We are building an app for that, it's called Bitfari. It pays people to disclose preferences and customizes city ads as they go about their day. It also blocks ads the majority of people don't want to see and routes them to different locations, so that public ad space is better allocated. The service has integrated over 200K screens globally and its currently valued at 25M+. You can learn more about it here https://bitfari.org/whitepaper/
You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
551–560 of 633 posts
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should we cut down all trees next to road? They’re a beautiful distraction.
Its voluntary and you need to deliberately watch them. They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways .
I would say the same about anything on the road that isn't specifically for safety/traffic shaping.
> They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways.
Even some of traffic shaping signage are specifically designed to be that way.
More importantly, this is about a freedom of expression. If I want to yell about my fruit farm or hold a sign for your product; is that different? How does the freedom to express yourself contend with some idea of limiting "commercial advertisement"?
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
How accurate did you get? Are frame-to-frame probabilities pretty independent? I wonder if you can hit some arbitrary threshold by implementing something like "n frames in a row."
The time series of frame probabilities is of course highly autocorrelated, but I never bothered to model that due to lack of interest. From memory, a simple single-frame classifier was >95% accurate (this was quite a few years ago, mind you). In my small-sample and not very rigorous testing, this was higher than human rates. Turns out that on average it's pretty hard to tell an ad from content just by looking at the pixels of a single frame.
I am quite confident that it wouldn't be too hard to build an ad detection ML model that would have near-perfect accuracy. That said, an approach based on algorithmically detecting repeated segments of lengths consistent with ad spots would work just as well, if not better.
P.S. One thing I thought was really interesting was that the classifier -- that was only ever shown a binary label (ad/not-an-ad) -- learnt an embedding that grouped together entire categories of things across TV networks and geographies (studio news, weather, traffic reports etc).
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few counterpoints I’ve heard over the years include: * The prevailing system will never be toppled by the conscious choice of the individual consumer. * No one person has the power to overturn capitalism, no matter how persistent. * There is no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
All these points are doing the stupid thing of presuming a clear controllable definition of capitalism; when in reality, no "ism" is a controllable unified entity. People will always and forever make mutually beneficial trades, probably with money. Now, will people also always have the opportunity to freely invest sums of money in imaginary chopped up pieces of a corporation without fear of financial liability should…
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Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, a…
I would also not bother blocking them… I intentionally tolerated ads for years, the flash era was pretty bad… but almost quaint compared to the onslaught of ads that know everything from who your friends are, how much money you make, and what dandruff shampoo you use… (plus that one time you googled “butt plugs”)
and for what? so they can still occupy the majority of screen space and intentionally distract me?
yeah give me the buzzing “swat the fly” ads instead please
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
This essay looks amazing. Can you please reference it?
The quoted essay is called Cut It Out. Hard to find a full text of it without OCR noise. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/banksy-accused-of-plagiarism-...
Banksy on Advertising
“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 girifriend 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
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its voluntary and you need to deliberately watch them. They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways .
I would say the same about anything on the road that isn't specifically for safety/traffic shaping. > They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways. Even some of traffic shaping signage are specifically designed to be that way. More importantly, this is about a freedom of expression. If I want to yell about my fruit farm or hold a sign for your product; is that different? How does the freedom to expres…
Safety on the road is more important that the freedom to annoy drivers. Also, you can express yourself elsewhere instead of on the road. And, on top of that, a driver doesn't have the freedom to completely ignore the expression (not yet). I can ignore some yelling fellow on a market (never liked that annoying, noisy shit either btw) with noisecancelling earplugs. One can't drive with a blindfold. I'm sure there is gonna be QQ over AR in driving, partly justified. However, less is more. Plus, AR could allow you to get traffic signs in a HUD. Can't miss them.
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#558Well, installing the ad blocker took me five minutes.
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#559> The center post was cut all the way through. The outer posts were each cut more than two thirds through. The great sign rested mostly on its own weight, precariously balanced. A south breeze would make it totter. A child could push it over. Within its gravitational time-space continuum, the billboard’s destiny was predetermined, beyond appeal. The arc of its return to earth could have been computed to within a tolerance of three millimeters. They savored the moment. The intrinsic virtues of free and worthy enterprise. The ghost of Sam Gompers smiled upon their labors.
“Push it over,” he said.
“You,” she said. “You did most of the work.”
“It’s your birthday.”
-Monkey Wrench Gang
Re: You block ads in your browser, why not in your city?
#560I strongly believe that advertising by definition is unethical in all of it's forms and "block" ads to the best of my ability, in real life as well. I do not view ads that reach me by mail, and as for billboards and posters I see around town, I make a note to avoid the products they advertise. I know this doesn't make a difference but it's an ideological thing. If my actions could in theory cause a tiny little dent i…
it must be very annoying when one of your favorite products is advertised to you