But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well.
-- 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like just one more reason in a long long long list of reasons not to go to McDonalds
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.
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...
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.
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.
They don't prevent going about the day, they make going about your day more difficult.
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.
IMHO I would argue that 0 advertising is a healthy amount.
They are not entitled to our attention. Advertising should be illegal no matter what. Disruptiveness just makes this unacceptable practice even worse.
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...
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.
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..
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.
How about some landscaping and art instead?
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.
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's a downside there which is that they suggest there's a way to do pervasive advertising everywhere that would be fine if only they were more private or had skip buttons, and I honestly don't think that's true.
I dislike abusive ads a lot, but I also dislike ads, in general. I think it's unhealthy for us to have this much mental energy devoted to basically fielding corporate propaganda all the time, I think this affects our ability to devote energy to responding to things like political propaganda or researching news articles and validating facts we see online, or being charitable to other disruptions or focusing in on the world around us.
That could be a much, much longer conversation, but I think you're completely correct to kind of step back and say, "does it really matter if the physical space is completely analogous to the online space?" There are negative outcomes related to having so much of urban space devoted to trying to trick people into buying things. And I do think there are healthier ways to do that advertising, and I do think some advertising is worse than other advertising, and there is definitely a spectrum and a continuum here in how I respond to ads, but I also just think that excessive advertising is unhealthy regardless of the form it takes and I worry that when I talk about eye-tracking and loyalty cards that I might distract people from the more primitive and basic argument of "it's heckin ugly to have giant ads blocking your view of the actual products in a store, and it's heckin ugly to have a bunch of billboards for Pepsi in the middle of a public park."
I vehemently dislike ads but I thought that should be mentioned.
Shoot the actual problem (i.e. the dark patterns and malicious compliance of the concerned websites), not the messenger.
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.
It didn't bring any benefits and has wasted excessive amounts of my time.
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.
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).
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.
- adverts seeks to hijack your attention away from whatever you were doing, which is a mental burden resulting diminished performance (in the case of a work environment), is downright dangerous in the case of traffic environments and lessens the enjoyment in the case of leisure activities.
- there is little to no ethical restriction on content; the advert that gets displayed is likely not that of the best product: it is the one whose owner paid the most money, and the ad that gets the most traction is the one that tells the best story, so perfused with lies by omission and other forms of deceit that we don't even notice any more.
- the ubiquity of ads causes an perpetual escalation of the struggle for attention, to the extent that we might credibly expect to get ads implanted in our brains eventually if we don't say enough is enough.
The solution seems simple enough to me: we need to establish a code of conduct for advertisers which at the core means that they may no longer shove ads down our throats at every junction; instead adverts should be freely displayed in separate spaces (like a dedicated page on each website) where people voluntarily could look for products and services that they need (or just to browse), much like the ad pages in newspapers of days now long gone by.
All we need is a mechanism that promotes this behavior, and sanctions breaches.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.france24.com/en/20141124-fr...
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.
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.
Why should I be subjected to this private noise while taking public transportation? Some city needs to stand up and fix this. Allow me to get where I am going in peace.
I think it's hard when our public transportation is chronically underfunded. Politicians and voters see corporate (advertising) funding as less onerous that citizen (taxes) funding.
That is lower than I thought it would be, and lower than one would expect given the space TfL dedicate to advertising in their budget report.
I would pay 3% more on travel tickets to not have any advertising.
https://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2020-21.pdf (this is pre-Covid.)
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.
– Banksy"The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here – it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous marks the difference - the only difference in their eyes - between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal."
The books have a raw and anarchistic edge that is not present in the TV series.
Funnily enough, you can say the same thing about Bansky's art:
> An artist who defaced several works of famed graffiti artist Banksy has been charged with the crime of vandalism -- which is pretty incredible since Banksy's collection is itself an act of vandalism
https://www.tmz.com/2014/04/02/banksy-david-william-noll-ric...
What a hypocrite:
> The E.U. Rules Against Banksy in His Trademark Fight With a Greeting Card Company, Citing His Own Statement That ‘Copyright Is For Losers’
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/banksy-trademark-full-colo...
Your second example is valid. But your first example is a complete strawman. Bansky didn't sue, the property owner did, because they liked Banksy's thing and didn't like what the vandal did.
I'm a fan, but there's still a point to be made here. Banksy works on public sites do function in part as ads.
In the second case I find greeting cars as objectionable as street billboards.
Some people find unapproved grafitti objectionable. How do you feel about that?
If not, why/how are those sins relevant?
But that is far away from "can't". Hardly anyone is going to stop you from drawing a moustache on a poster or from stickering a snarky remark over an ad or from spray painting your opinion about some advertised product on said ad.
That's what Banksy does and says "yes" to.
> No, that would be vandalism.
So what? That's just a word.
> As much as I hate ads, THEY have re-arranged the world by paying for it in a free market, and we must respect that.
LOL, but why "must we"? You have no reasoning, no justification.
But whether we should change that law is probably an off-topic here. All I am saying is that we must respect the law. If we don't agree with the law, we must try to change it, and not just go about destroying each other's property.
It's a pretty strong philosophical argument in that direction, in my opinion.
If you're disagreeing with that point, you should be explicit. You're arguing that these companies are paying for the advertising, but they aren't paying you to throw the rocks at your head, they're paying the building from which they obtain their vantage point. I don't think that actually qualifies as "paying for it", morally.
This is garbage libertarian ideology, and it can and should be questioned and opposed at every opportunity.
I’d love for there to be DAOs to combat those scooter companies, say for example by blocking the executives’ front doors, cars, garages, offices with giant billboards or vending machines.
https://1www.eltis.org/in-brief/news/e-scooters-allowed-back...
This is about balancing normal scooter uses advertising
The only reason you're commenting here about how much you hate scooters and not how much you hate cars is that cars were here when you were born, so they look to you like a natural feature of the universe, while scooters are new, so there's a lively debate about them. But there's really no comparison. Cars are the much bigger problem.
Interesting. I don't think one can legitimise just about anything with DAOs. But DAOs do represent a form of group think, an in-group, a collective, so that's there too.
I wonder if GreenPeace / Amnesty / XR / Anti-FA et al have experimented with DAOs.
Still I’m not opposed to it being a traditional non-profit, it might be possible to obtain 501(c)(3) tax exemption as a charity under the purpose of “combating community deterioration.”
What is infinitely more invasive are ads that are on by default, that do not give you the choice of not seeing them in the first place. The audacity to push an idea on to you feels like a shovel across the face. If you are lucky you can opt-out (on the web usually with an ad blocker) and in the case of ads in public spaces you are just out of luck.
Tejaratchi originally wrote the essay "Death, Phones, Scissors", published his zine Crap Hound in 1999. Banksy adapted it.
Tejaratchi is OK with that, and yes, it is a great rant.
Welcome to public spaces?
Life involves maybe seeing things, idea, people you don’t like. That’s not inherently bad.
What is allowed and tolerated in that public space is skewed, an unfair. Certainly not balanced.
You are certainly allowed to. Pony up for the ad space if you want to promote the opposite, or advertise something else entirely.
I don’t think that had anything to do with what I said.
Although I’m curious What would a not “skewed” public space looks like, and how do you manage that?
A paleo fan will think the same about a vegan/carbs ad, and so would an anti-vaxxer about a conventional health poster.
Harmful ideas can, and will reach those who are susceptible to it. I think the right way to oppose harmful ideas, is by gaining the education that would allow you, and others in society to judge such ideas.
The alternative of forbidding ads in public, is essentially censorship and making society even weaker as one way or another, harmful ideas will reach each and every one of us, and when they do, the less susceptible we are, the better.
What if coca cola decided that they didn't like the color of your house, should they be allowed to change it because it can be seen from the public space?
I live in Israel where there are constant conflicts about what is OK to be shown in public, especially between the religious and non-religious. In Jerusalem for example, some ultra-orthodox often vandalize any kind of poster that shows a woman in it. They just tear-out/spray over the women on the poster. Some are ridiculous cases where they defaced a poster of an old woman who survived the holocaust: https://www.timesofisrael.com/female-holocaust-survivors-por...
Even other groups could be pissed by posters that include things about women's hygiene or show models in swimsuits. In their eyes these are things they make a lot of effort to block from the eyes of their families, and having it in public breaches the culture and education they try to maintain. This is by itself interesting as public adverts can penetrate the most strict censorship that religious groups and cults maintain.
Seculars on the other hand can also be pissed about anti-abortion adverts, religious propaganda, scientology, etc. and ask for them to be banned.
As someone who's trying to be a "free-thinker" and tries to promote it, I think there's no point in hiding in a bubble, blocking yourself from seeing other ideas, even if they're crappy advertisements. All of this as long as the adverts/ideas fit within the aesthetics of the city they're in.
The risk of doing so is essentially losing free-thinking and some sort of communication with isolated social groups.
Why do we live in a city again?
For a long time I've defended the concept (if not the implementation) of advertising on websites as a contract between someone getting something (the user's use of the site) and what they're paying for it (attention bandwidth), with the only caveat being that the current way we serve ads is horrible for both privacy and security. That latter point is how I have justified to myself running an ad blocker.
Often I've equated online advertisements to physical ones, and also noted that what we consider "ads" online is fairly narrow and in a way that helps us justify vilifying them. Advertising can be helpful, and not just in the "I didn't know about that product until I saw the ad" way, but in the way that every store name above or on the door is an advertisement, and in it's most minimal form, a purely useful informational one (the sign advertising restrooms is "advertising" that). There is, necessarily, a spectrum along which advertisements run, from informational or coercive and manipulative, but it is a spectrum, and it is important to note what it is we object to, because "advertisements" is a poor substitute for what that is and unless we identify it, we're doomed to inadequately deal with it.
The idea that very public advertisements in the real world is an interesting one, because we're often presented with them even when using only public resources. Going into a store and seeing advertisements is one thing, you chose to go there and they control that area, but to be confronted with something while on public thoroughfares is another thing entirely. In some respect I totally agree, why should they be allowed to push these images and sounds towards me?
On the other hand, this makes me think of Home Owners Associations and people trying to control their environment (if we assume this is something to be prevented, and not just something we can assume is public domain to remix and use at will if presented in that public manner). In any case, it's an interesting additional context to the idea of advertising in physical and digital ways and how they relate and I'll be thinking on it in the future, so I thank you for sharing it.
You'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.
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.
"Advertising is a huge business predicated entirely on manipulating people to make purchases they otherwise wouldn't, surgically exploiting weaknesses in our psyche."
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.
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?
I do wear these brands, but try to subdue any labeling. i.e. black sharpie on the nike logo.
Without advertising new companies can't develop new services because only the existing ones will have customers.
It honestly blows my mind how someone can look at it and think it's a good idea, instead of how absurd that someone is allowed to put up a giant seizure machine in one of a city's busiest streets.
I used to think that advertisement had gone too far when it was used to track people online, but a literal real life recreation of the iCarly episode where Spencer causes a traffic accident using a billboard caught me by surprise.
Flashing signs like that are still very rude, though.
I've basically stopped listening to terrestrial radio because it seems like the majority of it is ads.
A trend I've noticed over the last few years is that gas stations specifically. As gas stations have replaced older pumps with newer ones, the new ones feature LCD screens that, as soon as you are done selecting the myriad of options it now requires just to put fuel in a car, you are suddenly bombarded with videos and very loud advertisements.
I have been walking away and sitting in my car but, a few weeks ago I got yelled at by a pump attendant that I had to stay next to my fuel door while it was filling for "safety reasons." So now I have to stand there and be bombarded by this thing screaming at me about what is for sale while filling up and it is very, very annoying.
Another one is a restaurant here in town that has one of these new LED signs that is so bright at night that it actually hurts my eyes. It is so bright that you can't make out what is in the road beyond it. Multiple people have complained about it my city's subreddit and it has lead to at least one traffic accident that I know about. I even went to file a complaint with the city zoning board about that one but was told there was nothing they could do as there were no regulations regarding the brightness of signs. They suggested I complain to the owner.
And it's so manipulative. "Hey, you're not good enough because you're too fat, or your hair is thinning, and no one will ever love you." "Look at these starving abused puppies, just LOOK AT THEM and donate now."
In the ever increasing war for our attention, it really does feel like physical advertising is becoming louder, more aggressive, more insulting, and just so much more ubiquitous that it is almost impossible to get away from it. We have got to find a way to start to reign in some of the more annoying - and dangerous - advertising going on out there.
Ads become a problem as soon as they become interactive, illuminated, or moving images. Those remove my option to consume the ads at my own pace and choice. Instead, they become attention magnets primarily to be fought against.
Just as pop-in ads or flashing/screen-estate-hungry ads are bad on websites do large, bright digital advertisement screens make a horrible streetscape and in public transit video screens totally kill your ride. You can no longer walk or sit in your own thoughts as you're kept occupied to avoid looking at the flashing, moving footage.
Google search still mostly does ads right. Not only are they sometimes even relevant but firstly they don't stand out so badly that I'd refuse to take a glance at them.
(Not that I ever click on any of them because that would support the ad-business. If I see something interesting I open an incognito window and browse the corresponding company's site directly and look for the bargain/offer - they might still be able to track me, even if partially, but at least there's no direct link via the clicking the ad.)
Unfortunately, the ban was struck down by the court this year in August, so we're going back.
For what it's worth, the ban was called out as great by various citizen activist groups[0], even if the reason it happened was quite political.
A few links:
- https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-natio...
- https://www.myhoardings.com/blog/ban-on-bangalore-hoardings-...
[0]: https://bengaluru.citizenmatters.in/bbmp-bangalore-illegal-h...
- each player's jersey
- arena walls
- courtside walls
- projected onto the court floor (updated each minute)
- on the side and top of the backboard
- most TV graphics ("Taco Bell play of the day")
- split-screen ads during free-throws
- traditional commercials during time-outs
That's a big if. Looking at the current situation I predict Apple/Meta/Google will own "your" AR. Just like with smartphones.
> Or when you’re walking down the high street, looking in shop windows; advertising again.
The important fact here is in this case we asked for it. I opened the online store app. Go ahead and show me the products. That's what I came for. I wouldn't even call that advertising, to me it's just information.
Totally different from shoving those products in my face every time I try to do anything. Now I don't care about products, I don't want to see them or hear about them. But these advertisers insist on subjecting me to their ads.
https://ny.curbed.com/2019/10/9/20906159/ballyhoo-media-floa...
If you want to defeat advertising, you have to acknowledge this side, otherwise you underestimate its brilliance and role in human wellbeing and productivity. Until you can carry its strengths forward without its weaknesses, it will keep propagating as the solution with no end in sight.
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.
That said, I would always want to live in a city in which advertisers are constantly fighting each other to get everyone's attention with ads, in every possible way, to the extent permitted by reasonable zone/cosmetic regulations[a], because the alternative is often symptomatic of economic stagnation or even disaster.
Anecdotally, a city without ads is a city without economic growth. Compare:
* Cities in the former Soviet Union: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=soviet%20union%20ci...
* Cities in North Korea: https://www.google.com/search?q=north+korea+city+streets&tbm...
* Cities in East Germany before reunification: https://www.google.com/search?q=east+germany+city+streets+be...
to, say,
* Peking streets: https://www.google.com/search?q=peking+streets&tbm=isch
* Tokyo streets: https://www.google.com/search?q=tokyo+streets&tbm=isch
* Times Square: https://www.google.com/search?q=times+square+nyc&tbm=isch
--
[a] For example, in the US it is virtually impossible to display ads on residential streets, because doing so requires getting explicit permission from local government bodies like a neighborhood commission.
https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/president-lyndon...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/specials/curious-canberra/2017-0...
We went all-in on this advertising based economy and no one really wants it but the advertisers.
Ultimately though, all such solutions turn into yet another money grab. Cable TV was supposed to be this premium ad-free experience, but media conglomerates realized hey, why not get money out of both subscriptions and ads?
This is exactly the reason why I advocate against YT Premium. You're still providing data to Google (and you need to provide real data otherwise the payment may fail) who has proven their bad faith several times with dark patterns and their non-GDPR-compliant "consent" flow.
The anti-billboard movement, adopted by a few cities such as Geneva[0], is a good step towards less visual pollution.
[0] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/directdemocracy/geneva-z%C3%A9r...
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.
“Push it over,” he said.
“You,” she said. “You did most of the work.”
“It’s your birthday.”
-Monkey Wrench Gang
Also, for YouTube, check out the SponsorBlock browser plugin.
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?
The VR goggle / IRL ad blocking is an interesting idea. I immediately jump to fear that something politically sensitive could be censored. However, I suppose we still have that issue in online ad blocking.
Are there any known examples of censorship of content critical of $GOV being applied to an ad-blocker? Any crowd sourced list could in theory be vulnerable to censorship.
It would be nice once AR glasses come. Although they probably won't be able to black things out (unless they also have an LCD layer to darken certain pixels) as well as a colour layer. Life online has improved so much with adblockers. I literally rarely see ads anymore online or on TV.
[1] https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=HTES19380414.2.41&e=-------en--2...
It also makes a difference that they can't put too much text on them, because they're too far away for you to be able to read that. So you have visually smaller billboards with simpler messages on them. Driving across Iowa is more pleasant because of this.
or watch Steve Mann's explaination what the ey tap is good for: https://youtu.be/DiFtmrpuwNY
I guess unfortunately the holo lense and alike will be rather used to inject ads to reality
So there are "adblocks" in cities, they're just done in a much better way than on the web: the ads aren't created at all instead of forcing citizens to spend time fighting an individual war against them.
If the equivalent augmented reality technology were developed, I'm unsure of what grounds objections would stand on. If someone wants to go about with video goggles which replace billboards with waterfalls or wildflowers, go for it. Develop the technology and release it.
I do sometimes antiadvertisement. I see anoying ads? I will write those companies. Works best when cc as many mail addresses you can find from them.
I also don't think most advertising is fair anyway. Most companies can't afford it, you actually don't see a lot of different ads as well.
It's always magnum ice cream, cigarettes, some weird hipster new thing no one needs.
The analogue of blocking ads in real life is physically removing, destroying, or defacing them.
Want something like that check out drab soviet era cities were advertising was banned.
Banksy certainly seems to have thin skin if he gets hurt feelings over adverts. Fuck that too, I'm responsible for my own feelings.
Now I think that this isn't a problem that needs a technology solution, but instead needs a civic and social strategy.
Ads are a huge drain on our collective mental space, for no benefit to most people.
Traffic billboards have even begun reading license plates for personalised ads.
The days where a billboard was just a billboard are over, ended by the ever scummier advertising industry and their lust for data.
The goal of the system is to mediate every interaction with digital technology and then leverage that mediation to become an ad delivery platform.
Fight it.
fig1 is an any billboard ads replaced with a xterm to show inbox or whatever.
it worked well in labs and constrained environment. didn’t work IRL.
should work today IRL with 1k lines of code with modern hardware + algos/models.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58...
Seems bananas to me for your entire functionality be dependent on third parties.
Result.
If getting rid of ads means the poor will be worse off why do so many well intentioned people support this position?
If google, facebook, instagram, youtube required a 7 dollar a month subscription you would cut access to the poor. A netflix subscription in india is a dollar but even at that price it shuts out people and most don't use it.
You are being targeted and identified because people will pay more to show ads to you compared to a poor person. You will get ads poor people won't. The fact that you are willing to allow ads means you end up paying for that poor person's usage. If all rich users decide to adblock the company will be forced to go to a pay model that will shut out the poor.
For the richer users it may be in your best interest to pay. For poor users who cannot afford to pay, don't have a credit card, etc ads are in their best interest.
They gotta make money to keep up somehow, and if they can't do it through ads, they will do it through subscription.
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.
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.
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.
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"...
criteo
33across
openx
adxpremium
setupad
4dex
adnxs
casalemedia
pubmatic
emxdgt
rubiconproject
districtm
lijit
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.
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.
But I just don't see an alternative, and I don't imagine how one can draw a line between what's good and what isn't. In a sense, there cannot be good ads by definition. In a perfect world, there is no ads, because there is no direct competition — and that's the only way. There is only 1 laundry powder, so you don't have to choose. There may be several laundry powders, each one being the best for a specific type of clothing. And there may be even several laundry powders for each type, one simply being cheaper than the other. But there is always one definitive answer, to which one is the best, so you can make your choice just applying the appropriate filters in your groceries app. Similarly, when you choose a smartphone, you don't really need reminded about samsung being the best everywhere you go: you just go to gsmarena (or such), use some filters and make an informed choice. If an app/consultant/oracle/search engine can truly allow you to choose what's best for you, nobody would think about it as an advertisement, and nobody would need to place it anywhere, because you'll consciously ask it when you need an advice.
Ads are not about that. They are about shouting your product name loud enough to substitute or even obstruct making an informed choice. This is pretty much necessary, when you have 20 laundry powder brands, that make essentially the same product, neither being the best for anyone. And while it could be unnecessary when selling a phone (since all of them are actually different, even if only in how they look), it isn't in the current market, since they need to persuade you that you need a new phone.
So, all ads are bad, but they are unavoidable in a free-market economics, where competition exists. And controlling them doesn't sound ok to me. To be fair, I'm somewhat libertarian-minded in general, so of course it doesn't sound ok to me, but, seriously, where should one draw the line? Is product-placement in movies ok? Is a guy shouting on a street for people come into a restaurant ok? Sure, there is a lot of gradient in-between all this and spoiling the city landscape or even drawing coca cola banners with lasers on the night's sky. But then regulating such things isn't really about regulating ads, since this could be about art projects as well. And, furthermore, one could just call coca-cola banner an art project anyway.
So, I don't see what should I be fighting against, and how should I do that. I appreciate that somebody out there is concerned and stands against evil ad-corporations, but I'm almost holding back to not call it futile.