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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?

#201
post #169
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see nothing hypocritical about either of those. The vandal wasn’t sued by the artist who may have approved. In the second case I find greeting cars as objectionable as street billboards.

So you called that artist a "vandal". Would you also call Bansky a "vandal"? Some people find unapproved grafitti objectionable. How do you feel about that?

If someone tagged my front door I'd be quite angry about it and clean it off. If someone spent 6 hours with a ladder carefully painting the entire outside of my house with a beautiful mural I'd still be upset that they painted my house without my permission but I'd probably leave it there.

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

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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-loudnes...

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.

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

#203
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> * At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow. And they've only added (most of) these recently. What they've done for me is is increased the time it takes to check out by at least a third. They're paying for the ads with lengthened lines, which is a little shocking when talking about the automated option, because customers choose the automated option to save time. It might be a bad expect…

They probably did the math: they don't need the order taking machine to take less time than making the meal itself. If they made it so you could place an order in 1 second you'd still be in their store for a while. "Might as well bombard them with ads!"

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

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you gaining by arguing this? What point are you trying to make? Do you really think an artist who hand-paints pieces on walls is comparable to a corporation that copy-pastes their flashing, carefully targeted, profit-seeking message onto dozens of billboards overlooking a highway? Are their motives and the results of their work not wildly different? Your second example is valid. But your first example is a c…

Banksy is a commercial enterprise, though. There is a financial benefit to putting their work in places where the public is forced to see it. By raising their public profile, they're also raising the prices they can charge for other work. It is, in a very real sense, advertising. I'm a fan, but there's still a point to be made here. Banksy works on public sites do function in part as ads.

I think it's critically different from advertising because the art is also the product itself. You're meant to enjoy the art for what it is. An ad on the other hand, is meant to encourage you to buy a separate product; this can be effective even if you absolutely hate the ad.

A more apt comparison would be a company giving out free samples. If you get a free sample of a delicious new cheese brand, you might talk about it to others and raise their public profile. But that only works if the cheese is delicious. On the other hand, an ad might just rudely scream "KRAFT MAC AND CHEESE" at you for twenty seconds in hopes of subconsciously leading you to buy their product when you see it in the store later that week.

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

#205
post #98
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think those ads were designed for womans too...

Ads are designed for whoever is doing the buying. I would guess that most underwear is bought by individuals, not their opposite-sex partners.

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).

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

#206

Reminds me of this Banksy quote: 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 girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most…

Fuck that indeed. Very strong message here, and I love it. I wish I could take all those ads and shove them into their asses. But what is being suggested here? What's mine to take? If I see an ad, can I reuse the artwork? No. If I see a car, I can't just copy it's design. Can I just paint over it, or rip it apart? No, that would be vandalism. As much as I hate ads, THEY have re-arranged the world by paying for it in…

> Can I just paint over it, or rip it apart?

That's what Banksy does and says "yes" to.

> No, that would be vandalism.

So what? That's just a word.

> As much as I hate ads, THEY have re-arranged the world by paying for it in a free market, and we must respect that.

LOL, but why "must we"? You have no reasoning, no justification.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody cares what your opinion about the ad is. If you do not like the "cost" of the item (watching a minute of an ad, to see a 10 second video), just go somewhere else to find an alternative. Or buy it once and never again. What you are saying is, basically, if someone is selling bread for $100, and they dont let you taste in advance, you are allowed to steal that bread, because $100 is not a right price for the bre…

Not liking the cost implies knowing the cost in advance. Does your website disclose that it's ad-supported, which data will be collected and how it will be used (which is required if your are based in the EU or offer service to EU-based customers) and whether you take responsibility for any ill effects from executing the ad code? Because otherwise it can be argued you are also "stealing" people's computing resources…

"Theft implies that you are deprived of the item once it's stolen - this is not the case here."

Yeah, exactly. If I write a book, and one person buys it, and a billion people copy it from that person (and I sell just one copy in total), there is nothing wrong, because I still have my book.

I am glad that most of people dont think this way, because we would not have any books in our world.

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

#208
post #159

Reminds me of this Banksy quote: 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 girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most…

> Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours Welcome to public spaces? Life involves maybe seeing things, idea, people you don’t like. That’s not inherently bad.

It brings up an interesting question.

I live in Israel where there are constant conflicts about what is OK to be shown in public, especially between the religious and non-religious. In Jerusalem for example, some ultra-orthodox often vandalize any kind of poster that shows a woman in it. They just tear-out/spray over the women on the poster. Some are ridiculous cases where they defaced a poster of an old woman who survived the holocaust: https://www.timesofisrael.com/female-holocaust-survivors-por...

Even other groups could be pissed by posters that include things about women's hygiene or show models in swimsuits. In their eyes these are things they make a lot of effort to block from the eyes of their families, and having it in public breaches the culture and education they try to maintain. This is by itself interesting as public adverts can penetrate the most strict censorship that religious groups and cults maintain.

Seculars on the other hand can also be pissed about anti-abortion adverts, religious propaganda, scientology, etc. and ask for them to be banned.

As someone who's trying to be a "free-thinker" and tries to promote it, I think there's no point in hiding in a bubble, blocking yourself from seeing other ideas, even if they're crappy advertisements. All of this as long as the adverts/ideas fit within the aesthetics of the city they're in.

The risk of doing so is essentially losing free-thinking and some sort of communication with isolated social groups.

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

#209
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Bring your cable box and remote and ask them how to tune in to your favorite show Firefly.

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

#210

Reminds me of this Banksy quote: 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 girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most…

Seems like perfectly curated marketing. But I do admit I am outraged when a row of stupid fucking scooters blocks my entire running path, when it’s clearly a location no one would ever rent a scooter, rather they are there to deliberately block the path for no other purpose than obnoxious exposure of their brand. I’d love for there to be DAOs to combat those scooter companies, say for example by blocking the executiv…

Copenhagen residents became sufficiently outraged that hire scooters were banned from the city centre.

https://1www.eltis.org/in-brief/news/e-scooters-allowed-back...

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