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Comment by blackhaz | Hacker News Reader

But they do. You have to mentally process the incoming data first, then discard it. It's a waste of attention, especially with mind-catching ads you can't figure out immediately. Sometimes they are as blocking as browser pop-ups, e.g.: logotypes (or even full ads) displayed before a responsive UI is shown to you, duty-free zones in the airports, and so on. I am pretty sure we will soon have real-life targeted billboards. Even with the current tech, what prevents a webcam with NN to recognize if you're wearing sneakers and tell the display along your way to show some beanie ads, especially if it's cold outside? If you walk into a grocery store you are bombarded with displays outright, and before checking out you are tasked with cross-sale suggestions. All this crap blocks your mind and steals your attention.

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> People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. … Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

-- Adaptation from a Banksy essay in defense of remixing ("vandalising") public advertisements.

Fundamentally, all these ads share the quality of showing people content they didn't ask for to lure consumers into spending money they otherwise wouldn't have. Why the wouldn't I block them everywhere? It's disgusting.

I know many people like to argue that they're a "necessary evil" to pay for content, but I have little patience for this argument because it assumes that vendors are entitled to the success of their flawed business models, and people should give up freedoms to support the industry.

My consciousness is not for sale, sorry.

>They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else.

wow, it is like they know me!

but anyway, I'm all for blocking ads when you go out, and hopefully once they can do that the technology can be extended to allow blocking of people who are not sexy enough, because imagine what I could do with the power of invisibility!

This essay looks amazing. Can you please reference it?

The quoted essay is called Cut It Out. Hard to find a full text of it without OCR noise.

https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/banksy-accused-of-plagiarism-...

Banksy on Advertising

“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

If browser ads had a real-life equivalent, they would be more like that creep who suddenly pops in front of attractive women in the street trying to grab their phone numbers, and no matter what you do you'll never get rid of him and he'll be following you on your way back home (probably to provide you with a "better user experience").

If all web ads were limited to a static gif here or there in the corner of a web page, I don't think adblock plus would be a thing at all.

ad blocking would absolutely be a thing still. Fundamentally an ad blocker is just a filter on what portions of web page get loaded. It is my intention to increase the signal to noise ratio on the things I experience, so I would filter these things out myself at the brain level. I'm just automating the process and offloading it to the browser, and there will always be strong incentive to automate things.

If ads were just gifs or pngs that loaded from the same site, did not noticably impact page load times, and were displayed alongside the main content (analagous to ads in a magazine) I would likely not bother blocking them (and blocking would be more difficult: how would the blocking software know that they were ads and not part of the main content of the page?)

I block ads when they do things like take over focus, are distractingly animated, slow down the page, overload my CPU, etc.

I would also not bother blocking them… I intentionally tolerated ads for years, the flash era was pretty bad… but almost quaint compared to the onslaught of ads that know everything from who your friends are, how much money you make, and what dandruff shampoo you use… (plus that one time you googled “butt plugs”)

and for what? so they can still occupy the majority of screen space and intentionally distract me?

yeah give me the buzzing “swat the fly” ads instead please

In fact, most ad blockers do just that: they filter out all ads but the ok-looking ones that fits a non-invasive standard.

They definitely do. Ads in the subway carry an outstanding cognitive load. A simple experiment helps understand this: just walk through a super ad-heavy subway (Paris or London) then through a much lighter one (Vienna). The difference is significant. The mental experiment is literally different.

The only reason ads exist is to reprogram our brains and make us want things we didn't previously want. It's brainwashing. People who say ads in public spaces do not bother them might be easier influenced than they understand. I often hear people say ads don't work on them but we're all susceptible to being manipulated.

Indeed, ads aren't charity. If companies are spending $1,000 per adult in the United States for advertising (which the are, from the figures I can find), that's because they either:

A. Expect the ads will manipulate spending habits to bring in more than $1,000 of profits per adult on average (with the actual spending needed to reach that profit being far in excess of $1,000, considering profit is only a fraction of revenue).

B. Don't expect the ads to manipulate spending habits, but are stuck in game theory hell where companies waste a vaste amount of resources (10x the budget of NASA) merely to maintain the status quo, because any company that doesn't will fall behind its rivals.

C. Some mixture of A and B.

The cost to the public is mental intrusion (if mental intrusion didn't work, companies wouldn't buy ads), financial (in case A), and also the bad habits that advertising companies and the companies that deliver them push on us so that we can consume more (sedentary culture of watching TV to consume more ads, mindless browsing to consume more ads, encouraging political fights with family to increase engagement and consume more ads).

It's hard to not come to the conclusion that advertising is a huge blight on modern society, and exactly the kind of thing collective action by a society should be fighting against.

Ads in the subway just shouldn't be a thing, period. You already pay for the ticket.

Unfortunately the ticket covers much less than the infrastructure cost. Then public spending covers some of it but ads are needed to fill the gap. Public money that would be spent to cover the ad revenue would not be spent elsewhere (in a hopefully useful way). I hate subway ads just as much as you, but wanted to make this reality check.

That’s crap, if infrastructure was 200% subsidised, there’d still be ads.

Good point, but I wonder what % of say, the NY MTA’s operating budget is funded with ads. I feel like these things are sold for way cheaper than they should be.

I think I remember reading that the naming rights for Citibike were sold for like 40 million dollars. Seems like an incredible bargain for literally thousands of mobile ads all over the city.

I remember being blown away by how much a subway ticket costs in London (2.5£). One would think it should cover a substantial chunk of the cost of running the whole thing. Still, there are ads, everywhere, unending craploads of 'em.

we stopped watching tv in our home a few years ago, coupled with pi hole and ublock origin across all browsers, i personally do not see ads and neither does most of my family. if i do see them at a friends house or somewhere, it is a really jarring experience. i was at a friends house recently and they were watching tv. i found the ad break as a horrifying experience. the volume is turned too high, you can't skip it and it becomes irritating after the third ad break in an hour.

Ads are louder as an industry standard.

In 2012, USA tried to implement the CALM act, which mandated content and ads to be at the same level (“A/85”), but it didn’t play out because ads are measured individually whereas a program is measured as a whole. Complaints to the FCC are still about the loudness of ads… See https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudnes...

A while back I built an ad/not-an-ad classifier for TV frames based purely on pixels (i.e. not prior knowledge of specific ads). One of the interesting findings -- perhaps obvious in retrospect -- was that ad frames were on average brighter than content frames.

I’m sure it’s out there, but I had a similar idea to make an audio device plugin like soundflower to pipe audio through and automatically mute when it detects an ad. We really need an OpenWrt-like project for smart TVs so that you could run something like what you created to mute the sound and display art during ad breaks.

how about we use a pi-hole to send a webhook whenever a url is blocked and then we can use that hook to do the display art thing? that would be nice

Point ad domains to 127.0.0.1 and run a local https that displays art.

How accurate did you get? Are frame-to-frame probabilities pretty independent? I wonder if you can hit some arbitrary threshold by implementing something like "n frames in a row."

The time series of frame probabilities is of course highly autocorrelated, but I never bothered to model that due to lack of interest. From memory, a simple single-frame classifier was >95% accurate (this was quite a few years ago, mind you). In my small-sample and not very rigorous testing, this was higher than human rates. Turns out that on average it's pretty hard to tell an ad from content just by looking at the pixels of a single frame.

I am quite confident that it wouldn't be too hard to build an ad detection ML model that would have near-perfect accuracy. That said, an approach based on algorithmically detecting repeated segments of lengths consistent with ad spots would work just as well, if not better.

P.S. One thing I thought was really interesting was that the classifier -- that was only ever shown a binary label (ad/not-an-ad) -- learnt an embedding that grouped together entire categories of things across TV networks and geographies (studio news, weather, traffic reports etc).

I don't know much about TV broadcasting, so sorry if this is dumb, but what's a segment length? I assume it is either: lengths of a particular shot, or (probably more likely) it is some extra information that is broadcast with the TV signal about how long a chunk of broadcast is?

I like the idea of looking at pixels, just because that's the sort of info that gets sent down the HDMI cable and will always be available.

There exist inline insertion signalling standards (e.g. SCTE-35). These could be used for the insertion of ads. However, none of this signalling typically makes it into the final over-the-air or cable broadcast and so is not useful for ad detection.

To your question on segment lengths, ad spots have specific, predefined duration. In the US these are typically 15s, 30s and 60s (sometimes 45s). This property could be exploited to detect ads. Consider, for example, a video segment that's exactly 30s in duration and is repeated many times over multiple TV channels. It is very likely to be an ad.

This. I also block ads and got rid of my tv years ago. But the moment an ad does pop up somewhere, it's really extra annoying.

We do have real life targeted ads. The NYC Link terminals, for example, can detect tons of data about the devices people carry, and the comings and goings of the owners, and sometimes link them to their ad profiles. ads for display can then be selected accordingly.

This isn't even particularly new tech, they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to, and this was in the early 2000s

> they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to

Any idea how this was supposed to work? I don't know how that information would leak out unless it was just listening for the audio from a car with windows rolled down.

An archive of the company behind that tech [1], has this to say:

> Each car radio sends out a signal at a frequency higher than the one it is receiving from the radio station. When a car passes by one of the MobilTrak sensors, the sensor picks up on the signal to determine what the driver is listening to on the radio

And US6813475B1 seems to be the patent behind the tech.

If they ever really could find that sort of signal in the noise of the real world, I've got to imagine that improved tech for in-car radios, not to mention people listening to their phones via Bluetooth and SiriusXM, has rendered it even more broken.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020720075012/http://www.mobilt...

> Each car radio sends out a signal at a frequency higher than the one it is receiving from the radio station.

Why would it do that? I thought car radios were merely receivers, not transmitters. This is insane...

It is a result of the mechanism used for operation. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheterodyne_receiver especially the section on Local oscillator radiation

Most radio receivers transmit a very weak signal slightly higher than the carrier frequency of the station tuned as a result of how they enhance received signals. Look up superheterodyne for details.

It's a side effect of how tuning works (local oscillator), and the signal is extremely weak, very little of it radiates out due to some components / PCB traces behaving as an accidental (poor) antenna.

Still, with good enough equipment it can be detected even from some distance.

Check this out: https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&ht...

What annoys me most is advertising on highway and in traffic. I am not allowed to use a smartphone because it distracts me; fair enough. What about safety on the road though? All these signals are pure noise, irrelevant to traffic.

Safety takes a back seat to corporate profits of course. Who cares if some schmuck crashes his car because he was looking at a billboard depicting a nearly nude woman, right? The need to sell products to these people is all consuming, they just gotta do it and all other concerns don't really matter to them.

Should we cut down all trees next to road? They’re a beautiful distraction.

Its voluntary and you need to deliberately watch them. They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways.

I would say the same about anything on the road that isn't specifically for safety/traffic shaping.

> They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways.

Even some of traffic shaping signage are specifically designed to be that way.

More importantly, this is about a freedom of expression. If I want to yell about my fruit farm or hold a sign for your product; is that different? How does the freedom to express yourself contend with some idea of limiting "commercial advertisement"?

Safety on the road is more important that the freedom to annoy drivers. Also, you can express yourself elsewhere instead of on the road. And, on top of that, a driver doesn't have the freedom to completely ignore the expression (not yet). I can ignore some yelling fellow on a market (never liked that annoying, noisy shit either btw) with noisecancelling earplugs. One can't drive with a blindfold. I'm sure there is gonna be QQ over AR in driving, partly justified. However, less is more. Plus, AR could allow you to get traffic signs in a HUD. Can't miss them.

> Safety on the road is more important that the freedom to annoy drivers.

That wasn't the point, although you are tacitly advancing the idea that annoying signage is acceptable whenever you think it's fine AND what you "watch" is voluntary. You're halfway there. There's not much to be gained from logically stepping you through it.

> Also, you can express yourself elsewhere instead of on the road.

Given the kind of answers you are providing, I don't think you've thought any of these things through. GL with whatever.

I have thought it through very well, and my logic is consistent. Acceptible or not depends on 1) if it is useful in the situation (traffic signs are, for driver safety; advertising isn't) 2) whether the receiver can block the ad with technology (not yet possible on road with advertising). You can ridicule me all you want. 33% of all internet users decided to use an ad blocker. They do not want to get distracted by silly skyscrapers, popups, flashy sounds, large irrelevant banners, and so on and so forth.

If you can be materially distracted from driving by a banner on the side of the road, then you shouldn't be on the road in the first place.

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?

> If you can be materially distracted from driving by a banner on the side of the road, then you shouldn't be on the road in the first place.

So if I browse a website and get distracted by all the ads, it is my own fault? This is victim blaming, as well as a dishonest take on the matter. There's not one banner on the road. Its distraction upon distraction upon distraction. Its like with smartphones. The problem isn't that someone quickly glances on their smartphone once. It is continuous distraction, on the wrong moment.

> If you are annoyed by a passive banner on the side of a road, then I wonder if you must be annoyed by someone saying Hi passing by. Noisy shit, eh?

This has a social function, its a two way benefit. Advertising isn't. Its a one-way communication. You can't talk back. Also, I already explained we can filter sound completely.

> So if I browse a website and get distracted by all the ads, it is my own fault?

At a certain point, yes - if the ad doesn’t take a major portion of your screen and is non-interactive. You are not a victim - there are reasonable boundaries of being “annoyed”.

> This has a social function, its a two way benefit. Advertising isn't. Its a one-way communication.

Not really. You could’ve easily claimed “I don’t GAF who you are and don’t say Hi to me”. The one-sidedness is an arbitrary constraint you’ve put to try to reject this scenario - it should have no bearing on the annoyingness of the sound waves.

> At a certain point, yes - if the ad doesn’t take a major portion of your screen and is non-interactive. You are not a victim - there are reasonable boundaries of being “annoyed”.

That's a too liberal definition. Consider our boundaries getting broken. I am not talking about one ad banner on the a website. I am talking about skyscrapers, pop-ups (actually banned by default on modern browsers), multiple flashy GIFs as banner (like in the 90s), sounds in ads (working on a tab you're not even on!). These are all examples of annoying ads. I'd care less for an ad which is obvious like how Google text Ads used to be on Google Search.

> You could’ve easily claimed “I don’t GAF who you are and don’t say Hi to me”.

Yeah, its funny how in USA its normal that if I go in a grocery store, people ask 'how are you' but they don't care about the answer, they're obliged to say it. I'm glad we don't have that nonsense dishonesty here in my country.

'Hi', however, is fairly neutral, in this example is person to person (instead of tech to person), and means no harm. Its a greeting, supposedly to start contact, or to initialize a business transaction (such as payment). Its as honest and functional as it gets!

> Yeah, its funny how in USA its normal that if I go in a grocery store, people ask 'how are you' but they don't care about the answer, they're obliged to say it

Wow, in most cases this just isn't true. Granted some employees are ordered to use it as a greeting, but most people who ask genuinely care, and there is no social expectation to ask. Perhaps the culture in the USA is just a bit more personable than you have a theory of mind for? If you really don’t believe me, try answering the question in the negative, theres a reason why its like a joke that you have to respond positively. You’ll instantly be asked whats bothering you, and most people won’t let go easily. They genuinely want to try to cheer you up if you aren’t doing well and if they think they can reasonably help you, generally will.

Been there, done it (Southern Bay Area 2005-2007). I am honest by default when it comes to questions. There is practically no interest in a conversation. You are supposed to say 'fine, how are you'. Its like regarding tipping culture as voluntary: fake.

> I am talking about skyscrapers, pop-ups (actually banned by default on modern browsers), multiple flashy GIFs as banner (like in the 90s), sounds in ads (working on a tab you're not even on!).

The issue was about the real world anyway; in the case of a website, you were the one who request the website be displayed on your computer (that's what the browser does).

In the real world, however, ads are simple banners like the Google text Ads.

> I'm glad we don't have that nonsense dishonesty here in my country.

It's not dishonest even if your interpretation were true, because both parties know it's just another form of greeting.

There's something different about streets and web. I'm not sure but on my laptop i kinda expect things to go to the point, fast. A street is not a mean to an end. So a bus stop with some ad.. doesn't really changes everything.

Consider web ads more like annoying bus boys trying to get you to order something in their restaurant by stepping in front of you and mirroring every move.

A street is as much a mean to an end as a laptop. I use streets to get from point A to point B, much like you use your laptop to arrive from state A to state B. I never have an intention to see ads when I go outside. Sometimes I use streets for fun, to stroll without aim, but never I go outside to "see some ads," much like you likely never open your laptop with an intention to see an ad.

These are not arguments but additional trails of my thoughts on the topic:

You went outside, you motivated yourself, and passing by a sign is not much now. My laptop is a bit of a promise of lazy direct access, which is more at odds with the ads.

Also street ads have been planned, there are usual spots and looks. Web is a bit wilder.

> I use streets to get from point A to point B

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.

It changes a lot if you have ADHD. IMHO, it's an accessibility problem for people like me.

I don't know if I would call it an accessibility problem for me personally, but yeah as someone who has trouble staying focused, a moving screen or flashy ad is almost impossible not to look at, and extremely intrusive. Using the web without an ad blocker is an absolute nightmare for me.

Flower gardens cause problems for people with allergies, but we don't ban them. We cannot make the entire world ideal for everyone.

Most cities do limit the sorts of flowers they plant.

> We cannot make the entire world ideal for everyone.

Huh? So just f** accessibility and leave everyone on their own? I'd understand if you'd argued that it wouldn't be feasible to do a particular thing, but such general statements leave a very bad taste.

Yes!! It's hard enough to maintain attention as it is. Last thing we need is entitled corporations stealing it every chance they get for the sake of profit.

I have ADHD and as long as my wife insists on talking to me while I'm driving billboards are a rounding error (and to be honest I'm more likely to be distracted by interesting architecture than advertising)

It really disturbs your way in public space ?

Maybe i'm too oblivious to IRL ads.

I think it makes navigation harder for me; I notice that it's a lot harder for me to parse out actually relevant information in busy spaces like airports/cities. Particularly while doing something like driving, because I'm juggling a lot of information in those situations and paying more attention to the people around me, rather than just focusing on signs.

For a long time I thought that was all just due to crowds/stress and nothing else, but I'm increasingly convinced that part of it is just that it's harder for me to pick out when scanning a room where the signs are the indicate where I'm supposed to be. Also seems to make it more likely that I'll walk past an indicator or miss something while I'm trying to navigate the space. I'm always paranoid inside of these busier spaces about whether I'm going to miss something important and end up walking in the opposite direction of where I need to go.

It may depend a lot on not just the area but also what you're personally used to; navigation in these spaces are a skill that people get better at over time. I suspect that some of the difficulties become less difficult as people's brains get better at filtering things out or recognizing indicators that they need to zero in on. In the same way that after a while playing a game you start to instinctively zero in on certain UX choices or indicators in a level, people also instinctively start to zero in on how a city indicates important information (is the sign always green, does it tend to show up in a specific place). So this might also be more of an early-user UX problem for people who don't go into the city all the time or who are particularly susceptible to getting distracted by motion/colors.

----

There's a lot of research that brains are really good at learning to filter out advertising; part of the arms race in advertising isn't just with ad blockers, it's figuring out how to present ads in increasingly unusual ways where your brain won't just do pattern recognition and literally just refuse to process or register them. Human brains are heckin good at pattern recognition.

But that means that there is an arms race with advertisers trying to figure out what the next evolution is with billboards or how to trick your brain to register things, and it means that people who are less equipped to do that filtering or are just unfamiliar with the space often end up getting thrown in the deep end because their brains aren't trained to do that filtering yet, or are trained to filter different things.

It very much depends on where you live of course. Thankfully, most places regulate public advertisement to some extent, but the level of regulation will differ from place to place.

Seems like a you problem.

Everybody draws the line somewhere else, but I hope you agree that "stealing your attention" is different from requiring an active action to be able to continue onward towards whatever task you were trying to accomplish (even if you might consider both unacceptable).

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