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In my city there's a major road with no billboards, and I drive on it whenever it's a reasonable option. It's not exactly lovely, but it's only as bad as driving on a busy road has to be, no worse. It's also a lot safer.

Whenever I tell people I prefer this road, they balk. When I tell them there's no billboards, they stop and think and realize that it's actually one of the nicest roads in the city. Parts of it are actually quite beautiful and forested.

I've seen a handful of billboards that were mildly entertaining. I've never seen a billboard that made me [edit to add: consciously] want to buy something, in my entire life, as far as I can recall. I've seen countless billboards that manipulated my emotions, showing me food or sex while I'm just trying to drive, purposefully distracting me. And countless more that just suck and are pointless. Among my many grievances with car-dependency, billboards aren't at the top of the list, but they're a very easy target because most people actually hate them as soon as they stop to think about it in my experience.

For integrated ads on YouTube (sponsor messages), you can use the SponsorBlock extension (https://sponsor.ajay.app/). If you're using Android, you can also get NewPipe with SponsorBlock integration.

If you can't use NewPipe, you can also.get Youtube ReVanced which also has sponsorblock

Do you watch any sports on TV?

The amount of ads packed into an NBA basketball game on TV is startling and exhausting:

  - each player's jersey
  - arena walls
  - courtside walls (tv screens)
  - projected onto the court floor (updated each minute)
  - on the side and top of the backboard 
  - most TV graphics ("Taco Bell play of the game")
  - split-screen ads during free-throws
  - traditional commercials during time-outs

Advertising isn't quite as pervasive on UK TV sports coverage but the one and only I ever see or hear and advert in my life is when I'm watching football on Sky Sports. It's unavoidable.

My mind immediately went to the feasibility of using an AI artist to remove most or all of this in real time. Could be an interesting shift in terms of the "live" experience being significantly worse/degraded relative to the broadcast version with all that stuff painted out.

- each player's jersey

i noticed some pretty no-name companies on jerseys recently

makes me wonder how much it actually costs to get them to wear like a pin with my face on it for a few games

"did you see me at the knicks game last night? i was everywhere!"

That is fucking egregious even by the absolute trip-hazard-in-hell standards of television, holy shit. I have no idea why anyone consumes anything on TV anymore.

Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont, and Maine all do not allow for billboard advertisement, so at least there are a few places you can go for respite.

Some states (Iowa, at least, maybe Nebraska?) seem to have a rule that billboards have to be a certain distance away from the road - a fairly large distance. You have to work to read them. It makes them much easier to ignore.

I don't know if that's the rule for all roads, or just for interstates. I don't know if it's for driver safety if they veer off the road, or for avoiding distraction, or just to limit advertising. But I like it.

Virginia has a very small number of billboards, and it's definitely one of the nice things about this area.

I haven't worked out exactly why some exist, but almost none do. The law is here:

https://law.lis.virginia.gov/vacode/title33.2/chapter12/

Regardless, the general feel of driving here is very different from many other states because of this rule. It's one of the first things I notice when I drive somewhere else in the US.

> But I cannot think of a single time I have ever made any purchase based on any billboard. I would love if more municipalities clamped down on these.

In California the billboards are now predominantly cannabis and casinos.

Depends where you are. Crossing the Bay Bridge, the difference is stark.

Which is baffling to me, because when I'm in the mood for vice I will make an active effort to find it. I'm not going to go "Oh boy, I'll find that one store advertised on that billboard I was subjected to", I'm going to Google the nearest dispensary (or go to the next closest if I've already determined that one to be crap), or plan a Vegas trip. And the magic of vices is that you don't need to even put people in the mood, vice is it's own attraction. Coke dealers don't need to advertise, their customers come to them.

In Michigan, it's cannabis or personal injury lawyers, which is pretty on brand for us.

I wonder if you can tell what a whole state is about just by looking at the billboards.

I don’t know where you live, but what about all the mail spam — physical mail like catalogs and email advertising/marketing? And that half of what’s published by most journalistic outlets is now veiled ads?

Dear Products,

I know me better than you. I’ll come find you WHEN I need you. In the meantime, please just sit tight and stay out of my way.

-Mr Consumption is Overrated

I do like these. I need them as kindling to start a fire.

Careful, many are coated in glossy toxic plastics that also make them impossible to recycle. Just an extra "fuck you" to the world by the advertiser in permanently ruining the materials they used.

>what about all the mail spam — physical mail like catalogs and email advertising/marketing?

You can opt out of junk mail. Varies by area. Likely can be done by a "no junk" sticker, or by opting out via your postal service, or both. (A lot of fliers aren't distributed by postal service, but legally must obey no junk signs)

Email is trickier, but recently I've had success simply unsubscribing from absolutely everything with an unsubscribe link. I used to leave stuff in if it might be useful.

To my surprise I now receive very few junk emails per day.

>I know me better than you. I’ll come find you WHEN I need you. In the meantime, please just sit tight and stay out of my way.

All of the above said, ads actually work. It is possible of course they don't work on you, the reader of this comment. (Meaning anyone reading, not just the parent comment)

But ads really do work in boosting sales.

They work on me and that’s exactly the problem — that is they work at manipulating me. And that’s why I want them gone. I’d rather free up the energy I spend on trying to ignore them and put that energy into something that actually makes my life better.

Email I almost ignore entirely. I generally only read emails that I send myself and a few specific filters.

Physical mail I just go down and throw it all out every so often. I wrote the date down on my whiteboard once after checking it and I noted that I go roughly three months in between times when I checked my mail.

There used to be a widget you could get from the likes of ThinkGeek that would spam the "off" IR signal for lots of tvs and commercial displays. I remember seeing it as a neat trick twenty years ago, but more and more.I wish I really had one. Lots of storefronts have absurdly bright screens on all night now, project moving shit onto the sidewalk and just generally bombard your vision with distraction.

I imagine you can use something like a Flipper to get a similar "put-outer" device nowadays but I haven't come across anyone using it in that way.

You are likely thinking of the Tv-B-Gone:

https://www.tvbgone.com/

That's it! Good remember, thanks!

> Disclaimer: This product is sold for the exclusive private use of the buyer on their own equipment . Use under adult supervision. For external use only. Side effect may include decreased anxiety, increased social skills, increased cognitive ability, increased sense of well being. The above statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. Effective personal choices are the sole responsibility of each individual user of this device.

Looks like it's built in on Flipper:

https://blog.flipper.net/infrared/

> To use the Universal Remote mode, navigate Infrared -> Universal library and select the type of device you want to control.

You can get rid of most of your remaining ads by using the Firefox version of ublock and sponsorblock. I almost never see any ads. Twitch is a notable exception.

Pro tip about Youtube in-video promos, SponsorBlock is a really nice extension that will auto-skip those in many more popular videos!

> #2, which is what the article is about, is unavoidable for me

Maybe one day you could wear AR goggles, and replace these ads by artworks?

If you ever visit washington DC it is absolutely wild the kind of things that are advertised via billboard. Raytheon making sure everyone knows where to get their missiles etc.

I still think it's super wild, but after thinking about it it's a lot like IT in big companies. Someone cold emails your boss and all of the sudden you're demoing some random doodad. In DC, your boss sees a fighter jet engine upgrade ad when walking into the Pentagon from the metro, and...

(I literally saw that exact ad at the pentagon metro station. who buys a 30 million dollar engine upgrade off of a metro ad?)

When my country was tendering for new fighter jets a few years ago there were a lot of ads on various social media. Since random civilians like yours truly seldom impulse buy $100M latest generation fighter jets, I presume the goal was to influence public opinion and politicians to lean on the actual procurement organization that was responsible for arriving at a recommendation for the next generation jet. Still, it all seemed pretty far fetched, or maybe the vendors just had a poor understanding of how such procurement programs are run in my country.

I noticed the same when I drove around the San Francisco Bay Area, except targeted at IT professionals. Just like with DC, it makes sense - target the eyes of the people who can influence decisions that actually financially matter.

Get outside of these bubbles, though, and it's all lawyers, casinos, car dealerships, and sex shops.

Billboards are kind of funny to me because I wonder if they really work.

I would assume that people living in the city are so used to them that they don't even notice them.

I think social media feed ads should have a requirement for a different background color of a certain % stronger/lighter than default. Everyone's hiding the "Promotion" text in light text or moving them around so the eye can't find it.

Years ago I was driving home and saw a Corona beer billboard and distinctly remember thinking that I would love a Pacifico. So it kinda worked on me.

You can get rid of #1 by moving to Mastodon. Many servers appreciate donations but basically none of them have ads.

#1 is about ads in the content itself, not ads that are designed to look like the posts around it

The Sponsorblock chrome extension does wonders