18 ms·

But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day. There is no analogy to interstitial pages with ads like in Forbes some time ago with the butt

But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day. There is no analogy to interstitial pages with ads like in Forbes some time ago with the button Continue to your article: it would be infuriating if you had to view an ad before being able to use the subway ticketing system. You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen. You don’t have pinkertons following you to learn your habits and show you “relevant” ads. If you walk into a grocery store wearing sunglasses, the clerk will not stand in front of you and say “I am sorry, please remove your shades before continuing because ads support our store and you need to see them.” But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well.

amelius 5y ago
For most women, photoshopped models on billboards already crossed the line decades ago.
- lillecarl 5y ago
  And for men the same, but with boxer-shorts ads right?
  - nirui 5y ago
    I think those ads were designed for womans too...
    - zo1 5y ago
      You could say that "sexy women" ads were designed for men.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - dylan604 5y ago
        you could say that "sexy women" ads were designed by men. This isn't so much of a FTFY as much of just a different perspective of the same comment.
    - shakow 5y ago
      Why would they be designed toward women; don't millions of men buy their own underwears in your country?
      - diordiderot 5y ago
        80% of consumer spending is by women in the us. Women are more likely to replace 'worn out' clothes There's a good chance that the majority of men's underwear is bought by women.
    - ciphol 5y ago
      Ads are designed for whoever is doing the buying. I would guess that most underwear is bought by individuals, not their opposite-sex partners.
      - danShumway 5y ago
        I guess the argument here is that those ads are designed for men, but they're designed to prey on an extremely primitive, kind of circular logic: "you would look like this if you bought this underwear." Sort of a "this man is desirable to women, please act like him." I am pretty iffy about that kind of detailed psychological reading into people, it's not completely clear to me that people internalize those ads in that way, and I suspect a lot of people internalize ads completely differently from each other, so I question if any of those explanations are actually generalizable. But I guess it's somewhat reasonable, maybe, to make the argument that male model ads are trying to say something like, "this is the clothing that attractive men wear, and if you were attractive you'd buy this." Or even, "this man is attractive and thus obviously has his life put together, and maybe you'd feel more like him if you had his brand of underwear on." But I'm much more sympathetic to and supportive of extremely broad statements like, "both sexy women ads and sexy men ads influence beauty standards in sometimes unhealthy/unobtainable directions regardless of the intent/purpose of the ad." I feel like getting super-specific about what exactly is running through a man's mind when they see an ad for underwear is when we start to get uncomfortably close to pseudoscience. But the much broader statement feels a lot less like pseudoscience, it does seem fairly clear that beauty standards are influenced by advertising (and by other things too, advertising is just one aspect of this).
- brokenkebab 5y ago
  I doubt there was a global women poll on this issue. And strongly suspect even if existed it wouldn't show that majority of women even care. You are welcome to change my mind
qybaz 5y ago
Thank the Lord reality (still) does not have cookie banners.
- cuu508 5y ago
  When you sign up for a store loyalty card, there's usually a form you fill out and sign. That's your "cookie consent".
  - qybaz 5y ago
    I don't have a problem with accepting some ToS when I sign up to a service. My problem is this new law where you have to accept the ToS of every single website on the internet before you can use it, then the ad networks, the analytics services, etc. It would be like having to sign a ream of papers every time I enter a store.
    - summm 5y ago
      The sites wouldn't need to get your consent for justifiable usage only. They actively decide they want more than that, they want to sell your data. So it's on them, the law itself is fine.
      - qybaz 5y ago
        Given that the sites wouldn't exist at all if it wasn't for the ad networks they use to feed their editors, it seems justifiable to me!
        Nextgrid 5y ago
        I have zero problems with ad-supported shit going out of business and making space for good, paid content. Imagine a world where content has to be so good as to convince people to take out their wallet. No more clickbait, "this video is sponsored by ShitVPN", chumboxes, etc.
        5y ago
Flankk 5y ago
The people writing articles at Forbes are on payroll. Ad blockers take food off their plate just to avoid a minor inconvenience. All you're doing is pushing these companies to either go subscription only or go bankrupt. Watch the level of entitlement of the people who will inevitably try defending their content theft. They can't win the argument and they always appeal to false moral virtues. They act like targeted ads are the dawn of an Orwellian police state.
- smarx007 5y ago
  I only visit Forbes when someone sends me a link and 9/10 times I get disappointed when I finish the article. When many of the resources I read put up paywalls, I ended up making 2 subscriptions to resources I trust/read most. I think you are taking this in a wrong direction. The real-world analogy of what you say would be “look at all that food a person is getting for free, all they need to do is to watch ads for 1hr; watch the level of entitlement of people who watch those ads in sunglasses!” Regarding theft: I don’t agree with the use of words like theft or piracy. Nobody loses an article and nobody is held at gunpoint to give one up. If you want, call it freeloading or schwarzfahren (literally black riding, ie riding without a ticket).
- davidodio 5y ago
  Honestly, going full subscription or bankrupt would be fine with me. It’s the publisher’s responsibility to find a business model that works. What exactly am I stealing by blocking ads? I have no moral or ethical oblication to view them or to allow them to follow me round the web… nowhere was I asked or consented to the exchange of my personal information and resources to view their content
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I’m responsible for my computer’s configuration; site operators are responsible for theirs. If I configure my computer to not show me ads, that’s my choice. If they configure their computer to not show me content, that’s also their choice. If they decide to show me content even if I’m not displaying ads, that’s also on them, same as if I configured mine to show ads and was then dissatisfied with my choice.
blackhaz 5y ago
But they do. You have to mentally process the incoming data first, then discard it. It's a waste of attention, especially with mind-catching ads you can't figure out immediately. Sometimes they are as blocking as browser pop-ups, e.g.: logotypes (or even full ads) displayed before a responsive UI is shown to you, duty-free zones in the airports, and so on. I am pretty sure we will soon have real-life targeted billboards. Even with the current tech, what prevents a webcam with NN to recognize if you're wearing sneakers and tell the display along your way to show some beanie ads, especially if it's cold outside? If you walk into a grocery store you are bombarded with displays outright, and before checking out you are tasked with cross-sale suggestions. All this crap blocks your mind and steals your attention.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  we stopped watching tv in our home a few years ago, coupled with pi hole and ublock origin across all browsers, i personally do not see ads and neither does most of my family. if i do see them at a friends house or somewhere, it is a really jarring experience. i was at a friends house recently and they were watching tv. i found the ad break as a horrifying experience. the volume is turned too high, you can't skip it and it becomes irritating after the third ad break in an hour.
  - laurent92 5y ago
    Ads are louder as an industry standard. In 2012, USA tried to implement the CALM act, which mandated content and ads to be at the same level (“A/85”), but it didn’t play out because ads are measured individually whereas a program is measured as a whole. Complaints to the FCC are still about the loudness of ads… See https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudness-for-broadcast.html https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudnes...
    - aix1 5y ago
      A while back I built an ad/not-an-ad classifier for TV frames based purely on pixels (i.e. not prior knowledge of specific ads). One of the interesting findings -- perhaps obvious in retrospect -- was that ad frames were on average brighter than content frames.
jorvi 5y ago
I think one element missing in that comparison is that you’d get a free subway ride or a grocery discount for viewing the ad. I vehemently dislike ads but I thought that should be mentioned.
- mellavora 5y ago
  So you mean the only thing funding the subway is ad revenue? Not, for example, taxes?
leppr 5y ago
Some new forms of IRL ads do interrupt your flow. Examples I've encountered: * In a mall touchscreen navigation kiosk, an ad is shown when you first wake up the device by touching it. * At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow. * On Starbucks screen menus, the whole menu is periodically replaced with a video ad, forcing you to wait until its end to finish making your choice. > You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen. In the biggest international airport in my country, there are now periodical Covid-19 "info spots" interrupting the display of timetables, check-in desk and gate information screens.
- dylan604 5y ago
  >At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow. Sounds like just one more reason in a long long long list of reasons not to go to McDonalds
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    It's amazing really. There has to be a business school case study there in how you go from being the trail-blazer and biggest success story in fast food, to one of the worst and getting worse with everything you do.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      It's also a school case study in showing how regardless they've gone down hill in food quality, in service quality, etc, their customers continue to patronize them.
      - throwawayboise 5y ago
        Maybe it's just me getting older, but I used to eat at McDonalds several times a week, at least. I have maybe eaten there once or twice in all of 2021, I'm not even sure I ate there at all. Same with my friends. It's just awful in every way now, from the experience to the food itself.
jyu 5y ago
Have you run into the IRL pop up ads? People walking in front of you, interrupting your UX for a quick "5 min conversation" about their chosen cause? These pesky ads get through my blockers no matter how often I update my filters.
- nulbyte 5y ago
  The local cable co. has set up shop in random places throughout the closest grocery store to me for a number of months recently. I can't stand it; it's like walking onto a used car lot to buy groceries.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    An effective way of revenge could be to pretend (actually, if they're a cable company pretending may not be necessary) to have a bad experience with them and ask about your money back or why you've been overcharged/etc, especially if their colleagues are pitching to another mark within earshot.
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      Bring your cable box and remote and ask them how to tune in to your favorite show Firefly.
- eloisius 5y ago
  Sounds like a typical stroll down Market Street. Never a shortage of people trying to get you to sign up and donate money to some cause, and they won’t take “no thanks” for an answer.
- tomjen3 5y ago
  I actually find those pretty easy to block, by just not engaging with them at all. Being polite is only for gentlefolk, riff-raff have no requirement for it.
- grishka 5y ago
  Actually yes. There are these "tea promoters" on the main street in my city. They would get in your way, and sometimes even literally grab you, to "ask a question", which is inevitably "do you drink tea?". This is a scam scheme where the next step is to take you to their store nearby, offer you a sample of their tea, and then it surprisingly turns out that this needs to be paid for and costs an exorbitant amount. Of course, this breaks every consumer protection law possible, but way too many people are amenable to guilt-tripping. I either ignore them and walk around them, or loudly tell them to fuck off. If only the police would act on this as vehemently as on anything even remotely related to opposition politics...
southerntofu 5y ago
Ads are everywhere you go on the streets. They lure your attention span with bright colors and LEDs which may create accidents. They reinforce a sense of need to consume and/or a feeling of being inappropriate as a person. Supermarkets will try very hard to "give" you their customer card so they can collect more detailed info about you and profile your habits. Companies often place adverts illegallly [0] by recruiting precarious workers who are going to face the police, not them. They'll even go as far as to cover a cycling area with a slippery material for their ads [1], or to cover historical monuments in spite of architectural regulations [2]. A multinational like Amazon will even steal a wall reserved for artists and pay goons to intimidate the population [3] in order to promote its shitty services. Also, i don't know about the current situation in regards to this, but more than a decade ago there was a "scandal" in which public French companies wanted to setup spy cameras in advertisement panels so they could target ads and study reactions. The tiny pinkertons following you around is, unfortunately and scaringly real: https://antipub.org/ecrans-de-pub-espions-du-metro-les-associations-contre-attaquent/ https://antipub.org/ecrans-de-pub-espions-du-metro-les-assoc... Last time i was in a big city i had the occasion to see an advertisement panel graphed with a huge red "Adblock". It was heartwarming, and reminded me that pretty much every where local people organize to sabotage advertisement panels and companies, and you should do the same in your neighborhood! I'm personally lucky enough that there's no advertisement where i live, and i think nobody from the neighborhood would let such a trend emerge. [0] https://lareleveetlapeste.fr/affichage-sauvage-quand-les-multinationales-saccaparent-lespace-public-en-toute-impunite/ https://lareleveetlapeste.fr/affichage-sauvage-quand-les-mul... [1] https://www.bfmtv.com/societe/paris-burberry-recouvre-une-piste-cyclable-d-une-pub-geante-et-provoque-la-colere-de-la-mairie_AN-201905170037.html https://www.bfmtv.com/societe/paris-burberry-recouvre-une-pi... [2] https://www.latribunedelart.com/le-patrimoine-parisien-denature-par-la-publicite https://www.latribunedelart.com/le-patrimoine-parisien-denat... [3] https://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1600089407-paris-amazon-embauche-des-gros-bras-mechants-proteger-publicite-illegale-gafa-societe https://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1600089407-paris-amazon-em...
- brokenkebab 5y ago
  Telling "lure you attention" is just a way to frame it. There are plenty of evidence that visual monotony has negative effect on mind, and FWIW in most modern urban environments (blocky, and painfully uniform) ads often do a little bit of favor by providing variance. I've been to places where street ads are heavily regulated to the point it's noticable that there are less billboards and they are more plain. Unless those are full of historical baroque, gothic/art nouveau buildings it absolutely doesn't make it more attractive (I support restricting ads in historical towns). As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?
CyberShadow 5y ago
> it would be infuriating if you had to view an ad before being able to use the subway ticketing system What about using a gas pump? https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/ozu1up/having_to_watch_30_seconds_of_ads_before_im_even/ https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/ozu1up/havin... Seems that the trend is going in this direction.
- pvinis 5y ago
  wow, that's bad. I don't know if the "trend is going in this direction", because I would never go to that gas station again after seeing that once. I'm sure most other people would too.
  - tetraca 5y ago
    In practice, not so much. Every gas station in my area installed these things, and they are busy as they've ever been. You would have to go well out of your way to avoid ads.
boomlinde 5y ago
> But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day. If I run around you all day shouting expletives at you, you might consider that there's nothing that I do that fundamentally gets in your way for as long as I keep a certain distance. But it will be annoying, exhausting and likely detrimental to your mental health in the long term. There's nothing inherently offensive about advertisement, IMO. Display the products you can sell me and their prices in your storefront window. Publish informational ads in categorized directories. Advertisement insofar that it lets consumers stay aware of the available alternatives for the products they need and use is a good thing, but when advertisers are no longer content with my demand for consumption and feel like they should create that demand through manipulation, they've outstayed their welcome.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  >If I run around you all day shouting expletives at you, you might consider that there's nothing that I do that fundamentally gets in your way for as long as I keep a certain distance. But it will be annoying, exhausting and likely detrimental to your mental health in the long term. But that's different. Ads in real life are passive. They are part of the environment like the color of the house. They don't actively interact with you specifically. >Advertisement insofar that it lets consumers stay aware of the available alternatives for the products they need and use is a good thing And the vast majority of people will never ever check that to find relevant things to them.
  - boomlinde 5y ago
    > But that's different. Ads in real life are passive. They are part of the environment like the color of the house. So let's say that the "color of my house" is obscene and disturbing imagery designed specifically to elicit an emotional response in viewers for the sake of making them feel bad. Point still stands; you don't have to actively get in someone's way to be a nuisance that's detrimental to the quality of life and leaves people worse off than without it. It's also worth mentioning that advertisement overwhelmingly refers to its targets in second person exactly to create the subtle illusion of addressing you specifically. To some small degree our brains probably don't recognize the difference. > And the vast majority of people will never ever check that to find relevant things to them. If I'm not actively looking for things that will improve my life, perhaps I am already content with my situation, and the things in question actually aren't that relevant to me.
danShumway 5y ago
> But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day. More common than you might expect, other people here have brought up checkout processes, etc... Beyond what they have said, I want to suggest though that some of the spacing and positioning and navigation around cities/roads is limited by needing room for advertising. There's a limit to how much information you can put along the side of a road in a city, and more of that space could be devoted to more obvious navigation signs at more regular intervals if advertising wasn't taking up some of that space. Maybe this is a stretch, but I wonder how much less stressful it would be if the biggest visual indicator on a bus stop was the actual bus stop number and not the full-page ad. In my mind, that is kind of delaying information until after you've passed through this space where you can only see the ad. > it would be infuriating if you had to view an ad before being able to use the subway ticketing system. You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen. Another example that springs to mind, I ride publicly funded transportation. The trains have displays inside of the train that indicate what the next stop will be. Those get interrupted by ads, if you glance up and want to see how close you are to your stop, you will likely need to sit through an ad before that information will pop up on the screen again. And that's not even in a private establishment, this is ads showing up in public space that isn't owned by any company. It's not even a 1st Amendment thing, they don't have any right to that space, we just decided to sell advertising space to those companies. Forcing people to view ads before they enter a subway or check out at a store is definitely something companies are starting to pay attention to and would be willing to try. A few physical stores have even started to roll out non-transparent glass in frozen sections that have ads overtop, so you can't walk through the isle and look to see what the store has, you have to open each section and manually check, and the glass screens just show you ads instead. > You don’t have pinkertons following you to learn your habits and show you “relevant” ads. This is also kind of a fun rabbit hole to jump down, there is a surprising amount of real-world data that gets processed for advertising; stores have experimented with tracking customers as they go through isles using facial recognition and/or tracking signals emitted from devices. Most loyalty cards feed purchases into a database so you can be tracked. And companies have been for a while now experimenting with and kind of openly talking about doing eye tracking in billboard ads in cities. To the best of my knowledge this has not actually been rolled out anywhere, but it keeps on coming up in research papers/patents/etc... and I think it's likely it will become common practice at some point. There's a connective tissue between digital advertising in physical spaces and digital spaces, and once you start to pick apart the links, it's hard to stop seeing them. A lot of digital tracking is augmented by physical tracking, and a nontrivial amount of digital tracking/profiles gets used in situations with real-world consequences. Some of the systems I talk about above like in-store ads are really only waiting for ways to be personalized per-customer before they can linked back into the tracking systems, and for stuff like dynamic displays, ads pre-purchase, etc... there's potential there to personalize them, which I think companies are likely to start taking advantage of. ---- > But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well. All that being said, I do think you're completely right, and I do think this is the slightly stronger argument: excessive advertising is just plain unhealthy period. I get into the tracking/disruption aspects of things because people respond to those aspects, but there's a downside there which is that they suggest there's a way to do pervasive advertising everywhere that would be fine if only they were more private or had skip buttons, and I honestly don't think that's true. I dislike abusive ads a lot, but I also dislike ads, in general. I think it's unhealthy for us to have this much mental energy devoted to basically fielding corporate propaganda all the time, I think this affects our ability to devote energy to responding to things like political propaganda or researching news articles and validating facts we see online, or being charitable to other disruptions or focusing in on the world around us. That could be a much, much longer conversation, but I think you're completely correct to kind of step back and say, "does it really matter if the physical space is completely analogous to the online space?" There are negative outcomes related to having so much of urban space devoted to trying to trick people into buying things. And I do think there are healthier ways to do that advertising, and I do think some advertising is worse than other advertising, and there is definitely a spectrum and a continuum here in how I respond to ads, but I also just think that excessive advertising is unhealthy regardless of the form it takes and I worry that when I talk about eye-tracking and loyalty cards that I might distract people from the more primitive and basic argument of "it's heckin ugly to have giant ads blocking your view of the actual products in a store, and it's heckin ugly to have a bunch of billboards for Pepsi in the middle of a public park."
mcculley 5y ago
I think that most people don't recognize the harm that these memes can cause. Most don't see them consciously at all. I realized at some point that I am what I label a "compulsive reader". When I see a sign, it intrudes into my perception and I have to read it. Many people don't even consciously see these words/signs. It is important to realize that not all brains work the same when weighing the costs of allowing theses intrusions.
ghusbands 5y ago
One big problem with your argument is that the word "yet" should be added almost everywhere. And in fact other responses have pointed out that there are plenty of places where ads are delaying interactive purchases. It's only a matter of time until it is in almost all the places you mentioned. For as long as there's no good pushback/regulation, there'll always be someone willing to pay to insert ads somewhere and someone willing to accept their money, because there's almost no immediate downside and the amount of money offered keeps going up until you fold. It happens continually, everywhere, that more and more ads, and more and more intrusive ones, keep appearing, and defending the status quo won't help us.
Forge36 5y ago
My best friend is a former smoker. He's quit many times. The biggest struggle he has is when anti-smoking commercials show up, being reminded of smoking makes him want to smoke. They don't prevent going about the day, they make going about your day more difficult.
johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago
What's a "healthy" amount of advertising? IMHO I would argue that 0 advertising is a healthy amount.
- matkoniecz 5y ago
  I would be fine with tasteful signs above shop entrances.
jevoten 5y ago
But ads in real life do mar the landscape, the real world, with their presence. You can drive through the countryside, and have the idyllic rolling hills scarred by a giant poster for the nearest McDonald's. Even in cities, they're visual pollution.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  If you don't like it, buy the property and take the ad down. I understand the eyesore, but I draw the line before telling someone he can't have a sign on his property.
  - eloisius 5y ago
    We don’t allow things on your property to emit all kinds of things without limitations. Smells, gases, smoke, radiation, etc. Why is visible EM radiation an exception? In fact it isn’t: try displaying pornography on your property.
quickthrower2 5y ago
You do have to view ads on subways though. I guess people don’t mind because they are waiting anyway. That interstitial ad only stops you for 3 seconds, maybe the same time it take for the ticket gate to open.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Advertising is mind rape. Not a single person who looks at ads has consented to giving corporations their attention, much less have their minds violated when they insert their little brands and offers. They are not entitled to our attention. Advertising should be illegal no matter what. Disruptiveness just makes this unacceptable practice even worse.
- smolder 5y ago
  They should be illegal no matter what? How would commerce function? How would one make a new business known? I hate ads too, but I don't think your extreme stance stands a chance at popularity.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Word of mouth? Designated market places? Who knows? In the end it doesn't really matter. As long as it's not advertising. Businesses aren't entitled to attention. They aren't entitled to being known. They aren't entitled to success. They aren't even entitled to existence. I simply don't understand how some business's concerns can possibly override everything else. Are we supposed to live in some cyberpunk hell with noise as far as the eye can see just so a bunch of corporations can make themselves known? If resisting this makes me extreme, then so be it.
    - smolder 5y ago
      I don't think you have thought this through. Businesses are peoples livelihoods. You have a lot of problems to solve with an intervention like you're suggesting. Based on the "I don't care, figure it out" attitude, I'm guessing you are still pretty young and can't see very far past your face with issues this complex. Not aiming to be rude, but this kind of half-baked, largely emotional argument detracts from the value of discussions, and drives away thoughtful commentators.
      - matheusmoreira 5y ago
        That's right, I didn't think it through. There's exactly one thing I'm absolutely sure of: advertising is unacceptable. Nothing emotional about it. I've recognized the fact these companies want to subject people to their ads without consent. I decided I won't accept that. Also, I don't have to solve anything. Society decides the rules and it's the businesses who have to figure out how to adapt to them. It's literally their problem. The fact it's gonna make life harder for them is irrelevant. The fact advertising makes them money changes nothing about the inherent unfairness of it. If you think there's more to it, you're welcome to elaborate. Saying "but how would society function" or "it's complex, you can't just ban ads" doesn't elevate discussion either. Of course it will function and of course we can do it, all we have to do is decide. There are places that actually have done just that and as far as I know they're doing just fine. This is the biggest example, it's even been posted here on HN which is how I found out about it: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa Businesses survived just fine before they started spamming people with their noise, they will keep on surviving once the noise gets banned. Since I've started researching this I've found there are so many cities in my country that have prohibited stuff like pamphlets, loudspeakers, signs and billboards. I have absolutely no doubt it led to immediate quality of life improvements. People here have suggested that I start getting involved in my city's government in order to try to improve the situation in my town as well, and I agree with them. I will give it my best shot.
1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago
Reminds me of the miniseries Maniac. It portrays an "alternate future" without Javascript, etc., where targeting advertising is in fact taken to these extremes, including the "Pinkertons" idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_(miniseries)
vanusa 5y ago
But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day. They do, in a suffuse, incremental but no less inexorable manner, in fact make "that place", "out there" -- meaning the city in which I live -- all the more uninviting and inhospitable. Like I don't even own the backs of my own eyeballs.

amelius 5y ago

For most women, photoshopped models on billboards already crossed the line decades ago.

lillecarl 5y ago
And for men the same, but with boxer-shorts ads right?
- nirui 5y ago
  I think those ads were designed for womans too...
  - zo1 5y ago
    You could say that "sexy women" ads were designed for men.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - dylan604 5y ago
      you could say that "sexy women" ads were designed by men. This isn't so much of a FTFY as much of just a different perspective of the same comment.
  - shakow 5y ago
    Why would they be designed toward women; don't millions of men buy their own underwears in your country?
    - diordiderot 5y ago
      80% of consumer spending is by women in the us. Women are more likely to replace 'worn out' clothes There's a good chance that the majority of men's underwear is bought by women.
  - ciphol 5y ago
    Ads are designed for whoever is doing the buying. I would guess that most underwear is bought by individuals, not their opposite-sex partners.
    - danShumway 5y ago
      I guess the argument here is that those ads are designed for men, but they're designed to prey on an extremely primitive, kind of circular logic: "you would look like this if you bought this underwear." Sort of a "this man is desirable to women, please act like him." I am pretty iffy about that kind of detailed psychological reading into people, it's not completely clear to me that people internalize those ads in that way, and I suspect a lot of people internalize ads completely differently from each other, so I question if any of those explanations are actually generalizable. But I guess it's somewhat reasonable, maybe, to make the argument that male model ads are trying to say something like, "this is the clothing that attractive men wear, and if you were attractive you'd buy this." Or even, "this man is attractive and thus obviously has his life put together, and maybe you'd feel more like him if you had his brand of underwear on." But I'm much more sympathetic to and supportive of extremely broad statements like, "both sexy women ads and sexy men ads influence beauty standards in sometimes unhealthy/unobtainable directions regardless of the intent/purpose of the ad." I feel like getting super-specific about what exactly is running through a man's mind when they see an ad for underwear is when we start to get uncomfortably close to pseudoscience. But the much broader statement feels a lot less like pseudoscience, it does seem fairly clear that beauty standards are influenced by advertising (and by other things too, advertising is just one aspect of this).
brokenkebab 5y ago
I doubt there was a global women poll on this issue. And strongly suspect even if existed it wouldn't show that majority of women even care. You are welcome to change my mind

qybaz 5y ago

Thank the Lord reality (still) does not have cookie banners.

cuu508 5y ago
When you sign up for a store loyalty card, there's usually a form you fill out and sign. That's your "cookie consent".
- qybaz 5y ago
  I don't have a problem with accepting some ToS when I sign up to a service. My problem is this new law where you have to accept the ToS of every single website on the internet before you can use it, then the ad networks, the analytics services, etc. It would be like having to sign a ream of papers every time I enter a store.
  - summm 5y ago
    The sites wouldn't need to get your consent for justifiable usage only. They actively decide they want more than that, they want to sell your data. So it's on them, the law itself is fine.
    - qybaz 5y ago
      Given that the sites wouldn't exist at all if it wasn't for the ad networks they use to feed their editors, it seems justifiable to me!
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        I have zero problems with ad-supported shit going out of business and making space for good, paid content. Imagine a world where content has to be so good as to convince people to take out their wallet. No more clickbait, "this video is sponsored by ShitVPN", chumboxes, etc.
        5y ago

Flankk 5y ago

The people writing articles at Forbes are on payroll. Ad blockers take food off their plate just to avoid a minor inconvenience. All you're doing is pushing these companies to either go subscription only or go bankrupt. Watch the level of entitlement of the people who will inevitably try defending their content theft. They can't win the argument and they always appeal to false moral virtues. They act like targeted ads are the dawn of an Orwellian police state.

smarx007 5y ago
I only visit Forbes when someone sends me a link and 9/10 times I get disappointed when I finish the article. When many of the resources I read put up paywalls, I ended up making 2 subscriptions to resources I trust/read most. I think you are taking this in a wrong direction. The real-world analogy of what you say would be “look at all that food a person is getting for free, all they need to do is to watch ads for 1hr; watch the level of entitlement of people who watch those ads in sunglasses!” Regarding theft: I don’t agree with the use of words like theft or piracy. Nobody loses an article and nobody is held at gunpoint to give one up. If you want, call it freeloading or schwarzfahren (literally black riding, ie riding without a ticket).
davidodio 5y ago
Honestly, going full subscription or bankrupt would be fine with me. It’s the publisher’s responsibility to find a business model that works. What exactly am I stealing by blocking ads? I have no moral or ethical oblication to view them or to allow them to follow me round the web… nowhere was I asked or consented to the exchange of my personal information and resources to view their content
sokoloff 5y ago
I’m responsible for my computer’s configuration; site operators are responsible for theirs. If I configure my computer to not show me ads, that’s my choice. If they configure their computer to not show me content, that’s also their choice. If they decide to show me content even if I’m not displaying ads, that’s also on them, same as if I configured mine to show ads and was then dissatisfied with my choice.

blackhaz 5y ago

But they do. You have to mentally process the incoming data first, then discard it. It's a waste of attention, especially with mind-catching ads you can't figure out immediately. Sometimes they are as blocking as browser pop-ups, e.g.: logotypes (or even full ads) displayed before a responsive UI is shown to you, duty-free zones in the airports, and so on. I am pretty sure we will soon have real-life targeted billboards. Even with the current tech, what prevents a webcam with NN to recognize if you're wearing sneakers and tell the display along your way to show some beanie ads, especially if it's cold outside? If you walk into a grocery store you are bombarded with displays outright, and before checking out you are tasked with cross-sale suggestions. All this crap blocks your mind and steals your attention.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago
we stopped watching tv in our home a few years ago, coupled with pi hole and ublock origin across all browsers, i personally do not see ads and neither does most of my family. if i do see them at a friends house or somewhere, it is a really jarring experience. i was at a friends house recently and they were watching tv. i found the ad break as a horrifying experience. the volume is turned too high, you can't skip it and it becomes irritating after the third ad break in an hour.
- laurent92 5y ago
  Ads are louder as an industry standard. In 2012, USA tried to implement the CALM act, which mandated content and ads to be at the same level (“A/85”), but it didn’t play out because ads are measured individually whereas a program is measured as a whole. Complaints to the FCC are still about the loudness of ads… See https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudness-for-broadcast.html https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudnes...
  - aix1 5y ago
    A while back I built an ad/not-an-ad classifier for TV frames based purely on pixels (i.e. not prior knowledge of specific ads). One of the interesting findings -- perhaps obvious in retrospect -- was that ad frames were on average brighter than content frames.

jorvi 5y ago

I think one element missing in that comparison is that you’d get a free subway ride or a grocery discount for viewing the ad. I vehemently dislike ads but I thought that should be mentioned.

mellavora 5y ago
So you mean the only thing funding the subway is ad revenue? Not, for example, taxes?

leppr 5y ago

Some new forms of IRL ads do interrupt your flow. Examples I've encountered: * In a mall touchscreen navigation kiosk, an ad is shown when you first wake up the device by touching it. * At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow. * On Starbucks screen menus, the whole menu is periodically replaced with a video ad, forcing you to wait until its end to finish making your choice. > You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen. In the biggest international airport in my country, there are now periodical Covid-19 "info spots" interrupting the display of timetables, check-in desk and gate information screens.

dylan604 5y ago
>At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow. Sounds like just one more reason in a long long long list of reasons not to go to McDonalds
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  It's amazing really. There has to be a business school case study there in how you go from being the trail-blazer and biggest success story in fast food, to one of the worst and getting worse with everything you do.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    It's also a school case study in showing how regardless they've gone down hill in food quality, in service quality, etc, their customers continue to patronize them.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Maybe it's just me getting older, but I used to eat at McDonalds several times a week, at least. I have maybe eaten there once or twice in all of 2021, I'm not even sure I ate there at all. Same with my friends. It's just awful in every way now, from the experience to the food itself.

jyu 5y ago

Have you run into the IRL pop up ads? People walking in front of you, interrupting your UX for a quick "5 min conversation" about their chosen cause? These pesky ads get through my blockers no matter how often I update my filters.

nulbyte 5y ago
The local cable co. has set up shop in random places throughout the closest grocery store to me for a number of months recently. I can't stand it; it's like walking onto a used car lot to buy groceries.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  An effective way of revenge could be to pretend (actually, if they're a cable company pretending may not be necessary) to have a bad experience with them and ask about your money back or why you've been overcharged/etc, especially if their colleagues are pitching to another mark within earshot.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    Bring your cable box and remote and ask them how to tune in to your favorite show Firefly.
eloisius 5y ago
Sounds like a typical stroll down Market Street. Never a shortage of people trying to get you to sign up and donate money to some cause, and they won’t take “no thanks” for an answer.
tomjen3 5y ago
I actually find those pretty easy to block, by just not engaging with them at all. Being polite is only for gentlefolk, riff-raff have no requirement for it.
grishka 5y ago
Actually yes. There are these "tea promoters" on the main street in my city. They would get in your way, and sometimes even literally grab you, to "ask a question", which is inevitably "do you drink tea?". This is a scam scheme where the next step is to take you to their store nearby, offer you a sample of their tea, and then it surprisingly turns out that this needs to be paid for and costs an exorbitant amount. Of course, this breaks every consumer protection law possible, but way too many people are amenable to guilt-tripping. I either ignore them and walk around them, or loudly tell them to fuck off. If only the police would act on this as vehemently as on anything even remotely related to opposition politics...

southerntofu 5y ago

Ads are everywhere you go on the streets. They lure your attention span with bright colors and LEDs which may create accidents. They reinforce a sense of need to consume and/or a feeling of being inappropriate as a person. Supermarkets will try very hard to "give" you their customer card so they can collect more detailed info about you and profile your habits. Companies often place adverts illegallly [0] by recruiting precarious workers who are going to face the police, not them. They'll even go as far as to cover a cycling area with a slippery material for their ads [1], or to cover historical monuments in spite of architectural regulations [2]. A multinational like Amazon will even steal a wall reserved for artists and pay goons to intimidate the population [3] in order to promote its shitty services. Also, i don't know about the current situation in regards to this, but more than a decade ago there was a "scandal" in which public French companies wanted to setup spy cameras in advertisement panels so they could target ads and study reactions. The tiny pinkertons following you around is, unfortunately and scaringly real: https://antipub.org/ecrans-de-pub-espions-du-metro-les-associations-contre-attaquent/ https://antipub.org/ecrans-de-pub-espions-du-metro-les-assoc... Last time i was in a big city i had the occasion to see an advertisement panel graphed with a huge red "Adblock". It was heartwarming, and reminded me that pretty much every where local people organize to sabotage advertisement panels and companies, and you should do the same in your neighborhood! I'm personally lucky enough that there's no advertisement where i live, and i think nobody from the neighborhood would let such a trend emerge. [0] https://lareleveetlapeste.fr/affichage-sauvage-quand-les-multinationales-saccaparent-lespace-public-en-toute-impunite/ https://lareleveetlapeste.fr/affichage-sauvage-quand-les-mul... [1] https://www.bfmtv.com/societe/paris-burberry-recouvre-une-piste-cyclable-d-une-pub-geante-et-provoque-la-colere-de-la-mairie_AN-201905170037.html https://www.bfmtv.com/societe/paris-burberry-recouvre-une-pi... [2] https://www.latribunedelart.com/le-patrimoine-parisien-denature-par-la-publicite https://www.latribunedelart.com/le-patrimoine-parisien-denat... [3] https://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1600089407-paris-amazon-embauche-des-gros-bras-mechants-proteger-publicite-illegale-gafa-societe https://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1600089407-paris-amazon-em...

brokenkebab 5y ago
Telling "lure you attention" is just a way to frame it. There are plenty of evidence that visual monotony has negative effect on mind, and FWIW in most modern urban environments (blocky, and painfully uniform) ads often do a little bit of favor by providing variance. I've been to places where street ads are heavily regulated to the point it's noticable that there are less billboards and they are more plain. Unless those are full of historical baroque, gothic/art nouveau buildings it absolutely doesn't make it more attractive (I support restricting ads in historical towns). As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?

CyberShadow 5y ago

> it would be infuriating if you had to view an ad before being able to use the subway ticketing system What about using a gas pump? https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/ozu1up/having_to_watch_30_seconds_of_ads_before_im_even/ https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/ozu1up/havin... Seems that the trend is going in this direction.

pvinis 5y ago
wow, that's bad. I don't know if the "trend is going in this direction", because I would never go to that gas station again after seeing that once. I'm sure most other people would too.
- tetraca 5y ago
  In practice, not so much. Every gas station in my area installed these things, and they are busy as they've ever been. You would have to go well out of your way to avoid ads.

boomlinde 5y ago

> But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day. If I run around you all day shouting expletives at you, you might consider that there's nothing that I do that fundamentally gets in your way for as long as I keep a certain distance. But it will be annoying, exhausting and likely detrimental to your mental health in the long term. There's nothing inherently offensive about advertisement, IMO. Display the products you can sell me and their prices in your storefront window. Publish informational ads in categorized directories. Advertisement insofar that it lets consumers stay aware of the available alternatives for the products they need and use is a good thing, but when advertisers are no longer content with my demand for consumption and feel like they should create that demand through manipulation, they've outstayed their welcome.

Aerroon 5y ago
>If I run around you all day shouting expletives at you, you might consider that there's nothing that I do that fundamentally gets in your way for as long as I keep a certain distance. But it will be annoying, exhausting and likely detrimental to your mental health in the long term. But that's different. Ads in real life are passive. They are part of the environment like the color of the house. They don't actively interact with you specifically. >Advertisement insofar that it lets consumers stay aware of the available alternatives for the products they need and use is a good thing And the vast majority of people will never ever check that to find relevant things to them.
- boomlinde 5y ago
  > But that's different. Ads in real life are passive. They are part of the environment like the color of the house. So let's say that the "color of my house" is obscene and disturbing imagery designed specifically to elicit an emotional response in viewers for the sake of making them feel bad. Point still stands; you don't have to actively get in someone's way to be a nuisance that's detrimental to the quality of life and leaves people worse off than without it. It's also worth mentioning that advertisement overwhelmingly refers to its targets in second person exactly to create the subtle illusion of addressing you specifically. To some small degree our brains probably don't recognize the difference. > And the vast majority of people will never ever check that to find relevant things to them. If I'm not actively looking for things that will improve my life, perhaps I am already content with my situation, and the things in question actually aren't that relevant to me.

danShumway 5y ago

> But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day. More common than you might expect, other people here have brought up checkout processes, etc... Beyond what they have said, I want to suggest though that some of the spacing and positioning and navigation around cities/roads is limited by needing room for advertising. There's a limit to how much information you can put along the side of a road in a city, and more of that space could be devoted to more obvious navigation signs at more regular intervals if advertising wasn't taking up some of that space. Maybe this is a stretch, but I wonder how much less stressful it would be if the biggest visual indicator on a bus stop was the actual bus stop number and not the full-page ad. In my mind, that is kind of delaying information until after you've passed through this space where you can only see the ad. > it would be infuriating if you had to view an ad before being able to use the subway ticketing system. You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen. Another example that springs to mind, I ride publicly funded transportation. The trains have displays inside of the train that indicate what the next stop will be. Those get interrupted by ads, if you glance up and want to see how close you are to your stop, you will likely need to sit through an ad before that information will pop up on the screen again. And that's not even in a private establishment, this is ads showing up in public space that isn't owned by any company. It's not even a 1st Amendment thing, they don't have any right to that space, we just decided to sell advertising space to those companies. Forcing people to view ads before they enter a subway or check out at a store is definitely something companies are starting to pay attention to and would be willing to try. A few physical stores have even started to roll out non-transparent glass in frozen sections that have ads overtop, so you can't walk through the isle and look to see what the store has, you have to open each section and manually check, and the glass screens just show you ads instead. > You don’t have pinkertons following you to learn your habits and show you “relevant” ads. This is also kind of a fun rabbit hole to jump down, there is a surprising amount of real-world data that gets processed for advertising; stores have experimented with tracking customers as they go through isles using facial recognition and/or tracking signals emitted from devices. Most loyalty cards feed purchases into a database so you can be tracked. And companies have been for a while now experimenting with and kind of openly talking about doing eye tracking in billboard ads in cities. To the best of my knowledge this has not actually been rolled out anywhere, but it keeps on coming up in research papers/patents/etc... and I think it's likely it will become common practice at some point. There's a connective tissue between digital advertising in physical spaces and digital spaces, and once you start to pick apart the links, it's hard to stop seeing them. A lot of digital tracking is augmented by physical tracking, and a nontrivial amount of digital tracking/profiles gets used in situations with real-world consequences. Some of the systems I talk about above like in-store ads are really only waiting for ways to be personalized per-customer before they can linked back into the tracking systems, and for stuff like dynamic displays, ads pre-purchase, etc... there's potential there to personalize them, which I think companies are likely to start taking advantage of. ---- > But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well. All that being said, I do think you're completely right, and I do think this is the slightly stronger argument: excessive advertising is just plain unhealthy period. I get into the tracking/disruption aspects of things because people respond to those aspects, but there's a downside there which is that they suggest there's a way to do pervasive advertising everywhere that would be fine if only they were more private or had skip buttons, and I honestly don't think that's true. I dislike abusive ads a lot, but I also dislike ads, in general. I think it's unhealthy for us to have this much mental energy devoted to basically fielding corporate propaganda all the time, I think this affects our ability to devote energy to responding to things like political propaganda or researching news articles and validating facts we see online, or being charitable to other disruptions or focusing in on the world around us. That could be a much, much longer conversation, but I think you're completely correct to kind of step back and say, "does it really matter if the physical space is completely analogous to the online space?" There are negative outcomes related to having so much of urban space devoted to trying to trick people into buying things. And I do think there are healthier ways to do that advertising, and I do think some advertising is worse than other advertising, and there is definitely a spectrum and a continuum here in how I respond to ads, but I also just think that excessive advertising is unhealthy regardless of the form it takes and I worry that when I talk about eye-tracking and loyalty cards that I might distract people from the more primitive and basic argument of "it's heckin ugly to have giant ads blocking your view of the actual products in a store, and it's heckin ugly to have a bunch of billboards for Pepsi in the middle of a public park."

mcculley 5y ago

I think that most people don't recognize the harm that these memes can cause. Most don't see them consciously at all. I realized at some point that I am what I label a "compulsive reader". When I see a sign, it intrudes into my perception and I have to read it. Many people don't even consciously see these words/signs. It is important to realize that not all brains work the same when weighing the costs of allowing theses intrusions.

ghusbands 5y ago

One big problem with your argument is that the word "yet" should be added almost everywhere. And in fact other responses have pointed out that there are plenty of places where ads are delaying interactive purchases. It's only a matter of time until it is in almost all the places you mentioned. For as long as there's no good pushback/regulation, there'll always be someone willing to pay to insert ads somewhere and someone willing to accept their money, because there's almost no immediate downside and the amount of money offered keeps going up until you fold. It happens continually, everywhere, that more and more ads, and more and more intrusive ones, keep appearing, and defending the status quo won't help us.

Forge36 5y ago

My best friend is a former smoker. He's quit many times. The biggest struggle he has is when anti-smoking commercials show up, being reminded of smoking makes him want to smoke. They don't prevent going about the day, they make going about your day more difficult.

johnnyApplePRNG 5y ago

What's a "healthy" amount of advertising? IMHO I would argue that 0 advertising is a healthy amount.

matkoniecz 5y ago
I would be fine with tasteful signs above shop entrances.

jevoten 5y ago

But ads in real life do mar the landscape, the real world, with their presence. You can drive through the countryside, and have the idyllic rolling hills scarred by a giant poster for the nearest McDonald's. Even in cities, they're visual pollution.

throwawayboise 5y ago
If you don't like it, buy the property and take the ad down. I understand the eyesore, but I draw the line before telling someone he can't have a sign on his property.
- eloisius 5y ago
  We don’t allow things on your property to emit all kinds of things without limitations. Smells, gases, smoke, radiation, etc. Why is visible EM radiation an exception? In fact it isn’t: try displaying pornography on your property.

quickthrower2 5y ago

You do have to view ads on subways though. I guess people don’t mind because they are waiting anyway. That interstitial ad only stops you for 3 seconds, maybe the same time it take for the ticket gate to open.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

Advertising is mind rape. Not a single person who looks at ads has consented to giving corporations their attention, much less have their minds violated when they insert their little brands and offers. They are not entitled to our attention. Advertising should be illegal no matter what. Disruptiveness just makes this unacceptable practice even worse.

smolder 5y ago
They should be illegal no matter what? How would commerce function? How would one make a new business known? I hate ads too, but I don't think your extreme stance stands a chance at popularity.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Word of mouth? Designated market places? Who knows? In the end it doesn't really matter. As long as it's not advertising. Businesses aren't entitled to attention. They aren't entitled to being known. They aren't entitled to success. They aren't even entitled to existence. I simply don't understand how some business's concerns can possibly override everything else. Are we supposed to live in some cyberpunk hell with noise as far as the eye can see just so a bunch of corporations can make themselves known? If resisting this makes me extreme, then so be it.
  - smolder 5y ago
    I don't think you have thought this through. Businesses are peoples livelihoods. You have a lot of problems to solve with an intervention like you're suggesting. Based on the "I don't care, figure it out" attitude, I'm guessing you are still pretty young and can't see very far past your face with issues this complex. Not aiming to be rude, but this kind of half-baked, largely emotional argument detracts from the value of discussions, and drives away thoughtful commentators.
    - matheusmoreira 5y ago
      That's right, I didn't think it through. There's exactly one thing I'm absolutely sure of: advertising is unacceptable. Nothing emotional about it. I've recognized the fact these companies want to subject people to their ads without consent. I decided I won't accept that. Also, I don't have to solve anything. Society decides the rules and it's the businesses who have to figure out how to adapt to them. It's literally their problem. The fact it's gonna make life harder for them is irrelevant. The fact advertising makes them money changes nothing about the inherent unfairness of it. If you think there's more to it, you're welcome to elaborate. Saying "but how would society function" or "it's complex, you can't just ban ads" doesn't elevate discussion either. Of course it will function and of course we can do it, all we have to do is decide. There are places that actually have done just that and as far as I know they're doing just fine. This is the biggest example, it's even been posted here on HN which is how I found out about it: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/ https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa Businesses survived just fine before they started spamming people with their noise, they will keep on surviving once the noise gets banned. Since I've started researching this I've found there are so many cities in my country that have prohibited stuff like pamphlets, loudspeakers, signs and billboards. I have absolutely no doubt it led to immediate quality of life improvements. People here have suggested that I start getting involved in my city's government in order to try to improve the situation in my town as well, and I agree with them. I will give it my best shot.

1vuio0pswjnm7 5y ago

Reminds me of the miniseries Maniac. It portrays an "alternate future" without Javascript, etc., where targeting advertising is in fact taken to these extremes, including the "Pinkertons" idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maniac_(miniseries)

vanusa 5y ago

But ads in real life do not prevent me from going on about my day. They do, in a suffuse, incremental but no less inexorable manner, in fact make "that place", "out there" -- meaning the city in which I live -- all the more uninviting and inhospitable. Like I don't even own the backs of my own eyeballs.