Billboards are banned where I live and it's great. It's interesting that this post says that where the author lives "someone can put up a 48-foot advertisement wherever they want". From other things I read I got the impression that in some (maybe many) cities a reason they're not banned is because they provide revenue, since many are on land like road medians that are controlled by local government. I'm not sure to what extent the designs themselves are reviewed but the ability to erect a billboard is regulated in such cases.
I grew up in Alaska which has a billboard ban. And then I went to Florida for university, and while there was a lot of culture shock I really think that the in your face billboards everywhere where the biggest bit.
Huge aggressive grabs for attention when you really should be paying attention to the road really should not be allowed.
Similar here but sort of the opposite, grew up with advertising and I didn't think it could possibly get worse. Then I visited Florida for the first time in a long time and I saw a floating ad on the water. Killed the trip entirely for me.
I once made a long drive through Vermont and was stunned at the absence of car-culture detritus compared to almost any other freeway I've seen in the US. Without all the gas stations and strip malls you can barely see the highway from a distance; it just disappears into the forest.
Kill billboards and you move the Overton window. Billboards are a no-brainer, so if we can't control them then we have no hope for any ads of any sort. If we can eliminate them then we can start on the next thing.
Pretty sure Seattle (maybe King County) doesn't allow billboards. You can really tell when you pass the banned area when driving south on I-5 getting close to Tacoma.
Also if interested the opening scenes of The Monkey Wrench Gang (by Edward Abbey) are about illegally cutting down billboards in Southwest Utah.
They're legal in King County, but they're required to be for business within a certain mile radius. There's several of them along the 522, for example. https://maps.app.goo.gl/cmCVXvJJgfYUAtXF9
In the early 1960s, Washington was one of the first states to successfully ban billboards from freeways. An exception can be seen in the lands owned by the Puyallup Tribe along I-5 near Fife, where massive billboards and video screens now flank both sides of the freeway. (Being classified as sovereign nation, the Puyallups can have their own sign laws.) If that state ban had not passed, you would now be seeing hundreds of similar signs from Vancouver to Bellingham, from Port Angeles to Spokane.
The City of Seattle, like many other cities, later passed a law limiting the installation of more billboards, aka off-premises signs. This was an outgrowth of a national effort to reduce the proliferation of commercial advertising that was spoiling our views of mountains, lakes, forests, pastoral lands, and architectural landmarks. It also took an inventory of billboards, ordering removal of those that had been erected without permits.
The City’s law was challenged in court by Ackerley Communications, the owner of most of the billboards in Seattle. The courts upheld the law but the dilemma was that there were scores of billboards in all corners of the city. So a deal was struck that if a billboard that was near certain sensitive locations, like schools or parks or homes, and was then removed, a new one could be erected in certain acceptable locations elsewhere.
Many billboards are installed in parking lots or vacant lots that have since been developed and those could not be replaced, as sign owners lost the leases. So, therefore, over time, the number of billboards would gradually decrease.
It's funny; there was a different hackernews thread just a couple days ago about banning all advertising, and billboards came up, and I posted about this.
Over in Washington state the rule for most major highways is that billboards can only advertise something which is actually being sold on the same piece of property.
I think it strikes a nice balance, preventing the most egregious forms of attention pollution.
Billboards are expensive and untargeted, so you need very high profit per acquired customer. Hence: law firms, sports betting, etc. Or you can go the long-term brand awareness route, hence alcohol, fast food, etc.
Yeah I visited Honolulu a few years ago. It took me a couple days to notice why the city sort of felt visually quieter than my home city. I love it - and it was horrible seeing billboards everywhere when I got home.
Why always jump to the extreme that will have almost zero political chance of winning. Billboards sound like a feasible incremental step in a good direction. Start there, everyone sees tangible improvements and is primed to make a bigger leap. Killing an entire industry as step one, is just simply never going to happen, dream on.
As a lot of HN is US based, I’ll just say in our divided bipartisanship state it’s a real shame we’ve forgotten that incremental improvements is always an option and I’d argue usually the best kind.
It isn't a political statement there are other avenues in marketing besides advertising. If a product is genuinely good it should serve on its own. Advertisements lead too much opportunity for exploitation.
Establishing that you support the extreme action does not mean that you are unwilling to accept incremental action as well.
Let's start by banning billboards, and then let's keep going and ban more forms of mental pollution until the overton window has moved enough that we can entirely ban the ability to pay to control someone's attention.
I don't think GP was suggesting this a political policy worth pursuing, but was just stating a preference. And stating an extreme preference does not imply that one would not be pleased with incremental improvement.
I, too, would love it if all advertising just disappeared.
I'm my town we also have strict rules on signage. Signs cannot be backlit or flashy. Generally they need to be setback from the street. This makes things harder to find but it's also easy on the eyes when you're just walking or driving around.
Oh, thank God. I only visited Portland once, and despite being vastly different from Austin in climate and flora, the sea of billboards made it feel eerily familiar (and not in a good way). I expected it to feel more like Seattle, but that one thing made a world of difference.
Huh, could have fooled me. My first experience of Austin was long stretches of ugly billboards (I think mostly on Burnet and N Lamar), and despite living here for years that first impression never left. Now that I think about it, without some kind of ban of course there would be way more billboards where I now live.
Design boards, zoning, permitting processes, etc have been a disaster for the affordability and inequality of the cities that lean into them. Advertising has serious drawbacks but these arbitrary design boards should be pared back and disempowered.
Having moved from urban South Africa (Johannesburg/Pretoria) to a country side-ish town in Ireland (Wexford), the lack of billboards and in-your-face advertising everywhere was absolutely breath-taking.
I did not realize just how mentally oppressive constant billboard advertising was until I did not see it any more wherever I go.
My favorite parkway in the US (at least for now) is the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. It's a National Park. It's gorgeous during the spring and fall with leafy trees exploding in color. No billboards too.
Spain also prefer no billboards along their highways - at least, the one time I visited. Our tour guide pointed it out. The only billboards were from the Barcelona Olympics, I believe.
When not commuting on metro, I always favored 295 even if traffic was slightly worse. It’s been decades, but I still vividly recall the trees being calming, even with traffic.
I recall living in Portland fifteen years ago. A mural on a health food store became the center of controversy because it was permitted while advertisements weren't. Local businesses sued the city to make sure they weren't prohibited from their God given right to slap gambling ads up in front of children.
Boston sells off every square inch of public bus stop, trash can, etc. to a small number of companies that pay a pittance for the right to resell the space for advertisements. Lexington and Concord are the only places where such things are disallowed.
During the pandemic I found a trash can in a suburb that had been postered with a Johnnie Walker ad for over a year, and sent in a phony request for a quote to advertise a community poetry slam event. The quote was for over $2000. Multiply that by every trash can in the city.
In Sweden this is already basically banned, it’s nearly impossible to get a permit to setup a billboard anywhere because it has to be approved by municipal and land owner. It’s so difficult that i know a guy that bought many chunks of land and put up a 100M high baloon advertising instead because it doesn’t cover land and is exempt. It would have worked if he didn’t make the ads so distracting that it caused an accident and he was forced to stop by order law.
I hesitate to suggest this but why not just contact anyone advertising asking them to not use billboards for the reasons you have, to the point where a lot of people will take down their billboards as they'll consider them to have a negative impact on their business? Suggest to businesses not to use billboards for the reasons you have, instead of trying to ban the practice.
But how will I know that I'm just 500 miles from South of the Border? Or 250 miles from the next Buc-ee's? Or be reminded not to diddle my daughter[1]?
I live in Alaska where billboards are banned, and it’s lovely. The ugliness of outdoor advertising is one of the first things I notice when traveling in most of the continental United States. Even without billboards, people still shop at local businesses.
I agree, but I also don't care. A few people are really passionate about this, most people agree but it's just not important. Let's busy our governments with important issues and not your vanity pet problem.
For me the test for acceptable advertising is whether I can avoid it or not: newspapers, magazines, free-to-air TV, free websites — fine; billboards, and any service I pay for — no way.
If I throw a pamphlet on the ground I have broken some city ordinance or law. If I blow it up so that nobody in the vicinity can avoid seeing it, then I'm all good.
Bizarre.
Trash is trash whether it's a piece of paper on the ground or blown up to billboard size.
Billboards are targeted at a very specific demographic: drivers. They're designed to draw attention away from the road and to whatever it is that they're trying to sell.
That reason alone is enough to ban billboards: we can't tell drivers they're terrible people for glancing at their phone for a second to get directions while simultaneously allowing corporations to plaster the roadway with ads that are deliberately designed to distract them.
They're mostly banned in Denver. I think they put a cap on them, and a new one going up means that another one has to come down. Functionally most have been eliminated because of this.
There's some interesting architecture where buildings have been visibly built around an existing billboard.
I also believe that billboards should be banned, inside and outside of a city. In addition to being excessive advertising which should be avoided, they also usually take up space (that could better be for trees, paths, etc).
Someone has also suggested taxing them. Maybe in some cases, they can be taxed instead of banned, although in some cases probably should just be banned.
Advertising signs might be permitted in some places inside of buildings (especially if they are advertising items being sold there (e.g. foods at a restaurant)), although even then it is probably best not to use too brightly lighted computer/television displays (which waste too much power and also produce too might light; in many cases, e-paper displays would be useful for commercial displays (not only advertising, but also e.g. business hours, which rarely change but sometimes do often enough (e.g. holidays) that it can help to occasionally change the display) that do not need to change very often), and they should also avoid being dishonest advertising.
This is what Adbusters has been supposed to be advocating for for decades. Except for that instead of just focusing on getting ads banned, they switched focus and started complaining about George W. Bush instead. And that is why we still have billboard advertising to this day.
It's the best case study I know of on the importance of just sticking to your one issue and not getting caught up trying to fix everything else that's broken in the world.
How about instead we fix the local ordinances, many of which were originally installed to prevent Black families from moving into white enclaves, that allow public bodies to function as armed HOAs? Seems like a smaller lift than banning advertising.
I don't care about billboards, but the real complaint in this article isn't about billboards.
Why not both? These policies aren't in opposition. I think its great that lots of different people campaign for lots of different policies which will improve our cities.
That’s interesting, because I read the article and it seems like a straightforward rant against billboards. The discussion here - except for your comment - is about either billboards or advertising in general.
If the article is really a metaphor for something else (racist town ordinances? zoning in general? something else?) I think a lot of us have missed it. Perhaps you could enlighten us.
I don't think it's a metaphor, I just think it observes a municipality demanding a business tear down and rebuild a facade for aesthetic reasons and uses that as a justification for banning billboards. Ban all the billboards you want, but municipalities should not be enforcing those aesthetic rules.
My HOA should let me build a mudhut and a lot should cost $100.
I sound sarcastic but I mean this unironically. This is a model that works in the developing world and what we had before private capital captured the real-estate market.
I mean, I completely disagree with the premise used to establish the argument.
> After the contractors appealed the mistake, city staff required them to tear the wall out and reinstall the approved siding.
This sounds to me like the most bullshit of bullshit jobs out there. Seems to me like if it was the building owners prerogative, great replace the siding, but city staff being involved in such seemingly trite issues—often with poor taste—infuriates me.
Sorry, your house doesn't meet the shadow requirements, you'll have to tear it down and try again. Sorry your house is 3ft too tall based on our policy from 50 years ago. Sorry, the outside has to be beige not some other silly thing, this is a place where people come to live out the rest of their dull existence without having to contend with hue. Your fence must be white, it says so right here!
That said, billboards do suck and we should ban them I guess.
If your neighbor had planning approval on building that would not shade your yard, and then built something that would never have been approved because it shades your yard, reducing your enjoyment of your yard and the value of your house, what’s your position?
I disagree with the intention to regulate such inane details of private land ownership, especially in the city. I wouldn't buy a house with the expectation that my view or my exposure to sun would be perpetually protected by the municipal government.
That said, I also can't buy a house, likely never will be able to, and most likely won't want to, all partly because of such absurd bureaucracy. It's difficult to imagine being so petulant as to seek justice about such a thing unless it made my private garden unworkable. I shouldn't have a hand in what my neighbor paints their house, and that's probably more closely related than the hypothetical silly examples I established. If they literally painted a swastika, well k I guess that's an edge case.
Vermont just banned billboards, period, alongside state highways (as do Hawai'i, Maine, and Alaska).
There is federal highway funding for billboard ads to promote wearing seat belts. Since Vermont didn't have billboards, they had to spend the money in nearby New Hampshire instead...
... New Hampshire doesn't have any seat belt laws.
The cost of having the first amendment is you have to tolerate voices you don’t want to hear. You can’t silence them without introducing the threat of silencing yourself.
The first amendment does not require allowing people to put up enormous structures along the highway that are designed with the express intention of coaxing drivers into focusing on your product instead of the road. That falls pretty cleanly into the kind of provably and immediately dangerous speech we don't typically allow.
Missouri talked about banning billboards in the 90s.
The end result was not only did the ban not pass, but the billboard companies through up what might, in scientific terms, be called a "metric f@ckton" of them down I-70 along with the rest of the state's highways.
They're ugly as dog crap. You don't realize just how many there are until you go up to Iowa and drive in a geographically-similar area and don't have to see the landscape spoiled by "LION'S DEN ADULT SUPERSTORE" and "HELL IS REAL" billboards.
I'm unconvinced based on legal precedents around tobacco advertising and pharmaceutical company sales reps. There are well-established legal definitions for all relevant terms here.
I dunno, the billboards in movies like Blade Runner were kind of cool.
Advertising in my opinion has a UX problem, it is however inextricable from a capitalist society. It needs to look great, it needs to be consistent and it should respect user consent and privacy. That's pretty much it.
Billboards don't invade your privacy or require consent, so they just need to look modern/great and be placed in areas where they won't disrupt natural and residential scenery. Unlike web-ads, they're more or less consistent but like i said earlier, I wish they were more "cool" like in scifi movies.
Advertising is a parasitic force on society. It sucks up your attention with a willful intention to change your purchasing behaviour, often knowing that the new behavior is worse for you.
If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring. But ads want to manipulate, so they have to be flashy and appeal to your emotions.
They pollute your mental headspace, and have no place in a healthy society.
Let's ban billboards. And then let's follow that up with a general purpose ban on paid advertisement.
Ironically the companies with the most widespread advertising are the LARGE companies! They pollute our daily lives with stupid ads.
I’m really not concerned about the car I don’t have, the quality of my floor mop, or the latest prescription pharmaceutical that my primary care doctor is too stupid to even spell.
I really feel for the small companies. But outside extremely industry specific mediums, they just can’t afford to advertise much. They have to be known from reputation and search engine results.
So, while I see the point you are trying to make, by volume, the bulk of advertising is utter crap.
I don't really care if companies -- of any size -- can reach me or not. If I want a service they provide, I will actively seek them out.
Large companies already have a huge advantage over small/new companies in that they have much more money to spend on marketing and advertising. If anything, banning paid advertising helps level the playing field.
People will still find out about small and new businesses if paid advertising was banned. In fact I learn about most smaller players through word of mouth and other non-paid sources.
>If I want a service they provide, I will actively seek them out.
The problem is there are some services you don’t even know exist that could be much better than how you’re currently solving a problem. Think prevention vs treatment of a problem.
For a concrete example:
I learned about a dog groomer that comes to your house this way. Maybe it should have been obvious there would be some that made house calls but searching Google maps for groomers tends to return the ones with locations that you drive to.
Dog hates the car. Problem solved with a thing I didn’t know existed.
Advertising is the cure worse than the disease in this case. I'm willing to have a slightly worse service occasionally if it means I'm not being bombarded with corporate propaganda. If a service is bad enough, or my desire for something is great enough, I will seek it out.
Like, the SlapChop is a good counter example I think. The commercial demos the item, makes it looks useful, uses hot sales tactics, a bunch of people think "it's just 20 bucks, and chopping stuff sucks", buy one, and now we've got a bunch of SlapChops in the landfill because in practice they're finicky and more annoying to use than just a knife.
To me, it seems like by volume commercials mostly fall into trying to convince you you want/need something that's ultimately not that useful vs inform, and the vast majority of actual useful things I've found via actively searching, or via word-of-mouth / seeing it at a friend's house.
If you're relying on ads to tell you how to solve your problems you're implicitly trusting that the information provided in ads is factual and unbiased, and that the problem in question wasn't entirely manufactured by the industry that is now showing you ads (see also: manscaping, engagement rings, vehicle AI integration, etc)
I don't mean to be rude but I genuinely can't think of any service I've learned about through advertising. Do you have an example? I actively seek out product reviews and trailers for things I already know I want but I don't think an ad has changed my mind, just changed whether I buy A or B
Good point. Friends, family, and colleagues keep telling me to buy stupid things they see from online ads all the time. They're probably pushing me towards an equal number of non-stupid things and I just don't notice.
In my personal life I pretty much never see ads and I like it that way, but thanks for giving me something to think about.
In the old days, if I wanted someone to remove a tree stump in my yard, I would ask my neighbor who had a stump removed who did it for them, or open the yellow pages.
In the modern age, I would open google maps (where companies can, for free, volunteer to be listed), or google.com and search.
The yellow pages are ads, and in a sense a company having a webpage which is indexed by google is advertising, but advertising in an index of services is wildly different from paying an influencer on tiktok to do a dance video that just happens to have a tree stump being removed in the background, as if by accident, with the company name visible.
I think anti-advertising people are largely fine with a yellow-pages-like list of companies, with a search engine that indexes company websites, with word-of-mouth questions and reports about what services exist out there.
Will it be harder for a new company that spends $10 on a purse made in vietnam and $20MM on advertising to convince consumers it's a necessary fashion item worth $20k to take off? Yes, absolutely. Will it be harder for a plumber in my area to get business? Honestly, probably about the same, people who need a plumber will usually look at the list of businesses offering the service in their area, and a new plumber can easily get added to google maps and slap together a site.
I would prefer if this search-engine / company-directory were government funded, and thus paid for via my taxes.
It's a useful service for the people, and having the government also be able to validate businesses are real legal entities seems quite useful, so making it tax funded seems pretty ideal.
Ditto for an up-to-date map, that's a generally useful thing to the populace, and the government really is the best authority on what streets are still usable, what towns exist, etc.
A government funded maps program would be great same with a government funded search engine that had to try and compete with international search engines with more resources.
You can choose not to use Google though and avoid their ads.
You can choose not to use any service that uses ads and only use ones that allow you to pay for ad free experiences.
Banning ads removes that possibility for others when you can solve the problem today for yourself.
> You can choose not to use any service that uses ads and only use ones that allow you to pay for ad free experiences.
Ads are so incredibly pervasive I effectively cannot.
There's stores I go to which only post their hours on instagram. There's friends I communicate with where my only communication avenue is instagram.
When I walk outside of my door I see billboards and ads, when I install an app required for my daily life, it's full of ads. iPhone, android, and windows all have ads by default littered throughout default apps.
We live in a society, and becoming a weirdo who refuses to use anything that doesn't run on my linux-phone will isolate me from that society. It's perfectly possible to criticize a thing and imagine alternatives without first becoming richard stallman.
> You could call the store or your friends, no ads there.
If everyone called the store to check if they're open instead of looking on instagram, the employee would never get time away from the phone to actually serve customers, you're suggesting something ridiculous. Text and phone calls aren't replacements for each other either between friends.
> What are these apps that are required for your daily life?
The app I have to use to buy train tickets has ads in it, mostly for fashion items sold at stores within train stations.
The app for checking train schedules is full of ads, and while there are open source apps on android for this, on iPhone you can't sideload open source apps so there's no ad-free alternatives. Releasing an app on iOS costs $100/year for the developer, so the incentive is not to make free open source apps. I really miss android. The iOS app store has so much completely garbage adware, and I can't even code up simple ad-free apps for myself without buying a macbook.
The app I have to use to send support requests to my landlord (an app dedicated to just that purpose) has a couple banner ads. The corporate landlord requires using it, and will not respond to phone calls.
My cell phone company's app, which is the only way to check my plan's remaining data, has a truly incredible number of ads.
.... and that's just off the top of my head. They're everywhere.
But even if all my apps were ad-free, the billboards posted everywhere, on busses, in trains, on buildings, are inescapable.
Instagram has been around less than 15 years. I'm suggesting you do what people did for the previous 100 years. You're not willing to do that to avoid ads? You're not willing to call or text your friends?
Instagram would be gone without ads, what would you do to fill the gap then?
Buy your tickets at the station? Use the train company website for the schedules?
Does your landlord or phone company have a website? What phone company is running third party ads in their app?
> Instagram has been around less than 15 years. I'm suggesting you do what people did for the previous 100 years. You're not willing to do that to avoid ads? You're not willing to call or text your friends?
The fact that instagram is relatively recent doesn't matter here, what matters is the social norms. You're a social outcast if you don't use ad-ridden software.
I'm not willing to be a depressed loner with no friends in order to avoid ads, if that's what you're asking. Just because I can unalive and no longer see ads doesn't mean that I have to like seeing them.
Social norms have changed, and I can't fix that by myself. I'll happily argue that social norms being ad-funded and brainwashing the populace, myself included, is bad though.
> Does your landlord or phone company have a website?
The cell phone provider's website has just as many ads as the app, they're equivalent. There isn't a webpage for my landlord.
Plenty of people manager to avoid being social outcasts without using Instagram. Keeping up with your friends pictures and reels is hardly a needed part of friendship. Call, text, message your friends, organise to hangout, put their birthdays in your calendar.
You're not willing to make literally the smallest of sacrifice to get what you want in avoiding ads. You've chosen a discount mobile network, go with a premium one to avoid ads.
If you're not going to be willing to pay for these things today how will your life be when you're forced to because they are no longer subsidised by advertising?
Imagine this: instead of the search engine space being 90% focused on ads and 10% on providing a good search experience, you could have one that is focused on finding the thing you're looking for.
You can have that now if you subscribe to Kagi but it costs money to operate and use. So without advertising you're choosing to make it impossible for poorer people to search.
I don't see that argument having much heft. The people who are worried about their view being soured by billboards aren't the ones who are worried about what happens to poorer people. They move in different circles.
I really can't believe that someone who frequents Hacker News can ask this question.
If by any chance this is a legit question, i feel the answer would be too obvious: asking people, googling, going to a store you think could sell the thing you want, etc. There are many many pretty obvious ways of finding out about stuff, without needing to have a corporation "reach out" to me and shove their shit everywhere in the form of ads.
And, just to expand a bit on this, what i find puzzling about the stance of "how will you find out about stuff without ads" is that it goes totally contrary to my contemporary experience.
Nowadays, when i want to find out about something, i don't just query Google about it, i usually make sure to add "site:reddit.com" to that query, precisely to avoid getting swamped by unuseful ads on the search results and instead have a change at getting to actual data from actual people. In this sense, ads are not only not useful for finding out about the stuff i want: they are actually hampering my ability to do so.
This a thread about imagining a world without ads. If we're trying to envision that, it surely is not too hard to imagine how such a useful service for society as a search engine could be funded by other means, right?
There are many many examples of useful services (both private and public) in our own world that manage to exist without the need to get plastered by obnoxious ads.
People get upset at the idea of using government money to feed the starving. Why do you assume they would be ok with spending billions to create a search engine?
The reality is you can choose to have your dream reality right now. Pay for Kagi, pay for ad free streaming or buy bluerays, stay of social media or subscribe direct to your content providers in patron.
We don't need to remove free access just so a few people can go ad free. Those people can already do it they just choose not to
Advertising may have been necessary the way you're describing in the 1950's but it's now so much easier to move information around.
As for all communication being a bit like advertising, a significant threshold has been crossed once you're paying to have your information elevated above that of your peers. If we didn't allow that, the noise floor would be lower, and it would be possible to achieve the benefits of advertising without the harms.
For instance, suppose I'm looking for a plumber... there are only maybe fifteen within a reasonable distance. There's no need for the plumbers to pay some third party for the privilege of being first in the list. I can limit my search criteria so that the results are narrow enough that I can consider each one, and they can instead spend that money on pipes or toilets or whatever.
The difference is that we’re reading these comments willingly. A great deal of advertising is imposed on people who don’t want it.
If I don’t want my behavior swayed by HN, I can stop reading it. If I don’t want my behavior swayed by advertising, I can... close my eyes every time a bus goes by, avoid any public place with an operating television, and never check my mail?
Yes? Unfortunately others can communicate to us without our consent. That could be ads or someone writing you a postcard, or yelling on a street corner. All of those can influence us and not all of them are welcome but I don’t think it’s reasonable to think we can live in a world where we can fully control it without becoming hermits.
I’m curious how you’d define advertising. Is it just something applied to another form of media? Would you count an end cap at the super market? Does the McDonald’s logo on the big sign you can see from the highway count? Or the coke machine inside?
Gotta disagree. The most disruptive up and comers seem to get there through word of mouth. I mean look at Figma. I haven't seen a single Figma ad since they began as a company (they probably exist somewhere) but they really rocketed off through word of mouth among the design community. Pretty sure slack was similar in this regard. Both disrupters.
I have no actual evidence of this always being the case but I would imagine given the fact the nature of a disrupter is that they're usually operating on principles of delivering a better product but without the budget to go crazy with advertising, they have to find more grassroots methods of market penetration.
The companies exist to serve me and not the other way around. Companies don't have any inherent right to exist. If they can't make money off of me they're probably not doing anything that matters.
Do you mean real progress like washing machines and more efficient solar panels or fake progress like another beverage company to replace the ones that are already there? Real progress will spread by word of mouth. It will be much slower, but I'll accept that to never see an ad for another McDonalds new burger of the month.
Also, search engines are the perfect solution for discoverability here. I don't care if lawn care ads pop up if I search "lawn care service" but I don't want to have this thrown at me when I watch a YouTube video about Napoleon
The difference between an advertisement and a post on HN is that the HN comment (presumably) is not a paid comment - people are saying things on HN because they genuinely believe them, not because someone with an agenda paid them to pretend to believe them!
And that makes all the difference. I am very happy to read that an HN commenter prefers one specific brand of car - assuming that this is an unbiased comment and the commenter was not paid to say that. On the other hand, if they *were* paid to say they like a specific brand of car, they are deceiving me! They are exposing my brain to ideas and associations that are inauthentic, and making me more likely to buy a certain brand of car even though that car cannot get mentioned on its own merits, and instead needs to pay for attention.
Also, I'm not sure I agree that "advertising is how monopolies are broken" - my read on the advertising industry is that larger companies today have a massive advantage over smaller companies, and that smaller businesses would be more able to succeed if advertising was removed. And the advantage more or less comes from the larger brands ability to afford to expose a larger number of people, and that exposure has superlinear effects on purchase behavior (because not only are you exposed to it, but your friends are talking about it, and their family is talking about it, etc).
There is a balance to be maintained for sure. I am known for bemoaning the almost-exclusively scammy ads on Facebook (and getting downvoted for it here).
But - also - my wife and I opened a restaurant recently. We need exposure. We are buying ad space on social media, having influencers review the place, working on putting up fliers at public bulletin boards, and investigating mailers (snail mail). It's clear, we're not going to make a go of it without connecting with more customers. If it was just me and her working it, we'd be in the green but we have day jobs and pay our (necessary) employees fairly.
Some ads are abusive. Some ads compel behavior that is obviously bad for the participants.
Take all the sports gambling ads right now.
Take loot boxes with flashing visuals for children.
Some ads are fine. They are informative and useful, and can provide value.
I'm my opinion, we have leaned too far towards the bad. The useful is being drowned out by ads that take advantage of any social or emotional vulnerability we have. Banking on physical rewards systems geared towards smaller, more meaningful social groups to make us give up attention, time, and money.
I'm in favor of banning ads. Let's try the other end of the spectrum for a bit.
To be crass: let God find his own in the ads world. The good products will still spread organically. It's still advertising. It's just not the bullshit we have today.
They can still promote their products, by sending them to social media reviewers no-strings-attached, or by posting through non-commercial channels. For instance, corporate representatives can promote their company's offerings on their own accounts on twitter or reddit.
What they should not be able to do is pay people, who have a media or influencer "brand", to say things about a product or service. Or pay media for a time slot during which a corporate agent spouts propaganda about the company's product or service. Or send a product to a reviewer as part of a contract for a review, even if it's supposedly a "fair and honest" review.
There are definitely a lot of problems with advertising and I am all for regulating them but this seems like such an extreme response. As someone who has worked for smaller organizations (both for profit and nonprofit) without some form of advertising people just would not hear about us at all.
If all advertising was banned, other institutions would set up to fill the vacuum. Imagine variations of Consumer Reports but that stretch across all sorts of industries.
Essentially, to get the word out about your organization or product (whether for-profit or non-profit), you'd have to convince someone with an audience to feature you *without paying them to do it*. In other words, your organization or product or service has to be genuinely interesting on its own.
And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape.
You sound like someone who has never had to run an event, concert, protest, market a new product, or build reputation on an existing one. Your solution — rely on influencers who only review — is unscalable across industries, price points, and ultimately eye balls.
I have taken one project to $3 billion and another to $700 million, and along the way we have run numerous events, marketed numerous products, and built many reputations. Many of the most successful products (including one that hit 2 million MAU) didn't use any form of paid promotion at all!
So, I do happen to have relevant experience. I haven't run a concert or a protest, but I've done the rest of the things you mentioned, some of which at considerable scale.
That’s impressive. Given that experience, how do you expect people to learn of products and events without any paid promotion in a scalable way? Here n=all businesses.
You continue to beg the question. "Without advertizing, companies would not be able to scale" is not a weakness of the push to ban advertizing - it is a virtue. The people advocating against advertizing _actively want_ businesses to have a smaller maximal size.
I have never attended an event, concert, protest, or volunteered my time based on ads. I have based on community event calendars, upcoming event calendars that while they may have taken money for placement (which they should have been required to disclose but probably didn't) had plenty of free listings. The main time I've used ads for 'things to do' is on vacation and have found the ad promoted stuff generally not a useful indicator and had just as good of luck with the service we randomly found on our own (thinking things like sailing/snorkeling excursions in Hawaii, Costa Rica).
Not everything has to scale, and we should be comfortable with some ideas just being bad and us not doing them.
We got here because of scaling. We can now efficiently tap into the mental space of billions of humans at the same time. And that’s not just a problem, that’s THE problem.
Meaning that “this doesn’t scale!” isn’t a side effect. It’s the main effect, it’s the solution.
"And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape."
Sounds nice in theory.
"You want to like us on facebook and get a perk for free on your app? (No money involved)."
"Hey you maybe want a job? We will give one to those who spread the word most about us"
Devil is in the details. And humans have a lot of details.
Otherwise I am all for starting to ban of advertisement, what is possible.
The law has pretty firm definitions for things like "in kind payments" and "consideration" - because these sorts of sneaky ways of rewarding people are also relevant to bribes!
So we aren't treading into new uncharted territory where the details need to be figured out - humans have been playing this game for centuries and the law already has effective tools for navigating the tricky parts.
And it is not really working well in my perception, when it is standard procedure for politicians to land high paying (useless) jobs in the industry they formerly regulated, after some grace period.
Or get payed a lot for being a public speaker. Where no one cares about the speech.
> convince someone with an audience to feature you without paying them to do it.
It takes time and effort to feature a product, how could they make a living?
I can imagine 4 different possible outcomes:
- People just find new loophole and behave exactly as before
- Large media company only features products from their friends and families. Monopoly.
- Only the government and a few selected individuals get the incentive. They gain from controlling the information.
- Only local businesses can survive.
They are very different outcome. You can't just ban one undesirable behaviour and hope for the best. You need to focus on what outcome you desire and how each and every side effects.
--
While we are banning monetary gain for ad, can we stop political lobbying too?
> It takes time and effort to feature a product, how could they make a living?
That's exactly the point. People shouldn't be making a living promoting other people's products. If they like something and want to promote it, for no compensation, then they should.
Imagine someone with a home improvement YouTube channel. They really, genuinely like certain brands for the tools that they use. So those tools will be visible in the videos, and the person making the videos is free to tell viewers how much they like those brands.
It’s a ban on advertising, not a ban on marketing budgets. You could still have a Malborough F1 company to make your brand inadvertently visible in F1, and a Malborough Acting company to make actresses smoke in public in defiance to bad males who want to tell them what to do (both are true stories).
If advertising is blocked, the exact same amount of dollars will be spent perverting every public speech.
This sounds like a Utopian idea that in practice would result in a lot of self-dealing and outright fraud on the part of the influencers you’re hypothecating. Hard pass.
All you’ve done here is shifted how the money is spent. The companies with deep pockets will spend extra on getting into that reviewer’s queue. See: lobbying.
I don't think that would be the case. If people want to find an org that is doing what you are doing, they will find you. If they aren't interested in whatever it is you're doing, then they won't hear about you.
And that's exactly the point. I don't want products and services pushed at me. I don't want companies telling me that I need what they offer, even if I've never really thought about it before.
And remember, this is just a ban on paid advertising. This doesn't mean you can't put up a website to market your product. You can sell through Amazon or whatever, and appear in search results (results that aren't affected by anyone paying for ad space or better rankings). You just can't pay others to advertise it for you.
There are a lot of problems with slavery and I am all for it them but this seems like such an extreme response. As someone who has worked for slave owners, without some form of slavery, people would just not pick cotton at all.
Billboards have been banned in Hawaii for a century ie. they were banned even before it became a state. Their are also billboard bans in Alaska, Vermont, and Maine.
To be clear I am 100% fine with billboard bans. I live in a billboard ban state and it's great. I was talking about the proposed complete ban of all advertising of any kind.
It is a reaction to an action. Smallish, discrete boards telling me your shop is around the corner selling sodas? Fine. Blinking, screaming, distracting, life-endangering bullshit boards? No.
Can you give an example of when this is bad for the target of the ad instead of the organization doing the advertising? Small organizations don't have a right to exist
Advertising is out of control. Doing mundane things like filling up fuel at a petrol stations, or catching a lift at work - there is a little screen targeting you with ads.
I don't think we really need to do that. In the US, advertising certain types of products (tobacco and alcohol, to name a couple) to children is illegal. So clearly the law already knows what an advertisement is, and how to define it in such a way that seems to get the job done from a legal perspective.
Procter & Gamble is welcome to become a media production company, but they can't push their media by paying for distribution - any paid distribution is advertising. Instead, distributors have to want to distribute the content because they think their audience will be interested in consuming it - a high bar to hit if the main purpose of your media is to push a product.
Paid actors, and for example company representatives, do count as acting on behalf of the company and therefore don't count as paid advertising. But, whatever medium they are talking to has to be an unpaid medium. A company representative (or paid actor) talking about a product in an interview is okay if the interviewer / distributor is not being paid to host the interview. (or if the interviewer / distributor is the company itself - that's also allowed).
Does that give massive companies an advantage? I would argue not really, because it creates massive overheads for pushing advertisement content, and since you aren't allowed to pay for distribution, it means that people have to be interesting in consuming your content of their own volition instead of other content that isn't trying to push products.
> Procter & Gamble is welcome to become a media production company, but they can't push their media by paying for distribution - any paid distribution is advertising.
I'm a bit confused.
When Amazon pays the postal service to send me a book, is that paid distribution and thus advertising?
Another example: I used to subscribe to the print edition of the Economist. I as a consumer paid for that product. Does that mean there's no ads in the Economist? (A substantial fraction of the print edition is made up of ads in the common sense understanding of the term.)
So when say Comcast owns a sports team and runs videos promoting the idea of buying a ticket to see that sports team it wouldn't be an ad because Comcast didn't pay itself?
I'm all for banning whole forms of advertisements (ex. Billboards) that don't actually educate the consumer about the product. But _all_ advertisements is too knee-jerk.
How about mentioning a product in health ad (Smoking kills. Nicotine patches help you quit smoking)?
Traditionally, the government setup some regulatory body to oversee these kind of exemptions. These body often corrupt over time. Is a corrupted regulatory body better than no exemptions allowed?
Do we want the legal text cover all cases and become so dense that nobody can comprehend? Or do we want some simple rules and live with the possible unintended consequences?
and the most important question : People hate changes and some industries need to rethink their own business. How could we get people agrees on this in a democratic setting?
What is considered payment? Is that just money? Some advertisements could be paid for with goods services or favors. Which of those do we ban? Is proselyting religion advertising?
Bribery laws, SEC insider trading/collusion stuff...there's many existing examples for definitions for that, when the law doesn't want something to be for sale.
I would define "advertisement" in this context as "paying someone else to say something of your choosing".
So, in the case of a billboard, if you are paying a landlord, that's advertising. If you are paying a newspaper to print a specific article, that's also advertising. This means paid press releases are also not allowed. Product placement would fall under this definition too - if a specific car brand is paying you to feature their cars in a movie, that's advertising.
Notably, it's not advertising if no payment is being made. If you are making a movie and you decide to feature a specific car brand - and you aren't getting any kickbacks for it - that's completely allowed.
It's also not advertising if it's first-party. For example, a sign that's advertising a restaurant is allowed if the actual restaurant itself is underneath that sign. And it's also not advertising if Disney is pushing Disney movies and products at Disney World, because Disney owns the full creative rights to Disney World and they aren't being paid by outsiders to adjust the messaging.
This definition can even be robust to grey areas like "what if a car brand makes a movie featuring their cars?" - well, how is that movie being distributed? Are they paying people to distribute the movie, or is it genuinely a good movie that people are distributing on their own? Paying people to distribute the movie is not allowed, but if the movie is good enough that people are distributing it anyway of their own volition, then it's okay!
Overall, the definition is pretty large, and paid promotion is so deeply ingrained into modern society that it's difficult to imagine exactly how much would change if advertising was banned. But, quite a lot would change! Pretty much the entire playbook for all commercial enterprises for "how to tell the world about your thing" would have to be re-written, and new institutions would have to be developed to replace advertising.
But I think society overall would benefit greatly from the change!
One thing that I think makes only targeting paid advertising a problem: companies often do more than one thing.
Is it ok that when you're watching broadcast/network TV, they advertise internet or cellular service, because the conglomerate that owns the TV station also owns an ISP and cell carrier?
Is it ok if you're using a popular web search engine, and they advertise their own hosted business productivity suite?
I think no, we should not allow these things. But no money (or consideration, or whatever) has exchanged hands here.
I'm actually okay with the things you mentioned. The really salient example for me is: should Disney be allowed to advertise Disney movies and Disney products at Disney world? The answer seems to be a pretty obvious yes to me. If you are at Disney World, you are in the "Disney Ecosystem", and so there's nothing wrong with Disney pushing more Disney stuff at you - that's just part of the experience.
I think that similar exceptions extend to a TV network that's pushing its own products at you while you are watching the station. No consideration has been provided to push the ad, so you are in whatever ecosystem.
How do you know when you've crossed the line into abuse? Well, we have anti-monopoly laws for that. At some point an ecosystem becomes so big it's a monopoly that needs to be broken up, and after it gets broken up it can't self-deal across the broken pieces anymore. So just like we already have good legal infrastructure in place for figuring out when "consideration" has happened, we also have good (well, maybe not good enough lately) legal infrastructure in place for figuring out when a company is too big and too able to self-deal.
So if I pay somebody independent to hand out leaflets, that's advertising. But if I employ somebody in the position of leafleteer, now it doesn't count.
Section 1. Ban on Commercial Advertisements
All commercial advertisements, in any medium, are hereby prohibited throughout the United States.
Section 2. Definition
For purposes of this Act, “commercial advertisement” means any paid or otherwise sponsored message intended to promote the sale or use of goods, services, or commercial ventures.
Section 3. Enforcement and Penalties
Violations of this Act shall be subject to civil or criminal penalties as determined by the courts.
The thing is going to hit the courts anyways. Just craft it in a way that hits the Pareto curve on effectiveness vs legality.
1: a public notice
*especially* : a paid notice that is published or broadcast (as to attract customers or to provide information of public interest)
3: something resembling an advertisement (as in alerting someone to something)
Though I also like @trgn's reference to Justice Potter's Definition[0].
I think a better way to answer this is define what kind of advertisements we want to ban. In that respect, I think this has a clearer definition than the previous HN post[1]. The definition of a billboard is much less ambiguous.
But let's not stop, let's continue the actual conversation. I think the problem with the earlier thread is that many conversations boiled down to dichotomies rather than the reality that there is a continuum of what is considered advertising. Personally, I have absolutely no issues with stores having signs in their windows or those wacky inflatable arm guys. Let's call this "old school advertising" for lack of better words.
But I want to add some context for anyone that is confused by people who are angry at ads. People that are upset with ads (myself included) are in generally upset about Surveillance Capitalism[2]. The thing is that ads have gotten out of control. I mean let's be real, the companies with the #5 and #7 market cap (Google @ ~1.8T and Meta @ ~1.3T) are both almost entirely driven by advertising. This does not sound like a healthy economy to me! Some of the richest companies in the world make more money convincing people to buy things rather than actually producing things. There's a lot of ways to define value, are we sure we want to base an economy where we define it this way? Where companies are extremely incentivized to persuade/manipulate people into buying things or thinking certain ways. Is this really what we want to be putting all the efforts of humanity into? Convincing people to buy shit? (or vote a certain way? Or think a certain way?) Do you think that is better than if we had larger concentrated efforts into other things? We said value is a vague word, right? So who creates more value: the person manufacturing a car or a quant trader on Wall-street? How about the person developing a search engine or the person developing better target advertising? Who is providing more value? How about with a different definition of value?
Regardless of how much you think a person or a public is able to be manipulated, surely you can agree that these are perverse incentives. This can help us circle back to my earlier point: do you think it should be acceptable to manipulate children? Certainly to some degree it is acceptable, right? We want to convince them to go to school and better themselves. But should we allow trillion dollar companies to persuade them to buy things? Certainly these are not fully developed humans who have the same constitutional resilience as a grown adult such as you or I, right? Now we can take that even further: what does it mean to advertise to kids? Are billboards? Surely they see them simply by living in the world. What about general audience TV? Surely they'd see those by watching TV.
Fundamentally, the root of the question is "in what directions do we want to be pushing humanity?" There's a lot of economic levels you can pull long before you get anywhere near what would be considered a Planned Economy[3,4].
[4] If you really think pulling any levers is equivalent then it would necessitate you also believing in the abolishment of all governments and all organizations of any kind. A rather ridiculous bar, but I want to make sure we don't degrade into pretending this is a black and white issue. There's a large continuum here and any effort to incentivize one direction over another is not the same as having absolute rule.
Absolutely agree. If you follow it all the way, advertising and the insatiable demand for consumer attention is the root of so many of our social problems. 24 hour network news bubbles, social media addiction, pharmaceutical companies spending more on advertising than R&D, etc. It all comes down to companies having to abuse the end users because to leave advertising money on the table is to go out of business.
> If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring.
I disagree. Lots of entities want to get information out, and they're all competing for attention. This includes a lot of manipulative information, but it's also true for important information. Say that I'm a government agency tasked with informing the public that a certain brand of car seat is unsafe, or just reminding people that wearing safety equipment is a good idea. I can't just publish it on the agency website, confident that everybody will routinely check it. People don't work like that. So, if I really want people to listen, I have to compete in the same way that ads do. And this of course explains why the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's online presence is batshit insane: https://bsky.app/profile/cpsc.gov . It needs to be. They need Sentinel Burrito to warn you that unattended cooking is the #1 cause of house fires because otherwise our stupid brains won't listen.
There's good and bad from advertising. I think it needs to be regulated and restricted more than banned. They did some study and where advertising was banned prices were higher because low cost providers couldn't put up a get it cheaper here ad. In the UK solicitors are banned from advertising and it makes getting one an expensive pain in the arse.
In olden days we used to get a classified ads newspaper through the door and that was good as you could pick it up if you wanted to check out the ads or ignore/chuck it otherwise. I'd be fine with ads if I had to click to see them. It's having them in your face when you don't want them that's a pain.
> Let's ban billboards. And then let's follow that up with a general purpose ban on paid advertisement
This sprint to the extreme is how one ensures we cannot ban billboards. (If I worked for a billboard company, I would try to frame a billboard ban as a ban on ads.)
You may not like billboards, but they are a form of expression and free speech. Admittedly against banning them. Have y’all not learned anything from the last election? Cancel culture and stifling free speech is not a strategy.
Let’s strike a deal. Let’s take the current city design boards and repurpose them so that instead of micromanaging stucco colors and setbacks they’re micromanaging visual advertising.
The plumber could be lowering prices, or focusing on making his customers happy enough that they recommend to a friend. Instead that money/effort is going into a dimension that has nothing to do with good plumbering. That's bad behavior.
This is out of touch with how businesses get going though. If you depend on word of mouth only as a plumber you’ll be out of business before you even get started.
Are you suggesting to wait around the hardware parking lot to hope to hear about someone who needs a plumber?
I think that if we did not live in a world where our attention was under attack all the time, it would make sense to develop a P2P search protocol for this sort of thing. Could be standard community driven open source, could be a government sponsored project, could be a crypto thing, lots of options here...
The plumber would dedicate a raspberry pi or yesteryear's phone with the bad battery or cracked screen, and they'd leave it plugged in in a closet somewhere and configure it to talk to a few peers who they know personally and who will vouch for their legitimacy. They of course would be vouching for others in the same way.
Nodes would gossip about services that are available, so you could figure out which plumbers are nearby and which of your peers trust those plumbers. Since you're operating on a web of trust, you can find a mutually trusted third party to act as a mediator in the case of disputes, and if you have a good or bad experience you can also gossip that info to your peers so that they can aggregate a sort of review system. But unlike Amazon's, it's full of people that you know and explicitly trust, so it's much harder to game since there's no single source of truth to target/abuse.
It would exchange the kind of information that traditionally comes via ads, but I think it would be so much more effective than ads because all parties want it to succeed--whereas ads have carved out a rather hostile landscape for this sort of thing.
This is obviously an uncharitable interpretation of the comment that you're replying to.
A better question would be how is seeing ads for sports betting in between periods of a game promoting bad behavior.
And the answer to that is very obvious -- the legalization of online sports betting and the nonstop barrage of ads for it on tv and social media is bad for individuals and society as a whole.
For large companies, sure. Large companies abuse everything though; tax, regulatory, worker rights, human rights etc. I have no clue how to fix it in a capitalist winner takes all world, but that's the problem, not advertising.
Small companies (few people) need advertising to get any reach normally.
There is zero chance that capitalism will solve this problem.
Even if you personally choose not to buy overly advertised goods, the overwhelming majority of people will not make the same choice. Advertising works extremely well, and it will always work no matter what you or I do.
So we will still have the problem of excessive advertising, which negatively impacts even people who try to ignore that advertising.
This sounds like sarcasm but I’ll assume the best interpretation.
Why do you think unregulated capitalism will solve the advertising problem? Other than what I am guessing your point is to relying on a large portion to punish bad advertisers and that eventually those companies will do boring adverts.
Clearly the average Joe/Jane is persuadable, and does not have an iron will to never be manipulated.
Clearly unrestrained advertisement is how we got here in the first place.
Well, in between step 1 ("ban billboards") and step 3 ("ban advertisement") you'd need step 2 ("repeal the First Amendment of the United States Constitution").
They're banned in 4 US states already, with seemingly no infringement on the 1st Amendment.
Legally speaking, the validity of banning billboards tends to be evaluated based on the Central Hudson test. More practically, there's numerous limitations to commercial speech... for example, you can't blare an audio ad from your rooftop.
>Well, in between step 1 ("ban billboards") and step 3 ("ban advertisement") you'd need step 2 ("repeal the First Amendment of the United States Constitution"). Let me know how that goes!
For most of US history, Commercial speech was not afforded full free speech rights. Nor does it currently enjoy them, although it is more protected than it used to be[0]:
Commercial speech, as the Supreme Court iterated in Valentine v. Chrestensen
(1942)[1], had historically not been viewed as protected under the First
Amendment. This category of expression, which includes commercial
advertising, promises, and solicitations, had been subject to significant
regulation to protect consumers and prevent fraud. Beginning in the 1970s,
however, the Supreme Court gradually recognized this type of speech as
deserving some First Amendment protection.
As such, it wouldn't require repealing anything. Just reinterpreting how the First Amendment applies (or not) to commercial speech. And given the wholesale tossing out of precedent by recent SCOTUS personnel, it's certainly possible (albeit unlikely -- and more's the pity -- in this configuration) for them to do so.
I don't know what you mean by "full" free speech rights. But for the last 50 years, under the Burger, Rehnquist, and Roberts courts, pure commercial speech has been held to be protected by the First Amendment. The Burger court overturned Valentine.
Right, but there is past (obsolete) precedent that suggests otherwise. If Valentine can be overturned, then the current way of thinking can also be changed.
The opinion overturning Valentine noted that 30 years of jurisprudence since Valentine had arrived at a consensus that Valentine sure was pretty dumb. Not just Burger's court.
>The opinion overturning Valentine noted that 30 years of jurisprudence since Valentine had arrived at a consensus that Valentine sure was pretty dumb. Not just Burger's court.
And the opinions on Gruen v. New York, Dobbs v. Jackson, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and especially on point, Citizen's United all broke with long precedent and turned things upside down. No amendments to repeal/change, just a different set of folks on SCOTUS.
And those were pretty dumb. So perhaps we'll have some improvement eventually, although I probably won't live to see it. And more's the pity.
> "The fact that it is self-regulated now, that’s not something brewers would want to put in jeopardy," Kirkpatrick said. "It’s the way they have operated for decades. You show a lot of people enjoying a football game or enjoying a baseball game but you don’t show any consumption. I don't think you’re going to see that change."
> A Heineken beer commercial said regulations ban showing someone drinking beer on camera. If you take a more relaxed view of regulations, that’s close to the truth. The rules come from the television networks, not the government. The restriction might not have the force of law but it’s just as effective. We rate the claim Mostly True.
Not only that, but they were then told to post forced speech by a court not let locations that sell cigarettes.
Whatever, I don't see the difference between PMI/RJR advertising and Anheuser-Busch, and Bayer, and Pfizer, and the US Army, and six car insurance companies all claiming to have the lowest rates and best service.
I kicked television out of my house in 2002. I don't have any streaming services provided by a third party, nor do I really listen to the FM band on my car radio, nor XM. The ads are too many to bear.
Pihole, ad nauseam. If you bypass my pihole, my browser clicks every ad you show and sends the data to /dev/null except what site, timestamp, and a thumbnail of the ad. Its not botting; I'm actively hostile to advertising.
Commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment. Regulations of commercial speech need to pass the "Central Hudson Test", which requires a compelling government interest (subject to heightened scrutiny) and narrowly-tailored regulation. Under this rubric, you can get cigarette ads off billboards, but you probably can't regulate Nike's ads.
If SCOTUS can develop a test to determine when the government is allowed to violate 1A, then they can loosen that test's requirements. They won't, of course, but I don't see why they couldn't, if they wanted to.
So, I dug into this somewhat deeply, and it's true that there's some case law which would make an outright ban of commercial advertising difficult, however:
The law is pretty consistent about the idea that any paid endorsement has to be "truthful". And as we've learned more about sociology and advertising, we've realized that things like paid endorsements are fundamentally not truthful, because they are misleading the public to believe that some figure or trusted source (even if only at a subconscious level - which is still enough to change consumer behavior!) is in favor of a product or brand.
So maybe if you could argue that paid speech is inherently untruthful (which I believe that it is!), then you could make legal policy that bans paid speech complaint with the First Amendment! (caveat: I am not a lawyer, I am not a legal activist, etc)
Read Va Pharmacy vs Va Citizens Consumer Council to get a sense for how well you're going to fare with "paid speech is inherently untruthful". It's addressed directly!
Sure, and after that let’s ban: potato chips, sugar water, sex outside the hours of 6:00 - 7:00 PM, caffeine, plastic straws, and non-bran-based cereals.
Yes, people need to take care of themselves, but part of that involves a degree of personal responsibility.
“Let’s ban paid advertisement.” This is not a serious discussion.
I think it’s a nonstarter that conflicts with 1st amendment principles, but I don’t necessarily disagree with the underlying sentiment that you’re expressing. Things like this are just the price we pay for living in a free / democratic society. But kudos to you for thinking outside the box.
How about you stop advocating for using the coercive power of the state to ban harmless speech or things you simply dislike? If a property owner wants to allow billboards on their building, they have every right to do so.
I just went through some of your comment history, and it strikes me as interesting that you very recently said:
"It's easy to spot political tribalism - just reference the comments here. They ultimately misrepresent, and have never tried to understand, their opposition's political position. It's kind of sad because it allows them to be manipulated by propaganda"
This is exactly what you just did by fabricating knowledge of my aesthetic taste. I hope this fact is as intriguing to you as it is to me.
Who says I don't like the aesthetic? I can like the aesthetic of something and also acknowledge the harm it causes. It's kinda weird that your response is to make things up about me here.
I live a town in which the bar in the village downtown is completely unlabeled, because the town code forbids it. Their website brags about being "A white brick building with no sign". (They have a big sign inside.)
How about if we don't make lots of wide authoritarian bans to make people behave according our will instead of their own. How about if we rule the world from the bottom up instead of the top down? What if we just mostly, you know, live and let live? Going with free speech, including billboards, is a good place to start trying out such a wild plan.
Billboards are obnoxious, ugly, and as the article pointed out, have basically no oversight from city design boards, meaning that they're not under any obligation to look nice.
In fact, there's almost a reverse incentive; if it clashes with the rest of the city's aesthetic, you're much more likely to notice it.
I don't really see how it's hurting "free speech" to restrict billboards. No one is suggesting we regulate the speech, no one is telling these companies what to say, we just don't want big ugly billboards blasting in our face and making our cities look terrible.
You're of course free to disagree with this, but you almost certainly draw the line somewhere. If I went and dumped a bunch of trash and feces into the middle of the street every day, you probably wouldn't be outraged when I eventually get a ticket, and I doubt that making a "free speech" argument would get me out of that fine, even if I explained the artistic merit of me doing that.
What exactly is authoritarian and from the top down about the majority of people deciding that they do not want a minority of rich people and especially companies to place huge ads everywhere in public places where everyone is forced to see them?
The majority deciding to ban the minority with enough money from taking over public spaces and forcing the majority to see their ads seems very bottom up to me.
Taking the Supreme Court argument that Property = Speech I see.
More money = More volume. There is no equality of "free" speech. Or rather, the speech if free, but the rich get to amplify their voice over the poor. You can say what you want if you're poor, but only if you're rich can you demand people listen to you without recompense or the right to block, and if you DO want to block you're "bad" and "anti-speech". (See Elon's how dare anyone have the right to block).
Driving is a captive audience, I don't have the option to "close my eyes/plug my ears" to avoid your "free speech" but with free speech comes the right to avoid hearing your bullshit. I can avoid buying a book, I can turn the channel on the radio, but a billboard doesn't offer that "right" to be free FROM your bullshit speech. There's more obligation on billboards in that regards, and it's kinda horseshit that you're allowed to hold me captive because you have enough money to spend on a campaign (whether it's commercial, political, religious IDGAF)
Wish "freespeechers" could understand this. I'm not saying we should just ban everything, and I'm not even sure I agree with a billboard ban (I would have signed up 25 years ago on that, adbusters reading chud that I was). I'm just saying it's really pathetic that people cry "free speech" when there are two things at play and the SCOTUS did a disservice on differentation between amplitude of property vs signal of speech.
Be grateful I'm deleting my followup message and I'm getting older and wiser and learning to shut up. You can waste your eyeball resources on something other than my comments which will convince no-one. Have a nice life.
Why should we tolerate amplified messages at all? If you've got something worth hearing to say, people will repeat it. We've been doing that for a million years or so, we're good at it.
I mean, let's make exceptions for events where everybody came to hear the thing, where consent for the amplification can be assumed because we all bought tickets or something, but if you're standing on the corner with a bullhorn shouting at passers-by, that's hostile behavior in the same way that billboards are. Please don't do it.
I am actually arguing quite the opposite, I am very anti-banning but where do you draw the line? it is a fine line between lawlessness and allowing bunch of idiots (regardless of which "political party" they are affiliated with) to make these decisions. so how do you get this done? obviously lawlessness is not the answer?
How do you place a value on aesthetics? Or driver distraction? Or the irritation I feel when I see 50 billboards for cannabis every time I drive down the road near my house?
Eh, if company wants to contribute a billion bucks to city coffers in order to put up a single billboard, that's surely worth the small amount of inconvenience.
So I hope we established that there is a finite tax that's large enough to cover the negative externalities.
Now we just need to figure out what finite amount of taxation is reasonable.
> What's the tax value of "my city looks like a garish parade of bullshit I don't need"?
Different municipalities (and their voters) can differ in how much they value money vs aesthetics. There's no one size fits all solution.
I mostly agree... but at the same time, in my city billboards also have specific regulations, ordinances, and an approval cycle before a governance committee. Maybe there is a middle ground between "allow everything" and "ban everything", which is simply to update the city code to put guidelines and review on them?
i agree, but not even a middle ground, like a small amount of exceptions for iconic advertisements, such as stuff on sides of buildings like the old Jordan jumpman thing in Chicago. or other stuff that ADD to a city rather than make it worse.
They are banned here in Vermont, and it’s great. Going across the border to New York or Massachusetts is always a shock. They’re just so ugly.
Agreed. It makes for a very obvious difference when we cross the river into New Hampshire. One of the things I love about living here.
A less extreme version of this other recent post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
Billboards are banned where I live and it's great. It's interesting that this post says that where the author lives "someone can put up a 48-foot advertisement wherever they want". From other things I read I got the impression that in some (maybe many) cities a reason they're not banned is because they provide revenue, since many are on land like road medians that are controlled by local government. I'm not sure to what extent the designs themselves are reviewed but the ability to erect a billboard is regulated in such cases.
I grew up in Alaska which has a billboard ban. And then I went to Florida for university, and while there was a lot of culture shock I really think that the in your face billboards everywhere where the biggest bit.
Huge aggressive grabs for attention when you really should be paying attention to the road really should not be allowed.
So fascinating. I’ve grown up on the east coast and it never even occurred to me as a possibility until a HN thread yesterday.
Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont are way ahead of the rest of the country on this, that’s for sure.
Similar here but sort of the opposite, grew up with advertising and I didn't think it could possibly get worse. Then I visited Florida for the first time in a long time and I saw a floating ad on the water. Killed the trip entirely for me.
I once made a long drive through Vermont and was stunned at the absence of car-culture detritus compared to almost any other freeway I've seen in the US. Without all the gas stations and strip malls you can barely see the highway from a distance; it just disappears into the forest.
I do find billboards annoying, but they're like 2% of the problem.
Kill billboards and you move the Overton window. Billboards are a no-brainer, so if we can't control them then we have no hope for any ads of any sort. If we can eliminate them then we can start on the next thing.
Pretty sure Seattle (maybe King County) doesn't allow billboards. You can really tell when you pass the banned area when driving south on I-5 getting close to Tacoma.
Also if interested the opening scenes of The Monkey Wrench Gang (by Edward Abbey) are about illegally cutting down billboards in Southwest Utah.
They're legal in King County, but they're required to be for business within a certain mile radius. There's several of them along the 522, for example. https://maps.app.goo.gl/cmCVXvJJgfYUAtXF9
There are a couple in downtown Seattle maybe it’s on I5? Example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/W6HbwSC4eFYYG3sW8
From [0]:
In the early 1960s, Washington was one of the first states to successfully ban billboards from freeways. An exception can be seen in the lands owned by the Puyallup Tribe along I-5 near Fife, where massive billboards and video screens now flank both sides of the freeway. (Being classified as sovereign nation, the Puyallups can have their own sign laws.) If that state ban had not passed, you would now be seeing hundreds of similar signs from Vancouver to Bellingham, from Port Angeles to Spokane.
The City of Seattle, like many other cities, later passed a law limiting the installation of more billboards, aka off-premises signs. This was an outgrowth of a national effort to reduce the proliferation of commercial advertising that was spoiling our views of mountains, lakes, forests, pastoral lands, and architectural landmarks. It also took an inventory of billboards, ordering removal of those that had been erected without permits.
The City’s law was challenged in court by Ackerley Communications, the owner of most of the billboards in Seattle. The courts upheld the law but the dilemma was that there were scores of billboards in all corners of the city. So a deal was struck that if a billboard that was near certain sensitive locations, like schools or parks or homes, and was then removed, a new one could be erected in certain acceptable locations elsewhere.
Many billboards are installed in parking lots or vacant lots that have since been developed and those could not be replaced, as sign owners lost the leases. So, therefore, over time, the number of billboards would gradually decrease.
[0]: https://www.cascadepbs.org/2012/08/hinshaw-billboards
Right, here's the current rules: https://wsdot.wa.gov/business-wsdot/highway-signs/advertisin...
It's funny; there was a different hackernews thread just a couple days ago about banning all advertising, and billboards came up, and I posted about this.
Wow that's great.
I'd prefer them all gone but stopping the bleeding is good too.
Up next: political add yard signs spammed everywhere but yards.
the mountain to sound green way, billboard free, is amazing, green, and beautiful. more places should do this.
Over in Washington state the rule for most major highways is that billboards can only advertise something which is actually being sold on the same piece of property.
I think it strikes a nice balance, preventing the most egregious forms of attention pollution.
It seems unlike digital ads, the billboard ROI is quite low
Where I live it’s mostly ads for injury attorneys and strip clubs.
I’d be fine without them
Billboards are expensive and untargeted, so you need very high profit per acquired customer. Hence: law firms, sports betting, etc. Or you can go the long-term brand awareness route, hence alcohol, fast food, etc.
Vegas
Maine banned billboards state-wide a long time ago and it’s great
Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii have as well, according to the internet
Yeah I visited Honolulu a few years ago. It took me a couple days to notice why the city sort of felt visually quieter than my home city. I love it - and it was horrible seeing billboards everywhere when I got home.
I rarely leave the state, and I'm always aghast at the real world. Shh. It's nice and quiet here!
Just ban all advertising.
Why always jump to the extreme that will have almost zero political chance of winning. Billboards sound like a feasible incremental step in a good direction. Start there, everyone sees tangible improvements and is primed to make a bigger leap. Killing an entire industry as step one, is just simply never going to happen, dream on.
As a lot of HN is US based, I’ll just say in our divided bipartisanship state it’s a real shame we’ve forgotten that incremental improvements is always an option and I’d argue usually the best kind.
It isn't a political statement there are other avenues in marketing besides advertising. If a product is genuinely good it should serve on its own. Advertisements lead too much opportunity for exploitation.
Establishing that you support the extreme action does not mean that you are unwilling to accept incremental action as well.
Let's start by banning billboards, and then let's keep going and ban more forms of mental pollution until the overton window has moved enough that we can entirely ban the ability to pay to control someone's attention.
The type of comment kind of shuts down discourse is my point. If you want any change you have to approach it with more tact.
I don't think GP was suggesting this a political policy worth pursuing, but was just stating a preference. And stating an extreme preference does not imply that one would not be pleased with incremental improvement.
I, too, would love it if all advertising just disappeared.
How would this be enacted in a free society?
There is a billboard near me that is advertising a billboard advertising company. They use the slogan "Unmissable. Unblockable. Un[something]able."
It makes me irrationally angry. They're rubbing the viewer's face in the fact that they can't avoid looking at the sign.
Really gives one a strong urge to deface it.
I'm my town we also have strict rules on signage. Signs cannot be backlit or flashy. Generally they need to be setback from the street. This makes things harder to find but it's also easy on the eyes when you're just walking or driving around.
Sopot in Poland banned all billboards. I'm excited to visit and see how it feels. Amazing I reckon.
Oh, thank God. I only visited Portland once, and despite being vastly different from Austin in climate and flora, the sea of billboards made it feel eerily familiar (and not in a good way). I expected it to feel more like Seattle, but that one thing made a world of difference.
Poland != Portland. But very close as they're both in the Northern Hemisphere, although not on the same continent.
Sopot, Poland[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopot
Lol, don't know how my mind filled in those letters, but that was indeed my Portland experience so I'll leave it.
Until this, I kept reading it as Poland despite reading it at least 3 times over.
Wait, doesn’t Austin have a billboard ban? There are some billboards but they’re grandfathered in and cannot be rebuilt if they fall over.
https://www.kut.org/austin/2022-04-21/advertising-companies-...
Huh, could have fooled me. My first experience of Austin was long stretches of ugly billboards (I think mostly on Burnet and N Lamar), and despite living here for years that first impression never left. Now that I think about it, without some kind of ban of course there would be way more billboards where I now live.
Design boards, zoning, permitting processes, etc have been a disaster for the affordability and inequality of the cities that lean into them. Advertising has serious drawbacks but these arbitrary design boards should be pared back and disempowered.
Having moved from urban South Africa (Johannesburg/Pretoria) to a country side-ish town in Ireland (Wexford), the lack of billboards and in-your-face advertising everywhere was absolutely breath-taking.
I did not realize just how mentally oppressive constant billboard advertising was until I did not see it any more wherever I go.
My favorite parkway in the US (at least for now) is the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. It's a National Park. It's gorgeous during the spring and fall with leafy trees exploding in color. No billboards too.
Spain also prefer no billboards along their highways - at least, the one time I visited. Our tour guide pointed it out. The only billboards were from the Barcelona Olympics, I believe.
It really does make a difference.
When not commuting on metro, I always favored 295 even if traffic was slightly worse. It’s been decades, but I still vividly recall the trees being calming, even with traffic.
Brazil did this.
I recall living in Portland fifteen years ago. A mural on a health food store became the center of controversy because it was permitted while advertisements weren't. Local businesses sued the city to make sure they weren't prohibited from their God given right to slap gambling ads up in front of children.
This idea won't be easy to implement.
Billboards must be terrible for property value, I’m surprised that alone hasn’t caused them to become more sparse.
Boston sells off every square inch of public bus stop, trash can, etc. to a small number of companies that pay a pittance for the right to resell the space for advertisements. Lexington and Concord are the only places where such things are disallowed.
During the pandemic I found a trash can in a suburb that had been postered with a Johnnie Walker ad for over a year, and sent in a phony request for a quote to advertise a community poetry slam event. The quote was for over $2000. Multiply that by every trash can in the city.
In Sweden this is already basically banned, it’s nearly impossible to get a permit to setup a billboard anywhere because it has to be approved by municipal and land owner. It’s so difficult that i know a guy that bought many chunks of land and put up a 100M high baloon advertising instead because it doesn’t cover land and is exempt. It would have worked if he didn’t make the ads so distracting that it caused an accident and he was forced to stop by order law.
The advertisers don't need billboards anymore. My car has a display for the radio (and other uses) and it displays ads that cannot be turned off.
I hesitate to suggest this but why not just contact anyone advertising asking them to not use billboards for the reasons you have, to the point where a lot of people will take down their billboards as they'll consider them to have a negative impact on their business? Suggest to businesses not to use billboards for the reasons you have, instead of trying to ban the practice.
Btw, Brazil's largest city, São Paulo, banned billboards. I believe it is better now.
It incentived the spread of graffiti art thorough the city.
But how will I know that I'm just 500 miles from South of the Border? Or 250 miles from the next Buc-ee's? Or be reminded not to diddle my daughter[1]?
[1] https://imgur.com/MaaS5ua
I live in Alaska where billboards are banned, and it’s lovely. The ugliness of outdoor advertising is one of the first things I notice when traveling in most of the continental United States. Even without billboards, people still shop at local businesses.
I agree, but I also don't care. A few people are really passionate about this, most people agree but it's just not important. Let's busy our governments with important issues and not your vanity pet problem.
For me the test for acceptable advertising is whether I can avoid it or not: newspapers, magazines, free-to-air TV, free websites — fine; billboards, and any service I pay for — no way.
Billboards are fantastic for some kinds of advertising. Like letting you know a big comedian or musician will be in town.
Honestly I like advertising in general, but Targeted ads are the problem. Billboards are the least targeted ad.
If I throw a pamphlet on the ground I have broken some city ordinance or law. If I blow it up so that nobody in the vicinity can avoid seeing it, then I'm all good.
Bizarre.
Trash is trash whether it's a piece of paper on the ground or blown up to billboard size.
Billboards are targeted at a very specific demographic: drivers. They're designed to draw attention away from the road and to whatever it is that they're trying to sell.
That reason alone is enough to ban billboards: we can't tell drivers they're terrible people for glancing at their phone for a second to get directions while simultaneously allowing corporations to plaster the roadway with ads that are deliberately designed to distract them.
Billboards can make an ugly street look nicer. Cities without any billboards look like a concrete jungle. Just go to Brazil if you don’t believe me.
They're mostly banned in Denver. I think they put a cap on them, and a new one going up means that another one has to come down. Functionally most have been eliminated because of this.
There's some interesting architecture where buildings have been visibly built around an existing billboard.
https://www.google.com/maps/@39.7618828,-105.0111584,3a,73.4...
I think this should extend to also buildings. No more any logos or names. Maybe a small directory with limited font size should be allowed.
I also believe that billboards should be banned, inside and outside of a city. In addition to being excessive advertising which should be avoided, they also usually take up space (that could better be for trees, paths, etc).
Someone has also suggested taxing them. Maybe in some cases, they can be taxed instead of banned, although in some cases probably should just be banned.
Advertising signs might be permitted in some places inside of buildings (especially if they are advertising items being sold there (e.g. foods at a restaurant)), although even then it is probably best not to use too brightly lighted computer/television displays (which waste too much power and also produce too might light; in many cases, e-paper displays would be useful for commercial displays (not only advertising, but also e.g. business hours, which rarely change but sometimes do often enough (e.g. holidays) that it can help to occasionally change the display) that do not need to change very often), and they should also avoid being dishonest advertising.
You cannot put up billboards wherever you want with zero oversight as the article suggests. You would see a heck of a lot more if this were the case.
This is what Adbusters has been supposed to be advocating for for decades. Except for that instead of just focusing on getting ads banned, they switched focus and started complaining about George W. Bush instead. And that is why we still have billboard advertising to this day.
It's the best case study I know of on the importance of just sticking to your one issue and not getting caught up trying to fix everything else that's broken in the world.
Where’s the specific bill to support?
Are there any new ballot initiatives for ideas like this? I would support this in a heartbeat.
While I think what proposed will never happen, this item is full of interesting debate.
How about instead we fix the local ordinances, many of which were originally installed to prevent Black families from moving into white enclaves, that allow public bodies to function as armed HOAs? Seems like a smaller lift than banning advertising.
I don't care about billboards, but the real complaint in this article isn't about billboards.
Why not both? These policies aren't in opposition. I think its great that lots of different people campaign for lots of different policies which will improve our cities.
Feels like a possibly important but unrelated issue. Is there some connection to billboards?
It's discussed in the article.
That’s interesting, because I read the article and it seems like a straightforward rant against billboards. The discussion here - except for your comment - is about either billboards or advertising in general.
If the article is really a metaphor for something else (racist town ordinances? zoning in general? something else?) I think a lot of us have missed it. Perhaps you could enlighten us.
I don't think it's a metaphor, I just think it observes a municipality demanding a business tear down and rebuild a facade for aesthetic reasons and uses that as a justification for banning billboards. Ban all the billboards you want, but municipalities should not be enforcing those aesthetic rules.
Let’s ban design review boards that mandate aesthetic choices on siding.
My HOA should let me build a mudhut and a lot should cost $100.
I sound sarcastic but I mean this unironically. This is a model that works in the developing world and what we had before private capital captured the real-estate market.
This gets flagged to third page? (6h, 308 points)
Is this happening before or after the debt reckoning?
I mean, I completely disagree with the premise used to establish the argument.
> After the contractors appealed the mistake, city staff required them to tear the wall out and reinstall the approved siding.
This sounds to me like the most bullshit of bullshit jobs out there. Seems to me like if it was the building owners prerogative, great replace the siding, but city staff being involved in such seemingly trite issues—often with poor taste—infuriates me.
Sorry, your house doesn't meet the shadow requirements, you'll have to tear it down and try again. Sorry your house is 3ft too tall based on our policy from 50 years ago. Sorry, the outside has to be beige not some other silly thing, this is a place where people come to live out the rest of their dull existence without having to contend with hue. Your fence must be white, it says so right here!
That said, billboards do suck and we should ban them I guess.
If your neighbor had planning approval on building that would not shade your yard, and then built something that would never have been approved because it shades your yard, reducing your enjoyment of your yard and the value of your house, what’s your position?
I disagree with the intention to regulate such inane details of private land ownership, especially in the city. I wouldn't buy a house with the expectation that my view or my exposure to sun would be perpetually protected by the municipal government.
That said, I also can't buy a house, likely never will be able to, and most likely won't want to, all partly because of such absurd bureaucracy. It's difficult to imagine being so petulant as to seek justice about such a thing unless it made my private garden unworkable. I shouldn't have a hand in what my neighbor paints their house, and that's probably more closely related than the hypothetical silly examples I established. If they literally painted a swastika, well k I guess that's an edge case.
Vermont just banned billboards, period, alongside state highways (as do Hawai'i, Maine, and Alaska).
There is federal highway funding for billboard ads to promote wearing seat belts. Since Vermont didn't have billboards, they had to spend the money in nearby New Hampshire instead...
... New Hampshire doesn't have any seat belt laws.
That's funny, because Maine just puts up DOT programmable signs with funny puns about "Click it or ticket".
The cost of having the first amendment is you have to tolerate voices you don’t want to hear. You can’t silence them without introducing the threat of silencing yourself.
TFA is not about the content of speech on billboards.
The first amendment does not require allowing people to put up enormous structures along the highway that are designed with the express intention of coaxing drivers into focusing on your product instead of the road. That falls pretty cleanly into the kind of provably and immediately dangerous speech we don't typically allow.
Missouri talked about banning billboards in the 90s.
The end result was not only did the ban not pass, but the billboard companies through up what might, in scientific terms, be called a "metric f@ckton" of them down I-70 along with the rest of the state's highways.
They're ugly as dog crap. You don't realize just how many there are until you go up to Iowa and drive in a geographically-similar area and don't have to see the landscape spoiled by "LION'S DEN ADULT SUPERSTORE" and "HELL IS REAL" billboards.
"Let's Ban Billboards "
I am not sure if this is right or wrong. But I have an idea how we could get the message out...
Billboards would be a fine start. Next let's ban paid speech in general.
That is harder. I think HN litigated this pretty hard in another thread, but delineating paid vs non-paid is not always clear.
I'm unconvinced based on legal precedents around tobacco advertising and pharmaceutical company sales reps. There are well-established legal definitions for all relevant terms here.
I dunno, the billboards in movies like Blade Runner were kind of cool.
Advertising in my opinion has a UX problem, it is however inextricable from a capitalist society. It needs to look great, it needs to be consistent and it should respect user consent and privacy. That's pretty much it.
Billboards don't invade your privacy or require consent, so they just need to look modern/great and be placed in areas where they won't disrupt natural and residential scenery. Unlike web-ads, they're more or less consistent but like i said earlier, I wish they were more "cool" like in scifi movies.
Advertising is a parasitic force on society. It sucks up your attention with a willful intention to change your purchasing behaviour, often knowing that the new behavior is worse for you.
If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring. But ads want to manipulate, so they have to be flashy and appeal to your emotions.
They pollute your mental headspace, and have no place in a healthy society.
Let's ban billboards. And then let's follow that up with a general purpose ban on paid advertisement.
I think this is deeply and fundamentally wrong.
Advertising is how small and new companies can reach customers. It's how monopolies are broken. It's how progress reaches the masses.
Yes, it is willfully intended to change people's behavior. So are many of our posts on HN. That is an important purpose for communication!
Ironically the companies with the most widespread advertising are the LARGE companies! They pollute our daily lives with stupid ads.
I’m really not concerned about the car I don’t have, the quality of my floor mop, or the latest prescription pharmaceutical that my primary care doctor is too stupid to even spell.
I really feel for the small companies. But outside extremely industry specific mediums, they just can’t afford to advertise much. They have to be known from reputation and search engine results.
So, while I see the point you are trying to make, by volume, the bulk of advertising is utter crap.
This doesn’t match my experience. Are you maybe talking about untargeted ads like in the Super Bowl?
My feed on social apps and youtube is very frequently filled with small businesses near me.
I don't really care if companies -- of any size -- can reach me or not. If I want a service they provide, I will actively seek them out.
Large companies already have a huge advantage over small/new companies in that they have much more money to spend on marketing and advertising. If anything, banning paid advertising helps level the playing field.
People will still find out about small and new businesses if paid advertising was banned. In fact I learn about most smaller players through word of mouth and other non-paid sources.
>If I want a service they provide, I will actively seek them out.
The problem is there are some services you don’t even know exist that could be much better than how you’re currently solving a problem. Think prevention vs treatment of a problem.
For a concrete example:
I learned about a dog groomer that comes to your house this way. Maybe it should have been obvious there would be some that made house calls but searching Google maps for groomers tends to return the ones with locations that you drive to.
Dog hates the car. Problem solved with a thing I didn’t know existed.
Advertising is the cure worse than the disease in this case. I'm willing to have a slightly worse service occasionally if it means I'm not being bombarded with corporate propaganda. If a service is bad enough, or my desire for something is great enough, I will seek it out.
Do you have strong examples of this?
Like, the SlapChop is a good counter example I think. The commercial demos the item, makes it looks useful, uses hot sales tactics, a bunch of people think "it's just 20 bucks, and chopping stuff sucks", buy one, and now we've got a bunch of SlapChops in the landfill because in practice they're finicky and more annoying to use than just a knife.
To me, it seems like by volume commercials mostly fall into trying to convince you you want/need something that's ultimately not that useful vs inform, and the vast majority of actual useful things I've found via actively searching, or via word-of-mouth / seeing it at a friend's house.
If you're relying on ads to tell you how to solve your problems you're implicitly trusting that the information provided in ads is factual and unbiased, and that the problem in question wasn't entirely manufactured by the industry that is now showing you ads (see also: manscaping, engagement rings, vehicle AI integration, etc)
I don't mean to be rude but I genuinely can't think of any service I've learned about through advertising. Do you have an example? I actively seek out product reviews and trailers for things I already know I want but I don't think an ad has changed my mind, just changed whether I buy A or B
How would you know? If you heard about it through word of mouth, and the person you heard it from heard it from an ad…
Good point. Friends, family, and colleagues keep telling me to buy stupid things they see from online ads all the time. They're probably pushing me towards an equal number of non-stupid things and I just don't notice.
In my personal life I pretty much never see ads and I like it that way, but thanks for giving me something to think about.
When you seek them out, how will you find them?
In the old days, if I wanted someone to remove a tree stump in my yard, I would ask my neighbor who had a stump removed who did it for them, or open the yellow pages.
In the modern age, I would open google maps (where companies can, for free, volunteer to be listed), or google.com and search.
The yellow pages are ads, and in a sense a company having a webpage which is indexed by google is advertising, but advertising in an index of services is wildly different from paying an influencer on tiktok to do a dance video that just happens to have a tree stump being removed in the background, as if by accident, with the company name visible.
I think anti-advertising people are largely fine with a yellow-pages-like list of companies, with a search engine that indexes company websites, with word-of-mouth questions and reports about what services exist out there.
Will it be harder for a new company that spends $10 on a purse made in vietnam and $20MM on advertising to convince consumers it's a necessary fashion item worth $20k to take off? Yes, absolutely. Will it be harder for a plumber in my area to get business? Honestly, probably about the same, people who need a plumber will usually look at the list of businesses offering the service in their area, and a new plumber can easily get added to google maps and slap together a site.
Who is paying for Google to run the search system or maps in this world?
I pay for kagi, and that works okay.
I would prefer if this search-engine / company-directory were government funded, and thus paid for via my taxes.
It's a useful service for the people, and having the government also be able to validate businesses are real legal entities seems quite useful, so making it tax funded seems pretty ideal.
Ditto for an up-to-date map, that's a generally useful thing to the populace, and the government really is the best authority on what streets are still usable, what towns exist, etc.
Most people can't afford to pay for Kagi.
A government funded maps program would be great same with a government funded search engine that had to try and compete with international search engines with more resources.
You can choose not to use Google though and avoid their ads.
You can choose not to use any service that uses ads and only use ones that allow you to pay for ad free experiences.
Banning ads removes that possibility for others when you can solve the problem today for yourself.
> You can choose not to use any service that uses ads and only use ones that allow you to pay for ad free experiences.
Ads are so incredibly pervasive I effectively cannot.
There's stores I go to which only post their hours on instagram. There's friends I communicate with where my only communication avenue is instagram.
When I walk outside of my door I see billboards and ads, when I install an app required for my daily life, it's full of ads. iPhone, android, and windows all have ads by default littered throughout default apps.
We live in a society, and becoming a weirdo who refuses to use anything that doesn't run on my linux-phone will isolate me from that society. It's perfectly possible to criticize a thing and imagine alternatives without first becoming richard stallman.
You could call the store or your friends, no ads there.
What are these apps that are required for your daily life?
My iPhone doesn't have any ads by default outside of the app store.
You're imagining a complete restricting of society and you're not even willing to do without a few apps and Instagram.
> You could call the store or your friends, no ads there.
If everyone called the store to check if they're open instead of looking on instagram, the employee would never get time away from the phone to actually serve customers, you're suggesting something ridiculous. Text and phone calls aren't replacements for each other either between friends.
> What are these apps that are required for your daily life?
The app I have to use to buy train tickets has ads in it, mostly for fashion items sold at stores within train stations.
The app for checking train schedules is full of ads, and while there are open source apps on android for this, on iPhone you can't sideload open source apps so there's no ad-free alternatives. Releasing an app on iOS costs $100/year for the developer, so the incentive is not to make free open source apps. I really miss android. The iOS app store has so much completely garbage adware, and I can't even code up simple ad-free apps for myself without buying a macbook.
The app I have to use to send support requests to my landlord (an app dedicated to just that purpose) has a couple banner ads. The corporate landlord requires using it, and will not respond to phone calls.
My cell phone company's app, which is the only way to check my plan's remaining data, has a truly incredible number of ads.
.... and that's just off the top of my head. They're everywhere.
But even if all my apps were ad-free, the billboards posted everywhere, on busses, in trains, on buildings, are inescapable.
Instagram has been around less than 15 years. I'm suggesting you do what people did for the previous 100 years. You're not willing to do that to avoid ads? You're not willing to call or text your friends?
Instagram would be gone without ads, what would you do to fill the gap then?
Buy your tickets at the station? Use the train company website for the schedules?
Does your landlord or phone company have a website? What phone company is running third party ads in their app?
> Instagram has been around less than 15 years. I'm suggesting you do what people did for the previous 100 years. You're not willing to do that to avoid ads? You're not willing to call or text your friends?
The fact that instagram is relatively recent doesn't matter here, what matters is the social norms. You're a social outcast if you don't use ad-ridden software.
I'm not willing to be a depressed loner with no friends in order to avoid ads, if that's what you're asking. Just because I can unalive and no longer see ads doesn't mean that I have to like seeing them.
Social norms have changed, and I can't fix that by myself. I'll happily argue that social norms being ad-funded and brainwashing the populace, myself included, is bad though.
> Does your landlord or phone company have a website?
The cell phone provider's website has just as many ads as the app, they're equivalent. There isn't a webpage for my landlord.
Plenty of people manager to avoid being social outcasts without using Instagram. Keeping up with your friends pictures and reels is hardly a needed part of friendship. Call, text, message your friends, organise to hangout, put their birthdays in your calendar.
You're not willing to make literally the smallest of sacrifice to get what you want in avoiding ads. You've chosen a discount mobile network, go with a premium one to avoid ads.
If you're not going to be willing to pay for these things today how will your life be when you're forced to because they are no longer subsidised by advertising?
Those are indeed very useful things.
It's true that people often spend their money on frivolous or unnecessary things. But sometimes people pay for useful things too!
Imagine this: instead of the search engine space being 90% focused on ads and 10% on providing a good search experience, you could have one that is focused on finding the thing you're looking for.
You can have that now if you subscribe to Kagi but it costs money to operate and use. So without advertising you're choosing to make it impossible for poorer people to search.
I don't see that argument having much heft. The people who are worried about their view being soured by billboards aren't the ones who are worried about what happens to poorer people. They move in different circles.
I really can't believe that someone who frequents Hacker News can ask this question.
If by any chance this is a legit question, i feel the answer would be too obvious: asking people, googling, going to a store you think could sell the thing you want, etc. There are many many pretty obvious ways of finding out about stuff, without needing to have a corporation "reach out" to me and shove their shit everywhere in the form of ads.
And, just to expand a bit on this, what i find puzzling about the stance of "how will you find out about stuff without ads" is that it goes totally contrary to my contemporary experience.
Nowadays, when i want to find out about something, i don't just query Google about it, i usually make sure to add "site:reddit.com" to that query, precisely to avoid getting swamped by unuseful ads on the search results and instead have a change at getting to actual data from actual people. In this sense, ads are not only not useful for finding out about the stuff i want: they are actually hampering my ability to do so.
Google doesn't exist in this world remember
Yes, i remember. I remember Google the search engine being a thing before it became an ad-ridden space.
Search engines are useful things. They can still exist on a world without ads.
Google existed before ads by losing investor money. Who is paying for it when ads are banned?
This a thread about imagining a world without ads. If we're trying to envision that, it surely is not too hard to imagine how such a useful service for society as a search engine could be funded by other means, right?
There are many many examples of useful services (both private and public) in our own world that manage to exist without the need to get plastered by obnoxious ads.
People get upset at the idea of using government money to feed the starving. Why do you assume they would be ok with spending billions to create a search engine?
The reality is you can choose to have your dream reality right now. Pay for Kagi, pay for ad free streaming or buy bluerays, stay of social media or subscribe direct to your content providers in patron.
We don't need to remove free access just so a few people can go ad free. Those people can already do it they just choose not to
Not through ads - you can be sure of that!
Advertising may have been necessary the way you're describing in the 1950's but it's now so much easier to move information around.
As for all communication being a bit like advertising, a significant threshold has been crossed once you're paying to have your information elevated above that of your peers. If we didn't allow that, the noise floor would be lower, and it would be possible to achieve the benefits of advertising without the harms.
For instance, suppose I'm looking for a plumber... there are only maybe fifteen within a reasonable distance. There's no need for the plumbers to pay some third party for the privilege of being first in the list. I can limit my search criteria so that the results are narrow enough that I can consider each one, and they can instead spend that money on pipes or toilets or whatever.
And also, in communication there is respectful and disrespectful. Screaming in my face is communication. It is not respectful.
The difference is that we’re reading these comments willingly. A great deal of advertising is imposed on people who don’t want it.
If I don’t want my behavior swayed by HN, I can stop reading it. If I don’t want my behavior swayed by advertising, I can... close my eyes every time a bus goes by, avoid any public place with an operating television, and never check my mail?
Yes? Unfortunately others can communicate to us without our consent. That could be ads or someone writing you a postcard, or yelling on a street corner. All of those can influence us and not all of them are welcome but I don’t think it’s reasonable to think we can live in a world where we can fully control it without becoming hermits.
And plenty of times a lot can be done to mitigate those, not being able to fix every chance, doesn't mean we should'nt try to fix what we can
Germany has a ban on coldcalling, Sao Paulo on outdoors advertising, Chile on Mascots / Kid Targeted Branding on Cereals
We can expand on those, I won't say neccessarily kill all advetisement, but we could certainly do a lot better than the current climate
Maybe not, but only because it’s impractical, not because advertising is actually a good thing.
But one way we can control some of it is by banning advertising
I’m curious how you’d define advertising. Is it just something applied to another form of media? Would you count an end cap at the super market? Does the McDonald’s logo on the big sign you can see from the highway count? Or the coke machine inside?
Any definition I could pick would be more than none, which us what we have now.
An easy start is all billboards, everything ublock origin considers an ad, TV/radio/magazine ones.
All very unambiguous
Gotta disagree. The most disruptive up and comers seem to get there through word of mouth. I mean look at Figma. I haven't seen a single Figma ad since they began as a company (they probably exist somewhere) but they really rocketed off through word of mouth among the design community. Pretty sure slack was similar in this regard. Both disrupters.
I have no actual evidence of this always being the case but I would imagine given the fact the nature of a disrupter is that they're usually operating on principles of delivering a better product but without the budget to go crazy with advertising, they have to find more grassroots methods of market penetration.
The states that have banned billboards seem to get by just fine though.
The companies exist to serve me and not the other way around. Companies don't have any inherent right to exist. If they can't make money off of me they're probably not doing anything that matters.
Do you mean real progress like washing machines and more efficient solar panels or fake progress like another beverage company to replace the ones that are already there? Real progress will spread by word of mouth. It will be much slower, but I'll accept that to never see an ad for another McDonalds new burger of the month.
Also, search engines are the perfect solution for discoverability here. I don't care if lawn care ads pop up if I search "lawn care service" but I don't want to have this thrown at me when I watch a YouTube video about Napoleon
The difference between an advertisement and a post on HN is that the HN comment (presumably) is not a paid comment - people are saying things on HN because they genuinely believe them, not because someone with an agenda paid them to pretend to believe them!
And that makes all the difference. I am very happy to read that an HN commenter prefers one specific brand of car - assuming that this is an unbiased comment and the commenter was not paid to say that. On the other hand, if they *were* paid to say they like a specific brand of car, they are deceiving me! They are exposing my brain to ideas and associations that are inauthentic, and making me more likely to buy a certain brand of car even though that car cannot get mentioned on its own merits, and instead needs to pay for attention.
Also, I'm not sure I agree that "advertising is how monopolies are broken" - my read on the advertising industry is that larger companies today have a massive advantage over smaller companies, and that smaller businesses would be more able to succeed if advertising was removed. And the advantage more or less comes from the larger brands ability to afford to expose a larger number of people, and that exposure has superlinear effects on purchase behavior (because not only are you exposed to it, but your friends are talking about it, and their family is talking about it, etc).
You assume that advertisement is the only way of discovering business, which is not true.
There is a balance to be maintained for sure. I am known for bemoaning the almost-exclusively scammy ads on Facebook (and getting downvoted for it here).
But - also - my wife and I opened a restaurant recently. We need exposure. We are buying ad space on social media, having influencers review the place, working on putting up fliers at public bulletin boards, and investigating mailers (snail mail). It's clear, we're not going to make a go of it without connecting with more customers. If it was just me and her working it, we'd be in the green but we have day jobs and pay our (necessary) employees fairly.
Both perspectives have truth.
Some ads are abusive. Some ads compel behavior that is obviously bad for the participants.
Take all the sports gambling ads right now.
Take loot boxes with flashing visuals for children.
Some ads are fine. They are informative and useful, and can provide value.
I'm my opinion, we have leaned too far towards the bad. The useful is being drowned out by ads that take advantage of any social or emotional vulnerability we have. Banking on physical rewards systems geared towards smaller, more meaningful social groups to make us give up attention, time, and money.
I'm in favor of banning ads. Let's try the other end of the spectrum for a bit.
To be crass: let God find his own in the ads world. The good products will still spread organically. It's still advertising. It's just not the bullshit we have today.
They can still promote their products, by sending them to social media reviewers no-strings-attached, or by posting through non-commercial channels. For instance, corporate representatives can promote their company's offerings on their own accounts on twitter or reddit.
What they should not be able to do is pay people, who have a media or influencer "brand", to say things about a product or service. Or pay media for a time slot during which a corporate agent spouts propaganda about the company's product or service. Or send a product to a reviewer as part of a contract for a review, even if it's supposedly a "fair and honest" review.
You probably don’t need advertising now that the internet exists and people can just research what they need.
You really think 1) advertising is the only channel for finding new products and 2) people will just give up looking for new products without ads?
You’re right. New plan: let’s ban all paid advertisements except for those that are approved by a committee of government officials. /s
No seriously, let's ban all advertisements. If you want that info, you can seek it out, it should not seek you.
There are definitely a lot of problems with advertising and I am all for regulating them but this seems like such an extreme response. As someone who has worked for smaller organizations (both for profit and nonprofit) without some form of advertising people just would not hear about us at all.
If all advertising was banned, other institutions would set up to fill the vacuum. Imagine variations of Consumer Reports but that stretch across all sorts of industries.
Essentially, to get the word out about your organization or product (whether for-profit or non-profit), you'd have to convince someone with an audience to feature you *without paying them to do it*. In other words, your organization or product or service has to be genuinely interesting on its own.
And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape.
You sound like someone who has never had to run an event, concert, protest, market a new product, or build reputation on an existing one. Your solution — rely on influencers who only review — is unscalable across industries, price points, and ultimately eye balls.
I have taken one project to $3 billion and another to $700 million, and along the way we have run numerous events, marketed numerous products, and built many reputations. Many of the most successful products (including one that hit 2 million MAU) didn't use any form of paid promotion at all!
So, I do happen to have relevant experience. I haven't run a concert or a protest, but I've done the rest of the things you mentioned, some of which at considerable scale.
That’s impressive. Given that experience, how do you expect people to learn of products and events without any paid promotion in a scalable way? Here n=all businesses.
> in a scalable way
You continue to beg the question. "Without advertizing, companies would not be able to scale" is not a weakness of the push to ban advertizing - it is a virtue. The people advocating against advertizing _actively want_ businesses to have a smaller maximal size.
Why should it be scalable. I’m fine with forcing things to not be scalable. Let products be word of mouth in local communities first.
I have never attended an event, concert, protest, or volunteered my time based on ads. I have based on community event calendars, upcoming event calendars that while they may have taken money for placement (which they should have been required to disclose but probably didn't) had plenty of free listings. The main time I've used ads for 'things to do' is on vacation and have found the ad promoted stuff generally not a useful indicator and had just as good of luck with the service we randomly found on our own (thinking things like sailing/snorkeling excursions in Hawaii, Costa Rica).
Not everything has to scale, and we should be comfortable with some ideas just being bad and us not doing them.
We got here because of scaling. We can now efficiently tap into the mental space of billions of humans at the same time. And that’s not just a problem, that’s THE problem.
Meaning that “this doesn’t scale!” isn’t a side effect. It’s the main effect, it’s the solution.
"And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape."
Sounds nice in theory. "You want to like us on facebook and get a perk for free on your app? (No money involved)."
"Hey you maybe want a job? We will give one to those who spread the word most about us"
Devil is in the details. And humans have a lot of details.
Otherwise I am all for starting to ban of advertisement, what is possible.
But disruption should be expected. A lot.
(I mean, most of the internet is financed by ads)
The law has pretty firm definitions for things like "in kind payments" and "consideration" - because these sorts of sneaky ways of rewarding people are also relevant to bribes!
So we aren't treading into new uncharted territory where the details need to be figured out - humans have been playing this game for centuries and the law already has effective tools for navigating the tricky parts.
And it is not really working well in my perception, when it is standard procedure for politicians to land high paying (useless) jobs in the industry they formerly regulated, after some grace period. Or get payed a lot for being a public speaker. Where no one cares about the speech.
> convince someone with an audience to feature you without paying them to do it.
It takes time and effort to feature a product, how could they make a living?
I can imagine 4 different possible outcomes:
- People just find new loophole and behave exactly as before
- Large media company only features products from their friends and families. Monopoly.
- Only the government and a few selected individuals get the incentive. They gain from controlling the information.
- Only local businesses can survive.
They are very different outcome. You can't just ban one undesirable behaviour and hope for the best. You need to focus on what outcome you desire and how each and every side effects.
-- While we are banning monetary gain for ad, can we stop political lobbying too?
> It takes time and effort to feature a product, how could they make a living?
That's exactly the point. People shouldn't be making a living promoting other people's products. If they like something and want to promote it, for no compensation, then they should.
Imagine someone with a home improvement YouTube channel. They really, genuinely like certain brands for the tools that they use. So those tools will be visible in the videos, and the person making the videos is free to tell viewers how much they like those brands.
Who is paying for all the costs involved in making that channel and showing it to everyone?
Patreon-style supporters.
You can use patreon today and avoid YouTube. Problem solved.
It’s a ban on advertising, not a ban on marketing budgets. You could still have a Malborough F1 company to make your brand inadvertently visible in F1, and a Malborough Acting company to make actresses smoke in public in defiance to bad males who want to tell them what to do (both are true stories).
If advertising is blocked, the exact same amount of dollars will be spent perverting every public speech.
Advertising. You are talking about advertising while attempting to call it something else.
It may not require money if that is banned but value will be exchanged and we’ll be back to square one.
This sounds like a Utopian idea that in practice would result in a lot of self-dealing and outright fraud on the part of the influencers you’re hypothecating. Hard pass.
All you’ve done here is shifted how the money is spent. The companies with deep pockets will spend extra on getting into that reviewer’s queue. See: lobbying.
> If all advertising was banned, other institutions would set up to fill the vacuum
Yes, you’d pay promoters and bids it. This is literally Prohibition 101.
I don't think that would be the case. If people want to find an org that is doing what you are doing, they will find you. If they aren't interested in whatever it is you're doing, then they won't hear about you.
And that's exactly the point. I don't want products and services pushed at me. I don't want companies telling me that I need what they offer, even if I've never really thought about it before.
And remember, this is just a ban on paid advertising. This doesn't mean you can't put up a website to market your product. You can sell through Amazon or whatever, and appear in search results (results that aren't affected by anyone paying for ad space or better rankings). You just can't pay others to advertise it for you.
There are a lot of problems with slavery and I am all for it them but this seems like such an extreme response. As someone who has worked for slave owners, without some form of slavery, people would just not pick cotton at all.
Billboards have been banned in Hawaii for a century ie. they were banned even before it became a state. Their are also billboard bans in Alaska, Vermont, and Maine.
To be clear I am 100% fine with billboard bans. I live in a billboard ban state and it's great. I was talking about the proposed complete ban of all advertising of any kind.
It is a reaction to an action. Smallish, discrete boards telling me your shop is around the corner selling sodas? Fine. Blinking, screaming, distracting, life-endangering bullshit boards? No.
> people just would not hear about us at all.
Can you give an example of when this is bad for the target of the ad instead of the organization doing the advertising? Small organizations don't have a right to exist
Advertising is out of control. Doing mundane things like filling up fuel at a petrol stations, or catching a lift at work - there is a little screen targeting you with ads.
What is an advertisement? Let’s see if we can define this before deciding on an all out ban.
I don't think we really need to do that. In the US, advertising certain types of products (tobacco and alcohol, to name a couple) to children is illegal. So clearly the law already knows what an advertisement is, and how to define it in such a way that seems to get the job done from a legal perspective.
paid advertisement is easier to define, I think. If entity A pays entity B to show/tell me something, that's an ad.
So paid actors in movies are ads? They are paid for by the production company.
Presumably we want to keep paid actors, but then the loop hole is that Procter & Gamble becomes a media production company.
That's actually close to how things used to be eg in the US.
Procter & Gamble is welcome to become a media production company, but they can't push their media by paying for distribution - any paid distribution is advertising. Instead, distributors have to want to distribute the content because they think their audience will be interested in consuming it - a high bar to hit if the main purpose of your media is to push a product.
Paid actors, and for example company representatives, do count as acting on behalf of the company and therefore don't count as paid advertising. But, whatever medium they are talking to has to be an unpaid medium. A company representative (or paid actor) talking about a product in an interview is okay if the interviewer / distributor is not being paid to host the interview. (or if the interviewer / distributor is the company itself - that's also allowed).
Does that give massive companies an advantage? I would argue not really, because it creates massive overheads for pushing advertisement content, and since you aren't allowed to pay for distribution, it means that people have to be interesting in consuming your content of their own volition instead of other content that isn't trying to push products.
> Procter & Gamble is welcome to become a media production company, but they can't push their media by paying for distribution - any paid distribution is advertising.
I'm a bit confused.
When Amazon pays the postal service to send me a book, is that paid distribution and thus advertising?
Another example: I used to subscribe to the print edition of the Economist. I as a consumer paid for that product. Does that mean there's no ads in the Economist? (A substantial fraction of the print edition is made up of ads in the common sense understanding of the term.)
The actors in a movie aren't the ones delivering the content to me.
So when say Comcast owns a sports team and runs videos promoting the idea of buying a ticket to see that sports team it wouldn't be an ad because Comcast didn't pay itself?
I'm all for banning whole forms of advertisements (ex. Billboards) that don't actually educate the consumer about the product. But _all_ advertisements is too knee-jerk.
Does public service announcement get exemption?
How about health ad ("Smoking kills") ?
How about mentioning a product in health ad (Smoking kills. Nicotine patches help you quit smoking)?
Traditionally, the government setup some regulatory body to oversee these kind of exemptions. These body often corrupt over time. Is a corrupted regulatory body better than no exemptions allowed?
Do we want the legal text cover all cases and become so dense that nobody can comprehend? Or do we want some simple rules and live with the possible unintended consequences?
and the most important question : People hate changes and some industries need to rethink their own business. How could we get people agrees on this in a democratic setting?
What is considered payment? Is that just money? Some advertisements could be paid for with goods services or favors. Which of those do we ban? Is proselyting religion advertising?
> What is considered payment?
Bribery laws, SEC insider trading/collusion stuff...there's many existing examples for definitions for that, when the law doesn't want something to be for sale.
Banning third party advertisers seems like it’s giving a huge advantage to large businesses that can afford their own in house ad departments
It's true. Large businesses have unfair advantages in general, and I think we should discourage large businesses from existing, too.
I would define "advertisement" in this context as "paying someone else to say something of your choosing".
So, in the case of a billboard, if you are paying a landlord, that's advertising. If you are paying a newspaper to print a specific article, that's also advertising. This means paid press releases are also not allowed. Product placement would fall under this definition too - if a specific car brand is paying you to feature their cars in a movie, that's advertising.
Notably, it's not advertising if no payment is being made. If you are making a movie and you decide to feature a specific car brand - and you aren't getting any kickbacks for it - that's completely allowed.
It's also not advertising if it's first-party. For example, a sign that's advertising a restaurant is allowed if the actual restaurant itself is underneath that sign. And it's also not advertising if Disney is pushing Disney movies and products at Disney World, because Disney owns the full creative rights to Disney World and they aren't being paid by outsiders to adjust the messaging.
This definition can even be robust to grey areas like "what if a car brand makes a movie featuring their cars?" - well, how is that movie being distributed? Are they paying people to distribute the movie, or is it genuinely a good movie that people are distributing on their own? Paying people to distribute the movie is not allowed, but if the movie is good enough that people are distributing it anyway of their own volition, then it's okay!
Overall, the definition is pretty large, and paid promotion is so deeply ingrained into modern society that it's difficult to imagine exactly how much would change if advertising was banned. But, quite a lot would change! Pretty much the entire playbook for all commercial enterprises for "how to tell the world about your thing" would have to be re-written, and new institutions would have to be developed to replace advertising.
But I think society overall would benefit greatly from the change!
One thing that I think makes only targeting paid advertising a problem: companies often do more than one thing.
Is it ok that when you're watching broadcast/network TV, they advertise internet or cellular service, because the conglomerate that owns the TV station also owns an ISP and cell carrier?
Is it ok if you're using a popular web search engine, and they advertise their own hosted business productivity suite?
I think no, we should not allow these things. But no money (or consideration, or whatever) has exchanged hands here.
I'm actually okay with the things you mentioned. The really salient example for me is: should Disney be allowed to advertise Disney movies and Disney products at Disney world? The answer seems to be a pretty obvious yes to me. If you are at Disney World, you are in the "Disney Ecosystem", and so there's nothing wrong with Disney pushing more Disney stuff at you - that's just part of the experience.
I think that similar exceptions extend to a TV network that's pushing its own products at you while you are watching the station. No consideration has been provided to push the ad, so you are in whatever ecosystem.
How do you know when you've crossed the line into abuse? Well, we have anti-monopoly laws for that. At some point an ecosystem becomes so big it's a monopoly that needs to be broken up, and after it gets broken up it can't self-deal across the broken pieces anymore. So just like we already have good legal infrastructure in place for figuring out when "consideration" has happened, we also have good (well, maybe not good enough lately) legal infrastructure in place for figuring out when a company is too big and too able to self-deal.
> It's also not advertising if it's first-party.
So if I pay somebody independent to hand out leaflets, that's advertising. But if I employ somebody in the position of leafleteer, now it doesn't count.
You know it when you see it.
How should the law codify that?
The law:
Section 1. Ban on Commercial Advertisements All commercial advertisements, in any medium, are hereby prohibited throughout the United States.
Section 2. Definition For purposes of this Act, “commercial advertisement” means any paid or otherwise sponsored message intended to promote the sale or use of goods, services, or commercial ventures.
Section 3. Enforcement and Penalties Violations of this Act shall be subject to civil or criminal penalties as determined by the courts.
The thing is going to hit the courts anyways. Just craft it in a way that hits the Pareto curve on effectiveness vs legality.
Removes all storefront signage
What is this place? What do they sell here? Wait, is this just a house? ... it would bring some mystery and excitement to shopping.
I think you have to specify that the payment goes to the owner of the platform - where platform is a very broad concept.
Try steelmanning! :)
Like with identifying negligence, minimal force, and parody, you can ask a fictional reasonable person.
No true Scotsman fallacy
I think a better way to answer this is define what kind of advertisements we want to ban. In that respect, I think this has a clearer definition than the previous HN post[1]. The definition of a billboard is much less ambiguous.
But let's not stop, let's continue the actual conversation. I think the problem with the earlier thread is that many conversations boiled down to dichotomies rather than the reality that there is a continuum of what is considered advertising. Personally, I have absolutely no issues with stores having signs in their windows or those wacky inflatable arm guys. Let's call this "old school advertising" for lack of better words.
But I want to add some context for anyone that is confused by people who are angry at ads. People that are upset with ads (myself included) are in generally upset about Surveillance Capitalism[2]. The thing is that ads have gotten out of control. I mean let's be real, the companies with the #5 and #7 market cap (Google @ ~1.8T and Meta @ ~1.3T) are both almost entirely driven by advertising. This does not sound like a healthy economy to me! Some of the richest companies in the world make more money convincing people to buy things rather than actually producing things. There's a lot of ways to define value, are we sure we want to base an economy where we define it this way? Where companies are extremely incentivized to persuade/manipulate people into buying things or thinking certain ways. Is this really what we want to be putting all the efforts of humanity into? Convincing people to buy shit? (or vote a certain way? Or think a certain way?) Do you think that is better than if we had larger concentrated efforts into other things? We said value is a vague word, right? So who creates more value: the person manufacturing a car or a quant trader on Wall-street? How about the person developing a search engine or the person developing better target advertising? Who is providing more value? How about with a different definition of value?
Regardless of how much you think a person or a public is able to be manipulated, surely you can agree that these are perverse incentives. This can help us circle back to my earlier point: do you think it should be acceptable to manipulate children? Certainly to some degree it is acceptable, right? We want to convince them to go to school and better themselves. But should we allow trillion dollar companies to persuade them to buy things? Certainly these are not fully developed humans who have the same constitutional resilience as a grown adult such as you or I, right? Now we can take that even further: what does it mean to advertise to kids? Are billboards? Surely they see them simply by living in the world. What about general audience TV? Surely they'd see those by watching TV.
Fundamentally, the root of the question is "in what directions do we want to be pushing humanity?" There's a lot of economic levels you can pull long before you get anywhere near what would be considered a Planned Economy[3,4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy
[4] If you really think pulling any levers is equivalent then it would necessitate you also believing in the abolishment of all governments and all organizations of any kind. A rather ridiculous bar, but I want to make sure we don't degrade into pretending this is a black and white issue. There's a large continuum here and any effort to incentivize one direction over another is not the same as having absolute rule.
Absolutely agree. If you follow it all the way, advertising and the insatiable demand for consumer attention is the root of so many of our social problems. 24 hour network news bubbles, social media addiction, pharmaceutical companies spending more on advertising than R&D, etc. It all comes down to companies having to abuse the end users because to leave advertising money on the table is to go out of business.
> If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring.
I disagree. Lots of entities want to get information out, and they're all competing for attention. This includes a lot of manipulative information, but it's also true for important information. Say that I'm a government agency tasked with informing the public that a certain brand of car seat is unsafe, or just reminding people that wearing safety equipment is a good idea. I can't just publish it on the agency website, confident that everybody will routinely check it. People don't work like that. So, if I really want people to listen, I have to compete in the same way that ads do. And this of course explains why the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's online presence is batshit insane: https://bsky.app/profile/cpsc.gov . It needs to be. They need Sentinel Burrito to warn you that unattended cooking is the #1 cause of house fires because otherwise our stupid brains won't listen.
There's good and bad from advertising. I think it needs to be regulated and restricted more than banned. They did some study and where advertising was banned prices were higher because low cost providers couldn't put up a get it cheaper here ad. In the UK solicitors are banned from advertising and it makes getting one an expensive pain in the arse.
In olden days we used to get a classified ads newspaper through the door and that was good as you could pick it up if you wanted to check out the ads or ignore/chuck it otherwise. I'd be fine with ads if I had to click to see them. It's having them in your face when you don't want them that's a pain.
> Let's ban billboards. And then let's follow that up with a general purpose ban on paid advertisement
This sprint to the extreme is how one ensures we cannot ban billboards. (If I worked for a billboard company, I would try to frame a billboard ban as a ban on ads.)
I don't know, all the billboards I ever see are for restaurants, concerts, and ambulance chasers. Let's ban Meta and Google instead.
You may not like billboards, but they are a form of expression and free speech. Admittedly against banning them. Have y’all not learned anything from the last election? Cancel culture and stifling free speech is not a strategy.
Let’s strike a deal. Let’s take the current city design boards and repurpose them so that instead of micromanaging stucco colors and setbacks they’re micromanaging visual advertising.
Housing gets cheaper, visual advertising disappears.
>intention to change your purchasing behaviour, often knowing that the new behavior is worse for you.
I think the latter part of that is a huge jump. How is seeing a billboard for a plumber promoting bad behavior?
The plumber could be lowering prices, or focusing on making his customers happy enough that they recommend to a friend. Instead that money/effort is going into a dimension that has nothing to do with good plumbering. That's bad behavior.
This is out of touch with how businesses get going though. If you depend on word of mouth only as a plumber you’ll be out of business before you even get started.
Are you suggesting to wait around the hardware parking lot to hope to hear about someone who needs a plumber?
I think that if we did not live in a world where our attention was under attack all the time, it would make sense to develop a P2P search protocol for this sort of thing. Could be standard community driven open source, could be a government sponsored project, could be a crypto thing, lots of options here...
The plumber would dedicate a raspberry pi or yesteryear's phone with the bad battery or cracked screen, and they'd leave it plugged in in a closet somewhere and configure it to talk to a few peers who they know personally and who will vouch for their legitimacy. They of course would be vouching for others in the same way.
Nodes would gossip about services that are available, so you could figure out which plumbers are nearby and which of your peers trust those plumbers. Since you're operating on a web of trust, you can find a mutually trusted third party to act as a mediator in the case of disputes, and if you have a good or bad experience you can also gossip that info to your peers so that they can aggregate a sort of review system. But unlike Amazon's, it's full of people that you know and explicitly trust, so it's much harder to game since there's no single source of truth to target/abuse.
It would exchange the kind of information that traditionally comes via ads, but I think it would be so much more effective than ads because all parties want it to succeed--whereas ads have carved out a rather hostile landscape for this sort of thing.
They said "often", not "always".
Even then, you've probably not picked the best plumber this way.
This is obviously an uncharitable interpretation of the comment that you're replying to.
A better question would be how is seeing ads for sports betting in between periods of a game promoting bad behavior.
And the answer to that is very obvious -- the legalization of online sports betting and the nonstop barrage of ads for it on tv and social media is bad for individuals and society as a whole.
I wonder if it would be popular enough to get a constitutional amendment to do it (in the US, where one likely would be required).
For large companies, sure. Large companies abuse everything though; tax, regulatory, worker rights, human rights etc. I have no clue how to fix it in a capitalist winner takes all world, but that's the problem, not advertising.
Small companies (few people) need advertising to get any reach normally.
Sounds like another problem that capitalism solves without unnecessary overregulation: just don't buy (overly) advertised goods.
There is zero chance that capitalism will solve this problem.
Even if you personally choose not to buy overly advertised goods, the overwhelming majority of people will not make the same choice. Advertising works extremely well, and it will always work no matter what you or I do.
So we will still have the problem of excessive advertising, which negatively impacts even people who try to ignore that advertising.
This sounds like sarcasm but I’ll assume the best interpretation.
Why do you think unregulated capitalism will solve the advertising problem? Other than what I am guessing your point is to relying on a large portion to punish bad advertisers and that eventually those companies will do boring adverts.
Clearly the average Joe/Jane is persuadable, and does not have an iron will to never be manipulated.
Clearly unrestrained advertisement is how we got here in the first place.
Well, in between step 1 ("ban billboards") and step 3 ("ban advertisement") you'd need step 2 ("repeal the First Amendment of the United States Constitution").
They're banned in 4 US states already, with seemingly no infringement on the 1st Amendment.
Legally speaking, the validity of banning billboards tends to be evaluated based on the Central Hudson test. More practically, there's numerous limitations to commercial speech... for example, you can't blare an audio ad from your rooftop.
Billboards? Banning billboards is fine by me. Banning all advertising is unconstitutional.
Banning targeted advertising probably wouldn't be.
I’d rather ban the behavior required for targeting (building invasive dossiers on everyday normal people), than the (admittedly annoying) speech.
That's probably about what it'd look like. Some combination of things that make it impossible to profitably advertise the way companies do today.
>Well, in between step 1 ("ban billboards") and step 3 ("ban advertisement") you'd need step 2 ("repeal the First Amendment of the United States Constitution"). Let me know how that goes!
For most of US history, Commercial speech was not afforded full free speech rights. Nor does it currently enjoy them, although it is more protected than it used to be[0]:
As such, it wouldn't require repealing anything. Just reinterpreting how the First Amendment applies (or not) to commercial speech. And given the wholesale tossing out of precedent by recent SCOTUS personnel, it's certainly possible (albeit unlikely -- and more's the pity -- in this configuration) for them to do so.[0] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/commercial-speech/
[1] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/valentine-v-chresten...
I don't know what you mean by "full" free speech rights. But for the last 50 years, under the Burger, Rehnquist, and Roberts courts, pure commercial speech has been held to be protected by the First Amendment. The Burger court overturned Valentine.
Right, but there is past (obsolete) precedent that suggests otherwise. If Valentine can be overturned, then the current way of thinking can also be changed.
The opinion overturning Valentine noted that 30 years of jurisprudence since Valentine had arrived at a consensus that Valentine sure was pretty dumb. Not just Burger's court.
>The opinion overturning Valentine noted that 30 years of jurisprudence since Valentine had arrived at a consensus that Valentine sure was pretty dumb. Not just Burger's court.
And the opinions on Gruen v. New York, Dobbs v. Jackson, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and especially on point, Citizen's United all broke with long precedent and turned things upside down. No amendments to repeal/change, just a different set of folks on SCOTUS.
And those were pretty dumb. So perhaps we'll have some improvement eventually, although I probably won't live to see it. And more's the pity.
Edit: Added conclusion.
That's what I said, with additional context and links.
However, commercial speech is not fully protected by the First Amendment.
E.g., In TV beer ads, no one is actually allowed to drink beer. And there are many more restrictions on commercial speech as well.
N.B., this is in the US. I can't speak for anywhere else.
There is so far as I can tell no law or regulation against showing people drinking beer in a beer commercial.
Show me a single US beer commercial that aired on TV which actually shows folks drinking beer.
No rush. I'll wait. But I won't hold my breath.
Show me a single law, regulation, or court case indicating that a beer ad can't depict the consumption of beer. I don't believe you can.
You're both half right.
There's no law, regulation, or court case because the industry self-regulates in fear of a new law being made.
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2014/aug/20/heineken/n...
> "The fact that it is self-regulated now, that’s not something brewers would want to put in jeopardy," Kirkpatrick said. "It’s the way they have operated for decades. You show a lot of people enjoying a football game or enjoying a baseball game but you don’t show any consumption. I don't think you’re going to see that change."
> A Heineken beer commercial said regulations ban showing someone drinking beer on camera. If you take a more relaxed view of regulations, that’s close to the truth. The rules come from the television networks, not the government. The restriction might not have the force of law but it’s just as effective. We rate the claim Mostly True.
Step three seemed to pass First Amendment muster for cigarette companies.
Not only that, but they were then told to post forced speech by a court not let locations that sell cigarettes.
Whatever, I don't see the difference between PMI/RJR advertising and Anheuser-Busch, and Bayer, and Pfizer, and the US Army, and six car insurance companies all claiming to have the lowest rates and best service.
I kicked television out of my house in 2002. I don't have any streaming services provided by a third party, nor do I really listen to the FM band on my car radio, nor XM. The ads are too many to bear.
Pihole, ad nauseam. If you bypass my pihole, my browser clicks every ad you show and sends the data to /dev/null except what site, timestamp, and a thumbnail of the ad. Its not botting; I'm actively hostile to advertising.
Commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment. Regulations of commercial speech need to pass the "Central Hudson Test", which requires a compelling government interest (subject to heightened scrutiny) and narrowly-tailored regulation. Under this rubric, you can get cigarette ads off billboards, but you probably can't regulate Nike's ads.
If SCOTUS can develop a test to determine when the government is allowed to violate 1A, then they can loosen that test's requirements. They won't, of course, but I don't see why they couldn't, if they wanted to.
So, I dug into this somewhat deeply, and it's true that there's some case law which would make an outright ban of commercial advertising difficult, however:
The law is pretty consistent about the idea that any paid endorsement has to be "truthful". And as we've learned more about sociology and advertising, we've realized that things like paid endorsements are fundamentally not truthful, because they are misleading the public to believe that some figure or trusted source (even if only at a subconscious level - which is still enough to change consumer behavior!) is in favor of a product or brand.
So maybe if you could argue that paid speech is inherently untruthful (which I believe that it is!), then you could make legal policy that bans paid speech complaint with the First Amendment! (caveat: I am not a lawyer, I am not a legal activist, etc)
Read Va Pharmacy vs Va Citizens Consumer Council to get a sense for how well you're going to fare with "paid speech is inherently untruthful". It's addressed directly!
Commercial speech has limits, even as the first amendment is interpreted today. Well, for now at least.
Sure, and after that let’s ban: potato chips, sugar water, sex outside the hours of 6:00 - 7:00 PM, caffeine, plastic straws, and non-bran-based cereals.
Yes, people need to take care of themselves, but part of that involves a degree of personal responsibility.
“Let’s ban paid advertisement.” This is not a serious discussion.
Ads are often involuntarily consumed. Even the most vigilant and self-aware person will fall prey to a multitude of advertising gimmicks.
Marketing is basically just manipulating deep-rooted psychological factors. Marketers would even tell you as much, I'm sure.
Choosing to eat potato chips and being bombarded by ads aren't anywhere near in the same ballpark.
I'm pretty serious about it. The world would be a much better place without advertising.
I think it’s a nonstarter that conflicts with 1st amendment principles, but I don’t necessarily disagree with the underlying sentiment that you’re expressing. Things like this are just the price we pay for living in a free / democratic society. But kudos to you for thinking outside the box.
And yet murder is illegal even if the victim walked into a dark alley alone.
How about you stop advocating for using the coercive power of the state to ban harmless speech or things you simply dislike? If a property owner wants to allow billboards on their building, they have every right to do so.
> harmless
It's not harmless, so your objection is irrelevant.
It is harmless - you don't like the aesthetic so your scale of "harm" is irrelevant.
I just went through some of your comment history, and it strikes me as interesting that you very recently said:
"It's easy to spot political tribalism - just reference the comments here. They ultimately misrepresent, and have never tried to understand, their opposition's political position. It's kind of sad because it allows them to be manipulated by propaganda"
This is exactly what you just did by fabricating knowledge of my aesthetic taste. I hope this fact is as intriguing to you as it is to me.
> you don't like the aesthetic so
Who says I don't like the aesthetic? I can like the aesthetic of something and also acknowledge the harm it causes. It's kinda weird that your response is to make things up about me here.
Billboards are a safety issue.
I hadn't considered trying to apply uBlock Origin to my real life.
This made me laugh. :)
The most basic billboard is a sign for your business. Can’t ban that.
I live a town in which the bar in the village downtown is completely unlabeled, because the town code forbids it. Their website brags about being "A white brick building with no sign". (They have a big sign inside.)
How about if we don't make lots of wide authoritarian bans to make people behave according our will instead of their own. How about if we rule the world from the bottom up instead of the top down? What if we just mostly, you know, live and let live? Going with free speech, including billboards, is a good place to start trying out such a wild plan.
Billboards are obnoxious, ugly, and as the article pointed out, have basically no oversight from city design boards, meaning that they're not under any obligation to look nice.
In fact, there's almost a reverse incentive; if it clashes with the rest of the city's aesthetic, you're much more likely to notice it.
I don't really see how it's hurting "free speech" to restrict billboards. No one is suggesting we regulate the speech, no one is telling these companies what to say, we just don't want big ugly billboards blasting in our face and making our cities look terrible.
You're of course free to disagree with this, but you almost certainly draw the line somewhere. If I went and dumped a bunch of trash and feces into the middle of the street every day, you probably wouldn't be outraged when I eventually get a ticket, and I doubt that making a "free speech" argument would get me out of that fine, even if I explained the artistic merit of me doing that.
What kind of "bottom up" perspective gives a damn about protecting billboards?
What exactly is authoritarian and from the top down about the majority of people deciding that they do not want a minority of rich people and especially companies to place huge ads everywhere in public places where everyone is forced to see them?
The majority deciding to ban the minority with enough money from taking over public spaces and forcing the majority to see their ads seems very bottom up to me.
Taking the Supreme Court argument that Property = Speech I see. More money = More volume. There is no equality of "free" speech. Or rather, the speech if free, but the rich get to amplify their voice over the poor. You can say what you want if you're poor, but only if you're rich can you demand people listen to you without recompense or the right to block, and if you DO want to block you're "bad" and "anti-speech". (See Elon's how dare anyone have the right to block).
Driving is a captive audience, I don't have the option to "close my eyes/plug my ears" to avoid your "free speech" but with free speech comes the right to avoid hearing your bullshit. I can avoid buying a book, I can turn the channel on the radio, but a billboard doesn't offer that "right" to be free FROM your bullshit speech. There's more obligation on billboards in that regards, and it's kinda horseshit that you're allowed to hold me captive because you have enough money to spend on a campaign (whether it's commercial, political, religious IDGAF)
Wish "freespeechers" could understand this. I'm not saying we should just ban everything, and I'm not even sure I agree with a billboard ban (I would have signed up 25 years ago on that, adbusters reading chud that I was). I'm just saying it's really pathetic that people cry "free speech" when there are two things at play and the SCOTUS did a disservice on differentation between amplitude of property vs signal of speech.
People without money to spend can use debt to amplify their message.
Be grateful I'm deleting my followup message and I'm getting older and wiser and learning to shut up. You can waste your eyeball resources on something other than my comments which will convince no-one. Have a nice life.
Why should we tolerate amplified messages at all? If you've got something worth hearing to say, people will repeat it. We've been doing that for a million years or so, we're good at it.
I mean, let's make exceptions for events where everybody came to hear the thing, where consent for the amplification can be assumed because we all bought tickets or something, but if you're standing on the corner with a bullhorn shouting at passers-by, that's hostile behavior in the same way that billboards are. Please don't do it.
anarchy, eh? lawlesness is what you pitch is?
People like you say this until the other party is in power, and bans stuff you don’t like, then you will cry about free speech too.
I won’t die on the hill of saving billboards anymore than id die on the hill of not taxing billionaires but sorry, whats fair is fair.
I am actually arguing quite the opposite, I am very anti-banning but where do you draw the line? it is a fine line between lawlessness and allowing bunch of idiots (regardless of which "political party" they are affiliated with) to make these decisions. so how do you get this done? obviously lawlessness is not the answer?
yeah I don't think it should be banned
The whole proposal is economically illiterate.
If billboards have negative externalities, then tax those; don't ban them.
How do you place a value on aesthetics? Or driver distraction? Or the irritation I feel when I see 50 billboards for cannabis every time I drive down the road near my house?
It's not harder than placing values on human lives, yet we manage to do so just fine for cost-benefit analysis of eg road safety.
What's the tax value of "my city looks like a garish parade of bullshit I don't need"?
Eh, if company wants to contribute a billion bucks to city coffers in order to put up a single billboard, that's surely worth the small amount of inconvenience.
So I hope we established that there is a finite tax that's large enough to cover the negative externalities.
Now we just need to figure out what finite amount of taxation is reasonable.
> What's the tax value of "my city looks like a garish parade of bullshit I don't need"?
Different municipalities (and their voters) can differ in how much they value money vs aesthetics. There's no one size fits all solution.
I mostly agree... but at the same time, in my city billboards also have specific regulations, ordinances, and an approval cycle before a governance committee. Maybe there is a middle ground between "allow everything" and "ban everything", which is simply to update the city code to put guidelines and review on them?
i agree, but not even a middle ground, like a small amount of exceptions for iconic advertisements, such as stuff on sides of buildings like the old Jordan jumpman thing in Chicago. or other stuff that ADD to a city rather than make it worse.