Let's Ban Billboards
iambateman.com
iambateman.com
Billboards are banned where I live and it's great. It's interesting that this post says that where the author lives "someone can put up a 48-foot advertisement wherever they want". From other things I read I got the impression that in some (maybe many) cities a reason they're not banned is because they provide revenue, since many are on land like road medians that are controlled by local government. I'm not sure to what extent the designs themselves are reviewed but the ability to erect a billboard is regulated in such cases.
Huge aggressive grabs for attention when you really should be paying attention to the road really should not be allowed.
Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont are way ahead of the rest of the country on this, that’s for sure.
Also if interested the opening scenes of The Monkey Wrench Gang (by Edward Abbey) are about illegally cutting down billboards in Southwest Utah.
In the early 1960s, Washington was one of the first states to successfully ban billboards from freeways. An exception can be seen in the lands owned by the Puyallup Tribe along I-5 near Fife, where massive billboards and video screens now flank both sides of the freeway. (Being classified as sovereign nation, the Puyallups can have their own sign laws.) If that state ban had not passed, you would now be seeing hundreds of similar signs from Vancouver to Bellingham, from Port Angeles to Spokane.
The City of Seattle, like many other cities, later passed a law limiting the installation of more billboards, aka off-premises signs. This was an outgrowth of a national effort to reduce the proliferation of commercial advertising that was spoiling our views of mountains, lakes, forests, pastoral lands, and architectural landmarks. It also took an inventory of billboards, ordering removal of those that had been erected without permits.
The City’s law was challenged in court by Ackerley Communications, the owner of most of the billboards in Seattle. The courts upheld the law but the dilemma was that there were scores of billboards in all corners of the city. So a deal was struck that if a billboard that was near certain sensitive locations, like schools or parks or homes, and was then removed, a new one could be erected in certain acceptable locations elsewhere.
Many billboards are installed in parking lots or vacant lots that have since been developed and those could not be replaced, as sign owners lost the leases. So, therefore, over time, the number of billboards would gradually decrease.
I'd prefer them all gone but stopping the bleeding is good too.
Up next: political add yard signs spammed everywhere but yards.
It's funny; there was a different hackernews thread just a couple days ago about banning all advertising, and billboards came up, and I posted about this.
I think it strikes a nice balance, preventing the most egregious forms of attention pollution.
Where I live it’s mostly ads for injury attorneys and strip clubs.
I’d be fine without them
Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii have as well, according to the internet
As a lot of HN is US based, I’ll just say in our divided bipartisanship state it’s a real shame we’ve forgotten that incremental improvements is always an option and I’d argue usually the best kind.
Let's start by banning billboards, and then let's keep going and ban more forms of mental pollution until the overton window has moved enough that we can entirely ban the ability to pay to control someone's attention.
I, too, would love it if all advertising just disappeared.
It makes me irrationally angry. They're rubbing the viewer's face in the fact that they can't avoid looking at the sign.
Really gives one a strong urge to deface it.
Sopot, Poland[0]
https://www.kut.org/austin/2022-04-21/advertising-companies-...
Spain also prefer no billboards along their highways - at least, the one time I visited. Our tour guide pointed it out. The only billboards were from the Barcelona Olympics, I believe.
It really does make a difference.
I recall living in Portland fifteen years ago. A mural on a health food store became the center of controversy because it was permitted while advertisements weren't. Local businesses sued the city to make sure they weren't prohibited from their God given right to slap gambling ads up in front of children.
This idea won't be easy to implement.
I did not realize just how mentally oppressive constant billboard advertising was until I did not see it any more wherever I go.
During the pandemic I found a trash can in a suburb that had been postered with a Johnnie Walker ad for over a year, and sent in a phony request for a quote to advertise a community poetry slam event. The quote was for over $2000. Multiply that by every trash can in the city.
It incentived the spread of graffiti art thorough the city.
Honestly I like advertising in general, but Targeted ads are the problem. Billboards are the least targeted ad.
That reason alone is enough to ban billboards: we can't tell drivers they're terrible people for glancing at their phone for a second to get directions while simultaneously allowing corporations to plaster the roadway with ads that are deliberately designed to distract them.
Bizarre.
Trash is trash whether it's a piece of paper on the ground or blown up to billboard size.
In your perfect billboard free world, would you also ban signs outside of a business saying what is on sale? what about signs outside a private residence?
What kinds of property would be allowed to display what kinds of sign?
I could see telling government agencies they cant rent billboard space out on the side of the road, but if someone puts a billboard on their roof or the edge of their property I think it would be gross to stop them.
There's some interesting architecture where buildings have been visibly built around an existing billboard.
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7618828,-105.0111584,3a,73.4...
Someone has also suggested taxing them. Maybe in some cases, they can be taxed instead of banned, although in some cases probably should just be banned.
Advertising signs might be permitted in some places inside of buildings (especially if they are advertising items being sold there (e.g. foods at a restaurant)), although even then it is probably best not to use too brightly lighted computer/television displays (which waste too much power and also produce too might light; in many cases, e-paper displays would be useful for commercial displays (not only advertising, but also e.g. business hours, which rarely change but sometimes do often enough (e.g. holidays) that it can help to occasionally change the display) that do not need to change very often), and they should also avoid being dishonest advertising.
It's the best case study I know of on the importance of just sticking to your one issue and not getting caught up trying to fix everything else that's broken in the world.
I don't care about billboards, but the real complaint in this article isn't about billboards.
If the article is really a metaphor for something else (racist town ordinances? zoning in general? something else?) I think a lot of us have missed it. Perhaps you could enlighten us.
I sound sarcastic but I mean this unironically. This is a model that works in the developing world and what we had before private capital captured the real-estate market.
> After the contractors appealed the mistake, city staff required them to tear the wall out and reinstall the approved siding.
This sounds to me like the most bullshit of bullshit jobs out there. Seems to me like if it was the building owners prerogative, great replace the siding, but city staff being involved in such seemingly trite issues—often with poor taste—infuriates me.
Sorry, your house doesn't meet the shadow requirements, you'll have to tear it down and try again. Sorry your house is 3ft too tall based on our policy from 50 years ago. Sorry, the outside has to be beige not some other silly thing, this is a place where people come to live out the rest of their dull existence without having to contend with hue. Your fence must be white, it says so right here!
That said, billboards do suck and we should ban them I guess.
That said, I also can't buy a house, likely never will be able to, and most likely won't want to, all partly because of such absurd bureaucracy. It's difficult to imagine being so petulant as to seek justice about such a thing unless it made my private garden unworkable. I shouldn't have a hand in what my neighbor paints their house, and that's probably more closely related than the hypothetical silly examples I established. If they literally painted a swastika, well k I guess that's an edge case.
There is federal highway funding for billboard ads to promote wearing seat belts. Since Vermont didn't have billboards, they had to spend the money in nearby New Hampshire instead...
... New Hampshire doesn't have any seat belt laws.
The end result was not only did the ban not pass, but the billboard companies through up what might, in scientific terms, be called a "metric f@ckton" of them down I-70 along with the rest of the state's highways.
They're ugly as dog crap. You don't realize just how many there are until you go up to Iowa and drive in a geographically-similar area and don't have to see the landscape spoiled by "LION'S DEN ADULT SUPERSTORE" and "HELL IS REAL" billboards.
I am not sure if this is right or wrong. But I have an idea how we could get the message out...
Advertising in my opinion has a UX problem, it is however inextricable from a capitalist society. It needs to look great, it needs to be consistent and it should respect user consent and privacy. That's pretty much it.
Billboards don't invade your privacy or require consent, so they just need to look modern/great and be placed in areas where they won't disrupt natural and residential scenery. Unlike web-ads, they're more or less consistent but like i said earlier, I wish they were more "cool" like in scifi movies.
If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring. But ads want to manipulate, so they have to be flashy and appeal to your emotions.
They pollute your mental headspace, and have no place in a healthy society.
Let's ban billboards. And then let's follow that up with a general purpose ban on paid advertisement.
Legally speaking, the validity of banning billboards tends to be evaluated based on the Central Hudson test. More practically, there's numerous limitations to commercial speech... for example, you can't blare an audio ad from your rooftop.
For most of US history, Commercial speech was not afforded full free speech rights. Nor does it currently enjoy them, although it is more protected than it used to be[0]:
Commercial speech, as the Supreme Court iterated in Valentine v. Chrestensen
(1942)[1], had historically not been viewed as protected under the First
Amendment. This category of expression, which includes commercial
advertising, promises, and solicitations, had been subject to significant
regulation to protect consumers and prevent fraud. Beginning in the 1970s,
however, the Supreme Court gradually recognized this type of speech as
deserving some First Amendment protection.
[0] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/commercial-speech/
[1] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/valentine-v-chresten...
And the opinions on Gruen v. New York, Dobbs v. Jackson, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and especially on point, Citizen's United all broke with long precedent and turned things upside down. No amendments to repeal/change, just a different set of folks on SCOTUS.
And those were pretty dumb. So perhaps we'll have some improvement eventually, although I probably won't live to see it. And more's the pity.
Edit: Added conclusion.
However, commercial speech is not fully protected by the First Amendment.
E.g., In TV beer ads, no one is actually allowed to drink beer. And there are many more restrictions on commercial speech as well.
N.B., this is in the US. I can't speak for anywhere else.
No rush. I'll wait. But I won't hold my breath.
There's no law, regulation, or court case because the industry self-regulates in fear of a new law being made.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/aug/20/heineken/n...
> "The fact that it is self-regulated now, that’s not something brewers would want to put in jeopardy," Kirkpatrick said. "It’s the way they have operated for decades. You show a lot of people enjoying a football game or enjoying a baseball game but you don’t show any consumption. I don't think you’re going to see that change."
> A Heineken beer commercial said regulations ban showing someone drinking beer on camera. If you take a more relaxed view of regulations, that’s close to the truth. The rules come from the television networks, not the government. The restriction might not have the force of law but it’s just as effective. We rate the claim Mostly True.
Whatever, I don't see the difference between PMI/RJR advertising and Anheuser-Busch, and Bayer, and Pfizer, and the US Army, and six car insurance companies all claiming to have the lowest rates and best service.
I kicked television out of my house in 2002. I don't have any streaming services provided by a third party, nor do I really listen to the FM band on my car radio, nor XM. The ads are too many to bear.
Pihole, ad nauseam. If you bypass my pihole, my browser clicks every ad you show and sends the data to /dev/null except what site, timestamp, and a thumbnail of the ad. Its not botting; I'm actively hostile to advertising.
The law is pretty consistent about the idea that any paid endorsement has to be "truthful". And as we've learned more about sociology and advertising, we've realized that things like paid endorsements are fundamentally not truthful, because they are misleading the public to believe that some figure or trusted source (even if only at a subconscious level - which is still enough to change consumer behavior!) is in favor of a product or brand.
So maybe if you could argue that paid speech is inherently untruthful (which I believe that it is!), then you could make legal policy that bans paid speech complaint with the First Amendment! (caveat: I am not a lawyer, I am not a legal activist, etc)
I think the latter part of that is a huge jump. How is seeing a billboard for a plumber promoting bad behavior?
Even then, you've probably not picked the best plumber this way.
A better question would be how is seeing ads for sports betting in between periods of a game promoting bad behavior.
And the answer to that is very obvious -- the legalization of online sports betting and the nonstop barrage of ads for it on tv and social media is bad for individuals and society as a whole.
Are you suggesting to wait around the hardware parking lot to hope to hear about someone who needs a plumber?
The plumber would dedicate a raspberry pi or yesteryear's phone with the bad battery or cracked screen, and they'd leave it plugged in in a closet somewhere and configure it to talk to a few peers who they know personally and who will vouch for their legitimacy. They of course would be vouching for others in the same way.
Nodes would gossip about services that are available, so you could figure out which plumbers are nearby and which of your peers trust those plumbers. Since you're operating on a web of trust, you can find a mutually trusted third party to act as a mediator in the case of disputes, and if you have a good or bad experience you can also gossip that info to your peers so that they can aggregate a sort of review system. But unlike Amazon's, it's full of people that you know and explicitly trust, so it's much harder to game since there's no single source of truth to target/abuse.
It would exchange the kind of information that traditionally comes via ads, but I think it would be so much more effective than ads because all parties want it to succeed--whereas ads have carved out a rather hostile landscape for this sort of thing.
Presumably we want to keep paid actors, but then the loop hole is that Procter & Gamble becomes a media production company.
That's actually close to how things used to be eg in the US.
Paid actors, and for example company representatives, do count as acting on behalf of the company and therefore don't count as paid advertising. But, whatever medium they are talking to has to be an unpaid medium. A company representative (or paid actor) talking about a product in an interview is okay if the interviewer / distributor is not being paid to host the interview. (or if the interviewer / distributor is the company itself - that's also allowed).
Does that give massive companies an advantage? I would argue not really, because it creates massive overheads for pushing advertisement content, and since you aren't allowed to pay for distribution, it means that people have to be interesting in consuming your content of their own volition instead of other content that isn't trying to push products.
I'm a bit confused.
When Amazon pays the postal service to send me a book, is that paid distribution and thus advertising?
Another example: I used to subscribe to the print edition of the Economist. I as a consumer paid for that product. Does that mean there's no ads in the Economist? (A substantial fraction of the print edition is made up of ads in the common sense understanding of the term.)
I'm all for banning whole forms of advertisements (ex. Billboards) that don't actually educate the consumer about the product. But _all_ advertisements is too knee-jerk.
How about health ad ("Smoking kills") ?
How about mentioning a product in health ad (Smoking kills. Nicotine patches help you quit smoking)?
Traditionally, the government setup some regulatory body to oversee these kind of exemptions. These body often corrupt over time. Is a corrupted regulatory body better than no exemptions allowed?
Do we want the legal text cover all cases and become so dense that nobody can comprehend? Or do we want some simple rules and live with the possible unintended consequences?
and the most important question : People hate changes and some industries need to rethink their own business. How could we get people agrees on this in a democratic setting?
Bribery laws, SEC insider trading/collusion stuff...there's many existing examples for definitions for that, when the law doesn't want something to be for sale.
Section 1. Ban on Commercial Advertisements All commercial advertisements, in any medium, are hereby prohibited throughout the United States.
Section 2. Definition For purposes of this Act, “commercial advertisement” means any paid or otherwise sponsored message intended to promote the sale or use of goods, services, or commercial ventures.
Section 3. Enforcement and Penalties Violations of this Act shall be subject to civil or criminal penalties as determined by the courts.
The thing is going to hit the courts anyways. Just craft it in a way that hits the Pareto curve on effectiveness vs legality.
What is this place? What do they sell here? Wait, is this just a house? ... it would bring some mystery and excitement to shopping.
I think you have to specify that the payment goes to the owner of the platform - where platform is a very broad concept.
So, in the case of a billboard, if you are paying a landlord, that's advertising. If you are paying a newspaper to print a specific article, that's also advertising. This means paid press releases are also not allowed. Product placement would fall under this definition too - if a specific car brand is paying you to feature their cars in a movie, that's advertising.
Notably, it's not advertising if no payment is being made. If you are making a movie and you decide to feature a specific car brand - and you aren't getting any kickbacks for it - that's completely allowed.
It's also not advertising if it's first-party. For example, a sign that's advertising a restaurant is allowed if the actual restaurant itself is underneath that sign. And it's also not advertising if Disney is pushing Disney movies and products at Disney World, because Disney owns the full creative rights to Disney World and they aren't being paid by outsiders to adjust the messaging.
This definition can even be robust to grey areas like "what if a car brand makes a movie featuring their cars?" - well, how is that movie being distributed? Are they paying people to distribute the movie, or is it genuinely a good movie that people are distributing on their own? Paying people to distribute the movie is not allowed, but if the movie is good enough that people are distributing it anyway of their own volition, then it's okay!
Overall, the definition is pretty large, and paid promotion is so deeply ingrained into modern society that it's difficult to imagine exactly how much would change if advertising was banned. But, quite a lot would change! Pretty much the entire playbook for all commercial enterprises for "how to tell the world about your thing" would have to be re-written, and new institutions would have to be developed to replace advertising.
But I think society overall would benefit greatly from the change!
Is it ok that when you're watching broadcast/network TV, they advertise internet or cellular service, because the conglomerate that owns the TV station also owns an ISP and cell carrier?
Is it ok if you're using a popular web search engine, and they advertise their own hosted business productivity suite?
I think no, we should not allow these things. But no money (or consideration, or whatever) has exchanged hands here.
I think that similar exceptions extend to a TV network that's pushing its own products at you while you are watching the station. No consideration has been provided to push the ad, so you are in whatever ecosystem.
How do you know when you've crossed the line into abuse? Well, we have anti-monopoly laws for that. At some point an ecosystem becomes so big it's a monopoly that needs to be broken up, and after it gets broken up it can't self-deal across the broken pieces anymore. So just like we already have good legal infrastructure in place for figuring out when "consideration" has happened, we also have good (well, maybe not good enough lately) legal infrastructure in place for figuring out when a company is too big and too able to self-deal.
So if I pay somebody independent to hand out leaflets, that's advertising. But if I employ somebody in the position of leafleteer, now it doesn't count.
> Let’s see if we can define this
1: a public notice
*especially* : a paid notice that is published or broadcast (as to attract customers or to provide information of public interest)
3: something resembling an advertisement (as in alerting someone to something)
I think a better way to answer this is define what kind of advertisements we want to ban. In that respect, I think this has a clearer definition than the previous HN post[1]. The definition of a billboard is much less ambiguous.
But let's not stop, let's continue the actual conversation. I think the problem with the earlier thread is that many conversations boiled down to dichotomies rather than the reality that there is a continuum of what is considered advertising. Personally, I have absolutely no issues with stores having signs in their windows or those wacky inflatable arm guys. Let's call this "old school advertising" for lack of better words.
But I want to add some context for anyone that is confused by people who are angry at ads. People that are upset with ads (myself included) are in generally upset about Surveillance Capitalism[2]. The thing is that ads have gotten out of control. I mean let's be real, the companies with the #5 and #7 market cap (Google @ ~1.8T and Meta @ ~1.3T) are both almost entirely driven by advertising. This does not sound like a healthy economy to me! Some of the richest companies in the world make more money convincing people to buy things rather than actually producing things. There's a lot of ways to define value, are we sure we want to base an economy where we define it this way? Where companies are extremely incentivized to persuade/manipulate people into buying things or thinking certain ways. Is this really what we want to be putting all the efforts of humanity into? Convincing people to buy shit? (or vote a certain way? Or think a certain way?) Do you think that is better than if we had larger concentrated efforts into other things? We said value is a vague word, right? So who creates more value: the person manufacturing a car or a quant trader on Wall-street? How about the person developing a search engine or the person developing better target advertising? Who is providing more value? How about with a different definition of value?
Regardless of how much you think a person or a public is able to be manipulated, surely you can agree that these are perverse incentives. This can help us circle back to my earlier point: do you think it should be acceptable to manipulate children? Certainly to some degree it is acceptable, right? We want to convince them to go to school and better themselves. But should we allow trillion dollar companies to persuade them to buy things? Certainly these are not fully developed humans who have the same constitutional resilience as a grown adult such as you or I, right? Now we can take that even further: what does it mean to advertise to kids? Are billboards? Surely they see them simply by living in the world. What about general audience TV? Surely they'd see those by watching TV.
Fundamentally, the root of the question is "in what directions do we want to be pushing humanity?" There's a lot of economic levels you can pull long before you get anywhere near what would be considered a Planned Economy[3,4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy
[4] If you really think pulling any levers is equivalent then it would necessitate you also believing in the abolishment of all governments and all organizations of any kind. A rather ridiculous bar, but I want to make sure we don't degrade into pretending this is a black and white issue. There's a large continuum here and any effort to incentivize one direction over another is not the same as having absolute rule.
Essentially, to get the word out about your organization or product (whether for-profit or non-profit), you'd have to convince someone with an audience to feature you *without paying them to do it*. In other words, your organization or product or service has to be genuinely interesting on its own.
And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape.
Sounds nice in theory. "You want to like us on facebook and get a perk for free on your app? (No money involved)."
"Hey you maybe want a job? We will give one to those who spread the word most about us"
Devil is in the details. And humans have a lot of details.
Otherwise I am all for starting to ban of advertisement, what is possible.
But disruption should be expected. A lot.
(I mean, most of the internet is financed by ads)
So we aren't treading into new uncharted territory where the details need to be figured out - humans have been playing this game for centuries and the law already has effective tools for navigating the tricky parts.
So, I do happen to have relevant experience. I haven't run a concert or a protest, but I've done the rest of the things you mentioned, some of which at considerable scale.
You continue to beg the question. "Without advertizing, companies would not be able to scale" is not a weakness of the push to ban advertizing - it is a virtue. The people advocating against advertizing _actively want_ businesses to have a smaller maximal size.
We got here because of scaling. We can now efficiently tap into the mental space of billions of humans at the same time. And that’s not just a problem, that’s THE problem.
Meaning that “this doesn’t scale!” isn’t a side effect. It’s the main effect, it’s the solution.
Yes, you’d pay promoters and bids it. This is literally Prohibition 101.
If advertising is blocked, the exact same amount of dollars will be spent perverting every public speech.
It takes time and effort to feature a product, how could they make a living?
I can imagine 4 different possible outcomes:
- People just find new loophole and behave exactly as before
- Large media company only features products from their friends and families. Monopoly.
- Only the government and a few selected individuals get the incentive. They gain from controlling the information.
- Only local businesses can survive.
They are very different outcome. You can't just ban one undesirable behaviour and hope for the best. You need to focus on what outcome you desire and how each and every side effects.
-- While we are banning monetary gain for ad, can we stop political lobbying too?
That's exactly the point. People shouldn't be making a living promoting other people's products. If they like something and want to promote it, for no compensation, then they should.
Imagine someone with a home improvement YouTube channel. They really, genuinely like certain brands for the tools that they use. So those tools will be visible in the videos, and the person making the videos is free to tell viewers how much they like those brands.
It may not require money if that is banned but value will be exchanged and we’ll be back to square one.
And that's exactly the point. I don't want products and services pushed at me. I don't want companies telling me that I need what they offer, even if I've never really thought about it before.
And remember, this is just a ban on paid advertising. This doesn't mean you can't put up a website to market your product. You can sell through Amazon or whatever, and appear in search results (results that aren't affected by anyone paying for ad space or better rankings). You just can't pay others to advertise it for you.
Can you give an example of when this is bad for the target of the ad instead of the organization doing the advertising? Small organizations don't have a right to exist
Why do you think unregulated capitalism will solve the advertising problem? Other than what I am guessing your point is to relying on a large portion to punish bad advertisers and that eventually those companies will do boring adverts.
Clearly the average Joe/Jane is persuadable, and does not have an iron will to never be manipulated.
Clearly unrestrained advertisement is how we got here in the first place.
Even if you personally choose not to buy overly advertised goods, the overwhelming majority of people will not make the same choice. Advertising works extremely well, and it will always work no matter what you or I do.
So we will still have the problem of excessive advertising, which negatively impacts even people who try to ignore that advertising.
Advertising is how small and new companies can reach customers. It's how monopolies are broken. It's how progress reaches the masses.
Yes, it is willfully intended to change people's behavior. So are many of our posts on HN. That is an important purpose for communication!
As for all communication being a bit like advertising, a significant threshold has been crossed once you're paying to have your information elevated above that of your peers. If we didn't allow that, the noise floor would be lower, and it would be possible to achieve the benefits of advertising without the harms.
For instance, suppose I'm looking for a plumber... there are only maybe fifteen within a reasonable distance. There's no need for the plumbers to pay some third party for the privilege of being first in the list. I can limit my search criteria so that the results are narrow enough that I can consider each one, and they can instead spend that money on pipes or toilets or whatever.
Large companies already have a huge advantage over small/new companies in that they have much more money to spend on marketing and advertising. If anything, banning paid advertising helps level the playing field.
People will still find out about small and new businesses if paid advertising was banned. In fact I learn about most smaller players through word of mouth and other non-paid sources.
In the modern age, I would open google maps (where companies can, for free, volunteer to be listed), or google.com and search.
The yellow pages are ads, and in a sense a company having a webpage which is indexed by google is advertising, but advertising in an index of services is wildly different from paying an influencer on tiktok to do a dance video that just happens to have a tree stump being removed in the background, as if by accident, with the company name visible.
I think anti-advertising people are largely fine with a yellow-pages-like list of companies, with a search engine that indexes company websites, with word-of-mouth questions and reports about what services exist out there.
Will it be harder for a new company that spends $10 on a purse made in vietnam and $20MM on advertising to convince consumers it's a necessary fashion item worth $20k to take off? Yes, absolutely. Will it be harder for a plumber in my area to get business? Honestly, probably about the same, people who need a plumber will usually look at the list of businesses offering the service in their area, and a new plumber can easily get added to google maps and slap together a site.
It's true that people often spend their money on frivolous or unnecessary things. But sometimes people pay for useful things too!
I would prefer if this search-engine / company-directory were government funded, and thus paid for via my taxes.
It's a useful service for the people, and having the government also be able to validate businesses are real legal entities seems quite useful, so making it tax funded seems pretty ideal.
Ditto for an up-to-date map, that's a generally useful thing to the populace, and the government really is the best authority on what streets are still usable, what towns exist, etc.
A government funded maps program would be great same with a government funded search engine that had to try and compete with international search engines with more resources.
You can choose not to use Google though and avoid their ads.
You can choose not to use any service that uses ads and only use ones that allow you to pay for ad free experiences.
Banning ads removes that possibility for others when you can solve the problem today for yourself.
Ads are so incredibly pervasive I effectively cannot.
There's stores I go to which only post their hours on instagram. There's friends I communicate with where my only communication avenue is instagram.
When I walk outside of my door I see billboards and ads, when I install an app required for my daily life, it's full of ads. iPhone, android, and windows all have ads by default littered throughout default apps.
We live in a society, and becoming a weirdo who refuses to use anything that doesn't run on my linux-phone will isolate me from that society. It's perfectly possible to criticize a thing and imagine alternatives without first becoming richard stallman.
What are these apps that are required for your daily life?
My iPhone doesn't have any ads by default outside of the app store.
You're imagining a complete restricting of society and you're not even willing to do without a few apps and Instagram.
If everyone called the store to check if they're open instead of looking on instagram, the employee would never get time away from the phone to actually serve customers, you're suggesting something ridiculous. Text and phone calls aren't replacements for each other either between friends.
> What are these apps that are required for your daily life?
The app I have to use to buy train tickets has ads in it, mostly for fashion items sold at stores within train stations.
The app for checking train schedules is full of ads, and while there are open source apps on android for this, on iPhone you can't sideload open source apps so there's no ad-free alternatives. Releasing an app on iOS costs $100/year for the developer, so the incentive is not to make free open source apps. I really miss android. The iOS app store has so much completely garbage adware, and I can't even code up simple ad-free apps for myself without buying a macbook.
The app I have to use to send support requests to my landlord (an app dedicated to just that purpose) has a couple banner ads. The corporate landlord requires using it, and will not respond to phone calls.
My cell phone company's app, which is the only way to check my plan's remaining data, has a truly incredible number of ads.
.... and that's just off the top of my head. They're everywhere.
But even if all my apps were ad-free, the billboards posted everywhere, on busses, in trains, on buildings, are inescapable.
Instagram would be gone without ads, what would you do to fill the gap then?
Buy your tickets at the station? Use the train company website for the schedules?
Does your landlord or phone company have a website? What phone company is running third party ads in their app?
The fact that instagram is relatively recent doesn't matter here, what matters is the social norms. You're a social outcast if you don't use ad-ridden software.
I'm not willing to be a depressed loner with no friends in order to avoid ads, if that's what you're asking. Just because I can unalive and no longer see ads doesn't mean that I have to like seeing them.
Social norms have changed, and I can't fix that by myself. I'll happily argue that social norms being ad-funded and brainwashing the populace, myself included, is bad though.
> Does your landlord or phone company have a website?
The cell phone provider's website has just as many ads as the app, they're equivalent. There isn't a webpage for my landlord.
You're not willing to make literally the smallest of sacrifice to get what you want in avoiding ads. You've chosen a discount mobile network, go with a premium one to avoid ads.
If you're not going to be willing to pay for these things today how will your life be when you're forced to because they are no longer subsidised by advertising?
If by any chance this is a legit question, i feel the answer would be too obvious: asking people, googling, going to a store you think could sell the thing you want, etc. There are many many pretty obvious ways of finding out about stuff, without needing to have a corporation "reach out" to me and shove their shit everywhere in the form of ads.
Search engines are useful things. They can still exist on a world without ads.
There are many many examples of useful services (both private and public) in our own world that manage to exist without the need to get plastered by obnoxious ads.
The reality is you can choose to have your dream reality right now. Pay for Kagi, pay for ad free streaming or buy bluerays, stay of social media or subscribe direct to your content providers in patron.
We don't need to remove free access just so a few people can go ad free. Those people can already do it they just choose not to
Nowadays, when i want to find out about something, i don't just query Google about it, i usually make sure to add "site:reddit.com" to that query, precisely to avoid getting swamped by unuseful ads on the search results and instead have a change at getting to actual data from actual people. In this sense, ads are not only not useful for finding out about the stuff i want: they are actually hampering my ability to do so.
The problem is there are some services you don’t even know exist that could be much better than how you’re currently solving a problem. Think prevention vs treatment of a problem.
For a concrete example:
I learned about a dog groomer that comes to your house this way. Maybe it should have been obvious there would be some that made house calls but searching Google maps for groomers tends to return the ones with locations that you drive to.
Dog hates the car. Problem solved with a thing I didn’t know existed.
In my personal life I pretty much never see ads and I like it that way, but thanks for giving me something to think about.
Like, the SlapChop is a good counter example I think. The commercial demos the item, makes it looks useful, uses hot sales tactics, a bunch of people think "it's just 20 bucks, and chopping stuff sucks", buy one, and now we've got a bunch of SlapChops in the landfill because in practice they're finicky and more annoying to use than just a knife.
To me, it seems like by volume commercials mostly fall into trying to convince you you want/need something that's ultimately not that useful vs inform, and the vast majority of actual useful things I've found via actively searching, or via word-of-mouth / seeing it at a friend's house.
And that makes all the difference. I am very happy to read that an HN commenter prefers one specific brand of car - assuming that this is an unbiased comment and the commenter was not paid to say that. On the other hand, if they *were* paid to say they like a specific brand of car, they are deceiving me! They are exposing my brain to ideas and associations that are inauthentic, and making me more likely to buy a certain brand of car even though that car cannot get mentioned on its own merits, and instead needs to pay for attention.
Also, I'm not sure I agree that "advertising is how monopolies are broken" - my read on the advertising industry is that larger companies today have a massive advantage over smaller companies, and that smaller businesses would be more able to succeed if advertising was removed. And the advantage more or less comes from the larger brands ability to afford to expose a larger number of people, and that exposure has superlinear effects on purchase behavior (because not only are you exposed to it, but your friends are talking about it, and their family is talking about it, etc).
Some ads are abusive. Some ads compel behavior that is obviously bad for the participants.
Take all the sports gambling ads right now.
Take loot boxes with flashing visuals for children.
Some ads are fine. They are informative and useful, and can provide value.
I'm my opinion, we have leaned too far towards the bad. The useful is being drowned out by ads that take advantage of any social or emotional vulnerability we have. Banking on physical rewards systems geared towards smaller, more meaningful social groups to make us give up attention, time, and money.
I'm in favor of banning ads. Let's try the other end of the spectrum for a bit.
To be crass: let God find his own in the ads world. The good products will still spread organically. It's still advertising. It's just not the bullshit we have today.
I’m really not concerned about the car I don’t have, the quality of my floor mop, or the latest prescription pharmaceutical that my primary care doctor is too stupid to even spell.
I really feel for the small companies. But outside extremely industry specific mediums, they just can’t afford to advertise much. They have to be known from reputation and search engine results.
So, while I see the point you are trying to make, by volume, the bulk of advertising is utter crap.
My feed on social apps and youtube is very frequently filled with small businesses near me.
If I don’t want my behavior swayed by HN, I can stop reading it. If I don’t want my behavior swayed by advertising, I can... close my eyes every time a bus goes by, avoid any public place with an operating television, and never check my mail?
An easy start is all billboards, everything ublock origin considers an ad, TV/radio/magazine ones.
All very unambiguous
Germany has a ban on coldcalling, Sao Paulo on outdoors advertising, Chile on Mascots / Kid Targeted Branding on Cereals
We can expand on those, I won't say neccessarily kill all advetisement, but we could certainly do a lot better than the current climate
Do you mean real progress like washing machines and more efficient solar panels or fake progress like another beverage company to replace the ones that are already there? Real progress will spread by word of mouth. It will be much slower, but I'll accept that to never see an ad for another McDonalds new burger of the month.
Also, search engines are the perfect solution for discoverability here. I don't care if lawn care ads pop up if I search "lawn care service" but I don't want to have this thrown at me when I watch a YouTube video about Napoleon
What they should not be able to do is pay people, who have a media or influencer "brand", to say things about a product or service. Or pay media for a time slot during which a corporate agent spouts propaganda about the company's product or service. Or send a product to a reviewer as part of a contract for a review, even if it's supposedly a "fair and honest" review.
I have no actual evidence of this always being the case but I would imagine given the fact the nature of a disrupter is that they're usually operating on principles of delivering a better product but without the budget to go crazy with advertising, they have to find more grassroots methods of market penetration.
But - also - my wife and I opened a restaurant recently. We need exposure. We are buying ad space on social media, having influencers review the place, working on putting up fliers at public bulletin boards, and investigating mailers (snail mail). It's clear, we're not going to make a go of it without connecting with more customers. If it was just me and her working it, we'd be in the green but we have day jobs and pay our (necessary) employees fairly.
This sprint to the extreme is how one ensures we cannot ban billboards. (If I worked for a billboard company, I would try to frame a billboard ban as a ban on ads.)
Yes, people need to take care of themselves, but part of that involves a degree of personal responsibility.
“Let’s ban paid advertisement.” This is not a serious discussion.
Marketing is basically just manipulating deep-rooted psychological factors. Marketers would even tell you as much, I'm sure.
Choosing to eat potato chips and being bombarded by ads aren't anywhere near in the same ballpark.
Small companies (few people) need advertising to get any reach normally.
Housing gets cheaper, visual advertising disappears.
It's not harmless, so your objection is irrelevant.
Who says I don't like the aesthetic? I can like the aesthetic of something and also acknowledge the harm it causes. It's kinda weird that your response is to make things up about me here.
"It's easy to spot political tribalism - just reference the comments here. They ultimately misrepresent, and have never tried to understand, their opposition's political position. It's kind of sad because it allows them to be manipulated by propaganda"
This is exactly what you just did by fabricating knowledge of my aesthetic taste. I hope this fact is as intriguing to you as it is to me.
I disagree. Lots of entities want to get information out, and they're all competing for attention. This includes a lot of manipulative information, but it's also true for important information. Say that I'm a government agency tasked with informing the public that a certain brand of car seat is unsafe, or just reminding people that wearing safety equipment is a good idea. I can't just publish it on the agency website, confident that everybody will routinely check it. People don't work like that. So, if I really want people to listen, I have to compete in the same way that ads do. And this of course explains why the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's online presence is batshit insane: https://bsky.app/profile/cpsc.gov . It needs to be. They need Sentinel Burrito to warn you that unattended cooking is the #1 cause of house fires because otherwise our stupid brains won't listen.
In olden days we used to get a classified ads newspaper through the door and that was good as you could pick it up if you wanted to check out the ads or ignore/chuck it otherwise. I'd be fine with ads if I had to click to see them. It's having them in your face when you don't want them that's a pain.
I won’t die on the hill of saving billboards anymore than id die on the hill of not taxing billionaires but sorry, whats fair is fair.
In fact, there's almost a reverse incentive; if it clashes with the rest of the city's aesthetic, you're much more likely to notice it.
I don't really see how it's hurting "free speech" to restrict billboards. No one is suggesting we regulate the speech, no one is telling these companies what to say, we just don't want big ugly billboards blasting in our face and making our cities look terrible.
You're of course free to disagree with this, but you almost certainly draw the line somewhere. If I went and dumped a bunch of trash and feces into the middle of the street every day, you probably wouldn't be outraged when I eventually get a ticket, and I doubt that making a "free speech" argument would get me out of that fine, even if I explained the artistic merit of me doing that.
Driving is a captive audience, I don't have the option to "close my eyes/plug my ears" to avoid your "free speech" but with free speech comes the right to avoid hearing your bullshit. I can avoid buying a book, I can turn the channel on the radio, but a billboard doesn't offer that "right" to be free FROM your bullshit speech. There's more obligation on billboards in that regards, and it's kinda horseshit that you're allowed to hold me captive because you have enough money to spend on a campaign (whether it's commercial, political, religious IDGAF)
Wish "freespeechers" could understand this. I'm not saying we should just ban everything, and I'm not even sure I agree with a billboard ban (I would have signed up 25 years ago on that, adbusters reading chud that I was). I'm just saying it's really pathetic that people cry "free speech" when there are two things at play and the SCOTUS did a disservice on differentation between amplitude of property vs signal of speech.
I mean, let's make exceptions for events where everybody came to hear the thing, where consent for the amplification can be assumed because we all bought tickets or something, but if you're standing on the corner with a bullhorn shouting at passers-by, that's hostile behavior in the same way that billboards are. Please don't do it.
The majority deciding to ban the minority with enough money from taking over public spaces and forcing the majority to see their ads seems very bottom up to me.
If billboards have negative externalities, then tax those; don't ban them.
So I hope we established that there is a finite tax that's large enough to cover the negative externalities.
Now we just need to figure out what finite amount of taxation is reasonable.
> What's the tax value of "my city looks like a garish parade of bullshit I don't need"?
Different municipalities (and their voters) can differ in how much they value money vs aesthetics. There's no one size fits all solution.