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You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?

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Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?

#411

Post by tekromancr »

blackhaz wrote: post #15
smarx007 wrote: post #7

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 sho…

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 billboa…

We do have real life targeted ads. The NYC Link terminals, for example, can detect tons of data about the devices people carry, and the comings and goings of the owners, and sometimes link them to their ad profiles. ads for display can then be selected accordingly.

This isn't even particularly new tech, they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to, and this was in the early 2000s

Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?

#412

Post by ouid »

sacado2 wrote: post #217
blackhaz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 billboa…

If browser ads had a real-life equivalent, they would be more like that creep who suddenly pops in front of attractive women in the street trying to grab their phone numbers, and no matter what you do you'll never get rid of him and he'll be following you on your way back home (probably to provide you with a "better user experience"). If all web ads were limited to a static gif here or there in the corner of a web pa…

ad blocking would absolutely be a thing still. Fundamentally an ad blocker is just a filter on what portions of web page get loaded. It is my intention to increase the signal to noise ratio on the things I experience, so I would filter these things out myself at the brain level. I'm just automating the process and offloading it to the browser, and there will always be strong incentive to automate things.

Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?

#413

Post by dionidium »

throwawaycities wrote: post #391
dionidium wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scooters are great. No scooter every meaningfully impacted my life in a city. Cars, on the other hand. Boy, if you hate scooters laying around just wait until you hear about these things clogging up every road. Drivers leave them on the street over night! Their personal property and they just...leave them parked all over the city. And they're way bigger than scooters. They block the roads. They're loud. They pollute.…

> if you hate scooters laying around just wait until you hear about these things clogging up every road. I love whataboutism. I’m very fascinated to know how you live in such a fashion that you purchase food and other products that sustain your life that in no way utilize roadways. Or are you just virtue signaling and personally contribute to this road traffic you hate so much and is the real “problem” by purchasing…

As a meta point “whataboutism” is a very stupid concept. We obviously evaluate things by comparison to other things and by their relationship to other related issues. Cars and scooters compete for public space and are directly comparable. If you’re locked in a room with a kitten and a lion and I hear you complaining about the kitten, then it’s not “whataboutism” to explain to you that you’ve got bigger problems.

Second, roads predate cars by thousands of years, so, no, they weren’t “made for cars.” Some actual roads existing today predate the cars on them by hundreds of years.

Third, the supply chain argument is very lazy and easily refuted. Most of the problematic car usage in my neighborhood has nothing to do with the supply chain. We can get your products delivered without building cities primarily for individual automobile traffic.

The most important detail in this discussion is that cars existed when you were born and you were raised in a society where they were normalized. Therefore, you regard them as a natural, unchangeable feature of the universe. Scooters are new, so you expect a lively debate about their use. This is the detail that informs everything about our disagreement.

Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?

#414

Post by dionidium »

bjoli wrote: post #396
dionidium wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scooters are great. No scooter every meaningfully impacted my life in a city. Cars, on the other hand. Boy, if you hate scooters laying around just wait until you hear about these things clogging up every road. Drivers leave them on the street over night! Their personal property and they just...leave them parked all over the city. And they're way bigger than scooters. They block the roads. They're loud. They pollute.…

Is you best argument "what about cars"? Scooters are a problem because they go fast among pedestrians. Cars usually don't, and when they donit is usually labelled terrorism. I think a good comparison is a bike: Bikers usually stay either on the road or on a bike path. When they go in pedestrian zones, their rather bad manouverability make bikers go slow or get off. Just one week ago I was hit by a scooter going over…

Yes, because cars and scooters occupy and compete for the same space and the difference between them is so large that anybody who thinks scooters are the bigger issue is in my view either totally blind to the problems with automobiles or lying. I don’t acknowledge a third possibility. Cars are orders of magnitude more problematic in cities than scooters. That’s not hyperbole. They are literally orders of magnitude more problematic.

If you’re locked in a room with a lion and a kitten and I hear you complaining about the kitten, then I’m going to think you’re either very confused or lying.

Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?

#415

Post by Fnoord »

blackhaz wrote: post #15
smarx007 wrote: post #7

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 sho…

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 billboa…

What annoys me most is advertising on highway and in traffic. I am not allowed to use a smartphone because it distracts me; fair enough. What about safety on the road though? All these signals are pure noise, irrelevant to traffic.

Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?

#416

Post by xphx »

cm2012 wrote: post #361
kdmccormick wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you; the copyright case especially shows that he is no paragon of anti-capitalism. But I think it's worth maintaining that (1) some things are worse than other things and (2) motive matters and (3) imperfect people can still make good points. I have never, ever felt like a piece of Banksy's art, or any original piece of visual artwork for that matter, is being shoved down my throat. They're quiet, static, rela…

Multiply it times a billion. One Banksy is tolerable, a million people graffiting their opinions everywhere would be truly awful. Therefore what Banksy is doing is immoral.

One Jesus of Nazareth is tolerable, a million people preaching their opinions everywhere would be truly awful. Therefore what Jesus was doing is immoral.

Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?

#418

Post by throwawayboise »

ouid wrote: post #412
sacado2 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If browser ads had a real-life equivalent, they would be more like that creep who suddenly pops in front of attractive women in the street trying to grab their phone numbers, and no matter what you do you'll never get rid of him and he'll be following you on your way back home (probably to provide you with a "better user experience"). If all web ads were limited to a static gif here or there in the corner of a web pa…

ad blocking would absolutely be a thing still. Fundamentally an ad blocker is just a filter on what portions of web page get loaded. It is my intention to increase the signal to noise ratio on the things I experience, so I would filter these things out myself at the brain level. I'm just automating the process and offloading it to the browser, and there will always be strong incentive to automate things.

If ads were just gifs or pngs that loaded from the same site, did not noticably impact page load times, and were displayed alongside the main content (analagous to ads in a magazine) I would likely not bother blocking them (and blocking would be more difficult: how would the blocking software know that they were ads and not part of the main content of the page?)

I block ads when they do things like take over focus, are distractingly animated, slow down the page, overload my CPU, etc.

Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?

#419

Post by throwawayboise »

egeozcan wrote: post #106
agumonkey wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something different about streets and web. I'm not sure but on my laptop i kinda expect things to go to the point, fast. A street is not a mean to an end. So a bus stop with some ad.. doesn't really changes everything. Consider web ads more like annoying bus boys trying to get you to order something in their restaurant by stepping in front of you and mirroring every move.

It changes a lot if you have ADHD. IMHO, it's an accessibility problem for people like me.

Flower gardens cause problems for people with allergies, but we don't ban them. We cannot make the entire world ideal for everyone.

Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?

#420

Post by qybaz »

shakow wrote: post #405
ThunderSizzle wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to have a cookie banner to have a third party provide ads, which is the most common way to do ads. Regardless, I block the ads, but I'm still trying to figure out to block all the dialogs about cookies for the ads I'm blocking.

> You need to have a cookie banner to have a third party provide ads No, you only need a cookie banner if those third parties collect data.

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