[HN Gopher] A Swiss town banned billboards. Zurich, Bern may soo...
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A Swiss town banned billboards. Zurich, Bern may soon follow
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 570 points
Date : 2024-07-26 04:26 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://archive.today/zvgZO
| Animats wrote:
| Sao Paulo did this in 2006, and it worked out very well.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| Worked out very well in clearing the city of advertisements or
| in improving the quality of life of its people because they see
| less public advertisement?
|
| In Berlin the largest bill board provider (Wall GmbH) also
| builds public toilets. Thanks to them they are much more
| plentiful around parks. Forcing them to go out of business
| would take those with them.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| Sao Paulo is ridden with crime, poverty and homelessness, the
| traffic is atrocious, the air is terrible, the public
| transport is built for a city 10% the size and the
| infrastructure is stuck in the '70s.
|
| But I do enjoy the lack of billboards.
| nwatson wrote:
| Didn't the city come close to running out of water? ... per
| ChatGPT: "The most notable crisis occurred between 2014 and
| 2016 when the Cantareira water system, one of the main
| sources of water for the metropolitan area, reached
| critically low levels."
|
| Running low on water in Sao Paulo would be a huge disaster.
| azlev wrote:
| Improve quality of life by removing cognitive load from
| people.
|
| There is legislation to grant permission to place some ads in
| exchange of, say public toilets to use your example.
|
| But removed billboards from buildings or external area
| weren't taxed or had any positive result to society.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Could Berlin not buy the public toilets from the billboard
| provider and pay to operate them? Why are we relying on an
| advertising business for public toilets? They're...public?
| nanoxide wrote:
| Because they're expensive and Berlin doesn't have money.
| They were also coin operated and thus frequently broken
| into and out of service because of that. They mostly have
| contactless pay now, which has disadvantages as well
| because its less accessible (especially for children and
| senior people).
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The capital of Germany with almost 3.85 million people
| (one of the EU's most populous cities) and it cannot
| afford public toilets.
|
| Thanks for sharing ground truth, despite it being
| exceptionally depressing.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Berlin has the disadvantage of historically being an
| enclave of Western Germany in the communist GDR, very
| hard/expensive to supply as a result and always at risk
| of the commies forcibly annexing it. No large (and thus:
| tax-paying) company wanted to set up its headquarters
| there for that reason, and additionally as it was an
| enclave there was no place for industry to set up
| production facilities.
|
| Nowadays, Berlin has a shit ton of "startups" HQ'd there,
| but they pay barely any taxes compared to production
| industry heavyweights.
| realityking wrote:
| Berlin's economy is unique for a major capital. Berlin is
| one of the weaker states economically in Germany. Mostly
| an effect of the division when most major industry left
| towards a place where the Soviet Army is not 5 minutes
| away and the city might be cut off from supplies at any
| moment. It's been getting better but only recently the
| GDP per capita of Berlin rose above that of Germany
| overall.
|
| This was radically different before World War 2. In 1938
| Berlin made up 10% of GDP (and Germany was bigger back
| then). Major companies like Lufthansa and Deutsche Bank
| were headquartered in Berlin. It was the center of the
| new Electrical industry being home of both Siemens and
| AEG.
| account42 wrote:
| Berlin can afford to have free public toilets when
| significantly poorer cities can. And yes, not charging
| for use can actually reduce the overal operating cost
| more than what you would have gained from the fee.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| Well, it could buy them. If they had money left to spend.
| But Berlin pays for a lot of public services already
| because it is operated by politicians who cater to the same
| public that favors removing bill boards. As a result e.g.
| they just bought all privately operated power plants for
| billions. They also heavily subsidize public transport
| tickets because it is popular. And they employ a large
| public staff in the city's administration but still cannot
| maintain a good quality of service despite all the billions
| spent (you wait weeks for appointments).
|
| Berlin is a text book example of how turning everything
| into public goods and spending a lot of tax money is not
| necessarily in the interest of the citizens IMHO.
| majewsky wrote:
| Germany actually has an extremely small public sector at
| 12.9% of all people in the workforce. Compare to
| neighboring countries like the Czech Republic (15.4%),
| Poland (23.6%) or Denmark (30.2%).
|
| Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_b
| y_public_se...
|
| Are you saying that Berlin is an outlier in Germany,
| then? My perception (looking from outside) has always
| been that their public sector is just completely
| understaffed.
| account42 wrote:
| Not that I am saying your argument is wrong, but I'd be
| wary of comparing such vaguely defined stats across
| countries. What does and doesn't count as public sector
| is going to vary wildly and so will how much of publicly
| funded work is done by direct employees vs. contractors.
| Statistics can lie as easily as they can give you useful
| info.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| Berlin has a work force of about 2.2 million people. 305k
| of those work for the public sector. That's about 13.8%
| so above Germany's average. However, it's not only
| important how much people work for the government but
| also how much it pays them. And Berlin pays much better
| salaries than other eastern German states. 24 years ago
| salaries in Eastern Berlin were increased to match those
| payed to western Berlin employees (instead of meeting in
| between). So for many years the city payed waaay more
| than its surrounding German member state to its staff.
| This financial issue is amplified by the fact Berlin now
| has to pay much higher pensions on average for its
| retired personnel.
| gglnx wrote:
| >>they just bought all privately operated power plants
| for billions<<
|
| No, Berlin brought only the previously privatized
| district heating (Fernwarme) back
| (https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/05/berlin-
| fernwae...). Because that is a monopoly and Berliners got
| ripped off by a private company.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| All of Berlin's district heating plants provide heat AND
| electricity. So the government owns a huge share of all
| electricity producers in this city now, too (about 60 %
| of the total production capacity).
|
| Whether this constitutes a monopoly is beside the point.
| Berlin paid 1.4 billions is does not really have (after
| it sold it 20 years ago when it had even less money and
| could not sustain a profitable business operation) and
| which does not solve a problem we really have. And now it
| will need to invest even more money to future-proof this
| acquisition.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| Places with billboard bans don't ban all ads, if the
| bathrooms aren't billboards they aren't banned. If the
| bathrooms are huge billboards next to parks then yeah, you'll
| have to find other bathrooms and that seems fine.
| seoulmetro wrote:
| In most first world countries, public toilets are a right not
| a privilege that people have to pay for.
|
| Europe is so backwards on their public toilet investments.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Exactly: here in Japan, public toilets are all over the
| place: train stations, public parks, or frequently just
| random places in the city, on the street. And they're free,
| of course.
| autoexec wrote:
| The bathrooms in Japan are crazy to me. Depending on
| where you are the toilet might be the most luxurious
| experience your ass has ever had, or sometimes it's a
| literal hole in the ground and not even toilet paper is
| provided.
|
| I've never had a problem finding a toilet there when I
| needed one, but I kept kleenex in my back pocket because
| I never knew what to expect.
|
| I still prefer the holes in the ground to pay toilets.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| You have to go to really rural places to find the squat
| toilets these days, or maybe some poorly-maintained park.
| All new bathrooms these days have western-style toilets.
|
| One thing to watch out for, however, is that many
| bathrooms have no way to dry your hands, even in very
| nice bathrooms in fancy buildings, so you should bring a
| small towel with you. Some bathrooms don't even have
| soap, though this is pretty rare in my experience, but a
| lack of drying towels or hand dryers is somewhat common.
| amluto wrote:
| There also seem to be no public trash cans. How do people
| dispose of the utterly absurd amount of disposable
| packaging that everything comes with?
| shiroiushi wrote:
| They generally throw it away in the place where they're
| opening it. Usually, you don't open stuff up until you
| get home, and I would hope you have a trash can there.
|
| The big factor for foreigners is that people don't
| normally eat and drink while walking down the street;
| it's generally considered rude. If they stop and sit
| somewhere and eat or drink there, they keep their trash
| with them instead of throwing it on the ground like many
| other countries. If you're just getting stuff from a
| convenience store, you can usually throw stuff in the
| trash cans there.
|
| Most stuff I've seen doesn't have an absurd amount of
| disposable packaging, but that is really common with the
| gift boxes of sweets that are commonly bought at stations
| and given as gifts. But these you don't normally eat in
| public.
| kelnos wrote:
| You dispose of it where you bought it, or you don't open
| it until you get home, or you act like a good hiker who
| is out in the wilderness, and pack up your trash to bring
| home with you where you can properly dispose of it.
|
| I always found it amazing that Japanese cities manage to
| stay so clean without public trash cans everywhere. It's
| a reminder that you have to solve the social and cultural
| problems first: if people think it's ok to throw trash on
| the ground, it doesn't matter how many public trash cans
| you have.
| account42 wrote:
| I still prefer to have both: Considerate people and
| public infrastructure to make make sure good behavior
| does not conflict with convenience.
| tekla wrote:
| Consideration is free. Public Infra is not. Amazing how
| cheap not being a shitty human is
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Where "pay" is pretty much just a symbolic amount. Same
| reasoning why shopping carts often have a 1EUR deposit. The
| price is close to zero but makes a big psychological
| difference to actually being zero.
|
| Relatedly, offering stuff for free on
| ebay/craigslist/whatever turns up some incredibly entitled
| choosing beggars. Offering it for a token amount gives you
| very different results.
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| ahahah that's beautiful. So it's all good because they built
| public toilets? Like when big companies have programs for the
| disabled, that makes it all good all of a sudden, we forget
| all about the other stuff? Damn...
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| You are laughing. But the city of Berlin was not able to
| provide this service. Spending a day in the park or on the
| playground with kids and needing a rest room meant either
| hiding in a bush, going home early or to the next
| restaurant where you had to pay a fee, usually (bc they
| provided a rest room to hundreds of people daily).
|
| I see this public private partnership a win-win.
| account42 wrote:
| Yet many other cities are able to provide free public
| toilets, including ones much much poorer than Berlin.
| Perhaps it's not really a matter of Berlin not being able
| to do it themselves.
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| > the city of Berlin was not able to
|
| > the city of Berlin was not willing to
|
| Fixed that for you.
| account42 wrote:
| And I'm sure the mega rich also donate a lot (in absolute
| terms). That doesn't mean the current levels of wealth
| inequality are good for society. The term for this is
| whitewashing bad behavior with good deeds.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Allow ads on/in only the toilets themselves.
|
| Problem solved.
| gglnx wrote:
| No, ads and toilets are separate in Berlin since 2019 [1].
| Wall won the contract for the new Toilettenvertrag [2] by the
| city. The city says now what and where to build. Before that,
| toilets were only built where it was profitable for a
| billboard. Now the city can make the toilets even free [3]
| and the toilets are ad-free.
|
| [1] https://taz.de/Toilettenvertrag-sorgt-fuer-
| Wirbel/!5431891/ [2] https://www.berlin.de/rbmskzl/aktuelles/
| pressemitteilungen/2... [3] https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/bei
| trag/2024/07/107-oeffentlic...
| pqdbr wrote:
| I think Sao Paulo is the largest megacity in the world that has
| deployed a ban like this.
|
| Amazing decision. Nobody misses them.
| methuselah_in wrote:
| but is it worth? These companies now go to online and push more
| in ai thereby increasing the carbon footprint.
| PlunderBunny wrote:
| I can run an ad blocker online - I can't do that walking down
| the street.
| szundi wrote:
| Following the parent commenter logic, extra resources are
| going to go into ad-blocker-blockers then
| grues-dinner wrote:
| Not with the attitude! An ad-scrubbing AR filter is certainly
| thinkable, though probably not actually practical as long as
| strapping goggles to your face in public is considered the
| preserve of terminal dorks.
|
| However, if it did happen, the arms race to prevent ad
| evasion in real life would be interesting. _Glass Earth,
| Inc._ by Stephen Baxter is a good short read along the
| extension of those lines (though the image of a multibillion
| satellite communications monopoly using a vast fleet of, uh,
| 67 geosynchronous satellites hasn 't dated well!)
| perihelions wrote:
| Ironically there's an AI filter that's classified _you_ as
| an ad, and is erasing you from our field of vision as we
| speak. HN 's spam filter is... not a frontier AI, to put it
| politely. You can email the mods to get your new account
| whitelisted!
| matsemann wrote:
| One cool thing I noticed about my polarized sunglasses is
| that they block most screens at public places. No
| ClearChannel ads for me while waiting for public transport!
| awestroke wrote:
| worst take I've seen this week
| kstenerud wrote:
| It's how you demonstrate your "wit" and "intelligence" and
| contrarian "edge" on HN. The lower the stakes, the more
| outlandish the takes.
| card_zero wrote:
| I'm disappointed that nobody's tried to be properly
| contrary yet. How about this: adverts are a _service._ If
| they work properly, they provide information about new
| products that interest you. If you didn 't want to know
| about the products, the advertisers didn't want to tell
| you, so really you have the same goals. The only problem is
| that billboards aren't targeted. Hence we need to replace
| billboards with more tracking, face recognition, mood
| recognition, AR glasses, brain implants, and enable people
| to be constantly surrounded by _enjoyable_ adverts.
| kstenerud wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPGgTy5YJ-g
| albertopv wrote:
| Installing a new billboard, or updating an existing one. isn't
| free either
| synicalx wrote:
| Ah yes, the two genres of advertising; AI and outdoor
| billboards.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| >carbon footprint
|
| Bottom of my list of concerns, whereas at the top is being
| surveilled and psychologically manipulated on an individual or
| group level. I am very sensitive about it...
| user3939382 wrote:
| I watched a baseball game for the first time in a while and there
| was a logo on the pitcher's mound. I'm beyond sick of incessant
| ads.
| awestroke wrote:
| But won't somebody think of the shareholders????
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| You wish, the dividends are miserable. Executive boards,
| rather.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| How much I hate these standalone ad displays and billboard size
| ad displays.
| bravura wrote:
| 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
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| When you touch these ads, this will be vandalism and marketing
| company will dispatch security company on you. Everyone in the
| ad food chain feels very entitled to litter public space and to
| violate your attention.
| RCitronsBroker wrote:
| not getting caught is the secret sauce here, just ask banksy
| lol
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Reminds me of the old adage ,,it's only illegal if you get
| caught".
|
| That's also applies to corporate corruption and politics.
| autoexec wrote:
| > When you touch these ads, this will be vandalism and
| marketing company will dispatch security company on you.
|
| They've even sued TV networks and movie studios for digitally
| painting different ads over their actual ads in movies and
| broadcasts.
| imiric wrote:
| I wonder what Banksy thinks of online advertising, which goes
| far beyond "taking the piss".
|
| At its best, your personal data is harvested and traded behind
| your back to tailor ads specifically for your demographic--and
| increasingly for you personally--and deliver them when you're
| most vulnerable.
|
| At its worst, it is all of the above, plus used by anyone who
| wants to influence how you think about political and social
| issues, ultimately corrupting democratic processes and
| destabilizing governments. It is the perfect medium for
| propaganda.
|
| In either case it is the most insidious form of psychological
| manipulation we've ever invented. I hope that we eventually
| collectively sober up about the ways this is harming our
| societies, and heavily regulate, if not outright ban it. The
| advertising industry has gone far beyond just promoting a
| product, and it needs to stop.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| I would hope all advertising (including online) isn't
| completely banned. It _is_ useful at times for learning about
| products. But that 's all it should really do: promote
| products (or services), and stop using psychological
| manipulation techniques and being such a cancer on society.
|
| 50+ years ago, the idea of advertisers harvesting your
| personal data and trading it behind your back to tailor ads
| for you was completely alien.
| imiric wrote:
| 50+ years ago we were being marketed cigarettes as "Torches
| of Freedom", promoted by doctors and cartoon characters. We
| rightfully banned these practices in most of the world
| because of the product they were advertising, but the
| deception and manipulation have been an industry staple,
| pioneered by Edward Bernays a century ago. The internet is
| simply a new tool they can use to make their work more
| sophisticated than ever before.
|
| It has also made a lot of people very rich, so I doubt that
| the advertising industry will accept devolving to a state
| before psychological manipulation became the norm, and
| sacrifice billions of dollars worth of revenue. Governments
| are unlikely to regulate it to that point either, given
| their symbiotic relationship.
|
| This banning of billboards is a good step, but the real
| problems are online.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| There's really no easy black-and-white answer to this
| problem I think. While advertising cigarettes with
| cartoon characters to get kids interested is obviously
| disgusting, or having doctors promote them, advertising
| has its place. Remember "Computer Shopper", the huge
| magazine back in the 80s/90s where the ads were really
| the main reason to buy it? Those ads were how people back
| then bought computer components, because there was no
| other way of learning what was for sale from where, and
| how much it cost. Of course, the internet (which Computer
| Shopper helped make popular and accessible) put the
| magazine out of business eventually, but before the
| internet revolutionized communications (including
| advertising), ads like those were essential if you wanted
| to find products that weren't available in your local
| retail stores, or were only available at inflated prices.
|
| It'd be nice if there was some kind of advertising
| industry code of ethics, but I can't imagine how this
| would develop, since the people in today's ad industry
| are obviously a bunch of con artists and sociopaths who
| lack any ethical standards at all.
| hello_computer wrote:
| I think consent is key. With " _Computer Shopper_ ", we
| gave our consent by picking-up the magazine and reading
| it. With Google/Bing/etc, we give it by choosing their
| search. With streaming, we give it by logging-in and
| watching whatever garbage they have on offer. But with
| billboards, subway placards, radios and televisions
| running in public spaces, etc... there is no consent, so
| those are more like rape.
| account42 wrote:
| I disagree that ads bundled with other services imply
| consent. The EU got it right with the GDPR that consent
| is meaningless if it is not freely given, meaning not
| giving consent must have zero negative consequences. It
| is too easy to manipulate people to act against their own
| interest by just dangling a carrot in front of them.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| I block ads everywhere.
|
| I can learn about products I am interested in by
| enthusiasts of certain areas, comparison tests, searching
| the web, friends recommendations, entities that collect
| news of a specific area, Hackernews and other forums,
| conferences, events (physical or digital) that are just for
| companies presenting their products in a certain area.
|
| So I don't need to have unasked ads shoved into my face to
| get to know products I "need" or desire.
|
| I don't see ads and I don't have FOMO.
| xigoi wrote:
| Why not just have websites specifically for learning about
| products and leave non-consenting people alone?
| account42 wrote:
| Do you actually believe you would not be able to learn
| about products to solve whatever needs you have without
| advertising?
| seoulmetro wrote:
| Ironic since Banksy is one of the largest indoctrinator out
| there.
|
| People who actually believe in the Banksy lie are unfortunate.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Deeply ironic considering Banksy has made millions plastering
| his products all over public spaces without any permission
| from anybody.
| nine_k wrote:
| Unlike billboards, a lot of people enjoy Banksy's
| "products", and consider them art. Also, they are much
| smaller and less obnoxious, not placed over a highway or on
| top of a large building.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| A lot of people like billboards too. That's why Times
| Square is one of the busiest tourist destinations in the
| world.
|
| None of that has any relation to the irony of Banksy's
| quote though.
| badprose wrote:
| What is the banksy lie?
| bertylicious wrote:
| Banksy doesn't really exist and all his paintings are
| actually an elaborate marketing campaign we don't
| understand yet.
| Towaway69 wrote:
| Personally I prefer the Banksy lies than the corporate lies
| of advertising.
|
| Both might lie but it depends on which lie you like to
| believe as to which form of advertising you find better.
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| The same complaint ("I did not choose to see this") could be
| done about anything that's out in public:
|
| Why do I have to see your street art? Why do I have to see your
| clothes? Why do I have to see your face? Why do I have to see
| your car?
|
| However, it's widely accepted that not wanting to see something
| doesn't justify vandalizing someone else's
| art/clothes/car/whatever.
|
| Why should it be different for ads?
| Doxin wrote:
| For some wild reason it's basically only permitted for large
| companies to deface the public space like this. You go try
| putting some street art out there while the cops are
| watching, see what happens.
|
| In addition to that by far most things people would want to
| put in public spaces isn't _explicitly_ designed to upset you
| like ads are. Why do we allow companies to plaster public
| spaces with veiled insults?
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| > ,,Public spaces"
|
| Usually buildings have private property owners. They agree
| to putting a bill board on their wall or they don't.
| Graffiti sprayers usually don't ask for permission -- and
| that's where the difference comes from.
|
| In Europe you don't usually have huge bill board on
| buildings. Rather you have lots of advertising columns on
| the side walks (here in Berlin we call them ,,Litfasssaule"
| named after the local inventor Paul Litfass in 1854). You
| could argue they being a nuisance for sure but before the
| internet and even before radio and tv it was an important
| place of public communication. Actually they were an
| improvement because prior to advertising columns
| advertisers were wildly plastering anything with posters.
| Doxin wrote:
| > Usually buildings have private property owners. They
| agree to putting a bill board on their wall or they
| don't.
|
| And yet if I agree to have someone stand on my property
| shouting insults at passers-by I'll get a visit from the
| police soon enough. This issue isn't as black and white
| as you make it out to be. Just because the owner of the
| building the billboard is attached to agrees to have it
| there doesn't mean no one else is affected.
|
| There's _already_ limits to what you can put on a
| billboard. Banning billboards isn 't some radical new
| category of thing. it's simply moving that threshold down
| to "you can put nothing on billboards"
| kelnos wrote:
| Property ownership does not entitle you to do absolutely
| anything you want. We live in a society of common spaces,
| and we need not allow people to own property if they do
| not agree to our social contract.
| mcosta wrote:
| Where is that contract and when did I signed it?
| Doxin wrote:
| "The social contract" is a very well defined and explored
| concept[0]. It's not a literal contract. Being
| intentionally obtuse about word definitions isn't going
| to convince anyone of anything.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
| account42 wrote:
| I'm sure if you commit a crime the Judge will also let
| you go if you point out that technically you never agreed
| to the laws of the country you live in.
| kortilla wrote:
| Pay for it like the companies do and nobody would care.
| It's shocking you think companies have a special privilege
| here.
| Doxin wrote:
| Sure it's perhaps not companies having special privilege,
| but I think it's equally awful to give "entities with
| lots of money" special privileges in the public space.
| Entities with lots of money are the minority, why should
| they get to dictate what public space looks like for the
| majority?
|
| If it came to a honest vote on whether people would like
| billboards or no billboards I think the result is
| obvious.
| kortilla wrote:
| It's not lots of money. Regular people can afford
| billboards.
|
| A vote of people liking billboards is completely
| independent of the "oh, the powerful corporations use
| them" pearl clutching. I would hate billboards if they
| were just dominated by individuals using them to promote
| religious and political ideologies.
|
| The only reason their usage is dominated by businesses is
| because businesses generate returns off of advertising.
| They don't have special privilege and they certainly
| aren't out of reach of individuals, clubs, non-profits,
| etc.
| imiric wrote:
| > Why should it be different for ads?
|
| Because other things in public don't manipulate me into
| thinking a certain way in order to take money from me. People
| that attempt to do that are labeled as grifters and scammers,
| and the legal system deals with them. Why should it be
| different for ads?
| BanksySquared wrote:
| Banksy's answer to this would be so simple, I'm baffled you
| bothered asking.
|
| You wouldn't attack another person for their clothes. Because
| it's on and belongs to a person.
|
| Banksy wouldn't give a damned if you painted over his art.
| Because it's not on person and belongs to no person. Same as
| the ad space and the abandoned building he painted over.
|
| He attacked those who legally contributed negatively to
| public spaces. No one's car is doing that, and if they were,
| kids would just scribble "Wash Me!" over it and you would be
| there clapping, oblivious to this conversation until pointed
| out.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > He attacked those who legally contributed negatively to
| public spaces. No one's car is doing that
|
| Are you kidding? Cars are well known for their negative
| contributions to public spaces, in the forms of (1)
| exhaust, and (2) noise.
|
| This is part of why I'm baffled that the solution to
| electric cars _not_ constantly generating terrible noise
| pollution is to mandate that they all include and operate
| noisemakers.
| account42 wrote:
| I'm sure you can understand that, while incidental, the
| noise cars make is important for their use in public
| spaces not being even more of an unacceptable danger and
| that simply taking the noise away means the car should
| not be allowed on public roads. If you can make the
| electric car at least as safe as existing cars for
| everyone around it then go right ahead and propose it.
|
| Yes, car noise is annoying but the alternative is much
| much worse. Not so for ads.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Yes, car noise is annoying but the alternative is much
| much worse.
|
| No, it isn't. When you solve a problem, the answer is not
| to panic and legislate that the problem must never be
| solved. If you have other problems, work on those.
|
| We already have plenty of technology for dealing with
| roads that are dangerous. In general, we handle them by
| preventing pedestrians from using or crossing them, and
| providing over- or underpasses. This is superior in every
| way to adding noisemakers to cars. But it's not
| necessarily the best solution! It's just one that (a) we
| already have, and (b) is better than what you're calling
| a superior alternative.
|
| The only reason anyone even considers noisemakers is that
| they're used to cars that make noise. But a history of
| doing something the wrong way is a terrible reason to
| avoid doing it the right way.
| account42 wrote:
| The alternative to noisemakers is to completely ban
| electric cars until there are alternatives to improve
| bystander safety to equivalent levels. In that scenario
| you will still have the same noise pollution from cars
| with real non-simulated miniature explosions so electric
| carse with noise makers are not worse in that respect. If
| we did not already have noisy cars then yes perhaps
| electric cars with noise makers would not be allowed but
| they would also not be allowed without them.
| kelnos wrote:
| Because my street art, my clothes, my face, and my car aren't
| trying to psychologically manipulate you into opening your
| wallet, merely by the fact of their presence.
|
| I would hope that you aren't arguing in such bad faith that
| you can't see that advertising is another thing entirely.
| account42 wrote:
| Yes? This is why we have or at least used to have obscenity
| laws. To prevent real-life equivalents of internet trolls
| from shitting up the public space.
| hiq wrote:
| > - Banksy
|
| Actually, Sean Tejaratchi.
|
| It's really unfortunate that the real credit is left out in
| practice:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Tejaratchi#Crap_Hound.
| jfoster wrote:
| Billboards tend to be used by larger companies. I wonder what
| they do with the newly freed up ad budget. I'm guessing it goes
| to online ads rather than a reduced ad spend.
| JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote:
| They could contribute to society and humanity in general, and
| find something useful to do. That's what we all have to do.
| Society should ask itself why they are exempt from such a duty.
| bruce511 wrote:
| They do contribute to society, and they do useful things.
| This is evidenced by the fact they are still in business and
| their customers still give them money.
|
| Now granted they may not benefit -you- directly, they may
| even make -your- life worse, but -society- as a whole keeps
| them around.
|
| Personally I'm not a smoker, so cigarette companies (to me)
| are a net loss. On the other hand enough people see them as a
| gain so I bow to societies vote.
| Two4 wrote:
| By your logic, heroin dealers benefit society too.
| exe34 wrote:
| as long as it is counted in the gdp (not the gdp per
| capita, it's only the people who care about that sort of
| silly thing)
| kachapopopow wrote:
| if you ask some people, the answer is yes.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| (The people that want to legalize drugs and drug
| distribution)
| shiroiushi wrote:
| Not just heroin dealers: contract killers also benefit
| society according to this logic. They're in business,
| their customers give them money for a service the
| customers think is valuable, etc. They may not benefit
| _you_ directly, and may make _your_ life worse (if you
| 're their target), but bruce thinks they're fine since
| they do "useful" things and have paying customers!
| Two4 wrote:
| Contract killing is not analogous to tobacco companies.
| Both big tobacco and heroin dealers base their business
| on the exploitation of addiction, and are a nett
| detractor of societal value in all ways except one:
| creating shareholder value.
|
| Strangely enough, I do actually think there's a time and
| a place to kill, but that's not the norm for hired
| killers.
| bruce511 wrote:
| You're comparing legal to illegal. That's kinda moving
| the goal posts a bit.
|
| By definition illegal things are things society as a
| whole have declared impermissible. By contrast cigarettes
| and advertising are legal, meaning that society has
| determined them to have value.
|
| Not surprisingly illegal things still happen because
| there is still demand by some minority for that service.
| Society as s whole though has decided that the negative
| effect on others outweighs the positive effect on the
| few.
| bruce511 wrote:
| You probably notice larger companies more, but I was in Orlando
| recently, and lots of the billboards there were for "small"
| local companies.
|
| Where I live it's a spread between big companies, local events,
| startups and so on.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Billboards tend to be used by cannabis dispensaries, casinos,
| car dealerships, and ambulance chasers.
| mft_ wrote:
| Probably not in the small Swiss town of Vernier ;)
| slipheen wrote:
| The American state of Vermont has banned billboards since 1968.
| It makes spending time in the state extraordinarily pleasant.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| Hawaii also has a billboard ban. It was really jarring moving
| back to Illinois after getting used to not having them. It
| seems pretty clear that the negative impact of billboards far
| outweigh the benefits so I'm always hoping more places outlaw
| them.
| bruce511 wrote:
| Yes travelling can really create a sense of what you have, or
| lack.
|
| Where I live there are very few billboards. I rarely see
| them. When I travel (especially to the US) it's very jarring.
| They are very visually polluting.
| hollerith wrote:
| There is a ban on billboards in Marin County (on the other
| side of the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco).
|
| Legally speaking, billboards are only banned within 500 yards
| or some other distance from the highway with the most traffic
| (where billboards would be most valuable, namely, US 101) but
| actually there are no billboards anywhere in the county and
| this has been the case since the 1960s (according to an old
| newspaper article). My guess is that the community has some
| way to exert "informal" (not based on formal governmental
| processes) pressure on landlords. Real estate prices are very
| high here in part because it is a very attractive landscape
| with plenty of hills and greenery and bodies of water, so
| maybe most landlords perceive that billboards have the
| potential to depress prices and keep the occasional landlord
| who contemplates erecting billboards in line somehow.
|
| Also as an exception to the general rule, bus shelters
| (structures owned and maintained by the city or the county to
| keep the rain and the sun off people waiting for a bus) near
| US 101 have ads on them (4' by 6' or so) and the buses
| themselves do, too, or at least they used to--it's been a few
| years since I noticed.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _Real estate prices are very high here in part because it
| is a very scenic place with a lot of hills and trees and
| such_
|
| I have a hard time accepting the "in part" even, and sort
| of align with "the only reason it's expensive is because of
| the closeness to SV".
|
| But yes it is very nice. And yes billboards would make it
| less nice.
| hollerith wrote:
| Marin County to SV is a really nasty commute, but I
| concede if it weren't close to downtown SF it would cost
| a lot less to live in Marin County.
|
| Large numbers of high paying jobs are necessary for high
| housing prices except in tax havens like Monaco.
| bbarnett wrote:
| When I was a kid, I lived on lake which was connected to
| Lake Ontario.
|
| One summer a job was across the our small lake, a 40
| minute drive by car, but maybe 10 minutes by boat as the
| crow flies. Sure, I got wet during rain and wavy days,
| but clothes get dry, and it sure was convenient.
|
| I often wondered, if the job was in SF itself, do people
| take boats to get to work? If so, why not? I presume
| docking costs? The place I worked had their own dock, so
| ... "sure, just tie up over there every day".
| hollerith wrote:
| Ferries are a popular way to commute from Marin Country
| to SF:
|
| https://www.goldengate.org/ferry/schedules-maps/
|
| https://www.blueandgoldfleet.com/sausalito/
|
| I don't know of anyone using or having used a private
| boat to make the commute.
| dalke wrote:
| When I was a kid in Miami, I read about people commuting
| to work by jet ski. This was before they replaced the
| Rickenbacker Causeway drawbridge with the William Powell
| Bridge, and the commute from Key Biscayne into Miami
| could be delayed and backed up, as boats had the right-
| of-way.
| ljf wrote:
| I had a friend who lived in New Jersey in a water front
| property - he used to ride a jetski over to New York to
| stop for a drink at a bar in a marina. The issue was you
| had to pay marina fees to be allowed to dock there, so
| while it was fun it was actually a pretty pricey way to
| get to NY (and you'd be wearing damp clothes) - but he
| still thought it was a lot of fun.
|
| He was OK but apparently the was a lot of boat theft in
| that area too.
| ryandrake wrote:
| There are people who live waaaaay out there and commute
| to their Silicon Valley job via a light airplane like a
| Cessna, quarterly, monthly, weekly, probably even daily.
| "Commutes, uh... find a way"
| dalke wrote:
| I knew one of those too. I consulted for a company across
| the street from the Palo Alto general aviation airport.
| The doc/pubs manager lived some place north of Sonoma.
| She would fly in, walk across the street, and go to work.
|
| At another job, the project manager lived in WA but
| worked in Palo Alto. He flew (commercial) in early
| Monday, with a small apartment to live in during the
| week, then take off mid-afternoon Friday to be back in WA
| with his family for the weekend.
| Lammy wrote:
| Fun fact: it was once envisioned that there would be a
| second Marin-SF bridge via Angel Island:
| https://cahighways.org/ROUTE131.html
| ghaff wrote:
| And resort/premium retirement areas like Aspen. I'd also
| argue that although jobs helped create a lot of the
| "elite" cities, once they were created, there's a fair
| bit to keep people in their orbit if not in the city
| proper even if employment opportunities become less of a
| consideration.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| No it's also because they systematically oppose
| increasing housing.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Marin's billboard ban is older than I'd thought, having
| been adopted in 1936 according to this article:
|
| <https://marinmagazine.com/community/history/history-of-a-
| hig...>
|
| At least one billboard, along 101 at the highway cut
| between San Rafael and Larkspur, survived until the late
| 1970s or early 1980s, but was burned down in what has been
| described as the closest an act of arson has come to
| earning an award of commendation by the Marin County Board
| of Supervisors.
|
| More recently, a "flower billboard" was created, and in
| 2010 removed, along US-101 in Novato:
|
| <https://www.marinij.com/2010/08/24/controversial-flower-
| bill...>
|
| (That article also places the county-wide ban more
| recently, in the 1970s.)
| lostlogin wrote:
| The worst are the super bright lcd/led screen billboards.
|
| They are incredibly obnoxious. I'm surprised if they don't
| case car crashes.
| Mo3 wrote:
| I'm sure they do
| cchi_co wrote:
| They are particularly intrusive and potentially hazardous
| usrusr wrote:
| The benefits of billboards are a zero sum game, it's absurdly
| easy for the benefits of a ban to outweigh them.
|
| Here in Germany regulation of outside ads has zero novelty
| value, it's so much a given that I don't know anything about
| the history of it. And it turns out the benefits of a ban are
| much bigger than just more pleasant views, because the ad
| spend does not simply disappear. Much of it gets channeled
| into event sponsoring, sports clubs and the like, in short
| things that actually improve life for all instead of just
| providing some more passive income for property owners. It's
| a total no-brainer if there ever was one.
| account42 wrote:
| Still plenty of outside ads in Germany. The regulation
| needs to be stronger.
| mynameisash wrote:
| This pretty much mirrors my experience: I live in Washington,
| and when I drive down the freeway, I see nothing but trees
| and mountains. When I go back to Minnesota to visit family,
| I'm bombarded with billboards -- often political or religious
| content. I don't miss that at all.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Various localities have similar bans. I'm aware of at least one
| with strict signage controls, shopping centers generally have
| an directory near the entrance(s) and that's about it other
| than the signage on the stores themselves.
| MH15 wrote:
| Irvine, CA has an outdoor advertising ban. Driving the 405
| through OC you quickly see the difference.
| storyinmemo wrote:
| Maine followed in 1978. The way life should be.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Should be a no-brainer in any U.S. state with ballot
| measures.
| cyberax wrote:
| Hah. Washington doesn't ban billboards, but we don't have that
| many of them. They are also usually not too garish.
|
| I was shocked by the number of "One call, that's all" accident
| attorney billboards in LA and FL when I drove through them
| several years ago.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Washington doesn't ban billboards
|
| Not _entirely_ , but it impose some very important limits on
| any signs near highways, such as requiring them to be
| advertising something that's available from the same property
| under them.
|
| That effectively blocks the most spammy and egregious forests
| of signs, because one can't just purchase a small rectangle
| of near-highway grass and start auctioning space above it to
| a large shifting pool of national bidders.
|
| https://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=47.42.040
| mikestew wrote:
| _They are also usually not too garish._
|
| Don't drive I-5 by Fife much, eh? Okay, you did say
| "usually".
|
| Redmond has an outright ban on billboards. That's how I know
| where the Redmond/Kirkland border is (there's a billboard on
| 124th St.) Now if they if they'd just follow King County on
| those fucking political signs. (King County says "not on
| public right-of-ways", Redmond says "where ever you see a
| patch of grass".)
| tmathmeyer wrote:
| Wow. I drive up 124th all the time, and never noticed.
| checking now on street view does prove you right though,
| there are three just west of willows.
| PessimalDecimal wrote:
| It used to be true that near the FL/GA border you'd see
| billboards advertising "TOPLESS DANCERS" for 50 miles on
| either side of the fine establishment buying these
| billboards. The sheer number of them was almost a parody of
| billboards in a way.
| cchi_co wrote:
| Didn't know that! Unique and progressive approach for 1968
| vertnerd wrote:
| It makes _living_ in the state extraordinarily pleasant, too!
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| One of the nice side effects of hosting the Olympics was the
| ban on new advertising billboards in the downtown core of
| Atlanta. There are a few old signs that were grandfathered in
| but it's close to impossible to get new billboards added. One
| of the nice side effects of having a tornado rip through
| downtown a decade later was that it destroyed some of the
| grandfathered in billboards which the city did not allow to be
| replaced despite crying from the billboard companies.
|
| To prevent "ambush marketing", the IOC demands control over
| advertising in the area around the games. Given what a big deal
| it was for a city like Atlanta to get to host the games, this
| was one of the few times when the public was going to win
| despite the money and influence of the advertising industry. To
| its credit, Atlanta has mostly stuck by those Olympic era
| billboard laws. The biggest exception probably is the huge
| video board next to the Ernst & Young building but it replaced
| a much more modest video sign that had already been there.
|
| Being a large city, Atlanta has the resources to fight court
| challenges against the well funded advertising industry.
| Several of the suburban and exurban communities I lived in had
| citizens and governments united in their hatred of billboards
| but they lacked the resources to prevent them as the billboard
| companies have lots of experience with bleeding local
| governments dry in court, sending a message to other local
| governments to not even bother trying to oppose them. Big
| cities however can do better... if they wish to.
|
| Los Angeles, you have an opportunity in 2028. Will you take
| advantage of it like Atlanta did?
| greenie_beans wrote:
| one of the few NIMBY regulations i'll get behind
| xenospn wrote:
| Meanwhile in LA, I see 305 billboards on my morning walk
| through sunset blvd.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| My old office was decorated with a picture of an art
| installation which was a house painted entirely white, even
| the palm trees. Someplace east LA. But in front there was a
| bus with a huge Marvel whatever advert pasted on the side
| passing by.
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| Meanwhile, Los Angeles has raised them to massive and blinding
| levels. Visual goose-stepping.
| eesmith wrote:
| 1950 SF predicted this advertising for the future, at
| https://archive.org/details/FirstLensman/page/n47/mode/2up?q...
| :
|
| > He wormed his way over to the left-hand, high-speed lane and
| opened up. At the edge of the skyscraper district, where Wright
| Skyway angles sharply downward to ground level, Samms'
| attention was caught and held by something off to his right--a
| blue-white, whistling something that hurtled upward into the
| air. As it ascended it slowed down: its monotone shriek became
| lower and lower in pitch; its light went down through the
| spectrum toward the red. Finally it exploded, with an earth-
| shaking crash; but the lightning-like flash of the detonation,
| instead of vanishing almost instantaneously, settled itself
| upon a low-hanging artificial cloud and became a picture and
| four words--two bearded faces and "SMITH BROS. COUGH DROPS"!
|
| > "Well, I'll be damned!" Samms spoke aloud, chagrined at
| having been compelled to listen to and to look at an
| advertisement. "I thought I had seen everything, but that is
| really new!"
| aspyct wrote:
| Yes please, more of that!
| thefaux wrote:
| Would love to see this in SF. It's especially bad on 101.
| lemoncucumber wrote:
| I agree, but it's also pretty funny how so many of them have
| this tiny techie audience and 99% of the people driving past
| will just be like "wtf is that about, what are all those
| acronyms?"
| autoexec wrote:
| Companies are still waiting for augmented reality to become a
| thing so that they can correct this problem and place ads on
| every available surface within your field of view no matter where
| you are.
| bbarnett wrote:
| That would require brain implants or implanted lenses or some
| such, and no one would ever leave that platform open enough to
| be constantly tracked, and constantly barraged by it. Who would
| do that to themselves?!
|
| And really, for it to be all encompassing, you'd need everyone
| to have to use such systems, such as forcing everyone to have
| such devices to log in to services, or even order food, or pay
| for things, and no one would force people to have a device to
| even pay for things, or eat.. I.. um, oh right, smartphones.
|
| (I firmly suspect that within 25 years not only will brain
| implants -> visual cortex happen, but that if you don't have
| one you won't be able to work effectively, you won't be able to
| identify yourself effectively, and you probably won't even be
| able to pay for things)
|
| mcmcmc: _Nowhere did the GP state that AR would be
| inescapable_. Yes, I know. I stated it. See above?
|
| My whole point revolves around the fact that I believe, just as
| with smartphones, that people will be severely hampered without
| said tech. That it will effectively be a requirement to have
| such tech. Statements such as "But you can just...", fail to
| realise just how much is dependent upon it. In many respects
| there are NO workarounds without a smartphone, there are jobs
| that require you to own one, there are tasks/things you do in
| life that absolutely require it, and if you don't have one?
|
| Often you cannot find a work around, or the work around is
| literally a monumental task, thus people simply capitulate.
|
| This is what brain implants and AR will be like in 25+ years.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Nowhere did the GP state that AR would be inescapable, just
| that ads would be inescapable _in AR_. I'd imagine high tech
| contact lenses would be a preferable approach to a seamless
| interface for most people who aren't born with this stuff
| already at mass adoption.
| account42 wrote:
| > Who would do that to themselves?!
|
| Enough people that it eventually becomes unavoidable for the
| rest. See: all the other horrors of modern civilization that
| you cannot avoid without becoming a hermit.
| somenameforme wrote:
| One of the many reasons AR will probably never go anywhere. It
| has some pretty neat applications, but then a ton of horribly
| dystopic ways to monetize it. And greed all but guarantees that
| the latter will drown out the former. Kind of like what
| happened to VR where anti-competitive exclusivity deals, profit
| motivated pricing (as opposed to a loss leader market to drive
| adoption) and all this other sort of nonsense went a long way
| towards killing the ecosystem before it even got off the
| ground. It was a like bait and switch, but they forgot the
| bait.
| mcmcmc wrote:
| Really? Seems like ad funded "free" tech products have been
| the most successful in gaining wide adoption. I'd argue the
| opportunity for greed in AR makes it more likely to go _lots_
| of places, although we may not like them in the long run.
| mrweasel wrote:
| My argument would be that we don't really know which tech
| products would be successful, because any attempt to create
| a better product is immediately crushed by a "free" ad
| supported alternative.
|
| The ad model yields worse product and are actively killing
| off any attempt to improve, because the majority of people
| don't understand the downside of financing products using
| ads, rather than direct payment.
|
| The ad funded model is only successful if you view the
| world solely in terms of profit. I think Windows is a good
| example, the product doesn't improve when Microsoft loads
| the install up with ads and telemetry, but it is more
| profitable, and therefor more successful, if you're a
| stockholder.
| xvector wrote:
| Sounds like companies that aren't interested in garishly
| monetizing it will have their market carved out for them.
|
| There are _far_ more clever and profitable ways to monetize
| MR than to shove ads in your face wherever you look.
|
| I very much doubt a modern company would take an approach
| this dumb when they could likely make much more money doing
| something much more subtle.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _There are far more clever and profitable ways to
| monetize MR than to shove ads in your face wherever you
| look._
|
| There are, but the problem with ads (and surveillance) is,
| they're purely additive on the margin. Any of the clever
| and profitable thing you do to monetize MR, you can get a
| bit more money if you also put in ads. Then the competition
| puts more ads. Rinse repeat, eventually ads overwhelm the
| experience - but not before you make bank.
|
| That's the cancerous nature of advertising. It metastasizes
| to every new medium, feeds on it, and ultimately consumes
| it.
| xvector wrote:
| Not really. If ads degrade the experience, people will
| turn to alternatives with fewer ads, or will pay for the
| privilege of fewer ads. Either way, ad-free or ad-lite
| experiences will always be available in a free market.
| account42 wrote:
| ... and then the ads move to those alternatives as well.
|
| Look, we have been through this cycle multiple times now.
| It's not hypothetical.
|
| And not, ad-free experiences are not always available.
| Not even close to it - consider for start the subject of
| TFA: public spaces covered with ads.
| Larrikin wrote:
| Once the tech is worth it we'll have uBlock, Ad Nauseum, and
| eventually Vanced apps. I'll help friends and family, but
| sadly have learned my lesson about helping the general public
| utilize such things.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| I don't really watch sports, but whenever I catch sight of a
| football game on TV, I'm amazed at how colorful and vibrant on
| field ads are, almost as if they were computer graphic
| generated or something.
| cyptus wrote:
| In soccer they actual are. the ads are injected to the
| sideboards beside the playing field, so that if you watch the
| same game on different channels, they have different ads
| depending on their avg viewers.
| 6510 wrote:
| seems like a fun adblock project
| walthamstow wrote:
| Where is this true? Certainly not in England, nor any UEFA
| games I watched last season. MLS?
| izacus wrote:
| It was pretty easy to spot if you watched Euro 2024
| games.
| moonshinefe wrote:
| I don't watch football, but in hockey they project digital
| ads onto the ice and parts of the plexiglass around the rink
| during the broadcasts that aren't there IRL. They are often
| vibrant and look out of place, it's quite possible that's
| what you were seeing.
| denysvitali wrote:
| There are companies doing exactly that: augmented reality /
| computer vision advertising.
|
| - https://www.uniqfeed.com/our-solutions/football/
|
| - https://supponor.com/
|
| They have on their websites some neat examples. For example
| Supponor literally replaces the ads in the live stream (see
| the hockey example on their front page).
|
| Not sure if it's the same two companies, but you can find an
| impressive result video here:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/blackmagicfuckery/comments/uf0re1/d.
| ..
| yread wrote:
| Would be nice if some (truly) free software was doing the
| opposite
| account42 wrote:
| I imagine it's just a matter of time. Sponsor block for
| removing sections of ads embedded in videos is already a
| thing. Making the blocking spatial instead of just
| temporal is not far removed.
| amne wrote:
| You should checkout F1. they now have e-ink on the side of
| the cars and the ads are dynamic and catch your eye. I would
| be curious to find out if it's some exotic type of e-ink tech
| they use to keep it lightweight (as in .. as light as a decal
| or paint)
| antoinealb wrote:
| Do you have a link ? I was not aware of that, the only
| thing I can find is that McLaren ran some tests to replace
| in-cockpit ads with a small eink screen, but nothing on the
| side of the cars.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| What you found is what he's talking about. I find it
| annoying to watch IMHO due to the e-ink flicker.
| account42 wrote:
| They generally are so that they can be localized / pay
| whoever is showing you the stream.
| peeters wrote:
| They are typically superimposed yes. It's extraordinarily
| easy with football, the field is essentially a premade green
| screen with completely standardized index points (the yard
| markers). What's funny is what happens when it starts snowing
| on the field, which is not rare with the NFL's schedule.
| endgame wrote:
| And it will be a disgusting barrage upon our senses at all
| hours of the day and night.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJg02ivYzSs
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I want the opposite. Someone needs to make AR glasses that
| selectively look for ads and remove them in real time. I would
| pay $$$ for such a feature. It doesn't even seem impossible
| with current technology either. Image recognition has gotten
| _really_ good.
| malthaus wrote:
| it is very likely that this ban might be prevented by lobbying,
| as one of the main providers (even visible on the picture in the
| article) is, let's say "well connected" to our legislative
| miklosz wrote:
| The city of Cracow in Poland banned billboards (and other visual
| advertising quite aggressively) about 2 years ago. Great
| outcomes. There are still some workarounds that companies do to
| put this s..t out in the public (e.g. covers of renovation works
| can contain up to 50% of advertising area, so we have renovations
| of just finished buildings only to put the covers with ads). Now,
| when I visit another city when there's no such ban I cannot stand
| this visual garbage. This should be banned everywhere.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Hopefully you like looking at the face of Lewandowski because
| it's all over the place.
| ptsneves wrote:
| A true classic. It looked extra cheesy when he advertised for
| Huawei.
|
| The man is a sellout and it has a kind of charm, because he
| knows his place: He is a just football player on the verge of
| retirement and he wants to squeeze the juice for the last
| drop.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| I remember his silhouette of size of entire building
| printed on scaffolding covering entire facade of a multi-
| storey building and advertising Huawei. Now Iga Swiatek is
| slowly taking over, recently she popped out in payment
| terminal when I was trying to touch in the debit card. Get
| the fuck off, greedy girl. Please don't force me to watch
| you bloody face.
| badpun wrote:
| If it's not her, it will be somebody else. The system is
| the problem, not specific people.
| 1992spacemovie wrote:
| Lol that's the last name of one of my Polish coworkers. Super
| common name I imagine.
| cromulent wrote:
| On my visits to Warsaw, I have always been struck by the
| translucent advertising entirely covering the sides of new-ish
| office buildings. Now I know how/why this is possible.
|
| Example (hard to find because no-one takes photos of the ugly
| buildings in Warsaw):
|
| https://www.businessinsider.in/thumb/msid-70660934,width-640...
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| It's corruption. On paper it's probably construction or
| renovation and there is some fraudulent deal between
| inspection department in city hall and marketing agency. Fuck
| you, Coca Cola.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Wow, that photo is taken on film, I bet.
| lrem wrote:
| That photo looks like the 90s though...
| einpoklum wrote:
| I've had the same experience in Bucharest.
| Beijinger wrote:
| The Paris of the East? Strange.
| bn-l wrote:
| Warsaw is the most visually depressing place I have ever been
| to.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| Really? I thought the old area along the west bank of the
| Vistula was nice. I didn't see much of the rest of the
| city, but most cities are uninspiring outside of their
| central areas.
| oblio wrote:
| You should visit Bucharest. Or, I imagine, Detroit :-p
| r053bud wrote:
| Nah Detroit has some beautiful architecture and really
| surprised me when I visited last year. Also being on a
| river and next to a lake is a nice feature. I've been to
| plenty of more depressing places in the US
| Loughla wrote:
| Mostly any ex-steel based industry town in the rust belt
| except Detroit, only because it has been the focus of
| overt development to directly impact its image as a
| wasteland. Not sure what took its place.
|
| Maybe Gary, Indiana? It's pretty crappy.
| illiac786 wrote:
| There put scaffold up just to hang advertising?!? That is so
| incredibly expensive, how can it be worth it? I had recently
| some shutters installed at my home (second floor) and the most
| expensive part was the scaffold...
| cyberpunk wrote:
| The marketing budget for a billboard / poster campaign is in
| the millions; they have to spend it somewhere or they'll get
| less next year.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| Moreover, if it's the _only_ advertising opportunity in the
| space, it's nominally higher value than it would be in a
| city with a large billboard presence.
| justinclift wrote:
| Can't scaffolding be reused though? If it lasts for years,
| and can be reused, then there's probably standard
| amortisation approaches for it.
| illiac786 wrote:
| Oh yeah, I meant the _renting_ of scaffolding is super
| expensive.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| When travelling through Poland then the contrast of visual
| pollution by billboards and other advertisements has been very
| big, between for example Estonia, Latvia, the nordic countries
| and Poland.
|
| In Poland basically everything is covered in huge
| adveretisements, "Kantor" here and there, car repair shops,
| etc. On bus stops all the walls are covered in them and there
| is even something on top of it, facing the road.
|
| Drinving there is tiring, the brain just gets tired from it.
|
| We think its part of slavic culture or something.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> We think its part of slavic culture or something._
|
| It isn't. It's the same, or worse, in Romania.
|
| It's just rabid unregulated capitalism of the post communist
| countries, gone wild, where everything is about making as
| much money as possible any way you can, which means
| advertising everywhere so you can influence people to spend
| their money with you. Romania is now IRL what the internet
| looks like without ad block.
|
| The ads for gambling and betting are the most nefarious, to
| the point it's becoming a societal issue.
| imajoredinecon wrote:
| Same deal here in Chicago compared to the West Coast city
| where I previously lived
| oblio wrote:
| > The ads for gambling and betting are the most nefarious,
| to the point it's becoming a societal issue.
|
| To that point: https://imgur.com/UWqa8jX
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Why the pharmacies? I noticed the same thing visiting
| Vegas, half the shops on the strip are pharmacies
| jakub_g wrote:
| > Driving there is tiring, the brain just gets tired from it.
|
| I moved away from Poland a decade ago, and each time I come
| back I get distracted like crazy as a passenger in a car. My
| brain doesn't know what's happening for the first hour until
| I realize what's up.
|
| Literally every 50m there's a billboard on a road, billboard
| on someone's house, billboard on a fence. From big companies
| (telcos etc.) through all kinds of local businesses ("Selling
| X", "buying Y", "repairing Z").
|
| A relevant meme that is on point:
| https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EvoPf6OWYAMC0Sd.jpg
| andrepd wrote:
| Damn, I identify with that photo a lot. Portugal is truly
| honorary Eastern Europe.
| mantas wrote:
| Up here in Lithuania we used to make fun of your billboards
| 20 years ago. But now it's getting worse and worse here too.
| While you seem to have rebounded from the lowest point.
| badpun wrote:
| It's not like that in the countryside. But in the cities,
| especially among the major inbound roads, yikes.
| cafard wrote:
| Try a drive in Pennsylvania.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| This is so wonderful. One instantly goes from feeling like a
| consumption robot to feeling human, just from looking at the
| pics. I wish this was everywhere.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/11sbctl/krak%C3%B3w...
| 627467 wrote:
| > (e.g. covers of renovation works can contain up to 50% of
| advertising area, so we have renovations of just finished
| buildings only to put the covers with ads).
|
| Actually finetuning the policies and regulations may provide
| the right incentive to both promote regular upkeep of buildings
| as well as funding them. Example: Ads over scaffold are only
| allowed every 5 years during renovations.
| xnx wrote:
| Mixed blessing of the coming AR (augmented reality) adscape is
| that virtual ads projected into our eyeballs will be cheaper
| and more targeted/effective than meatspace billboards.
| bn-l wrote:
| I hope there will be a ublock origin AR edition.
| brodo wrote:
| AR "metaverse" stuff did not take off on the last hype cycle,
| and even Apple's VR headset does not sell. If AR is "coming,"
| it is coming rather slowly.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| AR is "coming" in the same way smartphones were coming for
| years (decades?). Then iPhone happened and the rest is
| history. Technology needs to reach a level where it becomes
| obviously useful (for AR - low weight, cool form, not
| tiring,...)
| justinclift wrote:
| And that's pretty much the whole reason why Facebook/Meta
| can't be trusted with this stuff. :(
| mbesto wrote:
| Currently in Krakow, this city is absolutely gorgeous for the
| eastern bloc. Now I understand why.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _should be banned everywhere_
|
| Totally agree. Particularly vexed by New York letting Sidewalk
| Labs put these billboards across our streets [1].
|
| [1] https://platform.vox.com/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/2/chorus/u...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| They are probably paying the city revenue.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _are probably paying the city revenue_
|
| They absolutely are.
| crabmusket wrote:
| At least that one isn't blocking the footpath unlike what
| we've been dealing with in Sydney:
|
| https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/ridiculous-
| electron...
| whiplash451 wrote:
| I don't know if this includes subways but that would be welcome.
| Subway corridors full of billboards are an absolute brain drain.
| account42 wrote:
| Exactly I already pay for my fare and the government is already
| heavily subsidizing the transport company using my taxes but
| somehow I still need to pay with my attention? Fuck that.
| adalacelove wrote:
| I have always wondered how a world without marketing would look.
| I think marketing has a net negative effect. I also think that
| maybe you cannot eliminate all marketing but you can easily
| eliminate most of it just by controlling the spending of big
| companies, so it's possible. I have no ethical problems with
| eliminating it, as I consider it a form of manipulation and
| falsehood spreading, and anyway I don't consider companies have a
| right to free speech, or any real rights for that matter.
| m463 wrote:
| I kind of wonder how far you want to go with these sorts of
| things.
|
| Would controlling things like this bleed into adjacent social
| controls, like how HOAs will prevent any house from looking too
| different? Or possibly take on other dimensions, like sponsored
| in-real-life product placement and word-of-mouth?
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| As far as it makes sense and has a positive effect, don't be
| a pain.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| I don't think this is a real concern.
|
| Regular people living their lives like to make arbitrary
| changes to their houses, which is why HOA rules are
| contentious.
|
| Regular people aren't paid to advertise as they go about
| their day. It's not very comparable.
|
| And I've never heard anyone suggest that word of mouth
| recommendations should be banned... That's kind of an insane
| idea that isn't even remotely possible.
| 6510 wrote:
| > I have always wondered how a world without marketing would
| look.
|
| We would all be standing there at the entrance of the
| supermarket exchanging awkward looks not knowing what to do
| until an old lady shows up and we grab a cart because she did.
| Then we follow her around the store pretending not to be
| looking, buying the same products. When everyone has paid and
| the old lady is long gone we have conversations about what to
| do with the things we've just purchased.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Your vision of a world without marketing doesn't have
| children raised by adults? How would that work?
| account42 wrote:
| Is this supposed to be sarcasm? Genuinely stumped what you
| are trying to say because the literal interpretation of your
| comment makes zero sense.
| 6510 wrote:
| Oh man, I thought it was completely obvious what marketing
| is.
|
| It takes effort to bridge the gap between users and
| manufacturers. We are used to the company doing the work
| and picking up the bill but the customer has as much need
| to figure out what solutions are available.
|
| Having the company search the customer only barely works.
| It works but very poorly and only to some extend. The
| potential client feels bothered by the noise of endless
| offers and spends very little time on them. In stead of
| dangling your garden set in their face until one of them
| bites you can put it in a store next to the other garden
| sets.
|
| Because pushing barely work products are limited to that
| what is instantly obvious.
|
| Customers may also gather and inform themselves. They might
| willingly go to a conference and sit though lengthy
| presentations. In stead of screaming at you that I offer an
| email service a presentation is more about what sets it
| apart [say] its scripting interface.
|
| If stores and conferences are still considered marketing
| the customer will have to put in more work to stay
| informed. They would tend more towards objective side by
| side comparison making the company more about the product
| than about marketing.
|
| The pun of my joke was that customers are not stupid. They
| can find the breakfast cereal aisle and pick something
| entirely by themselves.
|
| I thought it was obvious since the screaming contest is
| enormously frustrating. An overpriced mediocre product will
| allow for the largest budget which is most likely to win -
| so that is what you have to make? lame
| kortilla wrote:
| A lot of marketing is not falsehood spreading. It's literally
| just trying to get the word to potential customers that a thing
| exists that might be useful to them. Most b2b marketing is like
| that.
|
| I agree that marketing where they have an attractive person
| just show something is manipulative though.
| kelnos wrote:
| Show me an ad that you think is just "trying to get the word
| out" and I'll show you the lies.
| kortilla wrote:
| Sure, google "skid steer rental Chicago".
|
| One of the sponsored results is for an electric skid steer
| that I didn't know existed. This is genuinely useful to
| know for small jobs.
|
| Another sponsored result is for a delivery rental service
| that can bring them anywhere. Also good to know for jobs
| where I don't want to go to an equipment rental place in
| the city to haul it myself to a site 150 miles away.
|
| A separate example is that lots of airports have 3rd party
| off airport parking that is cheaper. A billboard on the
| highway to the airport that says "off-site aport parking
| $20/day, $80/week with 24/7 shuttle service every 15 mins"
| is literally all just useful information about a way to
| save money using a third party at a convenience cost that
| you wouldn't think to look into.
| account42 wrote:
| -Xoogler working in the startup world
|
| Please consider that your worldview may be warped.
| kortilla wrote:
| Please consider you might not understand why I left.
| barnabee wrote:
| This is just so wide of the mark in my experience,
| _especially_ B2B where the sales and marketing tactics are
| just, well, awful.
|
| What I have observed is that almost without fail, I find out
| about really good, high quality products and services from
| friends and colleagues, through more general word of mouth,
| by reading reviews, and by research, not through ads.
|
| In fact, it is so noticably true that what is being
| advertised to me is rarely what I want that I use advertising
| as a _negative_ signal. If I recall seeing ads for something,
| I will consciously avoid buying it and that usually works out
| for the best.
|
| So I conclude advertising is mostly important for duping
| people into buying things they don't really want or need,
| that are more than likely nothing special, and that society
| would benefit greatly from a ban on advertising.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| So I'm curious. Suppose you're starting a new small business.
| You're selling a quality product but nobody knows about you.
| How do you propose they find out?
| tapland wrote:
| Well, when was the last time someone saw something like that
| advertised on billboards? Can't remember ever seeing anything
| like it on a billboard outside SF which is a very weird
| special case
| adalacelove wrote:
| Your product can be listed somewhere, discovered, word of
| mouth... The thing is you cannot pay to promote it. I agree
| it would be a challenge to solve, maybe some kind of
| compromise could be achieved.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| Partial answer: A lot of products people buy are not directly
| from the maker, but some store. So instead of marketing
| directly to consumers, the maker can just go and pitch to the
| store owner, who then carries the product. If there are
| enough stores out there (not a world full of Walmarts), then
| most makers will find many stores to carry their product.
| People go to the store, browse and buy.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| > A lot of products people buy are not directly from the
| maker, but some store.
|
| How does this account for high streets becoming ghost towns
| in the UK? It seems like running bricks & mortar stores in
| the UK isn't financially viable.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Well, ads obviously haven't worked...
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| One word. Amazon.
|
| I heard someone say Amazon did more damage to British
| town centres than Hitler's bombs.
| genewitch wrote:
| Surely you didn't read that in the Washington Post
| ghaff wrote:
| Wasn't especially my observation last time I was in
| London. But it's fair that a combination of online
| purchases and (maybe?) changing tastes/priorities have
| taken a hit on at least some categories of B&M retail
| overall.
| unglaublich wrote:
| Billboards are there for big corporations to retain their
| oligopolies, not for small ones to penetrate them.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Then how come small businesses buy them sometimes?
| burnished wrote:
| I don't know about you but I'm still not finding out about
| them, they have to compete with more established businesses
| for ad space.
|
| I have gotten precisely one piece of marketing communication
| that had a positive value in my entire life and it was from
| an online restaurant supplier. One. Solitary. Closer to forty
| than I am thirty.
|
| I just don't think the value proposition that you're talking
| about actually exists.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| You're just observing the long-term effects.
|
| If you're a new business and you're any good and you do
| effective marketing, in a couple years you're an
| established business. Then you see their ad and you say
| "well yeah but they're an established business." _Now_ they
| are, but at one point they weren 't. And at that point they
| weren't buying as much advertising because they didn't have
| as much money, but if they hadn't bought any they'd be gone
| instead of established.
|
| I also kind of suspect that big companies buy a lot of
| advertising specifically to outbid their smaller
| competitors on the ad slots, because the ROI is much higher
| for the company that wouldn't have been the customer's
| default, so the bigger company isn't buying the slot to
| build awareness, they're buying it to keep their challenger
| from doing that. And then most of the ads you see are for
| big companies.
|
| But not all of them.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| > If you're a new business and you're any good and you do
| effective marketing, in a couple years you're an
| established business.
|
| This is massively burying the lede here. Doing 'effective
| marketing' costs a large amount of money. Where is this
| marketing budget going to come from with a fresh business
| that hasn't begun to sell products at scale yet?
| ghaff wrote:
| >Doing 'effective marketing' costs a large amount of
| money.
|
| Yes. It requires an investment. Setting up a website.
| Maybe going to and speaking at relevant events. Sending
| out press releases. Etc. If you're going to setup a
| business and just not tell anyone, you probably shouldn't
| bother. And, in general, telling people and promoting
| your business is marketing even if you don't classically
| advertise.
| burnished wrote:
| And I'm saying that their marketing has had a negative
| impact on my life, I don't want it, and if your case
| represented a true and effective strategy then at some
| point I would have been exposed to it. Sorry, that it
| would have happened more than once.
| robxorb wrote:
| A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make a
| sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of quality.
|
| Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on their
| own, without paid promotion.
|
| I'd love to live in a world where there's no advertising and
| so therefore the only products available have to be genuinely
| fantastic.
|
| I can't see a downside - just as many products will still be
| needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect the
| economy negatively.
|
| What would happen is we would evolve faster and have more
| safety, reliability, productivity etc. The lack of useless
| junk polluting the planet would be yet another positive.
|
| Advertising is a net negative on human evolution.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > A product which needs help beyond its own merits to make
| a sale likely doesn't meet most people's definition of
| quality.
|
| How does the customer know anything about its merits if
| they've never heard of it?
|
| > Genuinely fantastic products spread like wildfire on
| their own, without paid promotion.
|
| What if it's not world changing product, it's just a new
| normal competitor in an existing market whose product is 2%
| better than average? Or is exactly average, but it costs
| slightly less? Don't we still want these things?
|
| > I can't see a downside - just as many products will still
| be needed for just as many people, so it shouldn't affect
| the economy negatively.
|
| An obvious downside is that it gives an even bigger
| advantage to incumbents with a known brand.
| jajko wrote:
| Not sure why you so desperately try to find some moral
| justification for advertising, having the skin in the
| game like many in HN?
|
| Its literally manipulation of those who have money to
| spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has
| absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in
| extreme cases it goes directly against it). Word of
| mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost something to keep
| the interference away but save you tons of money and time
| down the line). Its 2024, we are more connected than we
| probably should be. Manipulation always = lies, it
| doesn't matter how you wrap them around. We all have
| moral compass (barring sociopaths/psychopaths et al), and
| we all have opinion on such behavior.
|
| Sure its like nuclear armament, once one does it many
| _feel_ they also need to do it. But its purely emotional
| business on both ends (customers and companies feeling
| the need to pay for ads), where literally the only person
| truly winning is the advertiser (something about selling
| shovels during gold rush). Mankind as it is only loses, I
| don 't see any way its morally justifiable. Even having
| less services say online available for free ain't a
| losing proposition if you look at long term damage of
| advertising.
| baryphonic wrote:
| > Its literally manipulation of those who have money to
| spend them on product they otherwise wouldn't, has
| absolutely 0 relationship on quality on the product (in
| extreme cases it goes directly against it).
|
| This is an extremely strong claim. Certainly you'd
| concede that _some_ ads contain truthful information.
| Like there exists at least one ad that is true. So then
| how is it "manipulation" for someone to post that
| information in a public space?
|
| We jumped from "billboards are ugly" to "ads are
| categorically evil," and based on some pretty strong
| assumptions.
|
| > Word of mouth, unbiased reviews (yes, they cost
| something to keep the interference away but save you tons
| of money and time down the line).
|
| Okay, so how do you get the first person to buy your
| product if advertising is illegal? The base case would
| seem to require it. Same goes for "independent reviews."
| How do you find the independent reviewer? And this is
| ignoring getting a critical mass of customers for word of
| mouth to even work.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >How does the customer know anything about its merits if
| they've never heard of it?
|
| They buy it and try it out. How do you think most things
| sell? It isn't advertising! When I go to the supermarket,
| I know they have food and home supplies. If you sell one
| of those things, get it on a shelf. My supermarket
| literally has tiny batch products from local cottage
| industry. If I need hardware, I know I can get it at
| lowes or Home Depot. I didn't need any advertising to
| know that a place that says "Hardware store" on the sign
| will sell hardware!
|
| >What if it's not world changing product, it's just a new
| normal competitor in an existing market whose product is
| 2% better than average? Or is exactly average, but it
| costs slightly less? Don't we still want these things?
|
| This will entirely occupy all conversation of most normal
| people. People LOVE to talk about their shit that is
| slightly better than the same shit you buy. People LOVE
| to tell friends and family and strangers about this
| product they bought that is just slightly different.
|
| >An obvious downside is that it gives an even bigger
| advantage to incumbents with a known brand.
|
| Which is why Coca-Cola still advertises right? Because
| advertising only helps those just getting started in
| selling a brand new product?
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| One caveat being, some high quality things really do get
| drowned out or conceptually polluted by loudly advertised
| crap. It's a tangly problem that's for sure
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| It's less tangly if there isn't loudly advertised crap.
| tuetuopay wrote:
| You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways. Also
| it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted advertising by
| buying space in related places: magazines related to your
| product, sponsor spots in youtube videos, ads in specialty
| stores, etc. Start small by targeting an audience likely to
| be interested, not by mass-advertising in a spray-and-pray
| fashion.
|
| Example: I found out about JLCPCB from sponsor segments on
| electronics youtube channels, when they started their
| offering. Granted this is not a small business (the company
| behind JLC is a behemoth), but it is a Chinese company
| unknown in the west, that only did B2B before. They
| advertised directly to audiences that might be interested.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Also it would be more efficient to do semi-targeted
| advertising by buying space in related places: magazines
| related to your product, sponsor spots in youtube videos,
| ads in specialty stores, etc.
|
| Those are all still marketing. Whether they're better than
| billboards depends on what the product is.
|
| > You won't have the money to buy such billboards anyways.
|
| Billboard space is available starting at on the order of
| $1000/month. This is well within the reach of a small
| business for a one month campaign and the dynamic
| billboards will even sell space on an interval of 15
| minutes.
|
| The fixed billboards in the most expensive cities are all
| Coca Cola and McDonalds because those cost the most and
| that's who can afford them, but the proposal is "ban all
| marketing" not "ban all marketing by multinational
| corporations".
|
| The latter might be a good time though.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I thought we were talking specifically about banning
| billboard marketing. Or outdoor marketing if you want to
| be broad.
|
| I see no problem with that at all. Somehow, as has been
| pointed out in this thread, Hawaiians, etc, seem to make
| do.
| bhauer wrote:
| > _I thought we were talking specifically about banning
| billboard marketing._
|
| While that is the overall conversation, this specific
| subthread is rooted on a comment suggesting a _world
| without marketing_ wholesale.
| kelnos wrote:
| Word of mouth, to start. If there's no marketing, consumers
| in general will understand that they need to seek out
| products that they want and need, and will eventually find
| your new product.
|
| A side bonus is that this will eliminate a lot of useless
| garbage. Without advertising to manipulate people into buying
| things they didn't need and otherwise would not want,
| companies that sell junk will fail.
|
| At any rate, finding customers within the constraints of the
| law (including a hypothetical advertising ban) is not
| society's problem, it's the company's problem.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Word of mouth, to start.
|
| If you have two customers and you need a thousand customers
| to cover your fixed costs, you're out of business before
| this has time to be effective.
|
| > If there's no marketing, consumers in general will
| understand that they need to seek out products that they
| want and need, and will eventually find your new product.
|
| What you're really implying is that somebody is going to
| set up a website or search engine for people to find
| products, and then marketing would be replaced entirely by
| SEO and payola.
|
| > Without advertising to manipulate people into buying
| things they didn't need and otherwise would not want,
| companies that sell junk will fail.
|
| The assumption here is that the companies selling junk
| aren't the incumbents. What mechanism is going to exist to
| help people identify what is and isn't junk that can't or
| doesn't exist already?
| card_zero wrote:
| Do independent reviews and product testing count as
| marketing?
|
| There's some element of magicking away the payola in this
| thought experiment.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| We already have those things. To the extent that people
| can use them to get the good product instead of the junk
| one, don't they already do it?
|
| And, of course, we know that these things are often
| corrupted. One of the major problems is that people want
| this most for products that are expensive, but
| manufacturers only send free/pre-release test samples to
| reviewers they think will publish a favorable review.
|
| To do it right you need the reviewer to not have this
| dependency on the manufacturer for access, so they need
| money to buy the product themselves. Which is what you
| get with Consumer Reports, but they (haha) aren't funded
| by advertising, and then people on a tight budget forego
| subscription and don't know what to buy.
| account42 wrote:
| > To the extent that people can use them to get the good
| product instead of the junk one, don't they already do
| it?
|
| Because they are bombarded with effective psychological
| manipulation designed specifically to get them to buy buy
| buy without thinking.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| That's really two different classes of products. You want
| to read a review before you buy a car, but by and large
| people actually do that already.
|
| Low cost items don't need that because this isn't going
| to be the only sandwich or bottle of laundry detergent
| you buy this decade, so it's as easy to take a chance on
| it once and try it yourself as to read a review which may
| or may not be biased, and then if it sucks you don't buy
| it again.
| ghaff wrote:
| Somehow you have to get your product in front of (and
| probably give it away) to the people doing the
| independent reviews and product testing. That's
| marketing.
|
| There are probably some exceptions in well-defined
| markets with a limited number of products like
| automobiles but those are actually companies that, in
| general, spend a _lot_ on marketing and advertising.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > If you have two customers and you need a thousand
| customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of
| business before this has time to be effective.
|
| The obvious answer is that you chose a risky business to
| go into.
|
| There as a time when if you sold tiny hinges to mount
| stamps in a stamp collecting book there would be a
| Philatelist Monthly magazine or such that would be your
| target market where you can advertise.
| barnabee wrote:
| > If you have two customers and you need a thousand
| customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of
| business before this has time to be effective.
|
| You don't have a right to stay in business if the net
| effect of ccreating the conditions for you to do so is
| socially harmful.
|
| Rapid hyper-growth of the sort preferred by VCs might not
| be so common in a world which banned advertising. I don't
| see that as an issue.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| >If you have two customers and you need a thousand
| customers to cover your fixed costs, you're out of
| business before this has time to be effective.
|
| Spend your marketing budget on your fixed costs.
|
| Also, is your product direct-to-consumer? Because if it
| isn't, there are established channels to sell it to
| distributes, and if it is, you're likely a big part of
| the problem (since marketing of direct-to-consumer
| products is not usually a tool to let people know about
| new quality products).
| self_awareness wrote:
| > Word of mouth, to start
|
| The only thing that would achieve is that a "word of mouth"
| businesses would pop up. People would sign up, product
| place stuff in regular talks about weather near the office
| coffee machine. You would visit your parents and they would
| told ask you to buy some stuff you don't need because they
| would get a cut. Would you prefer that? I surely wouldn't.
|
| People have no idea how the world works, yet want to design
| laws and would like to force other people to act according
| to _their_ preferences. It 's so egocentric it's
| unbelievable.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| The same way humanity has done for thousands of years? Word
| of mouth and reputation. This isn't a new problem, what's new
| is the ubiquitousness of advertising and the amount of money
| that gets pissed away on marketing.
|
| So what ends up happening is that local businesses don't get
| any of the marketing opportunities which get bought out by
| big businesses with a large ad spend budget.
| SebastianKra wrote:
| My hope is that there would be an increased demand for
| journalism & reviews.
|
| Obviously we need to stop companies from paying them off, but
| that's not impossible.
| consteval wrote:
| In a free market your product, if it is truly better than
| competitors, will sell more. Because consumers will research
| products based on merit, and consumers can tell somehow which
| product is higher quality, and they can do it instantly.
|
| As you can see, we have never lived in a free market.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| If it's not 1905, you put up a website and let people search
| for your product. Modern marketing doesn't seek to inform,
| after all. It doesn't work to make a product discoverable.
| Does Ford Motor Company really need to spend that $400
| million annually? Would anyone soon forget the existence of
| the F150?
| genewitch wrote:
| i like the trap laid here. "But NoMoreNicksLeft, you have
| to pay for search rankings!" ban that, too. Ban SEO. If i
| make a page that has my product offerings on it, it should
| compete on my copy, not SEO or how much i spent at google,
| bing, FB, etc. This is a solvable problem with specifically
| _search_ technology, but also as a society we also have
| access to more people to ask for recommendations, to see
| other people talking about some new toy (or whatever) they
| bought.
|
| As far as search engines go, the search provider can
| wholesale ban everyone who even accidentally games the
| system. Put your widget catalog on a web page, be honest
| about your products and/or services, and you should be
| fine. I will repeat that, because i think this is the part
| that gets marketing graduates in a tizzy - _be honest about
| your products and /or services_. If you gotta lie about
| what you offer or can do, then i really could not care less
| if your business survives; there's already enough
| dishonesty in our society.
|
| edit to add: i actually logged in on my computer to reply
| to another comment you made (they should just buy a house
| closer to the job) which was very _good_.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| How might one practically ban SEO? The moment a search
| engine uses information on a web page to determine
| relevance, the operator of the website can modify its
| presentation to bump up its rankings. There's plenty of
| room even within the strictest possible bounds of "being
| honest", and being the first result on the biggest search
| engine is valuable enough that you'll still get an
| underground SEO industry, legal or not.
|
| Also, search providers know that users will get mad if
| they can't access popular websites, so there's no way
| they'll cut those websites off at a whim just for
| "accidental gaming", not unless they're compelled from
| above. And then you have the usual issues with
| corruptible officials deciding which companies are good
| and which are verboten.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| > How might one practically ban SEO?
|
| From a legal standpoint, this seems far easier than
| banning advertising of any form. Which, if you'll
| remember, has (some) constitutional protections within
| the US. In contrast, it's a bit more difficult to claim
| such a thing about SEO. We regulate the activities of
| business all the time, and SEOing just doesn't seem
| expressive in the ways that "free speech" are.
|
| From a practical standpoint, I do not have a clue. It
| seems as if this would just drive the worst of it
| overseas, where it is not possible to investigate or to
| prohibit effectively. I'll await the other guy's answer,
| maybe he has something more clever than I can come up
| with on a Friday at 5pm.
| breuleux wrote:
| A world without marketing would still allow for products to
| be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk about
| it. It would still allow you to have a website and a
| newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction
| would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews
| or references from influencers.
|
| So the way I imagine it would work is that you would register
| your product into an official registry (free of charge). Then
| if I need something specific I can search the registry for
| what I need, and your product might pop up, with links to
| your website, your videos, as well as all reviews and
| ratings. There could be a subsidy system that makes
| unreviewed products cheaper. If your product is really
| awesome, the awesome reviews should, in principle, suffice to
| make your business thrive.
|
| Of course, whatever the system in place is, there needs to be
| work done to make sure it cannot be cheated: if people can
| pay to prop up their product, they will. But it shouldn't be
| _necessary_ to pay to make people aware of a product that
| could improve their lives. Surely it should be possible to
| set up some kind of discovery system.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > A world without marketing would still allow for products
| to be registered, reviewed, rated, and for people to talk
| about it. It would still allow you to have a website and a
| newsletter that people can opt into. The only restriction
| would be that you cannot pay for better visibility, reviews
| or references from influencers.
|
| These are all forms of marketing, but not specifically
| _advertising_. I think what OP meant to say is "a world
| without advertising."
| breuleux wrote:
| > I think what OP meant to say is "a world without
| advertising."
|
| True, that's how I interpreted it.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| You know what, how about this: A corporation gets to spend
| let's say up to 5% of its total budget on advertising in the
| first two months of its existence, as long as it has a new
| product that is exclusive to the company and as long as the
| company is advertising exclusively for itself and for the new
| product, and as long as the corporation is financially and
| structurally independent from established corporations. Any
| loopholes that let Coca-Cola take advantage of this are
| systematically closed, the intent of the law is clearly
| communicated, and the FTC fines any established corporation
| trying to work around it.
|
| This advertising is only legal to put in free versions of
| media that have paid ad-free versions, and to opt-in
| newsletters organized by product (so that people can pay to
| keep it out of their lives but if they're curious about
| innovations in a space or just want to know what's coming out
| they can get a slight discount for it).
|
| This also gives an advantage to new companies, which is
| probably a good thing, though could of course be abused by a
| billionaire with fly-by-night companies, at which point we'd
| have to patch that loophole. Maybe with my favorite idea of
| "ownership disclosures", where the majority owner(s) of any
| given corporation has to be disclosed on product labels, so
| that you know if you're buying from Nestle or Unilever even
| if they want to obfuscate that fact.
| layer8 wrote:
| How often have you discovered a quality product through
| advertising, rather than through reviews, personal
| recommendations, or just being present in a store? I have a
| hard time remembering even a single case.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| if you need butter you don't go to the market? i'm confused,
| how do you live? you only consume when something show up on
| your instagram feed?!
| baxtr wrote:
| Your post is actually a form of marketing.
|
| Marketing for a certain idea, world view. Some may agree,
| others won't.
|
| That's what we do as species. We talk, we collaborate, we
| argue, we market.
| adalacelove wrote:
| I don't think so. For me the real test is whether or not
| someone is giving me a monetary incentive. The very act of
| having to pay someone to say something increases the
| probability of it being a lie
| baxtr wrote:
| For me the real test is whether or not someone is trying to
| persuade other human beings towards a certain action. An
| action that is favourable for you.
|
| This can be monetary of course. But this could also be
| ballot vote on election day. This could be a change in
| behaviour of people to drive less cars, but take the train
| instead. Or convince people that advertising should be
| banned for large corporates.
|
| Marketing is the art and science of achieving behavioural
| changes to your benefit.
| defrost wrote:
| Most in the ad game would see it as claiming behavioural
| changes to the benefit of clients in exchange for cash
| and reputation.
|
| Marketing is as much about selling a vision to a client
| as it is about moving the public.
|
| There are plenty of pointless rebranding campaigns.
| barnabee wrote:
| > For me the real test is whether or not someone is
| trying to persuade other human beings towards a certain
| action. An action that is favourable for you.
|
| I think the test for me, at least for the kind of
| marketing/advertising that should be banned, is the
| passiveness of it.
|
| If, while going through my day, I am interrupted by your
| billboard, banner ad, spam email, promotional app
| notification, street marketing person, etc. in an attempt
| to manipulate me into action, _that_ is the thing that
| should be illegal.
|
| If I walk into a shop and say "I'm looking for a camera",
| invite a business in to pitch for work, call somoene up
| for a quote, directly enter a query like "buy camera uk"
| into a search engine, etc. then I think that is ok. I
| have asked to be sold to, and I am mentally prepared for
| the fact of that happening (notwithstanding that certain
| techniques should maybe also not be allowed).
| baxtr wrote:
| Ok I agree with that. Attention intrusion is a bad thing.
| It's the worst form of advertising I'd argue.
| adalacelove wrote:
| Yes, we are always trying to have some effects on other
| people's behavior, but I don't think most people would
| say it's marketing. And maybe most important, quantity is
| a quality on itself. So, me as an individual trying to
| persuade another individual is a total different game
| than a big corporation trying to persuade millions of
| people. To give a more clear cut example, me having a
| look on the street is very different to mass
| surveillance.
| baxtr wrote:
| Of course it's convenient to define it the way it best
| fits your argument. I don't blame you for that.
|
| Quantity is of course relevant. But then again big
| corporations can do ANYTHING at a bigger scale than you
| and me.
| switch007 wrote:
| That's exactly something a marketing person would say
| baxtr wrote:
| Trust me, I'm a nerd ;)
| account42 wrote:
| The difference is that people come to the comment section
| here to read opinions on the subject of the article. People
| don't go on a highway drive just to learn about what lawyers
| and and casinos are available. I'm sure you can also
| understand the difference between a catalogue listing on-
| topic producs and unprompted signage.
| baxtr wrote:
| Show HN is also a big part of HN.
|
| Karma will you get more status and increase the likelihood
| of posts being upvoted. There are many guides online how to
| rank on HN in order to market your startup.
|
| HN comments have influenced my thinking and my subsequent
| actions quite heavily in the past years.
|
| The line you're drawing is super thin and only theoretical.
| atemerev wrote:
| Well, if you try to run your own business of any type, you
| suddenly realize why there's need for marketing. Things don't
| sell themselves. Nobody beats a path to your door even with the
| best of mousetraps.
| account42 wrote:
| ... because your competitiors are using ads to manipulate
| your potential customers into buying from them instead of
| you. Do you think people would just stop eating because
| restaurants/grocery stores were not allowed to advertise?
| atemerev wrote:
| I would stop eating because I wouldn't be able to sell my
| products and won't have money to go to restaurants! Like
| most of the people who don't work for employers (so they
| could outsource their marketing efforts to corporations),
| and have to market their efforts.
| account42 wrote:
| I can see why you would have trouble gaining customers
| without deception when you are not even able to answer a
| simple question honestly.
| atemerev wrote:
| Marketing is not about deception, it is about visibility.
| account42 wrote:
| You are right that advertising employs other manipulative
| tactics besides just deception. The other tactics are
| just as bad and most ads are straight up deceptive.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| Can we please ban advertising from society and into convenient
| little directory books where everything is categorized? If I want
| something, only *then* I [still most likely won't] want to see
| ads.
|
| Why am I acting so entitled about it?
|
| I just am, and frankly you should be too! :^)
| amatecha wrote:
| "We didn't recognize any public interest in having billboards"
|
| Seems about right - hopefully the same rationale can be employed
| in more and more cities.
| account42 wrote:
| And for different topics too. Corporations need to understand
| that the only reason they are permitted to exist is to benefit
| the public. If they are a net negative there is no reason we
| cannot or should not get rid of them.
| riffraff wrote:
| I don't like billboards much, so I'm fine with dropping them.
| Although this ban still allows sport advertisement, looks like
| sport brands will just start advertising every single match and
| gain exposition on the cheap.
|
| And of course we all can prefer "cultural" advertisement to soft
| drinks, but If the intent is to reduce visual pollution, why does
| the content of the advertisement matter?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| You're assuming that every single billboard switches to sports
| advertising. Which might not happen.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| On the way from office to home, there's a junction with a HUGE
| LCD display. At night, the screen is so bright it's very
| annoying.
|
| It's like being in a dark room and putting your laptop display to
| max. In front of everyone stopping at the red light. Not sure
| who's the genius behind it, but I think the ad has opposite
| effect of people hating the product advertised there.
| Narhem wrote:
| Ah yes the worm is being spread.
| secretsatan wrote:
| I'm all for this, I'm in a city not so far away, and there's so
| many nice areas with tree lined roads, parks, beautiful buildings
| and then suddenly a giant ugly billboard.
|
| I have noticed they are frequently vandalised, adverts are
| regularly torn off, and particularly large and ugly one has been
| removed down the road
| nyc111 wrote:
| This is great. I wish something similar could happen where I live
| but civic consciousness is very low around here
| SSchick wrote:
| Tangential: I live in a rather rich suburb in the US, there are
| barely ANY billboards, drive ~10-15 miles away from the city
| everything is _littered_ with billboards. Most of them advertise
| what I can only summarize as "probably spam". Tt is an
| interesting corralation and I would hope the state would just ban
| them.
| 98cnwpisufdh wrote:
| Something I like to do, to keep my personal space a tiny bit more
| ad-free: when on a flight, bus-ride or similar, where you have
| ads placed right in front of your eyes (mounted on the back of
| the seat in front of you), it's usually possible to slide the
| cardboard with the printed ad out, sideways, simply flip it and
| put it back. Enjoy a nice, calming, white rectangle for the rest
| of your trip.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I do this with ad plastered place mats in restaurants. So far
| none have put ads on both sides.
| GJim wrote:
| > ad plastered place mats in restaurants
|
| Good lord!
|
| Where on earth do you live where this dystopia is
| commonplace?
|
| One goes to a restaurant to relax. I'd be puzzled to say the
| least if the restaurant owners sought fit to try and sell me
| crap during a meal.
| Lutger wrote:
| Grenoble also banned all ads in 2014 and put in a lot of trees.
| It is truly an audacious move, yet completely rational. My dream
| is to also ban parking of cars in neighborhoods and most car
| traffic, cars can be parked along the edges in solar covered
| parking spaces. Add car sharing, better public transportation,
| urban agriculture, community gardens and parks: soon you'll have
| an efficient paradise of a city.
|
| Unfortunately mayors of cities in the Netherlands do not have
| sufficient power to change rules like these, its the state which
| makes these rules. This is why we won't see such a thing in my
| country. There are progressive cities where it could fly, but
| overall the Netherlands has become extremely conservative.
| systemtest wrote:
| The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car to
| get to work. They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an
| edge parking or city hub. If we want to lower cars in
| neighbourhoods, or want people to get rid of cars, our public
| transit system needs to be come a lot better first. If public
| transit was a good option to get to work for people, more
| people would use it.
|
| For me going to work is either a 20 minute car ride, with
| parking right in front of my house and right in front of work.
| Or it is a 10 minute walk, 45 minute bus ride where I likely
| have to stand and then another 5 minute walk. And I can't work
| past 20:00 because that's my last bus. Make it so public
| transit is less than 20 minutes, goes 24/7 and picks me up
| within 5 minutes walking of my home and I will use it.
|
| And no I don't even live in a village. Population of 140.000
| people and I work in a city of 300.000.
| bgnn wrote:
| busses are so bad here to be honest. a lot of metropolitan
| cities solved this problem by having frequent and efficient
| bus lines connecting to major train/tram/metro lines.
| Randstad is one big metropolis without a coherent public
| transportation planning.
|
| I moved here from Istanbul 12 years ago. the progress there
| was positive in this timeframe while in Randstad it was
| backwards to be honest. public transportation became more
| expensive and unreliable. busses are often empty and they
| seem to compensate this by increasing prices and cutting down
| the frequency, so it becomes less reliable for people to use
| it..
|
| my commute to work is 15 km. it's 20 min by car without
| traffic but post-Covid traffic is so bad that it's 50 mins in
| average (1 hour+ on Tuesdays). bus is 30 mins with 1
| connection but often I miss the connection and wait 15 mins,
| so it's 45 realistically. both are bad options, so I cycle
| instead in half an hour with my e-bike. if it's bad weather I
| take the car because busses are not on time so I can't plan
| being at the office for a meeting or so. plus, bus is much
| more expensive than my not so fuel efficient old car. go
| figure.
| systemtest wrote:
| Yes prices are problematic. The above mentioned 20
| kilometers to work is a 5 euro bus ticket. A bus full of
| people should not cost 25 cents per kilometer per person.
| It's slightly cheaper than my car but it should be a lot
| cheaper because so many people share one vehicle.
| briandear wrote:
| You have to pay the driver, benefits, maintenance of
| stops, and subsidize all the miles where the bus is below
| capacity.
| systemtest wrote:
| And we have to pay the shareholders of Connexxion, Qbuzz,
| Keolis and Arriva.
| papa-whisky wrote:
| Give me convenience or give me death...
| jajko wrote:
| Extremist approach will _never_ win any popularity and sway
| masses in such direction, so if you want to position some
| push for greener cities from extremist or even eco-
| terrorism perspective (so popular among young in western
| Europe these days), good luck seeing any results that would
| make you happy and actually achieve anything you wish for.
|
| World is more complex mixture of various people than just
| similarly-minded people. Number of examples in the past
| where people feeling righteous and above the rest imposed
| pretty harsh things on general population. Not the way we
| should be heading.
|
| We have serious issues with ecosystem, but even removing
| 100% of the cars alone won't solve any of those (plus it
| won't ever happen) so let's be a bit more smart.
| systemtest wrote:
| In an individualistic country like The Netherlands people
| will typically pick what is best for themselves. You need
| to give them a better alternative if you want to influence
| their decision making.
|
| Nobody is trading a 20 minute drive for a 60 minute bus
| trip in order to create a better neighbourhood. Get that
| bus trip down to at most 30 minutes and people might
| reconsider.
| namdnay wrote:
| > people will typically pick what is best for themselves.
| You need to give them a better alternative if you want to
| influence their decision making
|
| Or remove/penalise the more convenient (but harmful)
| alternatives. We shouldn't kid ourselves, we're going to
| need sticks as well as carrots if we want to avoid
| disaster
| rahen wrote:
| What disaster?
| namdnay wrote:
| The climate disaster
| rahen wrote:
| You may be listening to the media a bit too much. The
| concept of 'climate' is increasingly used in a similar
| way as 'social justice' in some political discussions -
| as a broad idea to justify various authoritarian
| policies.
| dbdr wrote:
| Listen to scientists.
| consteval wrote:
| The government deciding how to use tax money is not
| authoritarian. Making people and companies responsible
| for eating the cost of automobiles isn't authoritarian
| either, if anything I'd say it's the opposite.
|
| A big part of the reason why automobiles are so
| successful is that the cost are externalized. If oil
| companies and automobile manufacturers were forced to pay
| the cost of climate degradation they'd starve. But
| they're essentially on a type of welfare - where the
| people, and gov, eat those costs instead.
|
| If we're playing welfare anyway, we might as well use it
| for public transit. And, as an aside, climate change is a
| real thing. It's not even up for debate. And yes, in
| order to solve a problem, you need policies. The "try
| nothing and hope it works" approach has been our approach
| forever and surprise! It doesn't work.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| People do eat the cost of automobiles, what are you
| talking about? There is a federal gas tax, there are toll
| roads, there are property taxes, there are license and
| registration fees, there are even speeding fines, parking
| fines, etc etc. Cars also have an extremely positive
| impact on economic activity. They've enriched the lives
| of people, empower them to live in more affordable
| locations with higher standards of living, get access to
| goods shipped in from outside the state and outside the
| country at cheap prices, get access to overnight delivery
| on any food, product, or service, access to alternative
| schooling, medical care, ambulance services, fire rescue,
| police coverage, etc. etc.
|
| The climate has not degraded, it has warmed slightly. It
| is not even as hot today as it was in the early Holocene.
| The earth has actually greened from the CO2 fertilization
| affect, increasing the leaf area index on one quarter to
| one half of earth's surface over the past 35 years
| (https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-
| fertilization...).
|
| There are far less deaths from natural disasters today
| than there was 100 years ago (in large part thanks to
| automobiles enabling people to evacuate and emergency
| responders to be activated).
|
| Welfare is paid for by the same tax payers that are
| paying for gas tax, property tax, income taxes, etc. By
| no means should they be forced into some ideologue's
| vision for how "a perfect society" should work.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| For that, you're going to need to stop banning nuclear
| power and start embracing technological progress
| (including but absolutely not limited to EVs).
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| > You need to give them a better alternative if you want
| to influence their decision making.
|
| Exactly! Offering compelling alternatives is the only way
| to change behavior in a way that's a win-win for both you
| and the people who prefer the option you don't.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| Tangentially, this line of thinking has become very
| commonplace in the US.
|
| People will wait in drive-thru lines that take twice as
| long as parking and walking in for coffee, food and even
| school/daycare/camp dropoff/pickup. It's baffling to me
| but, on the upside, I'll gladly pick up their slack and be
| in/out twice as fast.
|
| Public transportation is not wide spread or serious but
| even in the places where it is an option (NE corridor),
| people often rather spend an extra 20/40/60 mins in a
| vehicle (theirs or a rideshare service) than use public
| transportation.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| > If we want to lower cars in neighbourhoods, or want people
| to get rid of cars, our public transit system needs to be
| come a lot better first.
|
| No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars.
|
| > If public transit was a good option to get to work for
| people, more people would use it.
|
| The people that live in the city center probably already use
| public transit because, for them, public transit is probably
| a faster commute. That means that the cars congesting the
| center are driven by people that live in the periphery or
| even suburbs outside of the city.
|
| So these people will want those nasty cars out, because they
| actually live there, and they will vote them out.
|
| You can never accommodate the people from the suburbs, unless
| they have a station right next to their door and their office
| and a train coming every 5 minutes, a car will always be
| faster. They live in someone else's municipality, so the
| mayors can just ignore them.
|
| People in the periphery are more delicate, but usually they
| are also tired of congestions, and it's much easier to make
| at least minor improvements to public transit for them.
|
| But again, you can restrict and make improvements in
| parallel, and the improvement will almost never be perceived
| as matching the restrictions anyway.
| systemtest wrote:
| > No, you can also start by imposing restrictions on cars.
|
| Getting people into public transit by making car ownership
| worse is how you get unhappy people. That is just
| unproductive and destructive. Make public transit better,
| that is how you get people out of cars _and_ happy.
|
| > The people that live in the city center probably already
| use public transit
|
| No they don't. The 74% of The Netherlands lives in a city
| yet 66% of people commute to work by car. That goes to show
| that even for people living in cities, going to work by car
| is still the preferred method. I'm one of them, in the
| example I gave above it was three times faster to go to
| work by car.
|
| > because they actually live there, and they will vote them
| out
|
| That is elitist "fuck you I got mine" mentality. Rich
| people in city centers able to afford expensive houses will
| make it harder for poor people in the affordable
| neighbouring cities to move around and get to work.
| izacus wrote:
| Can you provide a single study where people living in
| cities that reduced car dependency were "unhappy"?
|
| Every single survey I've seen across Netherlands,
| Slovenia, Switzerland and Germany showed big support
| AFTER the changes were made (but a lot of hand wringing
| like yours BEFORE they were made).
|
| The people that are usually unhappy are the ones that
| want to drag their SUVs in front of people living in city
| apartments and leave them there.
| systemtest wrote:
| Who did they survey? The rich people living in the center
| of Amsterdam that can afford to not own a car? Or the
| poor people living in Purmerend that now have a worse
| commute than before?
|
| Of course the people living in Amsterdam will answer the
| survey positively. It's not those people that are
| impacted. It's the poor person working at IKEA that now
| has an extra 30 minutes of commute because they imposed
| parking restrictions near their job. The rich Amsterdam
| city center person shopping at IKEA can take the metro
| because they can afford to live such a lifestyle.
| izacus wrote:
| I've listed several countries in Europe which are taking
| those steps. And they listed people who live there, yes.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Let's be real: you are not the poor person, you just want
| to ride your car for whatever reasons.
|
| Poor people will chose a job that is nearer, rents and
| salaries adjust to job opportunities - it's a good thing
| to decentralize, we cannot keep concentrating more jobs
| and dwellers around already problematic zones.
| alexawarrior3 wrote:
| Let's be real: you've never been poor. I have. When
| you're poor you don't "choose a job that's nearer". You
| get whatever you can take. If that's 2 hours commute each
| way, so be it. You need to eat and pay rent (at least in
| the US where there's not much in the way of welfare). The
| rich and poor alike drive, but the rich can live close to
| work and the poor often can't. The very poor take the bus
| if it's available and just eat the extra time commuting,
| which in my city is usually 3x the time driving. The bus
| is also a safety issue, my friends have been robbed
| waiting for the bus and after getting off the bus,
| driving is safer in this regard.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Don't be absurd. If the poor person somehow could find no
| jobs closer than a 2 hour commute away, they should buy a
| second home closer to the job. This isn't rocket science.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| Yes I have been poor, probably more than you, and I have
| chosen any job that's near to survive. Before starting my
| career in IT, I once had my car wrecked and consequently
| lost my job. I had to take another job nearby and commute
| by bicycle. If you talk about poor people benefiting from
| car centric cities, then you are delusional either about
| what "poor" really means, or about the reality of relying
| on a car when you're poor.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| > Make public transit better, that is how you get people
| out of cars and happy.
|
| This is fantasy, you cannot snap your fingers and make
| this happen, nor are the people in charge incompetent.
| Never has a city "simply" made PT better at a pace that
| allowed for significant car reduction _without making car
| users unhappy_. Again, car users will always complain,
| unless the PT takes them less time to commute, which is
| physically impossible to accommodate for all car users.
|
| > That is elitist "fuck you I got mine" mentality.
|
| No, car users have the "fuck you I got mine" mentality:
| they have a short commute because they are rich enough to
| pay for car space in the city, and want a perpetual right
| to this.
|
| > Rich people in city centers able to afford expensive
| houses will make it harder for poor people in the
| affordable neighbouring cities to move around and get to
| work.
|
| Rich people live in the outskirts in big houses, but want
| to able to steamroll with their car right into the city
| center, regardless of the impact to people living in the
| center and along the way to it.
| systemtest wrote:
| I can assure you that in The Netherlands, the rich people
| live in the cities. Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Utrecht, The
| Hague. You need to earn in the top 5% if you want to buy
| a place there. The people commuting into the city by car
| provide the services for the people living there. Police
| officers, healthcare workers, sanitation workers,
| teachers. Those people don't live in the city and with
| their work schedules often can only go by car.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| You're confusing the ultra rich that live in penthouses
| in the financial district, with the rich that commute
| from the suburbs or wealthy periphery into the center.
|
| > Police officers, healthcare workers, sanitation
| workers, teachers. Those people don't live in the city
| and with their work schedules often can only go by car.
|
| They absolutely can go by PT, or relocate, as it has been
| proven by all the cities that successfully have
| restricted cars.
|
| We cannot increase density in cities anymore, cars are
| not the solution because they simply don't scale and are
| not actually accessible to poor people.
| systemtest wrote:
| Do you even live in The Netherlands, making such bizarre
| statements?
|
| The top 5% earners are not the ultra rich. To even afford
| a 50 square meter apartment somewhat near the center of
| Amsterdam you need to be at least an engineer, lawyer or
| doctor earning six figures. Those people do not live in
| suburbs, that is where the people earning modal income
| live.
|
| Is this some sort of American way of thinking you are
| projecting onto my country?
|
| And where should those essential workers relocate to?
| They already live as close to the city as their
| lending/renting capabilities allow them. And no they
| can't all use public transit otherwise they likely would
| be using it already.
|
| And yes we can increase density. Amsterdam only has 3700
| people/km2. The metropole only has 900 people/km2.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| I'm a European enjoyer of car restrictions.
|
| You have a distorted view of what "modal income" is. If
| you can afford to live in the suburbs and drive one car
| (per worker) into the city, then you are rich. The poor
| live in the periphery and walk, use PT, or carpool. Then,
| the ultra-rich can afford to live in penthouses in the
| financial district and will always weasel a way in to be
| able to drive (or get driven) in a SUV, they are
| irrelevant to the discussion.
|
| You are relatively rich and want to have your way with
| your car and driving, and are using the poor as a bad
| excuse.
|
| What do you think will happen, that the system will
| collapse? Trains and buses spilling with people, no
| essential workers, police and healthcare unavailable,
| chaos, anarchy?
|
| No! Everything goes on normally in cities that have
| restricted car traffic. Because restrictions are gradual.
| If a job offer in the city center becomes less
| competitive (considering time _and_ money), then it will
| attract different workers from better locations. And same
| for housing.
|
| > And yes we can increase density. Amsterdam only has
| 3700 people/km2. The metropole only has 900 people/km2.
|
| Sure, if you want to make everything worse, you can keep
| dialing it up until it's too late. See any other major
| city in the world. There's an upper limit of what is
| acceptable, there not really a limit in decentralizing.
| consteval wrote:
| Part of making public transit better is making the car
| experience worse, necessarily. Because you need to take
| up time, and space, for PT. Unless you put all your
| trains underground, and build bike lines in an
| alternative (but parallel) universe. If you want an equal
| playing field, meaning both are given equal
| consideration, then naturally the car experience will be
| worse.
|
| The inverse is also true. The public transport experience
| is bad now because the car experience is optimized.
| ghaff wrote:
| >You can never accommodate the people from the suburbs,
| unless they have a station right next to their door and
| their office and a train coming every 5 minutes, a car will
| always be faster.
|
| That's really not universally true. If I'm going in and out
| during commuting hours and drive to the commuter rail
| station, it's about a wash whether I take the train into
| the city or drive depending upon where I'm going and what
| local subway connection/walk I need to do.
|
| It's pretty much useless outside of commuting hours though
| given limited train schedule and the fact that driving is
| faster at those times than rush hour. So I'll basically
| never take the train for an evening event.
| tizzy wrote:
| You guys are lucky in the NL that you have the _option_ to
| bike, drive, public transport. Maybe driving is still the
| fastest but the others are still treated as first class
| citizens.
|
| In the US you couldn't realistically bike anywhere nor does
| public transport go everywhere. Not to mention the 10 minute
| walk to the bus stop is probably much worse, especially
| outside of big cities.
| systemtest wrote:
| Agreed, on my recent trip to Los Angeles a 45 minute car
| trip would often turn into a 2 hours bus trip.
|
| And outside of Santa Monica / Venice / Hollywood / Downtown
| I would often not have sidewalks. It felt a bit like Spain
| in that regard.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| " In the US you couldn't realistically bike anywhere nor
| does public transport go everywhere."
|
| This does, of course, depend entirely on where in the US
| you live. People commute by bike year round in Minneapolis,
| and it's a stereotype for people in New York City to not
| have driving licenses because they take transit everywhere.
| digging wrote:
| I'm unfamiliar with Minneapolis - sounds pretty amazing
| if there's a strong bicycle culture there, but not if
| "people" only means <1% of commuters. Bicycle enthusiasts
| live everywhere and are willing to make difficult or
| risky trips; we can't judge a city by whether or not
| hardcore bicyclists can survive there.
|
| NYC is an extreme outlier, we love to see it, but about
| 98% of the US doesn't live in the area served by NYC
| transit. I am sure the population of Minneapolis is much
| smaller, too.
|
| The _vast_ majority of the US is prohibitively difficult
| to traverse by any mode except car. (Actually, it 's
| usually a highly frustrating and dangerous experience by
| car, too.) I see reports of more than 60% of the
| population living in suburbs, which are, as a general
| rule, designed to discourage non-car travel.
| ghaff wrote:
| NYC is also an outlier in that there's really no cultural
| expectation that you own a car and drive. As an adult
| professional, I'm not sure there's any other US city
| where I would choose not to do so simply because friends
| and activities are so often structured around owning a
| car and certainly being able to drive--even if there's
| decent transit. You can work around it to some degree
| (and I know a couple people who do) but I doubt I'd
| choose to.
| coldcode wrote:
| In San Francisco it's common to not own a car, since
| parking is expensive and often not available and
| insurance is high also. At one point in the mid-90s I
| vaguely remember the ticket for parking illegally was
| less than the average parking space, until the city
| realized it. But SF is very small, so public
| transit/Uber/etc gives you many options to get around.
| Where I live now, if you have no car you go nowhere.
| floxy wrote:
| Minneapolis, average _high_ temperature in January: 24F
| / -5C
|
| Twin Cities Normal Monthly Snowfall in inches (1981-2010)
| Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
| Annual 12.1 7.8 10.2 2.5 Trace 0 0 0 Trace
| 0.6 9.3 11.5 54.0
|
| https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Minnesota/Places/m
| inn...
|
| https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/climate/twin_cities/snowfall.
| htm...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| I don't think they're designed explicitly to discourage
| non-car travel. It's quite easy to ride a bike around the
| suburbs and kids in particular do it all the time. It's
| just that as a function of everyone wanting a quarter
| acre lot and cul-de-sacs, the neighborhoods themselves
| take miles to navigate and then you have to get to a main
| thoroughfare or possibly even a freeway to then commute
| 10+ miles to work or to get groceries or see a movie or
| whatever you might want to do. Try riding a bike 15 miles
| with 2 kids in tow while picking up groceries on the way
| back home from some after-school activity or sport. It's
| just not feasible.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Unless it is some express buss I think it might be hard to
| get buss travel time to less than twice that of a car.
|
| edit: Meant twice, not half.
| systemtest wrote:
| Didn't say bus, I meant public transit overal. Living and
| working in two cities of that size there should be faster
| public transit between them.
|
| Either that or better city planning so you don't end up
| with two cities of 140k and 300k but instead have one city
| of 440k with better interconnects between neighbourhoods
| and more light rail.
| its_bbq wrote:
| Travel by bus in London and your opinion may change
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| BRT can do interesting things though, since it can skip
| traffic without skipping stops.
| travisporter wrote:
| Honestly, even with the cost and the time I would take the
| bus. I hate driving so much lol.
| gpm wrote:
| > The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car
| to get to work
|
| I was curious about the statistics for this, and it looks
| like _barely_ not to me, according to this data:
| https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/figures/detail/84710ENG (the CSV you
| can download is much more readable than the table in the
| webpage)
|
| 0.44 trips/person/day travelling to/from work total in 2023,
| 0.21 of those by car. 2023 is the first year where that is
| the case though.
|
| Edit: If you go to the Dutch version of the data it includes
| another category for cars (commuting as a passenger in a car)
| that the English data omitted, with 0.01 of the trips. Moving
| it from "majority not-by-car in 2023" to "rounding errors
| mean the data doesn't say which is in the majority":
| https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/cijfers/detail/84710NED
| systemtest wrote:
| https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-
| vervoer/pe...
|
| > Inwoners van Nederland legden in 2022 gemiddeld 7,4
| kilometer per dag af om van en naar het werk te gaan. Ruim
| 70 procent van de reizigerskilometers van en naar het werk
| werd met de auto afgelegd, meestal als bestuurder. De trein
| werd gebruikt voor 10 procent van deze kilometers, de
| gemiddelde afstand per treinverplaatsing van en naar het
| werk was 42,8 kilometer. Fietsen was goed voor 29 procent
| van de verplaatsingen van en naar het werk en voor 8
| procent van de afgelegde afstand voor dit doel. De
| gemiddelde verplaatsingsafstand op de fiets was 4,7
| kilometer. Minder dan 0,6 procent van de totale afstand om
| van en naar het werk te gaan werd te voet overbrugd.
|
| Google Translate:
|
| > In 2022, residents of the Netherlands traveled an average
| of 7.4 kilometers per day to and from work. More than 70
| percent of the passenger kilometers to and from work were
| covered by car, usually as a driver. The train was used for
| 10 percent of these kilometers, the average distance per
| train trip to and from work was 42.8 kilometers. Cycling
| accounted for 29 percent of the trips to and from work and
| for 8 percent of the distance traveled for this purpose.
| The average distance traveled by bike was 4.7 kilometers.
| Less than 0.6 percent of the total distance to and from
| work was covered on foot.
| gpm wrote:
| I assume that's the same data. Cars go further than the
| average bicycle/pedestrian so while ~50% of the trips
| were by car ~70% of the distance was.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| It's also funny because the Netherlands are the gold
| standard that other countries point at for "How to get
| people out of cars and onto bikes."
| digging wrote:
| But it _is_. Over 77% of US workers commute in a car even
| in this data which includes people who work from home (ie
| don 't regularly commute): https://www.bts.gov/browse-
| statistical-products-and-data/sta...
|
| So if you remove the 15% WFH, I'm not awake enough to
| math that out but car travel is the _overwhelming_
| majority and bicycle commute is still negligible.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Really Japan is probably the gold standard but people
| find comfort because the Netherlands is Western and thus
| familiar. Despite having little dedicated biking
| infrastructure to speak of, bike rates are estimated in
| Tokyo at a very healthy 13%.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > Make it so public transit is less than 20 minutes, goes
| 24/7 and picks me up within 5 minutes walking of my home and
| I will use it.
|
| Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to
| commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for
| you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight.
|
| > The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car
| to get to work.
|
| Not the majority of city-dwellers in the Netherlands, I'm
| sure.
|
| > They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to an edge
| parking or city hub.
|
| 2-minute bike ride then. And I say that as someone who's
| lived in the Netherlands, albeit only for a few years. It was
| _such_ a joy to be able to commute without a car (which I am
| again stuck with these days).
| TylerE wrote:
| Their shift workers exist, as well as people with varying
| schedules like doctors/nurses. 24/7 is nessesary.
|
| Edit: Plus it could probably be justified by the reduction
| in drunk driving alone.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| >Agreed! Except for the 24/7. I mean, when it comes to
| commuting, you need public transport to end late enough for
| you to stay late, but you don't need it at midnight.
|
| Friday and Saturday public transit should at least run
| pretty late, unless you want people who don't want to pay
| for taxis driving home after drinking and partying.
| Someone wrote:
| > The majority of people in The Netherlands drive their car
| to get to work. They don't want to have to walk 10 minutes to
| an edge parking or city hub.
|
| Not if that walk is through a car neighborhood, but if it's
| through a neighborhood where there are almost no cars, good
| sidewalks, trees and grass?
|
| Also, aren't many neighborhoods already somewhat like that in
| the Netherlands, with limited on-street parking? Even if
| there's a parking garage under an apartment building, it
| likely already is a 5-10 minute walk to get there.
| kristjank wrote:
| A pleasing aesthetic will not reimburse me for time lost.
| globular-toast wrote:
| They don't want to walk because cars make walking less
| pleasant, more difficult and more dangerous. Everywhere you
| look things are made slightly easier for cars and slightly
| harder for everyone else.
| seper8 wrote:
| >Unfortunately mayors of cities in the Netherlands do not have
| sufficient power to change rules like these
|
| Fortunately the mayors of cities in the Netherlands don't have
| their head up their ass so far they cant see beyond their own
| needs.
|
| GL in your public transport utopia if you have kids, are
| disabled, live in the countryside, have to travel for work, and
| many other reasons.
|
| Not everyone lives in a big city you know?
| maeil wrote:
| Unnecessarily aggressive reply.
|
| They even said mayors of "cities". Not mayors of villages,
| mayors of towns, mayors of rural areas.
| BytesAndGears wrote:
| 1. I see kids in public transit all the time, including kids
| around age 10 taking trams by themselves. It's also common to
| see groups of kids out on bikes or in a park. It's more
| independence, not less.
|
| 2. I've seen a full range of disabilities on transit as well.
| Plus, isn't it better for the disabled if it's easy for them
| to drive since the roads and parking are mostly free of able-
| bodied people?
|
| 3. If you're in the countryside, you can still drive when you
| need to. You can park at the edge of a city and take quick
| efficient transit to whichever internal part of the city
| you'd like. Also, living somewhere inconvenient like the
| countryside is a choice, and that inconvenience should be
| considered when looking for a place to live
|
| 4. I travel for work and have never needed a car. If you do,
| see the answer above for those in the countryside, that
| applies too
|
| We can all make cities better without being 100% binary. Cars
| can be the exception rather than the rule, though
| jcotton42 wrote:
| > are disabled
|
| I'm a low-vision US citizen, and our piss-poor public transit
| here is a massive problem for me.
| cchi_co wrote:
| > My dream is to also ban parking of cars in neighborhoods and
| most car traffic, cars can be parked along the edges in solar
| covered parking spaces. Some individuals, particularly those
| with disabilities or mobility issues, may find it challenging
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That seems like a good reason to ban "most car traffic" but
| not "all car traffic", yes.
| briandear wrote:
| > My dream is to also ban parking of cars in neighborhoods
|
| So less freedom for residents?
| stetrain wrote:
| Are those residents paying for the total cost of that
| parking? The space consumed, the opportunity costs averted,
| the safety cost of more cars driving through dense areas with
| pedestrians and cyclists?
|
| If they are then that freedom is a valid choice. If they
| aren't, then they're being subsidized by public amenities,
| and the public can decide how those amenities should be used.
| sib wrote:
| Are the bicyclists and pedestrians paying the full cost of
| the streets and sidewalks that they are using?
| stetrain wrote:
| Not through direct usage tax, but probably through local
| taxes. And cycling and pedestrian infrastructure
| generally costs less per person-mile of capacity than car
| infrastructure.
|
| Those streets and sidewalks were created through public
| action, the public decided or elected people who decided
| that that was a good allocation of resources.
|
| Just like we decide that parking in some places is a good
| allocation of resources.
|
| Changing our minds on which thing to allocate resources
| to isn't an affront to our freedoms, when done in a way
| that is democratic or representative.
|
| The town deciding to build a park on some land instead of
| selling it to a developer to build a mall isn't an
| oppression of the mall builder's freedoms. It's just a
| choice.
|
| Personally I find having choices in how to move around is
| an increase in personal freedom. Needing to own, insure,
| maintain, and fuel a car to participate in a community is
| a financial burden, and a burden on those who have to
| deal with cars and traffic while trying to do things like
| walk across a giant parking lot to get between two
| locations that should be reasonable to walk between.
|
| Casting all decisions that do anything to take away
| public infrastructure for cars as a reduction in freedom
| is ridiculous.
| skeaker wrote:
| Those don't actively impede everyone else, so I don't
| mind if they use them for free.
| breuleux wrote:
| It's not that simple. _Your_ car increases your freedom, but
| everybody else 's cars decrease it. As a resident who does
| not have a car, cars impede my freedom to bike and jaywalk,
| they are unsightly and reduce visibility, they take up space
| that could be used for bike lanes, greenery, benches or
| terraces. It would be far more pleasant if there were far
| less of them.
|
| I believe that Japan bans on-street parking and that you are
| not allowed to have a car unless you can prove that you have
| dedicated parking for it. That seems like a good model to me.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Your dream sounds like a nightmare. I can only imagine what it
| would be like for the very elderly or anybody on crutches.
|
| Cars are very convenient and rapidly developing countries more
| populous than any European country have been embracing them as
| their economies grow richer for a reason.
| wiether wrote:
| > Add car sharing, better public transportation
|
| Ah yes, the _very elderly or anybody on crutches_... the
| people who have more to gain from using good public
| transportation than having to drive a two tons vehicle on
| streets filled with living kids.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Seven of my eight great grandparents were still alive while
| I was in high school and two of them lived with us. We
| didn't make them drive. We drove them to restaurants,
| church events, doctors, etc.
|
| When I drove my great grandmother to a restaurant as a
| teenager in Colorado, I'd park right by the restaurant in a
| handicapped spot, grab her walker from the back seat and
| help her hobble into her favorite restaurant. It was a
| meaningful part of her week in later years.
|
| There's absolutely no way it would have been feasible on
| public transit, even if we'd had the world-class 2024
| Taipei Metro I regularly use now.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| When I lived in Tokyo and in Japan in general I saw old
| people walk all the time. In fact the irony is, _they are
| the ones that need to walk most_. Physical inactivity
| accelerates senescence. Only young people can get away
| with not walking.
|
| Of course there's extremely ill people and when it comes
| to transport policies there's always exceptions for that
| kind of commute, but the approach to elderly mobility
| right now is completely backwards. We should be
| encouraging modes of transport that keeps the elderly
| moving and autonomous.
| macintux wrote:
| I live in a neighborhood with a fair share of 50+ adults,
| and there are no sidewalks leaving the neighborhood, and
| few in the area. I could walk to the grocery store, I
| could walk to a convenience store, but I can't do so
| safely.
|
| I'd be thrilled if we started making sidewalks a reality.
| skeaker wrote:
| Why would they have issues? Cars in the posited scenario
| aren't banned
| snowfield wrote:
| It's actually better. Because disabled parking is still a
| thing.
|
| Also you can easily find a parking space, because it's
| somewhat expensive. But that means I can go downtown on a
| Saturday, easily find parking for a few hours, do my shit and
| drive home. Yes it costs 10-15usd for 2 hours of parking. But
| that's a small price to pay.
|
| Reducing everyone's ability to drive greatly increases the
| people who actually need to drives ability to do so.
| 7e wrote:
| Advertising is business owners paying to take a dump in your
| brain. Google, Meta et all are no better than billboards.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Without billboards,How will they know that Jesus loves them?
| ktosobcy wrote:
| Reading comments it's amusing to see people, seems like,
| brainwashed into not being able to function without ads...
|
| Well, for once - maybe making more informed decission when buying
| stuff (starting with "do I even need that" instead of emotional
| impulse buying becasue hot chick/guy told them to)
| account42 wrote:
| More often than not those making such comments are themselves
| involved in the ad industry or have been in the past. It's just
| another example of men being able to comprehend something being
| bad when their salary depends on it.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Where do you draw the like between information of a product and
| advertising? technical data sheets, pictures of a product, or
| talking to potential customers are potentially advertising.
|
| Can you show your product in a trade magazine? Can you list
| your business in a phone book?
| ktosobcy wrote:
| > Where do you draw the like between information of a product
| and advertising?
|
| I guess anything that's invides my brain without my consent
| (so all billboards, bus-stop LEDs, etc) is annoying ads.
|
| Now, if you see a product ad in a magazine related to the
| filed that makes more sense (and I'd love to go back to the
| internet where ads were based on page context and not user
| tracking data btw)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >I guess anything that's invides my brain without my
| consent (so all billboards, bus-stop LEDs, etc) is annoying
| ads.
|
| Consent is interesting framing due to it's interactions
| with public commons and shared spaces.
|
| Does one give consent by entering the common space? How
| much consent does one give by entering the common space?
|
| My opinion is that public spaces can have rules, and you
| consent to anything that falls within those rules by
| entering them. For example, Everyone is consenting to
| billboard because they choose to drive on the highway
| instead of staying home. The way to withdraw consent is to
| change the rules, and can not be done unilaterally.
|
| I think this framework can also explain the difference
| between a magazine, which is essentially a private space.
| You consent to the rules of the magazine when you choose to
| open and read it.
|
| I think it would be pretty bogus if I published
| S1artibartfasts newsletter to my subscribers, and some
| third party thought they had the right to ban me placing
| ads because they didnt consent.
|
| The internet is an interesting mixture of these different
| spaces. Google serach results make sense as a private
| space, so they can show as many ads as they want. nobody is
| forced to go to google.com.
|
| A webpage is clearly private, but is the world wide web a
| public or private commons? that I am less sure about.
| benknight87 wrote:
| The EU's love of banning things is lazy policy-making. It's
| better to disincentivize and let markets take care of it. That
| way you preserve freedom while also encouraging desirable
| outcomes. Further reading: "Nudge" by Richard Thaler.
| jiripospisil wrote:
| I agree with the laziness but Switzerland is not in the EU so
| not really relevant.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Poster above you (in my hnreader) points out Seattle is pretty
| ad free, so maybe its not just a Swiss (noted as 'not in EU')
| thing. If 'lazy policy-making' improves quality of life, why
| would you be so against it? Especially in Switzerland, where
| voting isn't so much about screaming headlines, but more about
| maintaining/ improving said qol.
| secretsatan wrote:
| Not EU, and a direct democracy
| panick21_ wrote:
| Switzerland isn't in the EU.
|
| And no, banning things isn't 'lazy', its 'committed'.
|
| Markets are often the right solution, but in many case its not
| about manipulating marginal prices, its about making a clear
| statement.
|
| Our towns will be better, our collective living standard will
| go up without ads. There is not clear way how we can get a
| market to arbitrate this.
|
| > "Nudge" by Richard Thaler.
|
| That book is way, way over-rated and also just completely wrong
| and informed at times. Even the best example of 'Nudge' about
| opt-out organ donor barley hold up in the real world.
|
| This podcast about the book is pretty good:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjArvN9cfgE
|
| There is a Part 2 that goes into 'Nudge' being used by
| governments around the world.
|
| You can find the show-notes with lots of sources they used
| here:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/IfBooksCouldKill/comments/137g83j/i...
| sensanaty wrote:
| Yeah we should definitely let amoral and psychologically
| manipulative business practices be handled by the magical
| market! After all, it's worked so great so far in all the
| places without a billboard/advertising ban where you definitely
| don't see an ad on every single public surface where an eyeball
| might eventually land.
|
| Let's also let companies dump toxic waste into our drinking
| water, the "market" will surely make sure to reward only the
| good, clean companies.
| mft_ wrote:
| This was the result of Swiss direct democracy within the small
| town in question - essentially, an idea from citizens, voted on
| by citizens within the relevant area.
|
| So actually more "free" than most countries can even imagine.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Not that I agree with GP but there is a lot more to freedom
| than "the decision was made by a vote". "Freely chosen
| policy" is not inherently the same as "free policy", it's
| just (often) a good ingredient. Of course there are plenty of
| countries which can't seem to get any aspect of freedom down
| so your comparison still holds true regardless.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| There are no billboards in most of Seattle and it is great. There
| are also very few buildings with signage on them. It gives the
| place a very different, calming, and aesthetically pleasing vibe
| compared to cities like SF or LA.
| AlexDragusin wrote:
| * Manila has entered the chat
| https://x.com/moonlight2129/status/1624712320059600897/photo...
| pietervdvn wrote:
| For those living in placed with advertisements: I've made a
| website based on/contributing to OpenStreetMap where one can add
| advertising items, such as billboards:
| https://mapcomplete.org/advertising
|
| A few anti-pub groups are using it to map the issue and to lobby
| against it with data in hand.
| account42 wrote:
| Neat but it groups points too agressively. Is there any way to
| still see the individual icons while zoomed out a bit more to
| see e.g. whole cities?
| dailykoder wrote:
| >Markus Ehrle, the industry association's president, said that
| money would instead "flow to big internet companies like Google
| or Meta,"
|
| When I saw the headline, I thought 'oh, what a nice idea', but
| the quote above might have a point and I am not entirely sure how
| right it is. But I guess there is probably some truth to it.
|
| I hate digital, and especially animated, billboards very very
| much. It's super annoying and just plain distracting. Maybe just
| analog billboards might be a good way. So local businesses get a
| way to advertise themselves. Maybe it has to get some regulation
| so that big companies won't buy all the ad space? I am not sure.
| yreg wrote:
| Disabling ads on the web is trivial while disabling ads outdoor
| is currently impossible.
| tcfhgj wrote:
| they can advertise themselves, just not in public
| jajko wrote:
| It steals drivers attention where focus should be 100% on whats
| happening on the road and around it. Every % of attention
| stolen is a big win for advertisement, and increases chances of
| bad accident. Do a bit of statistics on number of drives per
| day globally, number of accidents, increase that chance even by
| 1% (which is very debatable but in many cases its much more),
| and you get nice number of number of deaths and damages done
| daily by ad business around the roads.
| culebron21 wrote:
| Sao Paulo city banned them around 2008. The entire Brazil
| followed within a decade.
| mft_ wrote:
| This is Swiss direct democracy in action. Bravo.
|
| (They have a very interesting system, for anyone interested in
| learning about how politics may be done differently. And it's
| supported by [or generates?] a culture of significant political
| engagement within the populace.)
| cchi_co wrote:
| I support the idea that citizens have a right to limit their
| exposure to advertising. I think it is a good decision to
| prioritize public interests over commercial ones
| Eumenes wrote:
| Maine and Vermont did this years ago. Its very nice. Meanwhile,
| driving through other urban areas in the US, the # of billboards
| make it seem like a hellscape. At least personal injury and bail
| bonds industry is doing well!
| selimnairb wrote:
| Vermont is way ahead on this one. It's one of the things that
| makes Vermont feel so different from the rest of the US.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Fyi, drive through many parts of Canada and billboards often mark
| political boundries. They are generally banned, except on tribal
| land where the native community largely governs its own land use.
|
| https://www.bcbusiness.ca/industries/general/board-politics/
| jonathanlydall wrote:
| I live in the greater Johannesburg area of South Africa, the area
| I'm in is probably amongst the very highest economic contributors
| of the country, and while sitting still in traffic there is no
| where one can look without some advert being in view, it's
| dystopian and depressing.
|
| Even worse though, there is this amazingly fancy huge electronic
| billboard and then all around it (like most streets here)
| everything is, if not messy from litter, just generally scruffy,
| unkept plants / grass, weeds growing on the verge of the road,
| streets not swept, etc.
|
| Technically, the depressing mess is the fault of the local
| government which is generally incompetent, but considering that
| they already charge these billboard companies for the rights to
| show these adverts there, they could just make another part of
| the deal for the rights is that the billboard companies are
| obligated to ensure that part of the road is kept neat.
|
| It wouldn't be the primary reason for the brain drain here, but
| definitely just one more reason that people give up on the
| country.
|
| (The reasons why skilled middle-class people are fleeing include:
| Crime, corruption, constant load shedding (it's been better as of
| late, but it remains to be seen if it's gone for good), we pay a
| significant amount of income tax, and then also 15% VAT on
| practically everything (on top of the import fees for most
| things). Despite the amount of taxes the middle class pays,
| government education, healthcare and policing are not to be
| relied on, so we also need to pay for private versions of those
| too. The bottom line is we get terrible value for money for the
| taxes we pay.
|
| I consider my taxes to be largely charity to the majority of the
| population which is in poverty and don't pay taxes, so I do feel
| absolutely aggrieved with the apathy, incompetence or corruption
| of our government which results in very little of that money
| being used where it should be.)
| anonylizard wrote:
| Ehhhh.... Why can't the government keep the road neat? Isn't
| that the government's job?
|
| The problem with including a stipulation in the contract, for
| the private company to keep it neat, is its hard to objectively
| monitor (Unlike say the money paid for advertising), which will
| therefore 100% become a way to extort the private companies.
|
| The optimal solution will just be 'pay off the government
| inspectors & spend as little on actually keeping it neat as
| possible'.
|
| People need to understand a government policies is like a
| software program, its not trivial to just 'add a feature'. An
| extremely corrupt government, is like hardware that flips bits
| randomly all the time, so please don't make it do even more
| things.
| beaglesss wrote:
| SA has massive brain drain but still better than many countries
| producing talent by many metrics.
|
| I've looked at the visa process before and it looked as if
| getting PR is nightmarishly difficult compared to other talent
| seeking nations like Taiwan or Australia. I don't understand
| it.
|
| If you issued liberal visas and an ak47 to fend off the
| carjackers id think hard about getting on the next flight.
|
| Truly a breathtaking beautiful country and I hope things look
| up for you soon.
| ano-ther wrote:
| I'd like that.
|
| In some cities (at least in France and Germany), the advertising
| companies have a deal: they build and maintain bus stops, public
| toilets and rubbish bins -- in return, they get an exclusive
| right for advertising in these spaces.
|
| In these cases, there will be a cost associated to turning off
| billboards.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| there are no billboards in vermont and it's great. there's a
| baseball field by my house with a bunch of billboards behind the
| fence and it feels like getting saturated with american
| advertisements whenever i walk by it, like a weird reverse zen
| anxious feeling, seeing all of those ads after not seeing any for
| a long time
| drblastoff wrote:
| If they want to limit "visual pollution" they should crack down
| on graffiti. Zurich is covered in it and it's really ugly. Local
| Swiss claimed it's no worse than other cities, but it was worse
| than any place I've seen.
| Anamon wrote:
| By graffiti, I assume you mean tags, i.e. not the ones with
| some artistic value?
|
| I live in Zurich and also wasn't under the impression that it's
| noticeably worse than elsewhere, but it's certainly an
| unnecessary eyesore.
|
| There was some reporting on it recently, saying that a major
| issue are private building owners. Public spots are usually
| cleaned up quickly. They said the city has some form of very
| cheap service/insurance offering that building owners can get,
| which assures that any reported sprayings will be washed off by
| city workers within x days, but that this service seems to be
| not widely known. So at least, people seem to be aware of the
| issue and doing something.
|
| Nothing preventing tackling both issues at the same time, in
| any case.
| TiredGuy wrote:
| When traveling to other countries, and sometimes even just to
| other major cities, I always enjoyed seeing the different
| billboards. Often they would be for local businesses that I
| wouldn't otherwise know about, and they also convey some of the
| local culture. I enjoy seeing the creative typography to style a
| foreign language, the appeals to this or that "ideal", the quirky
| attempts at humor. It always seemed to me to be part of the
| antidote to the "this city looks like all the other cities" trend
| of cultural homogenization that seems to be eating the world.
| Sure, there are also the ubiquitous global or luxury brand ones,
| but you take the good with the bad like everything else, and even
| these will often have a different twist based on the country
| you're in.
| alexawarrior3 wrote:
| ITT: if you're rich enough you don't have to see the billboards
| saturating the landscape of the customers feeding the investments
| you own.
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| > ads online are much more energy-intensive than billboards.
|
| Is this quote from the article remotely true or even verifiable?
| DaSHacka wrote:
| Just on its surface I find it extremely hard to believe sending
| a small HTTP GET request to the advertisers webserver and
| pulling a .webp is anywhere _near_ as energy consuming as:
|
| 1. Arranging for the billboard to be built
|
| 2. Hiring workers to drive to the site and build it
|
| 3. Finding an advertiser to put on the billboard
|
| 4. Printing their advert on a canvas
|
| 5. Hiring someone to go hang it up
|
| Plus every time a worker needs to drive to the site to perform
| maintenance.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| I've said it before and I'll say it again: Advertisement is a
| pollution, a parasite, a _cancer_ on modern society that we 've
| all put up with for too long.
|
| It makes our physical and online spaces uglier. They waste space.
| They waste electricity. They waste computational resources. They
| waste brain space for the people viewing them. The most
| aggressive advertisers often sell low-quality services/products
| or outright scams, which harms those least educated and poorest
| individuals.
|
| They encourage people to spend outside of their means. They make
| people feel they _need_ a product or else they 're _lesser_ or
| _ugly_ or _poor_ or a _bad friend_ or a _bad spouse_ or a _bad
| parent_ or whatever it is they 're preying on.
|
| And don't even get me started on advertising for _medication_.
| The fact that 's not illegal is insane.
| lolinder wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of people in tech have gotten fixated on _privacy_
| as the problem with advertisement. You get companies like
| Mozilla that have come to the conclusion that we need ads but
| we also need privacy, so maybe we need privacy-preserving ads!
|
| For me, privacy isn't even half the problem with ads.
| Billboards along highways are dangerous. Ads represent a
| ridiculous percentage of the paper sent via snail mail today,
| most of which gets immediately thrown away (or best case,
| recycled). Ads on web pages prevent me from actually reading
| the content on the page, and incentivize an insane writing
| style that I frankly don't want to read even with an ad
| blocker.
|
| Ads are bad, in and of themselves. Avoiding tracking doesn't
| solve their fundamental issue.
|
| As G.K. Chesterton put it in 1920 [0]:
|
| > Advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would
| be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all
| holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with
| one voice, "Give me money." Yet advertisement does really
| assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the
| ear. "Budge's Boots are the Best" simply means "Give me money";
| "Use Seraphic Soap" simply means "Give me money." It is a
| complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns
| commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of
| those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very
| wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are
| probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their
| own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate
| their houses.
|
| [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13468/13468-h/13468-h.htm
| zerotolerance wrote:
| It is difficult to overstate how important advertising is in
| every economy.
| dekken_ wrote:
| No, it's easy to misunderstand what makes a functional,
| prosperous economy.
|
| People need to have the capacity to _find_ things.
|
| Today we have the internet, and search engines.
|
| If people want something, they can look.
|
| In this way, all parties consent, otherwise advertisements
| are harassment.
| rangerelf wrote:
| > In this way, all parties consent, otherwise
| advertisements are harassment.
|
| ABSOLUTELY this.
|
| Advertisements use MY bandwidth, MY compute resources, MY
| time, MY space, to harass me by showing me things I have
| zero interest in, all the while interrupting what I'm
| doing, distracting me, and then having the gall to tell me
| "but think of the poor publishers!!".
|
| They have caused the appearance of an industry that's a pox
| on all ("influencers") who behave like society owes them
| the space, time, attention and deference that for whatever
| reason they think they need.
|
| And for a cherry on top, it makes everything more expensive
| because WE pay for all of it.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > People need to have the capacity to find things.
|
| There's a previous step: People need to _know_ that there
| is such a thing to find.
|
| Some advertising (I'll call it "base" advertising, though
| there may be a better term) is just information. "Hey,
| everybody, there's this new thing called a mobile phone!"
| "Hey, everybody, there's this new disease called AIDS that
| you really had better alter your behavior to avoid, because
| it's deadly."
|
| There's a second kind, which I will call "us" advertising:
| "Hey, everybody, _we_ have the best mobile phones!
| Available now at WalMart! "
|
| We don't need the second kind, at all. I'm not sure, but I
| suspect the first kind is at least somewhat useful.
|
| (You can still probably call it harassment, though. Useful,
| but still harassment.)
| dekken_ wrote:
| > People need to know that there is such a thing to find.
|
| IMO, finding things, also covers not being aware it
| existed.
|
| Like you're on amazon searching for something, and they
| suggest something you might also like, they don't know if
| you knew about it already. That's fine, still both
| parties consenting.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| You're missing the largest advertising: lifestyle
| advertising. It's not "hey everybody, we have the best
| mobile phone", it's "You will be cool, women will want
| you, success awaits you with our mobile phone".
| fragmede wrote:
| The second kind is still information though. Where do
| they sell mobile phones? At the grocers? At the butcher
| shop? At the dress shop? At the shoe store? If I had a
| small store that wasn't Walmart, and wanted people to
| come to my store that sells cellphones, isn't it also
| informative to know that my store exists and that I sell
| cellphones? It's only because people already know about
| Walmart and that it's an everything store that makes your
| example seem like it's not informative.
| lolinder wrote:
| Which means that when we move to dismantle it we should do so
| carefully, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't move to
| dismantle it. We've had economies founded on unethical
| systems before, and we chose to dismantle them in spite of
| the risks because it was the right thing to do.
| brodo wrote:
| If I remember "The Century of Self" correctly, advertising in
| its all-present form was invented after WW2.
| dekken_ wrote:
| Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
| throwadobe wrote:
| Citation needed. Maybe it's difficult to state it, entirely.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| That would be like saying your body is full of cancer and
| you're still alive thus it must be the cancer that's keeping
| you alive. Where you don't know what could have existed
| without advertisements.
|
| I wish there was a low friction microtransaction for services
| which seems to be the main (only?) thing that advertisement
| allows that would other wise not exist. The technology exists
| to do this so banning advertisements does not appear to be a
| net negative to me. Before the pandemic many food deliver
| services were not viable, now they are (at least where I
| live), we could have done that without a pandemic but it
| required something big to force through the change. I see
| banning certain kinds of ads as one of those big changes but
| without the pandemic, maybe it'll change habits enough to
| enable microtransactions.
| mihaaly wrote:
| No! Not, at, all! Not the way it is done!
|
| What you wanted to say is how influential it is, not
| important, not the same things, how hugely distorts the
| economy, distorts it on a grand scale! Not important, it is
| hugely harmful for the economy and societies, hugely!
|
| Probably you'd mean the promotional aspect, the getting
| informed of a new product kind of thing which was useful if
| it was not a misleading shameless lie into the face of the
| society by willful misinformation and forceful push of
| unwanted matters!
| laserlight wrote:
| Like how slavery was back in time, right? Just like we don't
| enslave people for economic benefit today, we have the choice
| to act virtuously, independent of the economic impact.
| Galanwe wrote:
| > And don't even get me started on advertising for medication.
| The fact that's not illegal is insane.
|
| In most of Europe, advertising for medication, tobacco,
| alcohol, gambling and trading is prohibited.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >Advertisement is a pollution, a parasite, a cancer on modern
| society
|
| A lot of people don't know this, but advertising existed in
| ancient society as well:
| https://imperiumromanum.pl/en/article/advertising-in-ancient...
|
| Although there are many modern-born societal ills, advertising
| is not one of them, as it's far older than modernity. There's
| something essential about advertising - not essential as in
| required or necessary - but _essence_ -ial as in the essence or
| spirit of advertising has existed for thousands of years.
|
| I think it's important to understand this because, although you
| can ban the particulars: billboards, youtube ads, and so forth,
| the spirit of advertising will persist, as Lindy things tend to
| do, only it will be expressed in different forms.
| ccppurcell wrote:
| Something can be a cancer in modern times and have existed
| long ago. For example: cancer.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Advertising may have _existed_ since ancient times, but
| nothing like what we have today. With better technology has
| come the ability to do so far more aggressively than anything
| that was possible back then.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Before radio, advertising in places like London was wild,
| far surpassing what we are used to. Ads covered the
| buildings up to the 3rd floor. [0]
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising_i
| n_Brit...
| pessimizer wrote:
| This Roman stuff is barely advertising. They're talking about
| the signs on the front of buildings advertising what goes on
| in those buildings, and a guy who got rich selling _garum_
| having a mosaic _on the floor of his own home_ that said that
| his _garum_ was awesome. The last citation in the article is
| just bizarre, interpreting graffiti as _advertisements for
| oneself._
|
| The profession of advertising is only recent, and afaik
| advertising itself didn't really exist at all until the dawn
| of patent medicines, that since they were all frauds could
| only differentiate by circulating their dishonest claims as
| widely as possible.
|
| > I think it's important to understand this because, although
| you can ban the particulars: billboards, youtube ads, and so
| forth, the spirit of advertising will persist, as Lindy
| things tend to do, only it will be expressed in different
| forms.
|
| So, I think that this is a misunderstanding that it is
| important to avoid. There was Roman advertising if 1) you
| think that merchants decorating the inside of their own
| houses with art referring to the things that they got rich
| selling is advertising, 2) you think that inns and
| restaurants having their own names painted on their outside
| walls, and possibly having names that implied self-praise is
| advertising, and/or 3) you think that writing graffiti is
| _self-advertising_.
|
| I think the idea that advertising is a force that will
| automatically express itself through other equally intrusive
| channels if suppressed is a made up story.
| marssaxman wrote:
| > you think that writing graffiti is self-advertising
|
| I wonder what else you think it could be? The vast majority
| of graffiti works I have seen, whether in person or in
| books of graffiti art, consist of nothing more than the
| writer's alias. Some people advertise their persistence, by
| scrawling their names in as many places as possible; some
| advertise their athleticism and courage, by writing in
| spots which are difficult or dangerous to reach; others
| advertise their artistic skill, writing their names in
| elaborate style with color and shading; but they're
| virtually all just writing their names, over and over,
| trying to build a reputation.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| I'm going to be very blunt: equating modern advertising with
| whatever the roman merchants did is either incredibly naive
| bordering on stupidity, or it's arguing in bad faith,
| bordering on malevolent faith.
| underdeserver wrote:
| People on HN forget that ads fund lots of things. Ads are why
| Google is free, Gmail is free, docs are free, Facebook,
| Instagram and Twitter are free.
|
| You are all free to pay for search and subscriptions to
| websites you follow. (Today paid search is even reportedly
| better.)
|
| Personally I'm waiting for the micropayment platform that lets
| me pay a cent or two per paywalled/ad supported article
| instead, but most people are happy with this tradeoff.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| 'Free' is relative. Those services are still making money -
| just with _you_ as the product.
|
| IMO that's even more ammunition as to why this is a problem.
| This system has enabled a vast amount of personal data
| collection and erosion of privacy for the sake of the product
| being 'free'.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Again, it's more complicated than that. What does " _you_
| are the product " actually mean, really? How does it
| tangibly affect people's lives?
|
| I'm sure the tradeoff is worth it for some people, and not
| worth it for others. It's just not simple, and I don't know
| what the split looks like.
| Krasnol wrote:
| It is "worth it for some people" because those people
| don't understand how they're the product, how it
| influences what they see if they go on some homepage
| where their data is being used to manipulate their
| behaviour, how they lose money because of that
| manipulation, etc.
|
| It will become worse now with LLMs feeding on their data.
| Soon it will be cheap to gather this data and use it for
| all kinds of scoring processes. All those things aim for
| gaining as much money as possible from those people who
| use services which seem _free_ to them but actually
| aren't.
|
| Maybe at that point people will realise that they'd up
| paying less if they pay for those services....at which
| point they'll learn about the other cancer: which is
| companies which need to generate more profit every
| quarter and who make their services more and more
| expensive...and so on. #capitalism
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| It's a valid argument on the internet where we use "free"
| services that are costly to run, like you described. There is
| no need for ads in public spaces though. Banning them is
| fair, it doesn't make good corporations less competitive,
| they just have to rely more on other methods like product
| quality and word of mouth, instead of corporate propaganda.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Yep. Sao Paulo has been doing this for a while and they
| seem better off for it.
| settsu wrote:
| It is a faulty assertion that those things must include
| advertising to be free.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Please suggest an alternative business model.
| settsu wrote:
| There's a number of alternative business models that have
| been employed by organizations large and small for
| decades. More information can be readily found online
| which will be better than I could provide.
| settsu wrote:
| And I want to be clear that I am not suggesting that
| alternatives are superior, nor that Google, et al, are
| obligated to use them. Just that they exist and have been
| widely and long used. So just to counter the idea that
| the advertising-supporting model is the _only_ route.
| pshc wrote:
| _> I 'm waiting for the micropayment platform that lets me
| pay a cent or two per paywalled/ad supported article instead_
|
| I hope for this too. The free internet has grown wildly but
| now that it's infested with bots that fundamentally cannot be
| stopped (without onerous Real ID controls at least) I want an
| alternative ad-free web that charges micropennies per post.
| neura wrote:
| I hear what you're saying and somewhat agree, but as with
| everything, I really don't think "it's that simple".
|
| First, that you're even using Google search or Gmail is
| providing Google with data they use for marketing. On top of
| the data those services take in (what you search for, what
| you click on in the results, how much time you spend watching
| one video compared to another, what mailing lists you're
| subscribed to, etc. etc.) they are provided tracking
| information from the majority of sites you visit (either
| directly or aggregated from other services). That allows them
| to let their customers market directly to you or even provide
| data to other companies (for a fee) so they can market to you
| more successfully (than not having that data).
|
| Even when paying for a service, the next step is to add ads
| back into it.
|
| For example, as a paying customer Amazon Video used to let
| you just watch the movies/shows they had available. Then they
| started advertising movies that they didn't have available to
| stream, but you could purchase or rent them. Then they
| started adding in ads for content that was available on 3rd
| party services. Now they have in-content ads that you can pay
| extra to remove.
|
| They're not the only company doing this, but it was just the
| first/easiest example I could call up that shows a
| progression of what a company does when they already have
| your attention/money.
|
| You can see that Google has become progressively more
| aggressive in pushing ads in their search over the years.
| They didn't have ads at first, worked their way up to being
| the "standard" search engine, then started putting ads
| between results, eventually getting to where we are today. I
| can do a search today and the entire first screen of results
| (1080p, zoom level 100%) is just sponsored results. One
| usually has to scroll a full page to get to any "real"
| results, assuming that the top non-sponsored results aren't
| skewed by "the algorithm", which might include things like
| whether or not the target page uses GA, has ads that benefit
| Google, conform to what Google thinks is "relevant" (very
| loose term) basically.
|
| I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find an excessive amount of
| examples where services that started making money with a
| simple product you could pay for, then turned to
| subscriptions, then turned to add-ons for the subscription,
| then just started pushing ads into their service regardless
| if you're already paying or not.
| underdeserver wrote:
| Strongly agree that it's not simple. I just like to take
| the contrarian view here, with everyone in this thread
| dunking on ads.
|
| It's a very complicated trade off, and I'm not sure
| humanity understands it well enough to act optimally. But
| the ad based model sure as hell isn't all bad, like people
| in this thread make it out to be.
| mihaaly wrote:
| What the fans of advertisment forget how much funds are
| channeled artificially from the end user into things they
| absolutely do not need or want, they even loath! It is hugely
| distorting the economy this way! (money is spent of unwanted)
|
| People gladly pay for things they really need. And people do
| not need all the things they use but do not pay directly for,
| but covertly and cowardly is drawn from them under the hood!
| Lied to and cheated the people are!
|
| People not happy, people are forced to use this way! As there
| are no micropayment solution built instead of the hugely
| harmful ad practices.
| mihaaly wrote:
| They lie and deceive on purpose and draw a lot of money for it!
| A lot! That everyone pays but mostly those suffer from the
| advertismenet and don't see the benefit of it (end user),
| making a product more expensive than should be.
| Krasnol wrote:
| The fact that the measurement for good advertisement is how
| good it steals our attention should be enough to forbid it.
| It's psychological rape.
| hooverd wrote:
| I love this. Although, now how will I know that HELL IS REAL or
| JESUS SAVES?
| wunderlust wrote:
| The American mind cannot understand this.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| People think of advertisements/sponsorships as "free money" to
| support things that otherwise couldn't be budgeted for (arts,
| sports, infrastructure), but if you think a bit deeper companies
| wouldn't pay for ads if they didn't expect a return on it.
|
| If an ad during a sports game pays the teams/league 10 million
| dollars, that means they expect the audience to spend in
| aggregate 10 million more dollars on the product. Sure, the
| company might be making a bad bet, and sometimes they do, but
| surely it would be better for everyone involved (except the
| advertisers and advertising company) if the league/teams just
| charged customers 10 million dollars more (not necessarily 10
| million/ticket number per ticket, it could be merch, or perks, or
| upcharging for the nicer seats, but they do that anyway).
|
| If you think about it, ads are basically a tool to fix broken
| monetization. But as long as they exist, we'll never address
| _why_ monetization is so broken, and I suspect people would be
| more willing to spend disposable income on the things they
| actually enjoy, instead of the things they see ads for.
| bn-l wrote:
| The article mentions the economic gain from the billboards but
| what about the negative externality that the advertisers don't
| have to pay?
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Got keys to my new apartment yesterday and noticed there are 3
| billboards within a block from my place that will be slightly
| ruining the sunrise
| ErikAugust wrote:
| Vermont resident here. We don't have billboards. They are
| illegal.
| mythrwy wrote:
| Ok, but how are they planning for people to find personal injury
| attorneys now?
| pseudosavant wrote:
| The city I live in in So Cal banned billboards and has had limits
| on business signs for a very long time ago. I have always
| appreciated the reduced visual noise. It is really obvious when
| you cross over into the next city over because it is nothing but
| billboards all over the highway for dispensaries, casinos,
| ambulance chasing or divorce attorneys, and car insurance.
| They've been so strict about it that it took about 15 years
| longer to get an In-n-Out.
| m3nsr3a wrote:
| Ads are necessary evil. Though fight will(and should) continue on
| all mediums.
|
| Was building a case for German offline event posters.
|
| 1: https://pasteboard.co/2IJsohNRRpQd.jpg
|
| 2: https://pasteboard.co/nFpogptFxuty.jpg
|
| 1: https://pasteboard.co/IGaRJDbNWLFG.jpg
|
| 1: https://pasteboard.co/3sclWRFcjRFb.jpg
| meagher wrote:
| Adfree Cities is worth checking out - https://adfreecities.org.uk
|
| HN post from 7 months ago
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38629763
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/zvgZO
| hoosieree wrote:
| 1. buy real estate in a billboard-infested city
|
| 2. ban billboards
|
| 3. sell
| elitan wrote:
| This is the #1 feature of my Meta Ray-Ban glasses.
| keraf wrote:
| A metro station in Prague (JZP) got recently renovated and
| shortly after the opening, ads were absent. It was a breath of
| fresh air, finally being in a space without visual pollution. In
| the following weeks, the metro station was plastered with ads
| again and people complained.
|
| I can't remember the details of the story, but it was found out
| that whoever owned that space (council, city or public transport
| company?) charged a really small amount for the ad space, to the
| point where removing it was a very negligible loss in revenue. So
| they removed all the ads again.
|
| It's undeniable the most beautiful metro station in Prague.
| Freshly renovated, cool design and no ads.
| zuluonezero wrote:
| I'm feeling the irony of not being able to read this article due
| to the banner advertising in the Bloomberg site.
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