criteo, Magnite, RTB House, Casale Media, EMX Digital, Adform, Pubmatic, Between Digital, Lijit Networks, AppNexus, 33Across, Adx Premium, Sharethrough, Smart Adserver, OpenX, BRealTime, bumlam.com (couldn't find information about owner of this domain), BidSwitch, Getintent,
Which one of those do you need to know usual screen resolutions of users? Or maybe there are some other reasons those all get contacted?
(You also missed some "minor" details like IP addresses and fingerprinting profiles overall, and I'm honestly not sure if you are as ignorant as you act or just pretend to do so, and which one would be more offensive)
I do not know a lot about the ad mechanism, which my partners use. But it usually works by contacting several servers and asking them "hey, there is someone visiting www.Photopea.com, probably from Canada, with a screen resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, how much would you pay for showing them your ad?" ... there is an auction, and the ad from the highest bidder is shown to you. The more servers take part in the auction, the more money I can make.
Like really, if you open a website for the first time in your life, what kind of secret information could it know about you?
The trackers in your site use cookies, and browser fingerprinting to create a profile of the visitors to your site, which combined with other data on the visitors is used to identify them personally.
That on its own should give you pause. But that data is then used by companies like Facebook or Google to allow the highest bidder to alter that users behaviour - by getting them to believe some propaganda, to vote for a political party, or to spend money on something they don’t need.
That’s the business model. That is how you make money on your site.
There are other ways of making money – I’m sure that had ad revenue not been available you would have found a different way.
I don’t understand why you can’t just load traditional ads related to your business that no ad blocker would work out of the box against.
If I visit a website about cars, one could put up car ads because it’s obviously in my interests at this point.
I don’t visit websites that require me to block my adblocker for the simple reason that it means they have no other monetizable content apart from me, and as I didn’t even get to their magnet content yet I have no idea how the website feels, which makes me not so open to sharing my data fingerprint.
My ads are traditional ads, and the ads are almost always related to the business.
There are no good and bad ads. The creators of ad blockers decide, what the ad is. The code of an ad blocker literally contains a code like: if(website is Photopea.com) find a specific element and delete it.
If an ad blocker tells you, that they are not blocking "good ads", they are usually blackmailing ad companies to pay them, so that they do not block their ads. The money, which could go to content creators, are going to ad block creators.
I hate ads and I never understood the „watch ads to get content“ business plan. Why not just provide demo content and ask users to pay for full access? By relying on ads for revenue, you basically invite adblockers. After all, if people didn’t like them, they wouldn’t exist.
The problem is that the ad-free experience often costs orders of magnitude above what the ad view would earn them. Let's take newspapers for example, ad view on a single page load would maybe earn them 10c, but if I wanted to pay I'd need to subscribe to a monthly commitment of ~15£/month (for the WSJ) and still have no guarantee my data won't be used maliciously (there is no way to pay anonymously) nor whether cancelling the subscription will be easy (no idea for the WSJ but the New York Times is infamous for this).
True, but there are hundreds of news websites out there and even if there was just one you'd still have to read it 5 times a day to make the subscription worthwhile.
I don't read news near enough to make a single subscription worthwhile, and even if I did I would read multiple sources meaning I'd need multiple subscriptions - that's completely unsustainable.
Maybe watching ads would be a fair exchange if there was an option to pay, often (mostly), there isn’t. Additionally to some (most), ads aren’t the problem, its tracking, creation of shadow profiles etc
Never used photopea, hope it works out for you, but I wish website creators stopped thinking that invasion of my privacy is a currency
It doesn't work very well, unfortunately. Those willing to pay usually are the most interesting part of the audience for ad providers, so it's difficult to compensate that loss by a reasonably priced 'ad-free' option. You probably would be surprised if you knew how much your attention may cost. Targeted ads created a market where everyone pays proportionally to their spendings. I'm not saying it's a good situation, but it looks like that's a local optimum rather hard to leave.
What bothers me is that huge companies are more resilient to tracking and ads restrictions, so that fight may further speed up centralisation of the internet. I would personally prefer the chaotic old-school world wide web with ugly flashing banners instead.
Photopea.com has an option to pay for an ad-free experience, and one in 2000 users is paying for it.
I make around $.01 (one USD cent) for an hour of using Photopea with ads. If someone was willing to pay me two cents for an hour of using Photopea (with no ads), I would gladly accept it.
That's interesting, I use Photopea a lot. How did you start it, and what led you to going with ads/premium to unblock ads instead of charging premium for more features?
i do not trust cities at all. give them the power to 'block ads' and then what? they have to also block 'hate' and 'disinformation' too right? NO THANKS
I don't know, this doesn't sound like an actionable advice to me. Which is pretty much why I take advertising as a given. And, yes, I don't think one should defend it. I mean, just watch some anti-utopia sci-fi, where everyone has to watch ads about everywhere, then compare it with the direction we are heading to, and reassess your position on "ads being ok".
But I just don't see an alternative, and I don't imagine how one can draw a line between what's good and what isn't. In a sense, there cannot be good ads by definition. In a perfect world, there is no ads, because there is no direct competition — and that's the only way. There is only 1 laundry powder, so you don't have to choose. There may be several laundry powders, each one being the best for a specific type of clothing. And there may be even several laundry powders for each type, one simply being cheaper than the other. But there is always one definitive answer, to which one is the best, so you can make your choice just applying the appropriate filters in your groceries app. Similarly, when you choose a smartphone, you don't really need reminded about samsung being the best everywhere you go: you just go to gsmarena (or such), use some filters and make an informed choice. If an app/consultant/oracle/search engine can truly allow you to choose what's best for you, nobody would think about it as an advertisement, and nobody would need to place it anywhere, because you'll consciously ask it when you need an advice.
Ads are not about that. They are about shouting your product name loud enough to substitute or even obstruct making an informed choice. This is pretty much necessary, when you have 20 laundry powder brands, that make essentially the same product, neither being the best for anyone. And while it could be unnecessary when selling a phone (since all of them are actually different, even if only in how they look), it isn't in the current market, since they need to persuade you that you need a new phone.
So, all ads are bad, but they are unavoidable in a free-market economics, where competition exists. And controlling them doesn't sound ok to me. To be fair, I'm somewhat libertarian-minded in general, so of course it doesn't sound ok to me, but, seriously, where should one draw the line? Is product-placement in movies ok? Is a guy shouting on a street for people come into a restaurant ok? Sure, there is a lot of gradient in-between all this and spoiling the city landscape or even drawing coca cola banners with lasers on the night's sky. But then regulating such things isn't really about regulating ads, since this could be about art projects as well. And, furthermore, one could just call coca-cola banner an art project anyway.
So, I don't see what should I be fighting against, and how should I do that. I appreciate that somebody out there is concerned and stands against evil ad-corporations, but I'm almost holding back to not call it futile.
But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well.