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No, ads are not here to stay. The arms race will escalate. Facebook will lose. And so will every other entity that thinks they'll be able to force ads down our

• seanp2k2 10y ago
  This. There are tons of talented engineers who will put some serious time into defeating any insidious crap that advertisers try to shove on us. If they start doing things like hosting ads on the same image domain as normal content with indistinguishable URL patterns, people will implement OpenCV to see if an image has any text, and block it if so (trivial example). It might be difficult enough that the mainstream ad blockers will miss it and the arms race will temporarily be "won" by Facebook et al, but the tech savvy will never have to look at ads. Real life is one exception, since it's hard to stop cities from allowing the construction of billboards. People could start ripping them down, breaking the electronic ones, tagging them, hacking them and replacing the images with offensive ones, etc to send a message that we don't want this trash polluting our vision, but most people aren't that annoyed by them yet.
  • Grishnakh 10y ago
    Messing with billboards can get you in legal trouble, which is probably one big reason it hasn't happened yet, unlike ad-blocking on the web which is perfectly legal and doable. However, now that we have super-cheap small "drone"/RC aircraft, it would probably be fairly simple to rig one up with a can of spray paint and use that to deface billboards without being easily nabbed.... (Anyone who wants to use my idea is welcome to it!)