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Comment by lifeinthevoid | Hacker News Reader

My biggest gripe with AR products is that they will just become a tool to spoil the real world with ads everywhere. No thanks.

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But many cities in the real world already have ads everywhere. If anything, a modified AR device could allow you to detect and remove those.

I cant wait for one to overblend the other .New shakedown unlocked.

Complex solution to a simple problem. Just ban ads in cities. Like some cities have already done. Then the ads that are left are just for stuff that is important, e.g. events, music, etc. No need for AI filtering algorithms that have to decide what to block and what to leave.

Probably impossible in the US at least, as it would be considered a first amendment violation.

Is graffiti also freedom of speech? If i have a wall does it mean i can write whatever i want on it? I guess not. These are social norms. And we could decide that advertisement is not ok in public spaces like it's not ok to walk around naked.

Not an equivalent situation at all. Graffiti makers don’t have billions of dollars to hire lawyers that challenge laws that ban advertising. Society increasingly runs less and less on social norms and more on laws.

Graffiti is illegal because it involves damaging property, not because of its textual / visual content...

But if i had a wall (own), could i write anything i want on it?

Plenty of US cities and towns have regulations prohibiting billboards.

Interesting, I didn’t know that. Maybe it would be possible legally then, although I imagine that NYC would be a tough place to get it passed.

On the other hand, your solution requires a lot of people to agree and possibly turn away some money, whereas the AR solution (once available) can be individually applied without any decisions by others; only for the one person to decide whether to buy it or not (if they have the money).

So it's not that clear to me which one of these is complex and which simple.

Oh no, what a pain, to make changes to the world based on a broad consensus of opinions, rather than relying on rapacious billionaires to helpfully put their surveillance device into all of our hands without our permission.

Turn away from the public, turn away from democratic participation, turn inward into your own curated world.

The public spaces are subsidized by advertising.

Filtering out billboards on the highway is reducing their impressions, and thus reducing the money that ultimately goes into repairing the road you're driving on.

The modified AR device will instead filter ads, but charge 0.03 cents per ad filtered, and each advertiser will get 0.02 cents each time their ad is filtered. Facebook of course keeps the remaining 30% for facilitating the ad and anti-ad marketplace.

Eventually there will be a bidding war where advertisers will require you to pay 0.10c not to view their ad, which they'll have made increasingly unpleasant to look at, and you'll have to adjust your device's balance and payment thresholds to avoid getting hit by AR jumpscares as you drive around.

Anyway, I pay on average $0.35c per youtube video not to look at ads based on the cost of youtube premium vs the number of videos I watch in a month, so honestly the above price-point seems like a good deal.

> pay 0.10c not to view their ad

i can't tell if this is satire or not lol

I’m not so sure that private billboards are funding road maintenance. I would assume that mostly comes from taxes and fees like tolls.

I imagine that there will be ad blocking hacks just like there are ad blockers on browsers. So not a huge difference from the current situation.

Good thing that in reality people are noticing that adds are too intrusive and removing them from public spaces. Or at least regulating them. Google about the cities that have banned outdoor advertisement.

adblockVR

Desire to digitally block out the scenery feels like a good litmus test for whether one is living in a dystopian hellscape.

This reminds me a Futurama quote: "Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century? Fry: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams."

As others already mentioned, the real space is already full of all sorts of advertisements. I personally can't wait for an AR uBlock.

Do you really look forward to

1) Try and maintain some piece of software on your device to overlay real-world adds? 2) Try and maintain some piece of software on your device to block AR adds?

I personally don't ...

can't edit and can't stand the 2 'adds' typos I made :-)

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