4 ms·

I have this idea that maybe ads should be entirely disallowed from everywhere, except for catalogues, printed and online. Crazy, right? It would work like this

by drclau 5y ago

I have this idea that maybe ads should be entirely disallowed from everywhere, except for catalogues, printed and online. Crazy, right? It would work like this: you feel like spending money or you want to buy a specific type of product? You pick-up/load the catalogue and browse until you can't take it anymore, or at least until you find something. And then follow a link to the seller's website, or get the address of the local store. No more ads everywhere, not in the physical world and neither in the online world. Admittedly, I have not spent much time thinking about it and the possible side effects.

igorkraw 5y ago
I've been thinking about this for a year and haven't found any downsides
- kelseyfrog 5y ago
  São Paulo's been living it for 14 years. I'd love to hear from residents how they feel about it too.
  - asxd 5y ago
    That's fascinating. Looks like this is due to the clean city law put in place in 2006 that removed upwards of 15000 billboards and other outdoor ads. The wikipedia entry [1] contains an account from a local reporter there. Here's the first bit: > São Paulo is a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You could not even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria. And now it is amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
bostik 5y ago
> ads should be entirely disallowed from everywhere, except for catalogues, printed and online. I've been saying this for a few years now, but that's only part of a Terminal Solution[tm]. I wouldn't disallow online ads, because done sensibly (https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html) they could happily coexist with everything else. Here's the more heretic take: make the core EU take the universal one - any and all data on an individual is ALWAYS the property of the person in question. No exceptions. Any third part storing a copy of it is merely a guardian of the data, not its owner. Then require for every single use of that data to compensate the individual.[ß] That flips the incentives, because all of a sudden every data processing round costs you real money that you have to pay out. Not in amortised compute costs, but in actual payouts. In a strange twist, the sums themselves don't need to be particularly large. The sheer overhead of requiring accurate accounting, auditable records, and all the extra back-office operations to make it possible to repay people at a global scale is expensive enough to transform the practice of hoarding personal information from an asset into a liability with capital L. In other words: if you want to advertise to me, you need to pay me for the privilege of wasting my time, my bandwidth, my electricity and my screen real estate. Through the nose, if needed. ß: I'm willing to make an exception to legal hard requirements. But unless you're a government conducting their necessary activities, you pay.

by drclau 5y ago

igorkraw 5y ago

I've been thinking about this for a year and haven't found any downsides

kelseyfrog 5y ago
São Paulo's been living it for 14 years. I'd love to hear from residents how they feel about it too.
- asxd 5y ago
  That's fascinating. Looks like this is due to the clean city law put in place in 2006 that removed upwards of 15000 billboards and other outdoor ads. The wikipedia entry [1] contains an account from a local reporter there. Here's the first bit: > São Paulo is a very vertical city. That makes it very frenetic. You could not even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria. And now it is amazing. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that we never realized. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

bostik 5y ago

> ads should be entirely disallowed from everywhere, except for catalogues, printed and online. I've been saying this for a few years now, but that's only part of a Terminal Solution[tm]. I wouldn't disallow online ads, because done sensibly (https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html) they could happily coexist with everything else. Here's the more heretic take: make the core EU take the universal one - any and all data on an individual is ALWAYS the property of the person in question. No exceptions. Any third part storing a copy of it is merely a guardian of the data, not its owner. Then require for every single use of that data to compensate the individual.[ß] That flips the incentives, because all of a sudden every data processing round costs you real money that you have to pay out. Not in amortised compute costs, but in actual payouts. In a strange twist, the sums themselves don't need to be particularly large. The sheer overhead of requiring accurate accounting, auditable records, and all the extra back-office operations to make it possible to repay people at a global scale is expensive enough to transform the practice of hoarding personal information from an asset into a liability with capital L. In other words: if you want to advertise to me, you need to pay me for the privilege of wasting my time, my bandwidth, my electricity and my screen real estate. Through the nose, if needed. ß: I'm willing to make an exception to legal hard requirements. But unless you're a government conducting their necessary activities, you pay.