Ads should actually be blocked in your city. Advertising as such should be something done in catalogues for this specific purpose. If you are looking for "random things to buy", there is a section for that in the catalogue.
Highly debatable whether the policy has achieved its goal of a "clean city". The city is uglier and dirtier than ever, especially downtown. A least billboards covered the decay (and were a source of income to buildings).
A very effective way to solve problems in a community resource is to demand maintenance from a private party in exchange from exploiting it in a sustainable way. São Paulo just closed that possibility.
Yes, there are other possibilities. By nature those are more bureaucratic and jittery. Maybe they are closer to a solution now, but if that's the case, it's because it easier to make that law more relaxed than strict.
I consider solving a problem directly to be less bureaucratic than solving it indirectly by involving even more parties and hoping they do what you want them to do and having to negotiate with them on how much they will do in exchange for what they are getting.
Taxpayer pays x to government which pays workers to clean.
Taxpayer pays x-y to government which pays x-y to government workers who need to go out and negotiate without private businesses and inspect to see if they are doing their job and then punish them if they are not and then deal with disputes. And it is very possible for y>x.
There are unavoidable inefficiencies for a government to perform any action.
The idea that a government can maintain all the surfaces of a large city in a pleasant situation is completely unrealistic. It can at most decentralize to to smaller bodies (and get a huge variance of outcomes, what is quite an ok solution too), but São Paulo doesn't have those bodies and is organized in a way that makes them almost impossible to create.
Yeah, maybe the best policy for the city is pushing governance into smaller bodies. But if your goal is to make the city visually pleasant, that's the solution that will take decades instead of years from the alternatives.
The solution should be simple: allow billboard ads, but tax them based on surface area. Use the tax revenue to hire more street sweepers. This shouldn't be hard to implement, as the city is already quite effective at fining businesses that do not comply with Cidade Limpa. Want to turn a building facade into a giant LED billboard, Shenzhen style? Fine, just pay up. Everybody wins.
This kind of policy would make sense for a quaint old European town, but here we're talking about the largest city in a developing country. Generally as a developing country your first priority should be to, well, develop. The last thing you want to do is stifle economic activity.
Ok, I could agree with that tax. But it's not the sweeper service that will make the city beautiful, sweeping is a bare minimum.
But anyway, how does advertising relates to development? Do you have a clear answer to this? Because not every economic activity feeds the development process, some even slow it down.
> But it's not the sweeper service that will make the city beautiful
Sure, but you can't force by law those decrepit buildings along the Minhocao to renovate. At least with advertising income they would be able to afford a paint job.
> how does advertising relates to development?
Everyone hates advertising, but it's an important driver for competition. A new business has no chance of breaking into an existing market without advertising, for instance (though I guess the internet has made outdoor ads less important). Not to mention the direct jobs that were lost with Cidade Limpa.
> Sure, but you can't force by law those decrepit buildings along the Minhocao to repaint.
Hum... Technically you can. The fight would really not be worth it, but the city can pass a law that fines eye-sores.
Anyway, you seem to want something aligned with my first comment up there of conditioning ads on a well maintained structures. That would very likely work too.
About advertisement, it is one of those industries that look like if they reduced by orders of magnitude the value they provide would increase. If that's the case, the right thing to do is to allow it, but tax it heavily (so all of those proposals are quite good). But "looks like" is a bad basis for actual policy, real data would be much better.
>Yes, there are other possibilities. By nature those are more bureaucratic and jittery.
Not really. The biggest corruption, waste of money and worst outcomes are when private and public sector intersect. Pure public (like healthcare systems outside US) or private (like food distribution) segments work best.
But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day. There is no analogy to interstitial pages with ads like in Forbes some time ago with the button Continue to your article: it would be infuriating if you had to view an ad before being able to use the subway ticketing system. You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen. You don’t have pinkertons following you to learn your habits and show you “relevant” ads. If you walk into a grocery store wearing sunglasses, the clerk will not stand in front of you and say “I am sorry, please remove your shades before continuing because ads support our store and you need to see them.”
But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well.
I guess the argument here is that those ads are designed for men, but they're designed to prey on an extremely primitive, kind of circular logic: "you would look like this if you bought this underwear." Sort of a "this man is desirable to women, please act like him."
I am pretty iffy about that kind of detailed psychological reading into people, it's not completely clear to me that people internalize those ads in that way, and I suspect a lot of people internalize ads completely differently from each other, so I question if any of those explanations are actually generalizable. But I guess it's somewhat reasonable, maybe, to make the argument that male model ads are trying to say something like, "this is the clothing that attractive men wear, and if you were attractive you'd buy this." Or even, "this man is attractive and thus obviously has his life put together, and maybe you'd feel more like him if you had his brand of underwear on."
But I'm much more sympathetic to and supportive of extremely broad statements like, "both sexy women ads and sexy men ads influence beauty standards in sometimes unhealthy/unobtainable directions regardless of the intent/purpose of the ad." I feel like getting super-specific about what exactly is running through a man's mind when they see an ad for underwear is when we start to get uncomfortably close to pseudoscience. But the much broader statement feels a lot less like pseudoscience, it does seem fairly clear that beauty standards are influenced by advertising (and by other things too, advertising is just one aspect of this).
I doubt there was a global women poll on this issue. And strongly suspect even if existed it wouldn't show that majority of women even care. You are welcome to change my mind
I don't have a problem with accepting some ToS when I sign up to a service. My problem is this new law where you have to accept the ToS of every single website on the internet before you can use it, then the ad networks, the analytics services, etc. It would be like having to sign a ream of papers every time I enter a store.
The sites wouldn't need to get your consent for justifiable usage only. They actively decide they want more than that, they want to sell your data. So it's on them, the law itself is fine.
I have zero problems with ad-supported shit going out of business and making space for good, paid content. Imagine a world where content has to be so good as to convince people to take out their wallet. No more clickbait, "this video is sponsored by ShitVPN", chumboxes, etc.
I can imagine such a world. It would be cable TV with heavy region locks. The poorer parts of the world wouldn't be on it at all.
Paying for things online is still a terrible experience. You need a credit card, which isn't always easy to get outside of the rich western countries. I would never have used websites like reddit, HN, Twitter, YouTube or Google if I had had to pay for it. As a kid I wouldn't have been able to pay even if I had wanted to.
>No more clickbait, "this video is sponsored by ShitVPN", chumboxes, etc.
No, you would have even more of this, because this type of monetization is not linked to cookies.
Advertisers usually buy ads to encourage the purchase of a product/service. It is not sustainable to spend more on advertising than what the revenue you get back from it in the form of purchases - over the long term, the ROI has to be positive. Ad-supported services still exist in poor parts of the world despite the advertisers only being able to pay very little (as it has to be relative to the local price of the advertised goods/services), so the prices of paid services can similarly be adjusted to compensate.
> heavy region locks
This is already done, I'm pretty sure Netflix in India costs a fraction of what you'd pay in the US for example. While it's not an ideal solution, it's mostly a solved problem.
> Paying for things online is still a terrible experience.
Agreed on this one, but again the reason it isn't is because currently ads are a "good enough" model that there is not enough market pressure to develop something better. If ads become unsustainable, the content industry will have no choice but to either die out or compromise and collaborate to develop a payment model that has better UX.
> you would have even more of this
Only if it's allowed. If ads are nuked out of existence due to enforced regulation (promoting products makes you a reseller from the eyes of the law and you need to assume liability and provide support & warranty) or even just platform rules (posting commercial content on YouTube requires a costly subscription - shilling sponsored products without it will result in a ban) you wouldn't have it.
Outside of email (which I do pay for), I can't think of an online service I'd pay for. HN is about as close as it gets, but I wouldn't pay for what it is today.
Fully with you on that one. The fact of the matter is that most "free" content is fast food style content - you eat it because it's designed to be addictive. Consumers may feel like they want it, but that's just because it's there, prodding you, calling out to you, autoplaying the next video out of "convenience". If it were to disappear tomorrow, I'd likely spend more time reading old books, practicing programming for my entertainment
There was a time when the likes of YouTube and blogging were just a hobby, not a job for pseudo marketers. Replacing paid "influencers" and "content creators" with plain hobbyists again would be a wonderful thing.
You don’t, that’s the point of the law. As in, the old “EU cookie law” focused on you knowing the terms, but that proved ineffectual where every website operator said “accept or GTFO” (you’d think that would end up an unstable equilibrium, but it didn’t).
Thus the “new” GDPR is predicated on the idea that consent given under “... or GTFO” terms is invalid, given the imbalance in negotiating power, and said consent (where required) had to be voluntary by that definition. The result is cigarette-labelling-level malicious compliance on part of website operators (and compliance-in-a-box vendors they use).
Many of the things you see, such as requiring you to turn off every single “purpose” or “partner”, are manifestly illegal (or rather, don’t legally constitute voluntary consent, so showing them is legal but tracking you afterwards isn’t), but enforcement has been lackluster so far. We’ll see where we end up I guess. (I genuinely don’t know how I want this to go.)
I have never given correct information for those. I always sign up with the name of a president and the address of the White House. I’ve been using a phone number from 15 years ago for those.
>I have never given correct information for those. I always sign up with the name of a president and the address of the White House. I’ve been using a phone number from 15 years ago for those.
I believe +1 (202) 456-1414 is the number[0] you want to use.
I don't understand the hate toward cookie banners. It's like if the citizens of a surveillance state complained if civilian-dressed informants had to carry a big ugly sign. Sure, the sign is ugly and everywhere; but maybe the actual problem is that there are so many informants that you have to see so many signs, rather than their signs being ugly.
Shoot the actual problem (i.e. the dark patterns and malicious compliance of the concerned websites), not the messenger.
Both are a problem in their own right. Tracking visitors to make up for your lackluster business model is abusive, but cookie banners as usually implemented are but one way to comply with regulations aimed at curtailing this. And in my book, it's a form of malicious compliance, making it equally part of the problem.
Annoying consent flows aren't compliant, at least not with the GDPR. A compliant consent flow should make it as easy to accept as it is to decline, so pre-ticked checkboxes or hiding/burying the decline option doesn't comply.
Incompetent regulators that are asleep at the wheel and still haven't done anything to punish this (GDPR went into effect in 2018) are definitely a problem though.
Even if the regulators attacked more websites it wouldn't matter. You'd just have more and more websites that block European users.
You can't expect websites to give you a pop up that asks whether they can monetize your visit or not. Everyone's going to click "refuse" because ads are annoying. As a consequence your website makes no money. At that point why run the website at all?
Regulators don't want to regulate too hard, because it would ruin all the freely available websites.
> As a consequence your website makes no money. At that point why run the website at all?
Many European websites are now proposing users to either accept cookies or buy a subscription to the website. This looks like a very sane way to address the problem to me.
> You'd just have more and more websites that block European users.
Why should I care? Market changes, adapt or disappear.
> This is not the market changing, it's a law crushing a free market that already existed.
In that case, what’s the difference between a free market and a compulsory market?
If market participants must only participate by choosing to spend or to not spend, they are beholden to the economic system, and are unfree actors in the status quo “free market” economic situation.
And yet by exercising political freedom to make themselves (more) free, these unfree participants in the “free market” somehow make the market unfree, and instead of viewing that as a benefit to market participants, you view it as a loss of freedom in the status quo “free market” to the detriment of the unfree participants.
I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, just trying to understand where you’re coming from.
And those same “unfree” participants are free to legislate what websites may or may not do with information that websites collect. The websites are similarly free to not do things that are prohibited by law in a given jurisdiction, or else not offer services to users subject to that legal jurisdiction.
There was never any “free market” status quo in the absence of regulation to begin with, either in statute or in practice. There always are forces external to the market which act upon it, and some of those forces are individuals and groups of people.
To say the free market exists, did previously exist, or could one day exist, is a truth claim I don’t see the evidence to support. Advocating for a “free market” as opposed to the status quo is both an economic and a political position, and thus should address both economic and political aspects of the issue you present.
What about this would you rather be different, and how so? Or what about this would you characterize differently?
> This is not the market changing, it's a law crushing a free market that already existed.
The same could be said about outlawing slavery. Before you scream at me, let me take a step back: of course ad-tech is by far not as horribly bad as slavery. Still the practices they established in the last decades are a violation of human rights, in the european interpretation. They track and profile humans online to a level no private investigator could do offline. And we are at the beginning of what is possible: people place network active microphones and cameras in their homes or carry them around all day. Devices they no longer control, since "no root for consumers" became a security feature. Public spaces are increasingly surveilled by networked cameras, physical advertisements in public spaces and private businesses track wireless signals of nearby phones. Privatized mass surveillance became the norm in cyberspace and the same is happening in meatspace as well. And at the same time the algorithms that guess which content best manipulates individual people into buying, voting or believing something are getting better fast and are deployed at scale.
We are at a crossroads of how society will develop, and this mentality that corporations can collect and use personal data however they like (and they like to manipulate people) is no longer acceptable. And if these corporations weren't creepy enough with their systematic stalking, governments lean more and more towards also using that data. As long as the government promises it is "just for fighting crime" people are somewhat consenting, but on the territory of my country we had two totalitarian regimes in the last century that abused data gathering at scale to identify and oppress their political opposition, to terrorize and murder them. Horrors like the STASI must never happen again. Say no to surveillance capitalism while you still can, demand a constitutional right to the protection of personal data now! Because the freedom of governments and corporations must be limited, so the freedom of the people is preserved.
The market must change, it is necessary. What we want is that you can take your smartphone and tell it that it is ok if it connects to the supermarkets augmented reality and every ad-space you walk by becomes a personalized experience, if that is your choice. That is your freedom. Don't let the ad-provider of the supermarket make that choice for you. Don't let someone tell you that freedom means you could choose to not go to the supermarket and instead grow potatos in your one room flat. That is bullshit. Fuck that free market, give us free people.
> You'd just have more and more websites that block European users.
Great! It frees up space for more respectful alternatives.
However ads are universally disliked and the problems the current ad model brings (privacy, spam/scams/malware, inappropriate/illegal content, etc) are generally universal too, so it's just a matter of time before similar regulation is enacted outside of Europe too.
> because it would ruin all the freely available websites.
Laws against theft/robbery/carjacking ruin free/below-market-rate car rental websites too, yet nobody is complaining about those because society has decided that theft is bad even if it would technically open up new business opportunities that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Why should this be any different?
We already knew cookies were being used everywhere. I dont need to be told the same thing 100000 times because it makes some people feel better and altruistic.
It didn't bring any benefits and has wasted excessive amounts of my time.
First-party, non-tracking cookies do not require a cookie banner.
I'm always flabbergaste how good the propaganda machines of ads agencies is that people are actively fighting protective measure on their behalf. Nihil novi sub sole I guess, but it's fascinating to see this process happen first hand.
That's just plain false. I know many people, especially in the older, less technically literate people, who now systematically disable such analytics thanks to these banners – people who had never realised the real dimension of users tracking before this law.
It's not propaganda by ad agencies. Why make it into a conspiracy? There are pretty great tools out there that you can use for websites, such as Google analytics, but the moment you use that you're implementing a cookie banner.
Want to have ads? Cookie banner. Want to have YouTube/Twitter/whatever integration? Cookie banner.
europa.eu has a cookie banner. A website that doesn't even need to pay its own bills!
> I don't understand the hate toward cookie banners.
My main issue with it is that if I disable cookies, then every single time I need to accept it. If I enable cookies then I only need to accept it one time. I think this annoying thing actually reduces security, because people are more likely to just not delete the cookies at the end of the session to avoid this annoying popup. Makes the web totally unusable if you delete the cookies regularly without a plugin to hide the cookie banner.
>I don't understand the hate toward cookie banners.
Because they fundamentally don't work. The EU politicians had to have known that they didn't work from previous experience, but decided to inflict us with these pop ups anyway. Their own damn website has this pop up.[0]
Reasons why cookie banners don't work:
1. They need to be implemented by the website. This means that if a website decides to ignore the cookie law they can set all the cookies they want and you won't be notified. If they are outside of the EU's jurisdiction they won't even care.
2. Targeted advertising is how a lot of websites pay the bills. This means that websites will use every trick in the book to get you to not click on the "refuse" button. Why wouldn't they? You're using their server time, but generating no revenue if you refuse. Websites will fight this process. They'll eventually lose, but the internet will either turn into a splinternet or cable TV. Ads are what make free websites work and cookies is how it happens right now.
3. Websites are made by people who aren't always well-versed in legalese and can't just hire a lawyer for everything. They don't always know whether they need a pop up or not. The safer option is to put it up there. If the EU's own website has one then probably so does yours.
4. Popups are annoying.
Cookies should be handled by the browser. Not some harebrained JavaScript.
At least twenty years ago the popups had voluptuous women for me to look at before before I closed them in annoyance. Now they're still spying on me same as before but they're irritating me while they do it.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 strongly disagree, his comment is not an ad, it is content. We all came to this page looking for comments like that. Every single experience in life changes the way I think and feel, that doesn't mean everything is an ad, the defining characteristic of an ad is the fact that it is unwanted, that it is imposed on people as an attention tax imposed on some other experience we actually want.
The difference is that his "ad" is relevant; you are on a comment thread about ads reading his (relevant) reply, similar to seeing an ad about a phone in a phone store.
In contrast, ads in most public places are completely irrelevant and unwelcome.
Another difference not mentioned by sibling comments is that ads are purchased. They are necessarily the domain of the well-funded and therefore already-powerful, and whose purpose is to typically to enhance their purchasers wealth or power. They are a tool for inequality.
Not really. Comments are comments. Not ads. You came here to read the comments. Nobody paid some ad company to show it to you and force the ideas into your head. The fact you agreed with the comment doesn't mean it's an ad, it means you found it persuasive.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
“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.
>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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
The people writing articles at Forbes are on payroll. Ad blockers take food off their plate just to avoid a minor inconvenience. All you're doing is pushing these companies to either go subscription only or go bankrupt. Watch the level of entitlement of the people who will inevitably try defending their content theft. They can't win the argument and they always appeal to false moral virtues. They act like targeted ads are the dawn of an Orwellian police state.
I only visit Forbes when someone sends me a link and 9/10 times I get disappointed when I finish the article. When many of the resources I read put up paywalls, I ended up making 2 subscriptions to resources I trust/read most.
I think you are taking this in a wrong direction. The real-world analogy of what you say would be “look at all that food a person is getting for free, all they need to do is to watch ads for 1hr; watch the level of entitlement of people who watch those ads in sunglasses!”
Regarding theft: I don’t agree with the use of words like theft or piracy. Nobody loses an article and nobody is held at gunpoint to give one up. If you want, call it freeloading or schwarzfahren (literally black riding, ie riding without a ticket).
Honestly, going full subscription or bankrupt would be fine with me. It’s the publisher’s responsibility to find a business model that works. What exactly am I stealing by blocking ads? I have no moral or ethical oblication to view them or to allow them to follow me round the web… nowhere was I asked or consented to the exchange of my personal information and resources to view their content
I’m responsible for my computer’s configuration; site operators are responsible for theirs. If I configure my computer to not show me ads, that’s my choice. If they configure their computer to not show me content, that’s also their choice. If they decide to show me content even if I’m not displaying ads, that’s also on them, same as if I configured mine to show ads and was then dissatisfied with my choice.
* In a mall touchscreen navigation kiosk, an ad is shown when you first wake up the device by touching it.
* At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow.
* On Starbucks screen menus, the whole menu is periodically replaced with a video ad, forcing you to wait until its end to finish making your choice.
> You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen.
In the biggest international airport in my country, there are now periodical Covid-19 "info spots" interrupting the display of timetables, check-in desk and gate information screens.
Analog ads have an installation & maintenance cost associated with them. Digital ads don't - if you have a screen anywhere, it can be turned into an ad with little effort and will require no ongoing maintenance.
Exactly. Ads are basically pollution. Digital (and network-connected) ads drive the cost of polluting to near zero, so you see them everywhere: on transit, in gas stations, on your TV's UI, in your operating system, etc. Analog ads actually have a deployment cost, so they don't pollute the space as much.
These pumps with “Gas Station TV” are so annoying that I go out of my way to get my gas at a different station. I’ve wondered if it actively drives other customers away too or if I’m just very sensitive to it.
I've found you can often mute those screens if you press one of the buttons beside the screen. Apparently it's different depending on the machine, so just mash them all I guess.
I've seen this too. I don't think you can find the option unless you keep swatting at the screen like a crazy person, so irritated at the ad that you're barely paying attention to the slightly dangerous act of fueling your vehicle. I think I've found it on every one I've used. I recall one having a mute that wasn't a proper mute, but instead would unmute itself after about 30 seconds, causing you to have to remute it. I think I screamed.
Yep, me too. A new gas station was beng built and I drove by it many times. When I noticed it opened, I got gas there, and they had ads on the pump! Shocking at the time. I decided never to go there again.
The gas station tv has never bothered me but I'm also able to tune it out completely. As I think about it, I struggle to even know which gas stations use it around me.
The fist time I saw that my first instinct was to set the pump on fire. Pure rage. I'll leave with only fumes when I see that. Fortunately it's not that popular here.
If it ever becomes ubiquitous, something's going to have to be done about it. I'd never convict anyone of destroying one of those ad screens.
> * At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow.
And they've only added (most of) these recently. What they've done for me is is increased the time it takes to check out by at least a third. They're paying for the ads with lengthened lines, which is a little shocking when talking about the automated option, because customers choose the automated option to save time.
It might be a bad expectation for us to have. McDonalds might find it more profitable to start ripping out seats (especially with covid), and adding more automated checkout stations. Have us spend 5-10 minutes ordering. Offer discounts if we spend 10 additional minutes ordering and watching ads. Enter us into a sweepstakes while we order that pays every half-hour in free food.
You could cram a lot of 2-sided touchscreen stations in the footprint of a McDonalds; people standing everywhere like a pachinko parlor, or a storefront full of video poker machines.
They probably did the math: they don't need the order taking machine to take less time than making the meal itself. If they made it so you could place an order in 1 second you'd still be in their store for a while. "Might as well bombard them with ads!"
They can even do A-B testing on the ads. Even if they lose some customers in line they can know they make more sales to compensate. Also they only really care about the 10% of customers who are totally addicted to the product and buy 90% of it. Those ones aren't leaving the line.
Don't know what mcdonalds you're in, but most of them combine the kiosk revamp with cuts to the amount of staff hours. It's definitely not faster to join the single line in 5th place than use one of the 3 (of 5) vacant kiosks.
Ah, but the KPI the execs are measuring for the kiosks is probably "self serve orders" so the more awkward they make the alternatives the better the numbers look
The McDonald's nearby doesn't allow counter orders anymore. You can only order through the kiosk, or using the phone app.
Both of them have numerous problems, and it's more time-efficient to order Uber Eats. But that has massive added fees.
I considered signing up to be an Uber Eats driver and filtering for anyone within 1 meter of me so I could pick up my own orders and save time(Uber's app is better), but there's not enough precision to do that.
So I ditched McDonald's and mostly drink Soylent nowadays.
The fact that people have so much difficulty on identifying blocking ads that are actually in real life (like changing the shafts configuration of a market) is pretty good evidence that they aren't as much annoying.
And in airplanes. Airlines like to use those screens in front of each seat as billboards. They're on by default and don't time out, so they keep cycling bright ads while you're trying to sleep. Sure, you can turn yours off, but most of your neighbors won't bother changing the default on state.
Has any American budget airline reached the depths Ryanair goes to make every last cent?
They don't have screens on the seats (too expensive), just a printed advert. But they do play audio adverts on the PA system a couple of times per flight, typically for things you can buy on board.
It's amazing really. There has to be a business school case study there in how you go from being the trail-blazer and biggest success story in fast food, to one of the worst and getting worse with everything you do.
It's also a school case study in showing how regardless they've gone down hill in food quality, in service quality, etc, their customers continue to patronize them.
Maybe it's just me getting older, but I used to eat at McDonalds several times a week, at least. I have maybe eaten there once or twice in all of 2021, I'm not even sure I ate there at all. Same with my friends. It's just awful in every way now, from the experience to the food itself.
McDonald's hamburgers and fries are way less greasy than most fast food joints, and the kiosk allows easily reducing the quantity of sauce in the burgers and salt in the fries. As such, it can be relatively healthy from a macronutrients perspective, while satisfying fast food cravings.
The vegetable salads are very fresh and pretty good, which can accommodate people on strict diets.
The kiosks also free workers to clean up tables more frequently and assist customers in various ways.
Of course this can vary from location to location, especially as so many McDonald's are franchised. But the actual experience at my local spots is enjoyable nowadays.
> * At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow.
Yeah lately this is really bad. Are you sure you don't want to order another side? And then you have to scroll to the "nope" button which is obviously off-screen. Am I sure I don't want to give 50 cents to the Ronald McDonald stuff? Piss off. I don't trust them to keep most of it themselves for 'overhead'.
> In the biggest international airport in my country, there are now periodical Covid-19 "info spots" interrupting the display of timetables, check-in desk and gate information screens.
Yeah this is really annoying in shops here too. Every minute or so they remind people to use the sanitiser or wear the mask. Yet some of the staff don't even do this. It just serves no purpose, other than virtue signalling. It becomes background noise. If someone doesn't know they have to wear the mask by now they have been living in a cave or something.
Have you run into the IRL pop up ads? People walking in front of you, interrupting your UX for a quick "5 min conversation" about their chosen cause? These pesky ads get through my blockers no matter how often I update my filters.
The local cable co. has set up shop in random places throughout the closest grocery store to me for a number of months recently. I can't stand it; it's like walking onto a used car lot to buy groceries.
An effective way of revenge could be to pretend (actually, if they're a cable company pretending may not be necessary) to have a bad experience with them and ask about your money back or why you've been overcharged/etc, especially if their colleagues are pitching to another mark within earshot.
I actually find those pretty easy to block, by just not engaging with them at all. Being polite is only for gentlefolk, riff-raff have no requirement for it.
Actually yes. There are these "tea promoters" on the main street in my city. They would get in your way, and sometimes even literally grab you, to "ask a question", which is inevitably "do you drink tea?". This is a scam scheme where the next step is to take you to their store nearby, offer you a sample of their tea, and then it surprisingly turns out that this needs to be paid for and costs an exorbitant amount. Of course, this breaks every consumer protection law possible, but way too many people are amenable to guilt-tripping.
I either ignore them and walk around them, or loudly tell them to fuck off. If only the police would act on this as vehemently as on anything even remotely related to opposition politics...
Sounds like a typical stroll down Market Street. Never a shortage of people trying to get you to sign up and donate money to some cause, and they won’t take “no thanks” for an answer.
Ads are everywhere you go on the streets. They lure your attention span with bright colors and LEDs which may create accidents. They reinforce a sense of need to consume and/or a feeling of being inappropriate as a person. Supermarkets will try very hard to "give" you their customer card so they can collect more detailed info about you and profile your habits.
Companies often place adverts illegallly [0] by recruiting precarious workers who are going to face the police, not them. They'll even go as far as to cover a cycling area with a slippery material for their ads [1], or to cover historical monuments in spite of architectural regulations [2]. A multinational like Amazon will even steal a wall reserved for artists and pay goons to intimidate the population [3] in order to promote its shitty services.
Also, i don't know about the current situation in regards to this, but more than a decade ago there was a "scandal" in which public French companies wanted to setup spy cameras in advertisement panels so they could target ads and study reactions. The tiny pinkertons following you around is, unfortunately and scaringly real: https://antipub.org/ecrans-de-pub-espions-du-metro-les-assoc...
Last time i was in a big city i had the occasion to see an advertisement panel graphed with a huge red "Adblock". It was heartwarming, and reminded me that pretty much every where local people organize to sabotage advertisement panels and companies, and you should do the same in your neighborhood! I'm personally lucky enough that there's no advertisement where i live, and i think nobody from the neighborhood would let such a trend emerge.
Telling "lure you attention" is just a way to frame it. There are plenty of evidence that visual monotony has negative effect on mind, and FWIW in most modern urban environments (blocky, and painfully uniform) ads often do a little bit of favor by providing variance. I've been to places where street ads are heavily regulated to the point it's noticable that there are less billboards and they are more plain. Unless those are full of historical baroque, gothic/art nouveau buildings it absolutely doesn't make it more attractive (I support restricting ads in historical towns).
As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?
Well, not every roof over a busstop bench needs to look the same. With ads it does. Plant (different!) trees inplace of the billboards. Or (god forbid) just let your local graffiti-guy spray there...
Btw.: a nice info-display emits over its life around 2t of CO2 PER YEAR! Most of it in waste..
For starters, let's read as written: I didn't say beautuful. Second: ok, replace ads with landscaping. One note though: ads pay for themselves, will it work with landscaping?
> For starters, let's read as written: I didn't say beautuful.
Fair, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. But I would argue that “less monotonous or plain” is not that different from “more beautiful”. I doubt you want random variety. People want variety that is interesting and nice-looking.
> One note though: ads pay for themselves, will it work with landscaping?
I’m willing to enough taxes such that we can make the places where live nice. I think most people would agree. And we mostly already do this.
Parks, tree-lined streets, modest landscaping and art, all of these things make life better and more enjoyable. They also help people feel contentment, reduce anxiety, etc.
It may be economically beneficial as well, as people may be healthier and more productive by living in a city with these types of spaces. I remember seeing some research that supports this idea. One example was patients at hospitals having better outcomes when the hospital environment was more made pleasant and beautiful (I believe it was from a Kurzgesagt video on beauty).
> ads often do a little bit of favor by providing variance
If your neighborhood needs ads to have variance, it says something really sad about it. You don't need gray concrete everywhere in order to build dwellings. Some cities like Cuba overflow with city gardens to feed the locals.
> As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?
Murals are not a problem: they're part of the environment, not something designed to stand out of the street (literally). As for flashing or strong lights, they are indeed a problem in my view.
Your opening reminded me of this piece attributed to Banksy:
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
I don't know if the "trend is going in this direction", because I would never go to that gas station again after seeing that once. I'm sure most other people would too.
In practice, not so much. Every gas station in my area installed these things, and they are busy as they've ever been. You would have to go well out of your way to avoid ads.
> But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day.
If I run around you all day shouting expletives at you, you might consider that there's nothing that I do that fundamentally gets in your way for as long as I keep a certain distance. But it will be annoying, exhausting and likely detrimental to your mental health in the long term.
There's nothing inherently offensive about advertisement, IMO. Display the products you can sell me and their prices in your storefront window. Publish informational ads in categorized directories. Advertisement insofar that it lets consumers stay aware of the available alternatives for the products they need and use is a good thing, but when advertisers are no longer content with my demand for consumption and feel like they should create that demand through manipulation, they've outstayed their welcome.
>If I run around you all day shouting expletives at you, you might consider that there's nothing that I do that fundamentally gets in your way for as long as I keep a certain distance. But it will be annoying, exhausting and likely detrimental to your mental health in the long term.
But that's different. Ads in real life are passive. They are part of the environment like the color of the house. They don't actively interact with you specifically.
>Advertisement insofar that it lets consumers stay aware of the available alternatives for the products they need and use is a good thing
And the vast majority of people will never ever check that to find relevant things to them.
> But that's different. Ads in real life are passive. They are part of the environment like the color of the house.
So let's say that the "color of my house" is obscene and disturbing imagery designed specifically to elicit an emotional response in viewers for the sake of making them feel bad. Point still stands; you don't have to actively get in someone's way to be a nuisance that's detrimental to the quality of life and leaves people worse off than without it.
It's also worth mentioning that advertisement overwhelmingly refers to its targets in second person exactly to create the subtle illusion of addressing you specifically. To some small degree our brains probably don't recognize the difference.
> And the vast majority of people will never ever check that to find relevant things to them.
If I'm not actively looking for things that will improve my life, perhaps I am already content with my situation, and the things in question actually aren't that relevant to me.
> But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day.
More common than you might expect, other people here have brought up checkout processes, etc... Beyond what they have said, I want to suggest though that some of the spacing and positioning and navigation around cities/roads is limited by needing room for advertising. There's a limit to how much information you can put along the side of a road in a city, and more of that space could be devoted to more obvious navigation signs at more regular intervals if advertising wasn't taking up some of that space.
Maybe this is a stretch, but I wonder how much less stressful it would be if the biggest visual indicator on a bus stop was the actual bus stop number and not the full-page ad. In my mind, that is kind of delaying information until after you've passed through this space where you can only see the ad.
> it would be infuriating if you had to view an ad before being able to use the subway ticketing system. You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen.
Another example that springs to mind, I ride publicly funded transportation. The trains have displays inside of the train that indicate what the next stop will be. Those get interrupted by ads, if you glance up and want to see how close you are to your stop, you will likely need to sit through an ad before that information will pop up on the screen again. And that's not even in a private establishment, this is ads showing up in public space that isn't owned by any company. It's not even a 1st Amendment thing, they don't have any right to that space, we just decided to sell advertising space to those companies.
Forcing people to view ads before they enter a subway or check out at a store is definitely something companies are starting to pay attention to and would be willing to try. A few physical stores have even started to roll out non-transparent glass in frozen sections that have ads overtop, so you can't walk through the isle and look to see what the store has, you have to open each section and manually check, and the glass screens just show you ads instead.
> You don’t have pinkertons following you to learn your habits and show you “relevant” ads.
This is also kind of a fun rabbit hole to jump down, there is a surprising amount of real-world data that gets processed for advertising; stores have experimented with tracking customers as they go through isles using facial recognition and/or tracking signals emitted from devices. Most loyalty cards feed purchases into a database so you can be tracked.
And companies have been for a while now experimenting with and kind of openly talking about doing eye tracking in billboard ads in cities. To the best of my knowledge this has not actually been rolled out anywhere, but it keeps on coming up in research papers/patents/etc... and I think it's likely it will become common practice at some point.
There's a connective tissue between digital advertising in physical spaces and digital spaces, and once you start to pick apart the links, it's hard to stop seeing them. A lot of digital tracking is augmented by physical tracking, and a nontrivial amount of digital tracking/profiles gets used in situations with real-world consequences.
Some of the systems I talk about above like in-store ads are really only waiting for ways to be personalized per-customer before they can linked back into the tracking systems, and for stuff like dynamic displays, ads pre-purchase, etc... there's potential there to personalize them, which I think companies are likely to start taking advantage of.
----
> But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well.
All that being said, I do think you're completely right, and I do think this is the slightly stronger argument: excessive advertising is just plain unhealthy period.
I get into the tracking/disruption aspects of things because people respond to those aspects, but there...
I think that most people don't recognize the harm that these memes can cause. Most don't see them consciously at all. I realized at some point that I am what I label a "compulsive reader". When I see a sign, it intrudes into my perception and I have to read it. Many people don't even consciously see these words/signs. It is important to realize that not all brains work the same when weighing the costs of allowing theses intrusions.
One big problem with your argument is that the word "yet" should be added almost everywhere. And in fact other responses have pointed out that there are plenty of places where ads are delaying interactive purchases. It's only a matter of time until it is in almost all the places you mentioned.
For as long as there's no good pushback/regulation, there'll always be someone willing to pay to insert ads somewhere and someone willing to accept their money, because there's almost no immediate downside and the amount of money offered keeps going up until you fold. It happens continually, everywhere, that more and more ads, and more and more intrusive ones, keep appearing, and defending the status quo won't help us.
My best friend is a former smoker. He's quit many times. The biggest struggle he has is when anti-smoking commercials show up, being reminded of smoking makes him want to smoke.
They don't prevent going about the day, they make going about your day more difficult.
But ads in real life do mar the landscape, the real world, with their presence. You can drive through the countryside, and have the idyllic rolling hills scarred by a giant poster for the nearest McDonald's.
We don’t allow things on your property to emit all kinds of things without limitations. Smells, gases, smoke, radiation, etc. Why is visible EM radiation an exception? In fact it isn’t: try displaying pornography on your property.
You do have to view ads on subways though. I guess people don’t mind because they are waiting anyway. That interstitial ad only stops you for 3 seconds, maybe the same time it take for the ticket gate to open.
Advertising is mind rape. Not a single person who looks at ads has consented to giving corporations their attention, much less have their minds violated when they insert their little brands and offers.
They are not entitled to our attention. Advertising should be illegal no matter what. Disruptiveness just makes this unacceptable practice even worse.
They should be illegal no matter what? How would commerce function? How would one make a new business known? I hate ads too, but I don't think your extreme stance stands a chance at popularity.
Word of mouth? Designated market places? Who knows? In the end it doesn't really matter. As long as it's not advertising.
Businesses aren't entitled to attention. They aren't entitled to being known. They aren't entitled to success. They aren't even entitled to existence. I simply don't understand how some business's concerns can possibly override everything else. Are we supposed to live in some cyberpunk hell with noise as far as the eye can see just so a bunch of corporations can make themselves known? If resisting this makes me extreme, then so be it.
I don't think you have thought this through. Businesses are peoples livelihoods. You have a lot of problems to solve with an intervention like you're suggesting. Based on the "I don't care, figure it out" attitude, I'm guessing you are still pretty young and can't see very far past your face with issues this complex. Not aiming to be rude, but this kind of half-baked, largely emotional argument detracts from the value of discussions, and drives away thoughtful commentators.
That's right, I didn't think it through. There's exactly one thing I'm absolutely sure of: advertising is unacceptable. Nothing emotional about it. I've recognized the fact these companies want to subject people to their ads without consent. I decided I won't accept that.
Also, I don't have to solve anything. Society decides the rules and it's the businesses who have to figure out how to adapt to them. It's literally their problem. The fact it's gonna make life harder for them is irrelevant. The fact advertising makes them money changes nothing about the inherent unfairness of it.
If you think there's more to it, you're welcome to elaborate. Saying "but how would society function" or "it's complex, you can't just ban ads" doesn't elevate discussion either. Of course it will function and of course we can do it, all we have to do is decide. There are places that actually have done just that and as far as I know they're doing just fine.
This is the biggest example, it's even been posted here on HN which is how I found out about it:
Businesses survived just fine before they started spamming people with their noise, they will keep on surviving once the noise gets banned. Since I've started researching this I've found there are so many cities in my country that have prohibited stuff like pamphlets, loudspeakers, signs and billboards. I have absolutely no doubt it led to immediate quality of life improvements. People here have suggested that I start getting involved in my city's government in order to try to improve the situation in my town as well, and I agree with them. I will give it my best shot.
Reminds me of the miniseries Maniac. It portrays an "alternate future" without Javascript, etc., where targeting advertising is in fact taken to these extremes, including the "Pinkertons" idea.
But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day.
They do, in a suffuse, incremental but no less inexorable manner, in fact make "that place", "out there" -- meaning the city in which I live -- all the more uninviting and inhospitable.
Like I don't even own the backs of my own eyeballs.
I cycle to work on an ebike. About 25 km each way. One of the major issues is the lack of proper infrastructure and awful attitude by drivers, in particular service drivers.
Advertisement company vans are a prime example. There are rolling advertisement posters in most bus stop shelters. These drivers will park up on the footpath blocking pedestrians and those using the bus to update the advertisements, often in the mornings during rush hour. They will park on the cycle lanes and force cyclists out into fast moving and unaccommodating aggressive traffic.
The same goes for delivery drivers. Legally they are permitted on double yellow ‘no parking’ lines on the street but the perception is no not hinder car traffic so they park up on the footpath instead.
During the pandemic there was a lot of temporary work on cycling infrastructure, mostly lazy efforts such as painted cycle lanes and plastic bollards. These drivers simply drive over the bollards or if wide enough down the protected lane. If you challenge them they are verbally abusive.
The attitude of all persons in a mechanically propelled vehicle is that this is not their fault. They are just doing their job. Their companies trot out the tired line that they take safety seriously bla bla bla…
So in regards physical advertisement is public space, for me this is a symptom of a wider problem of perceptions of ownership of our cities public space. We forget that cities are for people. We let cars dominate the majority of the available space. We let oversized vehicles make deliveries in medieval city streets. We use cars for short inappropriately short journeys such as for bringing our kids to school, often because it’s too dangerous to let them walk or cycle because there are too many cars.
We need to start treating our cities like parks with a focus people and figure out ways to remove ICE powered vehicles and limit the space all vehicles occupy.
> We forget that cities are for people. We let cars dominate the majority of the available space.
In my city it's especially bad. Cars on the road, cars on the road side, cars on sidewalks, cars on pedestrian crossings, cars chasing you while crossing the road on the designated crossing. And as you say, if you object they become abusive. It's a large Eastern European city that is living the American dream of going everywhere in a car.
I don't know where I heard it, but there was a story about a hammer-wielding bicycle gang that smashed up cars that weren't friendly to bicycles. Sort of like https://abc7ny.com/bikers-attack-car-bmw-attacked-flatiron-n.... When the police won't enforce the laws then I guess groups emerge that take matters into their own hands.
I wonder why society decided that advertising was so important, it was willing to let it completely dominate (and in my opinion destroy) our public spaces. People who need something will find it just fine without billboards. And people buying things they don't need is not exactly in the interest of society. So why should society pay for it?
I've been working on a policy paper idea for my home country - Slovenia. Complete ban of all outdoor advertising except shopfronts and limit those.
Now, since you can't just ban it outright, there's still need for advertising, a different solution should be offered:
Every community needs to have a public billboard, setup and maintained by the local government, one per 500 residents, where 25% of the area is auctioned to commercial ads, 25% is awarded with a lottery system (to prevent money dominating too much), 25% for cultural events and 25% for nonprofits and charity.
The advertising space should be place in a crowded area (like a square). It needs some extra rules for high density area, so that space can be grouped, but not too much.
All other outdoor advertising is banned. Since a lot of companies would be effectively banned by this move, some sort of (small) compensation should be paid to them and time given, so they can pivot.
Costs of removing the advertising should be subsidized for the same reason. Any advertising facades or roofs (i.e. different colored tiles used to make the roof) can stay, but the ad has to be removed when the roof/facade is replaced.
Money coming in from the ad actions should more than cover this expense.
Possibly add an exception to "shopping center", where such advertising is permitted, but with strict rules to what such a center is (i.e. has no residents).
I know most Americans will balk at such "government overreach" but I think it could pass here if someone actually put some effort in.
Presumably selling ad space on things like buses and bus stops helps pay for those services. I’m much more sympathetic to physical ads. I can just ignore it instead of waiting to click a skip button.
This is the obvious spin, that anyone trying to undermine such ideas would do. So I just checked the yearly (pre-pandemic) financial report for our bus service - the buses are COVERED in adverts. From what I can tell, those ads bring in less than 2% of all income.
The ads on bus stop were given in exchange for running the bike rental service, but that service isn't free to use, so the income can't be that great.
(2) Ignoring ads
I have a feeling that "I can just ignore it" is the critical fallacy that will undermine ideas such as mine.
To know just how much they are affecting you, you have to go to a place with no ads.
Honestly, if you're using ad blocking on your computer - turn it off completely. The difference in physical ads is not as big (since action blocking popups are not a thing), but even discounting those, just the saturation of "things going on" is tiring. Ignoring things is an active action that requires energy and focus... why you are giving that away freely to someone trying to manipulate you ... I do not understand.
The fact that you use "waiting to click a skip button" as a comparison shows how normalized ads have become.
The alternative to "fewer ads" isn't "ads being forced down your throat" but "no ads, at all".
Curious, I checked the revenue that bus ads bring in where I live. I can't find a specific line item, but it's definitely not one of the major income streams. I assume the return:reward ratio is good. They probably outsource the management of the ad space and get some millions trickle in for no effort.
To know just how much they are affecting you, you have to go to a place with no ads.
Honestly the only ads I ever see in real life are bus and bus stop ads. Maybe it's terrible where you live, but here, I can barely remember the last one I saw. If anything I wish the local government would have more ads. They have a bunch of activities on sometimes that I don't hear about or forget because their advertising is so poor.
That's amazing, I have pretty much exactly the same ideas. Advertising is a huge business predicated entirely on manipulating people to make purchases they otherwise wouldn't, surgically exploiting weaknesses in our psyche. It's immoral, and it's economically wasteful.
>I wonder why society decided that advertising was so important, it was willing to let it completely dominate (and in my opinion destroy) our public spaces.
Because advertising is a form of speech, and society has decided that speech is important?
All freedoms are limited by the freedoms of others. You may speak what you wish, but when and how you speak it is limited.
You can not scream about it in the middle of the night, since doing so bothers your neighbors.
Letting anyone and everyone do what ever they want would lead to anarchy. So no society, USA included, does this.
But some actors in societies have convinced the western population, especially Americans, into the fantasy of "freedom without limitation", which, just so happens to only apply to the rich and powerful, while everyone else has to contend with limitations on their freedoms.
I think you mean chaos rather than anarchy. Anarchy involves maximizing freedom for everyone, not just one's self, among other things. The strong doing whatever they want is the exact opposite of anarchy.
I own a website www.Photopea.com, visited by 3 million people a month.
Once in a while, I enable adblock detector, and do not allow usrers with adblocks use the service. I wish everyone was doing that.
When you see someone willing to give you a car (or anything else), but they want money in exchange (i.e. sell it to you), you understand, that it is wrong to take the car without giving them money (i.e. stealing).
But when you see someone willing to give you an article, a poem, a song, a funny video, but they want you to watch the ad in exchange, lots of people think it is fine to break their conditions.
It is extremely easy to detect ad blockers on the web. I wish website creators stopped tolerating ad blockers. People would finally learn to watch ads, or pay for stuff, and the creators would be able to create much better content.
That's interesting, I use Photopea a lot. How did you start it, and what led you to going with ads/premium to unblock ads instead of charging premium for more features?
I hate ads and I never understood the „watch ads to get content“ business plan. Why not just provide demo content and ask users to pay for full access? By relying on ads for revenue, you basically invite adblockers. After all, if people didn’t like them, they wouldn’t exist.
The problem is that the ad-free experience often costs orders of magnitude above what the ad view would earn them. Let's take newspapers for example, ad view on a single page load would maybe earn them 10c, but if I wanted to pay I'd need to subscribe to a monthly commitment of ~15£/month (for the WSJ) and still have no guarantee my data won't be used maliciously (there is no way to pay anonymously) nor whether cancelling the subscription will be easy (no idea for the WSJ but the New York Times is infamous for this).
True, but there are hundreds of news websites out there and even if there was just one you'd still have to read it 5 times a day to make the subscription worthwhile.
I don't read news near enough to make a single subscription worthwhile, and even if I did I would read multiple sources meaning I'd need multiple subscriptions - that's completely unsustainable.
I don’t understand why you can’t just load traditional ads related to your business that no ad blocker would work out of the box against.
If I visit a website about cars, one could put up car ads because it’s obviously in my interests at this point.
I don’t visit websites that require me to block my adblocker for the simple reason that it means they have no other monetizable content apart from me, and as I didn’t even get to their magnet content yet I have no idea how the website feels, which makes me not so open to sharing my data fingerprint.
My ads are traditional ads, and the ads are almost always related to the business.
There are no good and bad ads. The creators of ad blockers decide, what the ad is. The code of an ad blocker literally contains a code like: if(website is Photopea.com) find a specific element and delete it.
If an ad blocker tells you, that they are not blocking "good ads", they are usually blackmailing ad companies to pay them, so that they do not block their ads. The money, which could go to content creators, are going to ad block creators.
Maybe watching ads would be a fair exchange if there was an option to pay, often (mostly), there isn’t. Additionally to some (most), ads aren’t the problem, its tracking, creation of shadow profiles etc
Never used photopea, hope it works out for you, but I wish website creators stopped thinking that invasion of my privacy is a currency
It doesn't work very well, unfortunately. Those willing to pay usually are the most interesting part of the audience for ad providers, so it's difficult to compensate that loss by a reasonably priced 'ad-free' option. You probably would be surprised if you knew how much your attention may cost. Targeted ads created a market where everyone pays proportionally to their spendings. I'm not saying it's a good situation, but it looks like that's a local optimum rather hard to leave.
What bothers me is that huge companies are more resilient to tracking and ads restrictions, so that fight may further speed up centralisation of the internet. I would personally prefer the chaotic old-school world wide web with ugly flashing banners instead.
Photopea.com has an option to pay for an ad-free experience, and one in 2000 users is paying for it.
I make around $.01 (one USD cent) for an hour of using Photopea with ads. If someone was willing to pay me two cents for an hour of using Photopea (with no ads), I would gladly accept it.
You aren't just charging your users "ad views". You are also facilitating 3rd parties tracking their online behaviour, and they certainly aren't agreeing to those terms when they first land on your site.
Could you be more specific? What "3rd parties" are tracking what "behaviour" of yours, and why exactly is it worth so much? And what do you mean by "you" in "tracking you"? Do they know your name?
The behaviour is what websites you visit. It is worth money because websites have topics which hints how they can better target advertising at you. Yes, they know our names because they can track us across every website we visit.
In the case of photopea - as soon as I land on the homepage and before i consent to ANYTHING:
github
google analytics
facebook
stackpath
wikimedia
google adwords
google fonts
amazon ads
(a few others I dont recognise)
and, of course, the companies that you use to collect "consent"...
Even if i disable ALL the options on the "consent" module and reload the page, it STILL loads ALL of these. In fact, it seems to load even more! For example, I create a document, then it loads (in ADDITION to the above):
They are at the very least tracking that i visited your site. They are tracking the URLs that are active. As I click around and use the app, it is triggering more interaction with those services - so clearly they are monitoring actions/events too. This is just on YOUR site.
These networks are able to identify me by a cookie (and other techniques), so they can compile my activity on YOUR site into a log of my activities across multiple sites which they "provide their ads" on. They can absolutely identify you as an individual - google, facebook, etc, are ones that people have INTENTIONALLY given their names too, and many of these other networks sell/lease the data to others to allow them to provide their own identity link.
Furthermore, these 3rd party "scripts" have access to the entire page content too. They can read my email address should I register. They can even capture my password if they were so configured (or were in themselves hacked to do so).
Bear in mind i did NOT consent to any of this when I landed on your site, and even when i specifically removed "consent" via the form on your landing page, i was STILL being tracked by ALL those I mention above.
THIS is why people have blockers, etc. I dont mind if you have an image with a link to some advertisers product/service/whatever. What I care about it that my every action on your site is providing additional data for these companies to mine and build a secret profile of my browsing habits.
EDIT: I browsed without an ad blocker to compile this behaviour. I feel dirty.
Out of curiosity, I decided to check your website with adblocker turned off. After rejecting (!) GDPR consent, the website decided to send my personal information to the following companies: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Ad Lightning, Setupad, UniConsent, Adagio, ID5, Criteo, Magnite, RTB House, Casale Media, EMX Digital, Adform, Pubmatic, Between Digital, Lijit Networks, AppNexus, 33Across, Adx Premium, Sharethrough, Smart Adserver, OpenX, BRealTime, bumlam.com (couldn't find information about owner of this domain), BidSwitch, Getintent, Yahoo, and more - at some point I gave up trying to figure out who owns given domain names.
The privacy policy which is quite hidden on the website (https://www.photopea.com/privacy.html) says nothing about that. All it says is the following:
> We use third party tracking tools to improve the performance and features of the Service (e.g. Google Analytics). Such tools are created and managed by parties outside our control. As such, we are not responsible for what information is actually captured by such third parties or how such third parties use and protect that information.
This won't fly under GDPR, just saying. Not only you are responsible for third party behavior, but you didn't even mention all tracking scripts that are directly used (I see Facebook Pixel Code right in the source code for photopea.com). You are in Czech Republic, right? I think it is in European Union.
GDPR still applies in the UK via their "equivalent" UK GDPR, as does the PECR (which is their implementation of the ePrivacy Directive, which covers cookies).
If you know how the web works, you must know, that websites do not have access to your device. You do not tell Photopea your name or your address.
The only thing a website can know, is, that "someone with a screen resolution of 1920x1080 pixels visited www.Photopea.com at 18:37". It can be useful to know the number of visitors, or the usual screen resolutions.
> Google, Facebook, Amazon, Ad Lightning, Setupad, UniConsent, Adagio, ID5, Criteo, Magnite, RTB House, Casale Media, EMX Digital, Adform, Pubmatic, Between Digital, Lijit Networks, AppNexus, 33Across, Adx Premium, Sharethrough, Smart Adserver, OpenX, BRealTime, bumlam.com (couldn't find information about owner of this domain), BidSwitch, Getintent,
Which one of those do you need to know usual screen resolutions of users? Or maybe there are some other reasons those all get contacted?
(You also missed some "minor" details like IP addresses and fingerprinting profiles overall, and I'm honestly not sure if you are as ignorant as you act or just pretend to do so, and which one would be more offensive)
I do not know a lot about the ad mechanism, which my partners use. But it usually works by contacting several servers and asking them "hey, there is someone visiting www.Photopea.com, probably from Canada, with a screen resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, how much would you pay for showing them your ad?" ... there is an auction, and the ad from the highest bidder is shown to you. The more servers take part in the auction, the more money I can make.
Like really, if you open a website for the first time in your life, what kind of secret information could it know about you?
The trackers in your site use cookies, and browser fingerprinting to create a profile of the visitors to your site, which combined with other data on the visitors is used to identify them personally.
That on its own should give you pause. But that data is then used by companies like Facebook or Google to allow the highest bidder to alter that users behaviour - by getting them to believe some propaganda, to vote for a political party, or to spend money on something they don’t need.
That’s the business model. That is how you make money on your site.
There are other ways of making money – I’m sure that had ad revenue not been available you would have found a different way.
> When you see someone willing to give you a car (or anything else), but they want money in exchange (i.e. sell it to you), you understand, that it is wrong to take the car without giving them money (i.e. stealing).
Someone selling goods has to abide by some laws - typically, lies/false advertising is prohibited, they might have to provide a warranty, and most contracts can be cancelled within 14 days by returning the goods. This means that the car's specifications will be made available to me, the terms of the deal throughly detailed in a legal document I'd have to sign, and I might get to test drive the car before committing.
Ads in contrast don't have any of this. In your example of articles/poems/songs/funny videos, I don't get to check out the content beforehand, I have no recourse if it turns out to be defective/fraudulent/etc (such as clickbait, or a video with 2 mins actual content and 8 mins filler to get to the 10 min threshold for a second ad) after I "pay" by viewing the ad (and parting with my personal data) and I don't have any recourse either if the advertised product turns out to be a scam or malware.
Nobody cares what your opinion about the ad is. If you do not like the "cost" of the item (watching a minute of an ad, to see a 10 second video), just go somewhere else to find an alternative. Or buy it once and never again.
What you are saying is, basically, if someone is selling bread for $100, and they dont let you taste in advance, you are allowed to steal that bread, because $100 is not a right price for the bread.
Not liking the cost implies knowing the cost in advance. Does your website disclose that it's ad-supported, which data will be collected and how it will be used (which is required if your are based in the EU or offer service to EU-based customers) and whether you take responsibility for any ill effects from executing the ad code? Because otherwise it can be argued you are also "stealing" people's computing resources and personal data before they could make a conscious decision to "pay".
> steal
Theft implies that you are deprived of the item once it's stolen - this is not the case here, and the costs should be taken into account either way. You're comparing fractions of a cent from an ad view with $100. I'd feel much better about stealing the former than the latter even in case of actual, physical theft.
> they dont let you taste in advance
It doesn't have an impact on the "theft" scenario, but in case of a paid product I would still expect a refund if the bread is defective (moldy or fake) or was mis-sold with false advertising.
"Theft implies that you are deprived of the item once it's stolen - this is not the case here."
Yeah, exactly. If I write a book, and one person buys it, and a billion people copy it from that person (and I sell just one copy in total), there is nothing wrong, because I still have my book.
I am glad that most of people dont think this way, because we would not have any books in our world.
> I am glad that most of people dont think this way, because we would not have any books in our world.
Piracy has been around for decades, may be making a resurgence thanks to the balkanization of media streaming services and yet we still have movies, music & TV.
Why stop at ads though? I should just have a personalized algorithm that filters all real-world content I see, or otherwise sanitizes it for my consumption. For example, apply beauty filters to everyone around me so I don't have to deal with the unpleasantness of ugly people. Block out any noise that might trigger discomforting thoughts, like political opinions that I disagree with.
If it sounds dystopian, well.. once we're used to it, having to experience the ugliness of an unfiltered world would surely seem more dystopian. Right?
I strongly believe that advertising by definition is unethical in all of it's forms and "block" ads to the best of my ability, in real life as well. I do not view ads that reach me by mail, and as for billboards and posters I see around town, I make a note to avoid the products they advertise. I know this doesn't make a difference but it's an ideological thing. If my actions could in theory cause a tiny little dent in a graph somewhere, I make a point to do it.
"Advertising is a huge business predicated entirely on manipulating people to make purchases they otherwise wouldn't, surgically exploiting weaknesses in our psyche."
Junk mail is particularly frustrating because companies are generating so much paper waste only for someone to deliver it to your door, and you to put it directly in the bin. No, Dominoes, I don't give a fuck about your shit pizza, and sending junk through my letterbox 5 days a week isn't going to change my mind.
Sports Illustrated recently started sending me their full monthly magazine with my name on it, without a subscription. It also goes straight into the trash.
(For anyone thinking once a month doesn't sound too bad: Sports Illustrated has so many pages it stacks up to almost a centimeter thick)
> I strongly believe that advertising by definition is unethical in all of it's forms
So, you think “Show HN” is unethical, too? If so, how are people with a new product going to find customers? Word of mouth? How do they find their first customer?
I suspect your opinion on advertising is strong, but not that strong.
I wouldn't mind ads in my browser if they behaved inobtrusively. What makes me block them is their infuriating attempts to hijack my attention even at a cost of preventing me from reading / listening / watching the real content.
I live in the area of Grenoble, a french city leaded by ecologists than banned ads several years ago (since 2014 if I'm correct).
This is a pleasure, or, more precisely, I feel overwhelmed when I exit my city and am surrounded by so many ads!
The state of Hawaii also bans most ads and billboards (they are considered to take away from the natural beauty, which, of course, is a big tourism draw). I find it odd that there is even much debate about it and that most places do not have laws like this:
How are ads freedom of speech though? Unless it's the old "corporations are people" again.
I invite any CEO to personally walk around my city with a banner of their choosing. Being allowed to spend millions of dollars to make kids addicted to smoking and drinking isn't free speech, it's legalized crime.
Austin, TX long ago passed a law that said a billboard can be used to advertise only for the business on the parcel of land where the billboard is physically located. Thus, a car repair shop could have a billboard advertising themselves, but they are not allowed to lease it out to advertise, say, a tanning salon that is not on the same site.
At the time it was passed, any existing billboards were granted an exemption, and can be leased to show arbitrary ads. There has been a trend to replace those billboards with digital versions. Austin passed a law to prevent such conversions, but it has been challenged up to the Supreme Court, as the advertising companies which own all those "analog" billboards claim their first amendment rights have been violated.
Because corporations are people and so therefore have exceptional claim to Freedom Speeches™ denied us mere humans (natural persons).
The 5-4 podcast about the SCOTUS covers these (and other) pro-corporation decisions. https://www.fivefourpod.com Basically the ELI5 treatment for those of us completely ignorant of the law. Highest recommendation.
Just so you know, they didn't actually replaced them by trees. And they didn't stop ads in the bus stop even after 2019. But having no other ads is already nice !
Absolutely. I don't much care what people do with their stores but billboards are even worse than online ads because they're entirely non-consensual manipulation since you can't avoid them at all. It really should be considered a form of psychological violence.
I think thats going to be one of the early successes of AR glasses. Its trivially easy to make, and freemium versions will replace generic ads with ones tailored to you.
Perhaps if we did that for, say, 80 years, then after the last advertiser has dropped dead of advanced age, we could cautiously re-enable the legality of purely informational, manipulation-free adverts.
Yeah, good luck defining what an ad is. And adverts will always try to manipulate their audience. It would take 3 seconds for them to start doing that again.
That neener-neener attitude is a great example of why advertisers need to be told "just no, for the entire rest of your lives, without exception".
What fraction of your lifespan spent behind bars do you care to wager that you can wiggle and sleaze around the rules? Especially ones that are applied by judges with common sense, rather than algorithms?
Paid online services have been a thing long before internet advertising took over. People used to have search, email, GPS navigation, business directories, news, weather and lots more before Google was even an idea. Why do people suddenly think giving up your privacy to look at obnoxious ads all day is the only way technology will progress further?
They don't wanna pay. If you don't like ads, stay in your home or in sandboxed areas you control or approve. You don't get to control other peoples' property.
How will anyone know about search, email or GPS navigation? If its word of mouth, isn't this a form of advertising? How will they pay for them without a credit card; which will be issued by a bank that can't advertise them. Does that also rely upon word of mouth? How can a new entrant arrive in the banking industry without being able to advertise its services?
Without advertising new companies can't develop new services because only the existing ones will have customers.
A public information service would solve all of these issues. The UK has the Citizen's Advice Bureau. Also public libraries can contain informational bits.
In both of the above cases you as the consumer have to actively seek them out. But I'd be OK with public services being 'advertised' on TV, billboards etc as there would be no profit motive.
Yes. Find another avenue for virtue signaling that contributes on a local level. Paying for the right to be a roaming advert is what has been advertised to you, hence you are repeating the cycle.
I do wear these brands, but try to subdue any labeling. i.e. black sharpie on the nike logo.
About online ads, is most of the tracking and code that runs to identify my preferences or is some kind of anti=fraud shit,that will get even more complex and invasive as bad guys will try commit fraud.
I am thinking at a partial solution(emphasize on partial), offer the users a non-tracking account(Free) , you still give them targeted ads but using a non tracking method like a survey at account creation, options for the user to tell you that he does not like this type of ad, options for the user to tell you what kind of ads he wants to see (like I could accept non-animated ads, software related, local business related, technology related, and article related ads).
But all of this would be impossible if most of the tracking is for anti-fraud , then you would need some DRMed browsers to confirm you probably are a human.
My city replaced the old billboards ( primarily in bus stops, but there are freestanding ones as well ) by electronic billboards. It is like there are giant 2 meter tall Phones everywhere, but this time they only show ads.
I go out of my way to be offline when I am out of the house and now the city council has shoved these screens right in my face. No escape.
I mean, the simplest answer is that "your browser" implies actual possession of the browser, whereas "your city" implies only a metaphor of possession of the city, so the question is deliberately misleading.
The giant ad billboards always remind me of the giant portraits of the supreme leader they have in authoritarian world states. Instead of his image dominating the public sphere, we have the Coca Cola company, or some clothers retailer or what-not. There's also that scene in Blade Runner with the giant ads about a new life in the other colonies.
632 comments
[ 762 ms ] story [ 846 ms ] threadYou're closer to a solution now.
Yes, there are other possibilities. By nature those are more bureaucratic and jittery. Maybe they are closer to a solution now, but if that's the case, it's because it easier to make that law more relaxed than strict.
Taxpayer pays x to government which pays workers to clean.
Taxpayer pays x-y to government which pays x-y to government workers who need to go out and negotiate without private businesses and inspect to see if they are doing their job and then punish them if they are not and then deal with disputes. And it is very possible for y>x.
The idea that a government can maintain all the surfaces of a large city in a pleasant situation is completely unrealistic. It can at most decentralize to to smaller bodies (and get a huge variance of outcomes, what is quite an ok solution too), but São Paulo doesn't have those bodies and is organized in a way that makes them almost impossible to create.
Yeah, maybe the best policy for the city is pushing governance into smaller bodies. But if your goal is to make the city visually pleasant, that's the solution that will take decades instead of years from the alternatives.
This kind of policy would make sense for a quaint old European town, but here we're talking about the largest city in a developing country. Generally as a developing country your first priority should be to, well, develop. The last thing you want to do is stifle economic activity.
But anyway, how does advertising relates to development? Do you have a clear answer to this? Because not every economic activity feeds the development process, some even slow it down.
Sure, but you can't force by law those decrepit buildings along the Minhocao to renovate. At least with advertising income they would be able to afford a paint job.
> how does advertising relates to development?
Everyone hates advertising, but it's an important driver for competition. A new business has no chance of breaking into an existing market without advertising, for instance (though I guess the internet has made outdoor ads less important). Not to mention the direct jobs that were lost with Cidade Limpa.
Hum... Technically you can. The fight would really not be worth it, but the city can pass a law that fines eye-sores.
Anyway, you seem to want something aligned with my first comment up there of conditioning ads on a well maintained structures. That would very likely work too.
About advertisement, it is one of those industries that look like if they reduced by orders of magnitude the value they provide would increase. If that's the case, the right thing to do is to allow it, but tax it heavily (so all of those proposals are quite good). But "looks like" is a bad basis for actual policy, real data would be much better.
Not really. The biggest corruption, waste of money and worst outcomes are when private and public sector intersect. Pure public (like healthcare systems outside US) or private (like food distribution) segments work best.
But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well.
This isn't so much of a FTFY as much of just a different perspective of the same comment.
Women are more likely to replace 'worn out' clothes
There's a good chance that the majority of men's underwear is bought by women.
I am pretty iffy about that kind of detailed psychological reading into people, it's not completely clear to me that people internalize those ads in that way, and I suspect a lot of people internalize ads completely differently from each other, so I question if any of those explanations are actually generalizable. But I guess it's somewhat reasonable, maybe, to make the argument that male model ads are trying to say something like, "this is the clothing that attractive men wear, and if you were attractive you'd buy this." Or even, "this man is attractive and thus obviously has his life put together, and maybe you'd feel more like him if you had his brand of underwear on."
But I'm much more sympathetic to and supportive of extremely broad statements like, "both sexy women ads and sexy men ads influence beauty standards in sometimes unhealthy/unobtainable directions regardless of the intent/purpose of the ad." I feel like getting super-specific about what exactly is running through a man's mind when they see an ad for underwear is when we start to get uncomfortably close to pseudoscience. But the much broader statement feels a lot less like pseudoscience, it does seem fairly clear that beauty standards are influenced by advertising (and by other things too, advertising is just one aspect of this).
Paying for things online is still a terrible experience. You need a credit card, which isn't always easy to get outside of the rich western countries. I would never have used websites like reddit, HN, Twitter, YouTube or Google if I had had to pay for it. As a kid I wouldn't have been able to pay even if I had wanted to.
>No more clickbait, "this video is sponsored by ShitVPN", chumboxes, etc.
No, you would have even more of this, because this type of monetization is not linked to cookies.
Advertisers usually buy ads to encourage the purchase of a product/service. It is not sustainable to spend more on advertising than what the revenue you get back from it in the form of purchases - over the long term, the ROI has to be positive. Ad-supported services still exist in poor parts of the world despite the advertisers only being able to pay very little (as it has to be relative to the local price of the advertised goods/services), so the prices of paid services can similarly be adjusted to compensate.
> heavy region locks
This is already done, I'm pretty sure Netflix in India costs a fraction of what you'd pay in the US for example. While it's not an ideal solution, it's mostly a solved problem.
> Paying for things online is still a terrible experience.
Agreed on this one, but again the reason it isn't is because currently ads are a "good enough" model that there is not enough market pressure to develop something better. If ads become unsustainable, the content industry will have no choice but to either die out or compromise and collaborate to develop a payment model that has better UX.
> you would have even more of this
Only if it's allowed. If ads are nuked out of existence due to enforced regulation (promoting products makes you a reseller from the eyes of the law and you need to assume liability and provide support & warranty) or even just platform rules (posting commercial content on YouTube requires a costly subscription - shilling sponsored products without it will result in a ban) you wouldn't have it.
There was a time when the likes of YouTube and blogging were just a hobby, not a job for pseudo marketers. Replacing paid "influencers" and "content creators" with plain hobbyists again would be a wonderful thing.
Thus the “new” GDPR is predicated on the idea that consent given under “... or GTFO” terms is invalid, given the imbalance in negotiating power, and said consent (where required) had to be voluntary by that definition. The result is cigarette-labelling-level malicious compliance on part of website operators (and compliance-in-a-box vendors they use).
Many of the things you see, such as requiring you to turn off every single “purpose” or “partner”, are manifestly illegal (or rather, don’t legally constitute voluntary consent, so showing them is legal but tracking you afterwards isn’t), but enforcement has been lackluster so far. We’ll see where we end up I guess. (I genuinely don’t know how I want this to go.)
I believe +1 (202) 456-1414 is the number[0] you want to use.
[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/get-involved/write-or-call/
Shoot the actual problem (i.e. the dark patterns and malicious compliance of the concerned websites), not the messenger.
Incompetent regulators that are asleep at the wheel and still haven't done anything to punish this (GDPR went into effect in 2018) are definitely a problem though.
You can't expect websites to give you a pop up that asks whether they can monetize your visit or not. Everyone's going to click "refuse" because ads are annoying. As a consequence your website makes no money. At that point why run the website at all?
Regulators don't want to regulate too hard, because it would ruin all the freely available websites.
Many European websites are now proposing users to either accept cookies or buy a subscription to the website. This looks like a very sane way to address the problem to me.
> You'd just have more and more websites that block European users.
Why should I care? Market changes, adapt or disappear.
This is not the market changing, it's a law crushing a free market that already existed.
In that case, what’s the difference between a free market and a compulsory market?
If market participants must only participate by choosing to spend or to not spend, they are beholden to the economic system, and are unfree actors in the status quo “free market” economic situation.
And yet by exercising political freedom to make themselves (more) free, these unfree participants in the “free market” somehow make the market unfree, and instead of viewing that as a benefit to market participants, you view it as a loss of freedom in the status quo “free market” to the detriment of the unfree participants.
I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, just trying to understand where you’re coming from.
There was never any “free market” status quo in the absence of regulation to begin with, either in statute or in practice. There always are forces external to the market which act upon it, and some of those forces are individuals and groups of people.
To say the free market exists, did previously exist, or could one day exist, is a truth claim I don’t see the evidence to support. Advocating for a “free market” as opposed to the status quo is both an economic and a political position, and thus should address both economic and political aspects of the issue you present.
What about this would you rather be different, and how so? Or what about this would you characterize differently?
The same could be said about outlawing slavery. Before you scream at me, let me take a step back: of course ad-tech is by far not as horribly bad as slavery. Still the practices they established in the last decades are a violation of human rights, in the european interpretation. They track and profile humans online to a level no private investigator could do offline. And we are at the beginning of what is possible: people place network active microphones and cameras in their homes or carry them around all day. Devices they no longer control, since "no root for consumers" became a security feature. Public spaces are increasingly surveilled by networked cameras, physical advertisements in public spaces and private businesses track wireless signals of nearby phones. Privatized mass surveillance became the norm in cyberspace and the same is happening in meatspace as well. And at the same time the algorithms that guess which content best manipulates individual people into buying, voting or believing something are getting better fast and are deployed at scale.
We are at a crossroads of how society will develop, and this mentality that corporations can collect and use personal data however they like (and they like to manipulate people) is no longer acceptable. And if these corporations weren't creepy enough with their systematic stalking, governments lean more and more towards also using that data. As long as the government promises it is "just for fighting crime" people are somewhat consenting, but on the territory of my country we had two totalitarian regimes in the last century that abused data gathering at scale to identify and oppress their political opposition, to terrorize and murder them. Horrors like the STASI must never happen again. Say no to surveillance capitalism while you still can, demand a constitutional right to the protection of personal data now! Because the freedom of governments and corporations must be limited, so the freedom of the people is preserved.
The market must change, it is necessary. What we want is that you can take your smartphone and tell it that it is ok if it connects to the supermarkets augmented reality and every ad-space you walk by becomes a personalized experience, if that is your choice. That is your freedom. Don't let the ad-provider of the supermarket make that choice for you. Don't let someone tell you that freedom means you could choose to not go to the supermarket and instead grow potatos in your one room flat. That is bullshit. Fuck that free market, give us free people.
Great! It frees up space for more respectful alternatives.
However ads are universally disliked and the problems the current ad model brings (privacy, spam/scams/malware, inappropriate/illegal content, etc) are generally universal too, so it's just a matter of time before similar regulation is enacted outside of Europe too.
> because it would ruin all the freely available websites.
Laws against theft/robbery/carjacking ruin free/below-market-rate car rental websites too, yet nobody is complaining about those because society has decided that theft is bad even if it would technically open up new business opportunities that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Why should this be any different?
It didn't bring any benefits and has wasted excessive amounts of my time.
First-party, non-tracking cookies do not require a cookie banner.
I'm always flabbergaste how good the propaganda machines of ads agencies is that people are actively fighting protective measure on their behalf. Nihil novi sub sole I guess, but it's fascinating to see this process happen first hand.
You should've been running a blocker already. I run third party blockers as much as possible, but these banners are just excessive and useless.
That's just plain false. I know many people, especially in the older, less technically literate people, who now systematically disable such analytics thanks to these banners – people who had never realised the real dimension of users tracking before this law.
Want to have ads? Cookie banner. Want to have YouTube/Twitter/whatever integration? Cookie banner.
europa.eu has a cookie banner. A website that doesn't even need to pay its own bills!
That's just wrong, you don't need a cookie banner for non-tracking ads.
Regardless, I block the ads, but I'm still trying to figure out to block all the dialogs about cookies for the ads I'm blocking.
No, you only need a cookie banner if those third parties collect data.
My main issue with it is that if I disable cookies, then every single time I need to accept it. If I enable cookies then I only need to accept it one time. I think this annoying thing actually reduces security, because people are more likely to just not delete the cookies at the end of the session to avoid this annoying popup. Makes the web totally unusable if you delete the cookies regularly without a plugin to hide the cookie banner.
Because they fundamentally don't work. The EU politicians had to have known that they didn't work from previous experience, but decided to inflict us with these pop ups anyway. Their own damn website has this pop up.[0]
Reasons why cookie banners don't work:
1. They need to be implemented by the website. This means that if a website decides to ignore the cookie law they can set all the cookies they want and you won't be notified. If they are outside of the EU's jurisdiction they won't even care.
2. Targeted advertising is how a lot of websites pay the bills. This means that websites will use every trick in the book to get you to not click on the "refuse" button. Why wouldn't they? You're using their server time, but generating no revenue if you refuse. Websites will fight this process. They'll eventually lose, but the internet will either turn into a splinternet or cable TV. Ads are what make free websites work and cookies is how it happens right now.
3. Websites are made by people who aren't always well-versed in legalese and can't just hire a lawyer for everything. They don't always know whether they need a pop up or not. The safer option is to put it up there. If the EU's own website has one then probably so does yours.
4. Popups are annoying.
Cookies should be handled by the browser. Not some harebrained JavaScript.
[0] https://www.europa.eu
In 2012, USA tried to implement the CALM act, which mandated content and ads to be at the same level (“A/85”), but it didn’t play out because ads are measured individually whereas a program is measured as a whole. Complaints to the FCC are still about the loudness of ads… See https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudnes...
I am quite confident that it wouldn't be too hard to build an ad detection ML model that would have near-perfect accuracy. That said, an approach based on algorithmically detecting repeated segments of lengths consistent with ad spots would work just as well, if not better.
P.S. One thing I thought was really interesting was that the classifier -- that was only ever shown a binary label (ad/not-an-ad) -- learnt an embedding that grouped together entire categories of things across TV networks and geographies (studio news, weather, traffic reports etc).
I like the idea of looking at pixels, just because that's the sort of info that gets sent down the HDMI cable and will always be available.
To your question on segment lengths, ad spots have specific, predefined duration. In the US these are typically 15s, 30s and 60s (sometimes 45s). This property could be exploited to detect ads. Consider, for example, a video segment that's exactly 30s in duration and is repeated many times over multiple TV channels. It is very likely to be an ad.
Consider web ads more like annoying bus boys trying to get you to order something in their restaurant by stepping in front of you and mirroring every move.
Maybe i'm too oblivious to IRL ads.
For a long time I thought that was all just due to crowds/stress and nothing else, but I'm increasingly convinced that part of it is just that it's harder for me to pick out when scanning a room where the signs are the indicate where I'm supposed to be. Also seems to make it more likely that I'll walk past an indicator or miss something while I'm trying to navigate the space. I'm always paranoid inside of these busier spaces about whether I'm going to miss something important and end up walking in the opposite direction of where I need to go.
It may depend a lot on not just the area but also what you're personally used to; navigation in these spaces are a skill that people get better at over time. I suspect that some of the difficulties become less difficult as people's brains get better at filtering things out or recognizing indicators that they need to zero in on. In the same way that after a while playing a game you start to instinctively zero in on certain UX choices or indicators in a level, people also instinctively start to zero in on how a city indicates important information (is the sign always green, does it tend to show up in a specific place). So this might also be more of an early-user UX problem for people who don't go into the city all the time or who are particularly susceptible to getting distracted by motion/colors.
----
There's a lot of research that brains are really good at learning to filter out advertising; part of the arms race in advertising isn't just with ad blockers, it's figuring out how to present ads in increasingly unusual ways where your brain won't just do pattern recognition and literally just refuse to process or register them. Human brains are heckin good at pattern recognition.
But that means that there is an arms race with advertisers trying to figure out what the next evolution is with billboards or how to trick your brain to register things, and it means that people who are less equipped to do that filtering or are just unfamiliar with the space often end up getting thrown in the deep end because their brains aren't trained to do that filtering yet, or are trained to filter different things.
> We cannot make the entire world ideal for everyone.
Huh? So just f** accessibility and leave everyone on their own? I'd understand if you'd argued that it wouldn't be feasible to do a particular thing, but such general statements leave a very bad taste.
This is an excellent point to make: Streets are for getting from A to B, and ads don't impede that.
The Internet is for getting access to information, and many of the online ad formats do impede that.
You went outside, you motivated yourself, and passing by a sign is not much now. My laptop is a bit of a promise of lazy direct access, which is more at odds with the ads.
Also street ads have been planned, there are usual spots and looks. Web is a bit wilder.
In contrast, ads in most public places are completely irrelevant and unwelcome.
If all web ads were limited to a static gif here or there in the corner of a web page, I don't think adblock plus would be a thing at all.
I block ads when they do things like take over focus, are distractingly animated, slow down the page, overload my CPU, etc.
and for what? so they can still occupy the majority of screen space and intentionally distract me?
yeah give me the buzzing “swat the fly” ads instead please
This isn't even particularly new tech, they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to, and this was in the early 2000s
Any idea how this was supposed to work? I don't know how that information would leak out unless it was just listening for the audio from a car with windows rolled down.
> Each car radio sends out a signal at a frequency higher than the one it is receiving from the radio station. When a car passes by one of the MobilTrak sensors, the sensor picks up on the signal to determine what the driver is listening to on the radio
And US6813475B1 seems to be the patent behind the tech.
If they ever really could find that sort of signal in the noise of the real world, I've got to imagine that improved tech for in-car radios, not to mention people listening to their phones via Bluetooth and SiriusXM, has rendered it even more broken.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020720075012/http://www.mobilt...
Why would it do that? I thought car radios were merely receivers, not transmitters. This is insane...
Still, with good enough equipment it can be detected even from some distance.
> They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways.
Even some of traffic shaping signage are specifically designed to be that way.
More importantly, this is about a freedom of expression. If I want to yell about my fruit farm or hold a sign for your product; is that different? How does the freedom to express yourself contend with some idea of limiting "commercial advertisement"?
If you are annoyed by a passive banner on the side of a road, then I wonder if you must be annoyed by someone saying Hi passing by. Noisy shit, eh?
So if I browse a website and get distracted by all the ads, it is my own fault? This is victim blaming, as well as a dishonest take on the matter. There's not one banner on the road. Its distraction upon distraction upon distraction. Its like with smartphones. The problem isn't that someone quickly glances on their smartphone once. It is continuous distraction, on the wrong moment.
> If you are annoyed by a passive banner on the side of a road, then I wonder if you must be annoyed by someone saying Hi passing by. Noisy shit, eh?
This has a social function, its a two way benefit. Advertising isn't. Its a one-way communication. You can't talk back. Also, I already explained we can filter sound completely.
At a certain point, yes - if the ad doesn’t take a major portion of your screen and is non-interactive. You are not a victim - there are reasonable boundaries of being “annoyed”.
> This has a social function, its a two way benefit. Advertising isn't. Its a one-way communication.
Not really. You could’ve easily claimed “I don’t GAF who you are and don’t say Hi to me”. The one-sidedness is an arbitrary constraint you’ve put to try to reject this scenario - it should have no bearing on the annoyingness of the sound waves.
That's a too liberal definition. Consider our boundaries getting broken. I am not talking about one ad banner on the a website. I am talking about skyscrapers, pop-ups (actually banned by default on modern browsers), multiple flashy GIFs as banner (like in the 90s), sounds in ads (working on a tab you're not even on!). These are all examples of annoying ads. I'd care less for an ad which is obvious like how Google text Ads used to be on Google Search.
> You could’ve easily claimed “I don’t GAF who you are and don’t say Hi to me”.
Yeah, its funny how in USA its normal that if I go in a grocery store, people ask 'how are you' but they don't care about the answer, they're obliged to say it. I'm glad we don't have that nonsense dishonesty here in my country.
'Hi', however, is fairly neutral, in this example is person to person (instead of tech to person), and means no harm. Its a greeting, supposedly to start contact, or to initialize a business transaction (such as payment). Its as honest and functional as it gets!
Wow, in most cases this just isn't true. Granted some employees are ordered to use it as a greeting, but most people who ask genuinely care, and there is no social expectation to ask. Perhaps the culture in the USA is just a bit more personable than you have a theory of mind for? If you really don’t believe me, try answering the question in the negative, theres a reason why its like a joke that you have to respond positively. You’ll instantly be asked whats bothering you, and most people won’t let go easily. They genuinely want to try to cheer you up if you aren’t doing well and if they think they can reasonably help you, generally will.
The issue was about the real world anyway; in the case of a website, you were the one who request the website be displayed on your computer (that's what the browser does).
In the real world, however, ads are simple banners like the Google text Ads.
> I'm glad we don't have that nonsense dishonesty here in my country.
It's not dishonest even if your interpretation were true, because both parties know it's just another form of greeting.
That wasn't the point, although you are tacitly advancing the idea that annoying signage is acceptable whenever you think it's fine AND what you "watch" is voluntary. You're halfway there. There's not much to be gained from logically stepping you through it.
> Also, you can express yourself elsewhere instead of on the road.
Given the kind of answers you are providing, I don't think you've thought any of these things through. GL with whatever.
-- Adaptation from a Banksy essay in defense of remixing ("vandalising") public advertisements.
Fundamentally, all these ads share the quality of showing people content they didn't ask for to lure consumers into spending money they otherwise wouldn't have. Why the wouldn't I block them everywhere? It's disgusting.
I know many people like to argue that they're a "necessary evil" to pay for content, but I have little patience for this argument because it assumes that vendors are entitled to the success of their flawed business models, and people should give up freedoms to support the industry.
My consciousness is not for sale, sorry.
https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/banksy-accused-of-plagiarism-...
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girifriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers" and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
- Banksy
wow, it is like they know me!
but anyway, I'm all for blocking ads when you go out, and hopefully once they can do that the technology can be extended to allow blocking of people who are not sexy enough, because imagine what I could do with the power of invisibility!
A. Expect the ads will manipulate spending habits to bring in more than $1,000 of profits per adult on average (with the actual spending needed to reach that profit being far in excess of $1,000, considering profit is only a fraction of revenue).
B. Don't expect the ads to manipulate spending habits, but are stuck in game theory hell where companies waste a vaste amount of resources (10x the budget of NASA) merely to maintain the status quo, because any company that doesn't will fall behind its rivals.
C. Some mixture of A and B.
The cost to the public is mental intrusion (if mental intrusion didn't work, companies wouldn't buy ads), financial (in case A), and also the bad habits that advertising companies and the companies that deliver them push on us so that we can consume more (sedentary culture of watching TV to consume more ads, mindless browsing to consume more ads, encouraging political fights with family to increase engagement and consume more ads).
It's hard to not come to the conclusion that advertising is a huge blight on modern society, and exactly the kind of thing collective action by a society should be fighting against.
I think I remember reading that the naming rights for Citibike were sold for like 40 million dollars. Seems like an incredible bargain for literally thousands of mobile ads all over the city.
I vehemently dislike ads but I thought that should be mentioned.
I think you are taking this in a wrong direction. The real-world analogy of what you say would be “look at all that food a person is getting for free, all they need to do is to watch ads for 1hr; watch the level of entitlement of people who watch those ads in sunglasses!”
Regarding theft: I don’t agree with the use of words like theft or piracy. Nobody loses an article and nobody is held at gunpoint to give one up. If you want, call it freeloading or schwarzfahren (literally black riding, ie riding without a ticket).
Examples I've encountered:
* In a mall touchscreen navigation kiosk, an ad is shown when you first wake up the device by touching it.
* At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow.
* On Starbucks screen menus, the whole menu is periodically replaced with a video ad, forcing you to wait until its end to finish making your choice.
> You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen.
In the biggest international airport in my country, there are now periodical Covid-19 "info spots" interrupting the display of timetables, check-in desk and gate information screens.
If it ever becomes ubiquitous, something's going to have to be done about it. I'd never convict anyone of destroying one of those ad screens.
And they've only added (most of) these recently. What they've done for me is is increased the time it takes to check out by at least a third. They're paying for the ads with lengthened lines, which is a little shocking when talking about the automated option, because customers choose the automated option to save time.
It might be a bad expectation for us to have. McDonalds might find it more profitable to start ripping out seats (especially with covid), and adding more automated checkout stations. Have us spend 5-10 minutes ordering. Offer discounts if we spend 10 additional minutes ordering and watching ads. Enter us into a sweepstakes while we order that pays every half-hour in free food.
You could cram a lot of 2-sided touchscreen stations in the footprint of a McDonalds; people standing everywhere like a pachinko parlor, or a storefront full of video poker machines.
Both of them have numerous problems, and it's more time-efficient to order Uber Eats. But that has massive added fees.
I considered signing up to be an Uber Eats driver and filtering for anyone within 1 meter of me so I could pick up my own orders and save time(Uber's app is better), but there's not enough precision to do that.
So I ditched McDonald's and mostly drink Soylent nowadays.
The fact that people have so much difficulty on identifying blocking ads that are actually in real life (like changing the shafts configuration of a market) is pretty good evidence that they aren't as much annoying.
They don't have screens on the seats (too expensive), just a printed advert. But they do play audio adverts on the PA system a couple of times per flight, typically for things you can buy on board.
Sounds like just one more reason in a long long long list of reasons not to go to McDonalds
Of course, people typically "age out", but economics of that $.99 menu put together with their powerful marketing means constant flow of new patrons.
McDonald's hamburgers and fries are way less greasy than most fast food joints, and the kiosk allows easily reducing the quantity of sauce in the burgers and salt in the fries. As such, it can be relatively healthy from a macronutrients perspective, while satisfying fast food cravings.
The vegetable salads are very fresh and pretty good, which can accommodate people on strict diets.
The kiosks also free workers to clean up tables more frequently and assist customers in various ways.
Of course this can vary from location to location, especially as so many McDonald's are franchised. But the actual experience at my local spots is enjoyable nowadays.
Yeah lately this is really bad. Are you sure you don't want to order another side? And then you have to scroll to the "nope" button which is obviously off-screen. Am I sure I don't want to give 50 cents to the Ronald McDonald stuff? Piss off. I don't trust them to keep most of it themselves for 'overhead'.
> In the biggest international airport in my country, there are now periodical Covid-19 "info spots" interrupting the display of timetables, check-in desk and gate information screens.
Yeah this is really annoying in shops here too. Every minute or so they remind people to use the sanitiser or wear the mask. Yet some of the staff don't even do this. It just serves no purpose, other than virtue signalling. It becomes background noise. If someone doesn't know they have to wear the mask by now they have been living in a cave or something.
I either ignore them and walk around them, or loudly tell them to fuck off. If only the police would act on this as vehemently as on anything even remotely related to opposition politics...
Companies often place adverts illegallly [0] by recruiting precarious workers who are going to face the police, not them. They'll even go as far as to cover a cycling area with a slippery material for their ads [1], or to cover historical monuments in spite of architectural regulations [2]. A multinational like Amazon will even steal a wall reserved for artists and pay goons to intimidate the population [3] in order to promote its shitty services.
Also, i don't know about the current situation in regards to this, but more than a decade ago there was a "scandal" in which public French companies wanted to setup spy cameras in advertisement panels so they could target ads and study reactions. The tiny pinkertons following you around is, unfortunately and scaringly real: https://antipub.org/ecrans-de-pub-espions-du-metro-les-assoc...
Last time i was in a big city i had the occasion to see an advertisement panel graphed with a huge red "Adblock". It was heartwarming, and reminded me that pretty much every where local people organize to sabotage advertisement panels and companies, and you should do the same in your neighborhood! I'm personally lucky enough that there's no advertisement where i live, and i think nobody from the neighborhood would let such a trend emerge.
[0] https://lareleveetlapeste.fr/affichage-sauvage-quand-les-mul...
[1] https://www.bfmtv.com/societe/paris-burberry-recouvre-une-pi...
[2] https://www.latribunedelart.com/le-patrimoine-parisien-denat...
[3] https://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1600089407-paris-amazon-em...
As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?
Btw.: a nice info-display emits over its life around 2t of CO2 PER YEAR! Most of it in waste..
How about some landscaping and art instead?
Fair, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. But I would argue that “less monotonous or plain” is not that different from “more beautiful”. I doubt you want random variety. People want variety that is interesting and nice-looking.
> One note though: ads pay for themselves, will it work with landscaping?
I’m willing to enough taxes such that we can make the places where live nice. I think most people would agree. And we mostly already do this.
Parks, tree-lined streets, modest landscaping and art, all of these things make life better and more enjoyable. They also help people feel contentment, reduce anxiety, etc.
It may be economically beneficial as well, as people may be healthier and more productive by living in a city with these types of spaces. I remember seeing some research that supports this idea. One example was patients at hospitals having better outcomes when the hospital environment was more made pleasant and beautiful (I believe it was from a Kurzgesagt video on beauty).
If your neighborhood needs ads to have variance, it says something really sad about it. You don't need gray concrete everywhere in order to build dwellings. Some cities like Cuba overflow with city gardens to feed the locals.
> As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?
Murals are not a problem: they're part of the environment, not something designed to stand out of the street (literally). As for flashing or strong lights, they are indeed a problem in my view.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
What about using a gas pump?
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/ozu1up/havin...
Seems that the trend is going in this direction.
I don't know if the "trend is going in this direction", because I would never go to that gas station again after seeing that once. I'm sure most other people would too.
If I run around you all day shouting expletives at you, you might consider that there's nothing that I do that fundamentally gets in your way for as long as I keep a certain distance. But it will be annoying, exhausting and likely detrimental to your mental health in the long term.
There's nothing inherently offensive about advertisement, IMO. Display the products you can sell me and their prices in your storefront window. Publish informational ads in categorized directories. Advertisement insofar that it lets consumers stay aware of the available alternatives for the products they need and use is a good thing, but when advertisers are no longer content with my demand for consumption and feel like they should create that demand through manipulation, they've outstayed their welcome.
But that's different. Ads in real life are passive. They are part of the environment like the color of the house. They don't actively interact with you specifically.
>Advertisement insofar that it lets consumers stay aware of the available alternatives for the products they need and use is a good thing
And the vast majority of people will never ever check that to find relevant things to them.
So let's say that the "color of my house" is obscene and disturbing imagery designed specifically to elicit an emotional response in viewers for the sake of making them feel bad. Point still stands; you don't have to actively get in someone's way to be a nuisance that's detrimental to the quality of life and leaves people worse off than without it.
It's also worth mentioning that advertisement overwhelmingly refers to its targets in second person exactly to create the subtle illusion of addressing you specifically. To some small degree our brains probably don't recognize the difference.
> And the vast majority of people will never ever check that to find relevant things to them.
If I'm not actively looking for things that will improve my life, perhaps I am already content with my situation, and the things in question actually aren't that relevant to me.
More common than you might expect, other people here have brought up checkout processes, etc... Beyond what they have said, I want to suggest though that some of the spacing and positioning and navigation around cities/roads is limited by needing room for advertising. There's a limit to how much information you can put along the side of a road in a city, and more of that space could be devoted to more obvious navigation signs at more regular intervals if advertising wasn't taking up some of that space.
Maybe this is a stretch, but I wonder how much less stressful it would be if the biggest visual indicator on a bus stop was the actual bus stop number and not the full-page ad. In my mind, that is kind of delaying information until after you've passed through this space where you can only see the ad.
> it would be infuriating if you had to view an ad before being able to use the subway ticketing system. You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen.
Another example that springs to mind, I ride publicly funded transportation. The trains have displays inside of the train that indicate what the next stop will be. Those get interrupted by ads, if you glance up and want to see how close you are to your stop, you will likely need to sit through an ad before that information will pop up on the screen again. And that's not even in a private establishment, this is ads showing up in public space that isn't owned by any company. It's not even a 1st Amendment thing, they don't have any right to that space, we just decided to sell advertising space to those companies.
Forcing people to view ads before they enter a subway or check out at a store is definitely something companies are starting to pay attention to and would be willing to try. A few physical stores have even started to roll out non-transparent glass in frozen sections that have ads overtop, so you can't walk through the isle and look to see what the store has, you have to open each section and manually check, and the glass screens just show you ads instead.
> You don’t have pinkertons following you to learn your habits and show you “relevant” ads.
This is also kind of a fun rabbit hole to jump down, there is a surprising amount of real-world data that gets processed for advertising; stores have experimented with tracking customers as they go through isles using facial recognition and/or tracking signals emitted from devices. Most loyalty cards feed purchases into a database so you can be tracked.
And companies have been for a while now experimenting with and kind of openly talking about doing eye tracking in billboard ads in cities. To the best of my knowledge this has not actually been rolled out anywhere, but it keeps on coming up in research papers/patents/etc... and I think it's likely it will become common practice at some point.
There's a connective tissue between digital advertising in physical spaces and digital spaces, and once you start to pick apart the links, it's hard to stop seeing them. A lot of digital tracking is augmented by physical tracking, and a nontrivial amount of digital tracking/profiles gets used in situations with real-world consequences.
Some of the systems I talk about above like in-store ads are really only waiting for ways to be personalized per-customer before they can linked back into the tracking systems, and for stuff like dynamic displays, ads pre-purchase, etc... there's potential there to personalize them, which I think companies are likely to start taking advantage of.
----
> But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well.
All that being said, I do think you're completely right, and I do think this is the slightly stronger argument: excessive advertising is just plain unhealthy period.
I get into the tracking/disruption aspects of things because people respond to those aspects, but there...
For as long as there's no good pushback/regulation, there'll always be someone willing to pay to insert ads somewhere and someone willing to accept their money, because there's almost no immediate downside and the amount of money offered keeps going up until you fold. It happens continually, everywhere, that more and more ads, and more and more intrusive ones, keep appearing, and defending the status quo won't help us.
They don't prevent going about the day, they make going about your day more difficult.
IMHO I would argue that 0 advertising is a healthy amount.
Even in cities, they're visual pollution.
I understand the eyesore, but I draw the line before telling someone he can't have a sign on his property.
They are not entitled to our attention. Advertising should be illegal no matter what. Disruptiveness just makes this unacceptable practice even worse.
Businesses aren't entitled to attention. They aren't entitled to being known. They aren't entitled to success. They aren't even entitled to existence. I simply don't understand how some business's concerns can possibly override everything else. Are we supposed to live in some cyberpunk hell with noise as far as the eye can see just so a bunch of corporations can make themselves known? If resisting this makes me extreme, then so be it.
Also, I don't have to solve anything. Society decides the rules and it's the businesses who have to figure out how to adapt to them. It's literally their problem. The fact it's gonna make life harder for them is irrelevant. The fact advertising makes them money changes nothing about the inherent unfairness of it.
If you think there's more to it, you're welcome to elaborate. Saying "but how would society function" or "it's complex, you can't just ban ads" doesn't elevate discussion either. Of course it will function and of course we can do it, all we have to do is decide. There are places that actually have done just that and as far as I know they're doing just fine.
This is the biggest example, it's even been posted here on HN which is how I found out about it:
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
Businesses survived just fine before they started spamming people with their noise, they will keep on surviving once the noise gets banned. Since I've started researching this I've found there are so many cities in my country that have prohibited stuff like pamphlets, loudspeakers, signs and billboards. I have absolutely no doubt it led to immediate quality of life improvements. People here have suggested that I start getting involved in my city's government in order to try to improve the situation in my town as well, and I agree with them. I will give it my best shot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_(miniseries)
They do, in a suffuse, incremental but no less inexorable manner, in fact make "that place", "out there" -- meaning the city in which I live -- all the more uninviting and inhospitable.
Like I don't even own the backs of my own eyeballs.
Advertisement company vans are a prime example. There are rolling advertisement posters in most bus stop shelters. These drivers will park up on the footpath blocking pedestrians and those using the bus to update the advertisements, often in the mornings during rush hour. They will park on the cycle lanes and force cyclists out into fast moving and unaccommodating aggressive traffic.
The same goes for delivery drivers. Legally they are permitted on double yellow ‘no parking’ lines on the street but the perception is no not hinder car traffic so they park up on the footpath instead.
During the pandemic there was a lot of temporary work on cycling infrastructure, mostly lazy efforts such as painted cycle lanes and plastic bollards. These drivers simply drive over the bollards or if wide enough down the protected lane. If you challenge them they are verbally abusive.
The attitude of all persons in a mechanically propelled vehicle is that this is not their fault. They are just doing their job. Their companies trot out the tired line that they take safety seriously bla bla bla…
So in regards physical advertisement is public space, for me this is a symptom of a wider problem of perceptions of ownership of our cities public space. We forget that cities are for people. We let cars dominate the majority of the available space. We let oversized vehicles make deliveries in medieval city streets. We use cars for short inappropriately short journeys such as for bringing our kids to school, often because it’s too dangerous to let them walk or cycle because there are too many cars.
We need to start treating our cities like parks with a focus people and figure out ways to remove ICE powered vehicles and limit the space all vehicles occupy.
In my city it's especially bad. Cars on the road, cars on the road side, cars on sidewalks, cars on pedestrian crossings, cars chasing you while crossing the road on the designated crossing. And as you say, if you object they become abusive. It's a large Eastern European city that is living the American dream of going everywhere in a car.
I've been working on a policy paper idea for my home country - Slovenia. Complete ban of all outdoor advertising except shopfronts and limit those.
Now, since you can't just ban it outright, there's still need for advertising, a different solution should be offered:
Every community needs to have a public billboard, setup and maintained by the local government, one per 500 residents, where 25% of the area is auctioned to commercial ads, 25% is awarded with a lottery system (to prevent money dominating too much), 25% for cultural events and 25% for nonprofits and charity. The advertising space should be place in a crowded area (like a square). It needs some extra rules for high density area, so that space can be grouped, but not too much.
All other outdoor advertising is banned. Since a lot of companies would be effectively banned by this move, some sort of (small) compensation should be paid to them and time given, so they can pivot. Costs of removing the advertising should be subsidized for the same reason. Any advertising facades or roofs (i.e. different colored tiles used to make the roof) can stay, but the ad has to be removed when the roof/facade is replaced. Money coming in from the ad actions should more than cover this expense.
Possibly add an exception to "shopping center", where such advertising is permitted, but with strict rules to what such a center is (i.e. has no residents).
I know most Americans will balk at such "government overreach" but I think it could pass here if someone actually put some effort in.
This is the obvious spin, that anyone trying to undermine such ideas would do. So I just checked the yearly (pre-pandemic) financial report for our bus service - the buses are COVERED in adverts. From what I can tell, those ads bring in less than 2% of all income.
The ads on bus stop were given in exchange for running the bike rental service, but that service isn't free to use, so the income can't be that great.
(2) Ignoring ads I have a feeling that "I can just ignore it" is the critical fallacy that will undermine ideas such as mine.
To know just how much they are affecting you, you have to go to a place with no ads.
Honestly, if you're using ad blocking on your computer - turn it off completely. The difference in physical ads is not as big (since action blocking popups are not a thing), but even discounting those, just the saturation of "things going on" is tiring. Ignoring things is an active action that requires energy and focus... why you are giving that away freely to someone trying to manipulate you ... I do not understand.
The fact that you use "waiting to click a skip button" as a comparison shows how normalized ads have become. The alternative to "fewer ads" isn't "ads being forced down your throat" but "no ads, at all".
To know just how much they are affecting you, you have to go to a place with no ads.
Honestly the only ads I ever see in real life are bus and bus stop ads. Maybe it's terrible where you live, but here, I can barely remember the last one I saw. If anything I wish the local government would have more ads. They have a bunch of activities on sometimes that I don't hear about or forget because their advertising is so poor.
Because advertising is a form of speech, and society has decided that speech is important?
You can not scream about it in the middle of the night, since doing so bothers your neighbors.
Letting anyone and everyone do what ever they want would lead to anarchy. So no society, USA included, does this.
But some actors in societies have convinced the western population, especially Americans, into the fantasy of "freedom without limitation", which, just so happens to only apply to the rich and powerful, while everyone else has to contend with limitations on their freedoms.
Once in a while, I enable adblock detector, and do not allow usrers with adblocks use the service. I wish everyone was doing that.
When you see someone willing to give you a car (or anything else), but they want money in exchange (i.e. sell it to you), you understand, that it is wrong to take the car without giving them money (i.e. stealing).
But when you see someone willing to give you an article, a poem, a song, a funny video, but they want you to watch the ad in exchange, lots of people think it is fine to break their conditions.
It is extremely easy to detect ad blockers on the web. I wish website creators stopped tolerating ad blockers. People would finally learn to watch ads, or pay for stuff, and the creators would be able to create much better content.
I don't read news near enough to make a single subscription worthwhile, and even if I did I would read multiple sources meaning I'd need multiple subscriptions - that's completely unsustainable.
If I visit a website about cars, one could put up car ads because it’s obviously in my interests at this point.
I don’t visit websites that require me to block my adblocker for the simple reason that it means they have no other monetizable content apart from me, and as I didn’t even get to their magnet content yet I have no idea how the website feels, which makes me not so open to sharing my data fingerprint.
There are no good and bad ads. The creators of ad blockers decide, what the ad is. The code of an ad blocker literally contains a code like: if(website is Photopea.com) find a specific element and delete it.
If an ad blocker tells you, that they are not blocking "good ads", they are usually blackmailing ad companies to pay them, so that they do not block their ads. The money, which could go to content creators, are going to ad block creators.
Never used photopea, hope it works out for you, but I wish website creators stopped thinking that invasion of my privacy is a currency
It doesn't work very well, unfortunately. Those willing to pay usually are the most interesting part of the audience for ad providers, so it's difficult to compensate that loss by a reasonably priced 'ad-free' option. You probably would be surprised if you knew how much your attention may cost. Targeted ads created a market where everyone pays proportionally to their spendings. I'm not saying it's a good situation, but it looks like that's a local optimum rather hard to leave.
What bothers me is that huge companies are more resilient to tracking and ads restrictions, so that fight may further speed up centralisation of the internet. I would personally prefer the chaotic old-school world wide web with ugly flashing banners instead.
I make around $.01 (one USD cent) for an hour of using Photopea with ads. If someone was willing to pay me two cents for an hour of using Photopea (with no ads), I would gladly accept it.
You aren't just charging your users "ad views". You are also facilitating 3rd parties tracking their online behaviour, and they certainly aren't agreeing to those terms when they first land on your site.
These networks are able to identify me by a cookie (and other techniques), so they can compile my activity on YOUR site into a log of my activities across multiple sites which they "provide their ads" on. They can absolutely identify you as an individual - google, facebook, etc, are ones that people have INTENTIONALLY given their names too, and many of these other networks sell/lease the data to others to allow them to provide their own identity link.
Furthermore, these 3rd party "scripts" have access to the entire page content too. They can read my email address should I register. They can even capture my password if they were so configured (or were in themselves hacked to do so).
Bear in mind i did NOT consent to any of this when I landed on your site, and even when i specifically removed "consent" via the form on your landing page, i was STILL being tracked by ALL those I mention above.
THIS is why people have blockers, etc. I dont mind if you have an image with a link to some advertisers product/service/whatever. What I care about it that my every action on your site is providing additional data for these companies to mine and build a secret profile of my browsing habits.
EDIT: I browsed without an ad blocker to compile this behaviour. I feel dirty.
The privacy policy which is quite hidden on the website (https://www.photopea.com/privacy.html) says nothing about that. All it says is the following:
> We use third party tracking tools to improve the performance and features of the Service (e.g. Google Analytics). Such tools are created and managed by parties outside our control. As such, we are not responsible for what information is actually captured by such third parties or how such third parties use and protect that information.
This won't fly under GDPR, just saying. Not only you are responsible for third party behavior, but you didn't even mention all tracking scripts that are directly used (I see Facebook Pixel Code right in the source code for photopea.com). You are in Czech Republic, right? I think it is in European Union.
I’d just like to add that a decent chunk of the traffic to this site is from people typing “free photo editor” or things along those lines.
The creator of this site is specifically targeting people who want a free photo editor… And then complaining about people wanting to use it for free.
UK cookie law is pretty strict, and also pretty clear to read - https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/guidance-...
The issue is nobody bothers to follow it, and enforcement isn't likely enough, or crippling enough, to drive compliance.
The only thing a website can know, is, that "someone with a screen resolution of 1920x1080 pixels visited www.Photopea.com at 18:37". It can be useful to know the number of visitors, or the usual screen resolutions.
Which one of those do you need to know usual screen resolutions of users? Or maybe there are some other reasons those all get contacted?
(You also missed some "minor" details like IP addresses and fingerprinting profiles overall, and I'm honestly not sure if you are as ignorant as you act or just pretend to do so, and which one would be more offensive)
Like really, if you open a website for the first time in your life, what kind of secret information could it know about you?
That on its own should give you pause. But that data is then used by companies like Facebook or Google to allow the highest bidder to alter that users behaviour - by getting them to believe some propaganda, to vote for a political party, or to spend money on something they don’t need.
That’s the business model. That is how you make money on your site.
There are other ways of making money – I’m sure that had ad revenue not been available you would have found a different way.
Someone selling goods has to abide by some laws - typically, lies/false advertising is prohibited, they might have to provide a warranty, and most contracts can be cancelled within 14 days by returning the goods. This means that the car's specifications will be made available to me, the terms of the deal throughly detailed in a legal document I'd have to sign, and I might get to test drive the car before committing.
Ads in contrast don't have any of this. In your example of articles/poems/songs/funny videos, I don't get to check out the content beforehand, I have no recourse if it turns out to be defective/fraudulent/etc (such as clickbait, or a video with 2 mins actual content and 8 mins filler to get to the 10 min threshold for a second ad) after I "pay" by viewing the ad (and parting with my personal data) and I don't have any recourse either if the advertised product turns out to be a scam or malware.
What you are saying is, basically, if someone is selling bread for $100, and they dont let you taste in advance, you are allowed to steal that bread, because $100 is not a right price for the bread.
> steal
Theft implies that you are deprived of the item once it's stolen - this is not the case here, and the costs should be taken into account either way. You're comparing fractions of a cent from an ad view with $100. I'd feel much better about stealing the former than the latter even in case of actual, physical theft.
> they dont let you taste in advance
It doesn't have an impact on the "theft" scenario, but in case of a paid product I would still expect a refund if the bread is defective (moldy or fake) or was mis-sold with false advertising.
Yeah, exactly. If I write a book, and one person buys it, and a billion people copy it from that person (and I sell just one copy in total), there is nothing wrong, because I still have my book.
I am glad that most of people dont think this way, because we would not have any books in our world.
Piracy has been around for decades, may be making a resurgence thanks to the balkanization of media streaming services and yet we still have movies, music & TV.
If it sounds dystopian, well.. once we're used to it, having to experience the ugliness of an unfiltered world would surely seem more dystopian. Right?
"Advertising is a huge business predicated entirely on manipulating people to make purchases they otherwise wouldn't, surgically exploiting weaknesses in our psyche."
I wish it was banned outright.
(For anyone thinking once a month doesn't sound too bad: Sports Illustrated has so many pages it stacks up to almost a centimeter thick)
So, you think “Show HN” is unethical, too? If so, how are people with a new product going to find customers? Word of mouth? How do they find their first customer?
I suspect your opinion on advertising is strong, but not that strong.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.france24.com/en/20141124-fr...
https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/hrscurrent/vol10_ch0436-0474/...
I invite any CEO to personally walk around my city with a banner of their choosing. Being allowed to spend millions of dollars to make kids addicted to smoking and drinking isn't free speech, it's legalized crime.
https://www.france24.com/en/20141124-french-city-grenoble-ba...
At the time it was passed, any existing billboards were granted an exemption, and can be leased to show arbitrary ads. There has been a trend to replace those billboards with digital versions. Austin passed a law to prevent such conversions, but it has been challenged up to the Supreme Court, as the advertising companies which own all those "analog" billboards claim their first amendment rights have been violated.
https://www.kut.org/austin/2021-11-09/austins-billboards-sup...
The 5-4 podcast about the SCOTUS covers these (and other) pro-corporation decisions. https://www.fivefourpod.com Basically the ELI5 treatment for those of us completely ignorant of the law. Highest recommendation.
Perhaps if we did that for, say, 80 years, then after the last advertiser has dropped dead of advanced age, we could cautiously re-enable the legality of purely informational, manipulation-free adverts.
What fraction of your lifespan spent behind bars do you care to wager that you can wiggle and sleaze around the rules? Especially ones that are applied by judges with common sense, rather than algorithms?
Without advertising new companies can't develop new services because only the existing ones will have customers.
In both of the above cases you as the consumer have to actively seek them out. But I'd be OK with public services being 'advertised' on TV, billboards etc as there would be no profit motive.
I do wear these brands, but try to subdue any labeling. i.e. black sharpie on the nike logo.
How about a picture of Scrooge saying “bah humbug”?
I am thinking at a partial solution(emphasize on partial), offer the users a non-tracking account(Free) , you still give them targeted ads but using a non tracking method like a survey at account creation, options for the user to tell you that he does not like this type of ad, options for the user to tell you what kind of ads he wants to see (like I could accept non-animated ads, software related, local business related, technology related, and article related ads). But all of this would be impossible if most of the tracking is for anti-fraud , then you would need some DRMed browsers to confirm you probably are a human.
I go out of my way to be offline when I am out of the house and now the city council has shoved these screens right in my face. No escape.