You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
bearbin.net
bearbin.net
But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well.
This isn't so much of a FTFY as much of just a different perspective of the same comment.
Women are more likely to replace 'worn out' clothes
There's a good chance that the majority of men's underwear is bought by women.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
I believe +1 (202) 456-1414 is the number[0] you want to use.
Shoot the actual problem (i.e. the dark patterns and malicious compliance of the concerned websites), not the messenger.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
You should've been running a blocker already. I run third party blockers as much as possible, but these banners are just excessive and useless.
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.
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!
That's just wrong, you don't need a cookie banner for non-tracking ads.
Regardless, I block the ads, but I'm still trying to figure out to block all the dialogs about cookies for the ads I'm blocking.
No, you only need a cookie banner if those third parties collect data.
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.
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
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.
Maybe i'm too oblivious to IRL ads.
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.
----
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.
> 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.
This is an excellent point to make: Streets are for getting from A to B, and ads don't impede that.
The Internet is for getting access to information, and many of the online ad formats do impede that.
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.
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.
I block ads when they do things like take over focus, are distractingly animated, slow down the page, overload my CPU, etc.
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
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
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.
> 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.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020720075012/http://www.mobilt...
Why would it do that? I thought car radios were merely receivers, not transmitters. This is insane...
Still, with good enough equipment it can be detected even from some distance.
> 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"?
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
-- 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.
My consciousness is not for sale, sorry.
https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/banksy-accused-of-plagiarism-...
“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.
- Banksy
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!
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.
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 vehemently dislike ads but I thought that should be mentioned.
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).
Examples I've encountered:
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like just one more reason in a long long long list of reasons not to go to McDonalds
Of course, people typically "age out", but economics of that $.99 menu put together with their powerful marketing means constant flow of new patrons.
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.
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.
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...
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.
[0] https://lareleveetlapeste.fr/affichage-sauvage-quand-les-mul...
[1] https://www.bfmtv.com/societe/paris-burberry-recouvre-une-pi...
[2] https://www.latribunedelart.com/le-patrimoine-parisien-denat...
[3] https://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1600089407-paris-amazon-em...
As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?
Btw.: a nice info-display emits over its life around 2t of CO2 PER YEAR! Most of it in waste..
How about some landscaping and art instead?
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).
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.
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.
What about using a gas pump?
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/ozu1up/havin...
Seems that the trend is going in this direction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
They don't prevent going about the day, they make going about your day more difficult.
IMHO I would argue that 0 advertising is a healthy amount.
Even in cities, they're visual pollution.
I understand the eyesore, but I draw the line before telling someone he can't have a sign on his property.
They are not entitled to our attention. Advertising should be illegal no matter what. Disruptiveness just makes this unacceptable practice even worse.
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.
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:
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
Edit: aren't "donations" received by a for-profit also taxable?
Edit2: items of value acquired by theft are taxable.
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: 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.
How can I even decide to agree or not before I visit the page? Bet they also fingerprint you before the consent pop ups even make it to the screen.
How about they stop serving web pages for free instead? Just return 402 Payment Required. If they send me ads, I will delete them.
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.
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 was actually hoping you'd agree with me :)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.france24.com/en/20141124-fr...
https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/hrscurrent/vol10_ch0436-0474/...
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.
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.
https://www.kut.org/austin/2021-11-09/austins-billboards-sup...
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.
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.
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.
https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2020-21.pdf (this is pre-Covid.)
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.
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.
– BanksyFunnily 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
https://www.tmz.com/2014/04/02/banksy-david-william-noll-ric...
What a hypocrite:
> The E.U. Rules Against Banksy in His Trademark Fight With a Greeting Card Company, Citing His Own Statement That ‘Copyright Is For Losers’
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/banksy-trademark-full-colo...
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.
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.
* The prevailing system will never be toppled by the conscious choice of the individual consumer.
* No one person has the power to overturn capitalism, no matter how persistent.
* 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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
The whole point of having a strong defense force is to have peace. People don't start wars with a strong opponent, only a weak one.
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
In the second case I find greeting cars as objectionable as street billboards.
Some people find unapproved grafitti objectionable. How do you feel about that?
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.
Banksy can be both and is both.
>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.
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.
https://www.tmz.com/2014/04/02/banksy-david-william-noll-ric...
advertizers invade our homes, our bodies and our souls, the most sinister social engineering campaign yet.
If not, why/how are those sins relevant?
Welcome to public spaces?
Life involves maybe seeing things, idea, people you don’t like. That’s not inherently bad.
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.
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.
What is allowed and tolerated in that public space is skewed, an unfair. Certainly not balanced.
I don’t think that had anything to do with what I said.
Although I’m curious What would a not “skewed” public space looks like, and how do you manage that?
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!
You are certainly allowed to. Pony up for the ad space if you want to promote the opposite, or advertise something else entirely.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Why do we live in a city again?
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.
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.”
Ah, gotcha. That's an interesting take. A DAO to govern "retail" activist investors / lobby-groups / think-tank, if you will.
https://1www.eltis.org/in-brief/news/e-scooters-allowed-back...
This is about balancing normal scooter uses advertising
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I think of obnoxious transportation marketing I think first of stuff like this:
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2021/08/16/opinion-muscle-car-ma...
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
That's what Banksy does and says "yes" to.
> No, that would be vandalism.
So what? That's just a word.
> 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.
LOL, but why "must we"? You have no reasoning, no justification.
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.
It seems to me, of course I have no way of knowing, but it SEEMS to me that you are NOT EVEN AWARE that you're not making arguments.
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.
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".
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.
> 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.
I do not have compassion or empathy for ads.
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.
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.
But in the case of vandalizing advertisements, breaking the law is a risk some of us are gleefully willing to take.
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).
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
This is garbage libertarian ideology, and it can and should be questioned and opposed at every opportunity.
"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 books have a raw and anarchistic edge that is not present in the TV series.
I could never put my finger on exactly why they felt so different.... there is an energy to the book that isnt there in the TV.
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.
Tejaratchi originally wrote the essay "Death, Phones, Scissors", published his zine Crap Hound in 1999. Banksy adapted it.
Tejaratchi is OK with that, and yes, it is a great rant.
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.
You're closer to a solution now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Advertising is a huge business predicated entirely on manipulating people to make purchases they otherwise wouldn't, surgically exploiting weaknesses in our psyche."
I wish it was banned outright.
(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)
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.
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.
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".
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.
Because advertising is a form of speech, and society has decided that speech is important?
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.
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.
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?
Without advertising new companies can't develop new services because only the existing ones will have customers.
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.
I do wear these brands, but try to subdue any labeling. i.e. black sharpie on the nike logo.
How about a picture of Scrooge saying “bah humbug”?
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.
Flashing signs like that are still very rude, though.
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.
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.)
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.
A few links:
- https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio...
- https://www.myhoardings.com/blog/ban-on-bangalore-hoardings-...
[0]: https://bengaluru.citizenmatters.in/bbmp-bangalore-illegal-h...
- 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
That's a big if. Looking at the current situation I predict Apple/Meta/Google will own "your" AR. Just like with smartphones.
> 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.
https://ny.curbed.com/2019/10/9/20906159/ballyhoo-media-floa...
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.
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.
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.
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:
* Cities in the former Soviet Union: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=soviet%20union%20ci...
* Cities in North Korea: https://www.google.com/search?q=north+korea+city+streets&tbm...
* Cities in East Germany before reunification: https://www.google.com/search?q=east+germany+city+streets+be...
to, say,
* Peking streets: https://www.google.com/search?q=peking+streets&tbm=isch
* Tokyo streets: https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+streets&tbm=isch
* Times Square: https://www.google.com/search?q=times+square+nyc&tbm=isch
--
[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.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/president-lyndon...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/curious-canberra/2017-0...
We went all-in on this advertising based economy and no one really wants it but the advertisers.
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?
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 anti-billboard movement, adopted by a few cities such as Geneva[0], is a good step towards less visual pollution.
[0] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/directdemocracy/geneva-z%C3%A9r...
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.
“Push it over,” he said.
“You,” she said. “You did most of the work.”
“It’s your birthday.”
-Monkey Wrench Gang
Also, for YouTube, check out the SponsorBlock browser plugin.
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?
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.
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.
[1] https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=HTES19380414.2.41&e=-------en--2...
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.
or watch Steve Mann's explaination what the ey tap is good for: https://youtu.be/DiFtmrpuwNY
I guess unfortunately the holo lense and alike will be rather used to inject ads to reality
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.
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.
I do sometimes antiadvertisement. I see anoying ads? I will write those companies. Works best when cc as many mail addresses you can find from them.
I also don't think most advertising is fair anyway. Most companies can't afford it, you actually don't see a lot of different ads as well.
It's always magnum ice cream, cigarettes, some weird hipster new thing no one needs.
The analogue of blocking ads in real life is physically removing, destroying, or defacing them.
Want something like that check out drab soviet era cities were advertising was banned.
Banksy certainly seems to have thin skin if he gets hurt feelings over adverts. Fuck that too, I'm responsible for my own feelings.
Now I think that this isn't a problem that needs a technology solution, but instead needs a civic and social strategy.
Ads are a huge drain on our collective mental space, for no benefit to most people.
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.
The goal of the system is to mediate every interaction with digital technology and then leverage that mediation to become an ad delivery platform.
Fight it.
fig1 is an any billboard ads replaced with a xterm to show inbox or whatever.
it worked well in labs and constrained environment. didn’t work IRL.
should work today IRL with 1k lines of code with modern hardware + algos/models.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58...
Seems bananas to me for your entire functionality be dependent on third parties.
Result.
If getting rid of ads means the poor will be worse off why do so many well intentioned people support this position?
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.
They gotta make money to keep up somehow, and if they can't do it through ads, they will do it through subscription.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"...
criteo
33across
openx
adxpremium
setupad
4dex
adnxs
casalemedia
pubmatic
emxdgt
rubiconproject
districtm
lijit
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 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.
I’d just like to add that a decent chunk of the traffic to this site is from people typing “free photo editor” or things along those lines.
The creator of this site is specifically targeting people who want a free photo editor… And then complaining about people wanting to use it for free.
UK cookie law is pretty strict, and also pretty clear to read - https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/guidance-...
The issue is nobody bothers to follow it, and enforcement isn't likely enough, or crippling enough, to drive compliance.
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.
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)
Like really, if you open a website for the first time in your life, what kind of secret information could it know about you?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.