[macintux]

Tangential at best, but there really should be limits to how bright (or white) a digital billboard can be. I’ve been temporarily blinded at night when, while trying to read an ad with a dark background, it switched over to a different ad.

[kube-system]

Contact your local lawmakers, these regulations are definitely a thing: https://www.scenic.org/sign-control/billboard-facts-by-state...

[kibwen]

Why settle for crumbs? There should be limits on how many billboards, digital or otherwise, are allowed to exist, and that limit can be "zero". Advertising is a blight.

[kube-system]

In my experience, the worst offenders are not billboards but signage for local establishments, which would usually be unaffected by a billboard ban.

[asdff]

Be happy these monstrosities haven't been installed near you yet, but they are coming eventually for us all:

https://old.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/rdqu7o/las_favo...

https://old.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/p3ry42/you_can_...

[ryeights]

That is truly awful. Enough to ensure I will never move to L.A. so long as it is in operation.

Any city government that allows an installation like that deserves to be dissolved. How have people not figured out how to destroy that monstrosity yet?

[sidewndr46]

There is a strip club near me that is quite a ways off the interstate. They put up a sign so large you can see it from the interstate. For good measure they added in a lighthouse like light that revolves.

It's awful.

[nonameiguess]

I used to live across the street from AT&T Plaza in downtown Dallas, which now has this 70-foot jumbotron monstrosity lighting up 10 city blocks, 99% of the time with a screensaver: https://attd.imgix.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/13155803/A...

So glad I moved right before they started construction on this. This is on 24/7, and how that is remotely acceptable in a place people live I have no idea.

[brirec]

I don’t expect any laws to really change this any time soon, but the billboards in Times Square are about as egregious in this regard as it possibly could get.

[kube-system]

NY does have laws about this, but I'm going to guess that if anywhere has exemptions, it's Times Square.

https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/engineering/real-estate/rep...

[chirau]

I wouldn't say any of them are individually too bright (except maybe the big Nasdaq screen). I would say, however, that the density or collection of the boards makes for a really lit up scene. What disturbs me more is the frequent changes in color due to ads switching and lights going from on to off or one color to another. That fast and random changing can be annoying.

[paulcole]

> Advertising is a blight.

You do realize that you’re an enthusiastic and active participant in what is the marketing and advertising project of a VC firm, right?

I think what you mean to say is that the advertising you like isn’t a blight and the advertising you don’t like is a blight.

[kibwen]

What makes you think I'm at all happy with the advertising here? As I said: advertising is a blight. In the meantime, I'm happy to exploit the false generosity of advertisers to denounce their practices on their own platforms. I'm unclear why you thought this was a counterargument?

[paulcole]

You may say you’re unhappy with it, but your actions say you’ve been contributing heavily here for 11 years. You support something that you think is a blight because you don’t think this is a blight.

Just like every HN commenter who thinks they hate ads, the truth is they hate the ads they hate and (at best) pretend the other ads aren’t ads.

Also I really like ads and am quite stupid so that might explain why I thought my comment was a good one.

[serf]

This is a ridiculous argument.

One can enjoy a single aspect of something without that implying total agreement.

I hate advertisement in nearly every aspect, I hate 'SV culture' in nearly every aspect -- but I can acknowledge that the collision of those two themes created a community that I enjoy, and has facilitated conversation that is generally on a more interesting level than the majority of communities out there on the internet that I could be spending time at otherwise.

>You support something that you think is a blight because you don’t think this is a blight.

I don't/can't/won't fall for the idea that 'HN=advertisement'; it's simply not true. HN has become something that is greater than the sum of its' parts, to ignore the other qualities that drive people to participate here would be disingenuous.

[paulcole]

> I don't/can't/won't fall for the idea that 'HN=advertisement'; it's simply not true

This is how you know HN is an absolutely fantastic ad. People who “hate” ads will fall all over themselves to explain why this ad isn’t an ad. “You see it’s different because reasons. I would never like an ad.”

I do believe the other reasons people engage here are real. But the fundamental underlying reason this place exists is for marketing and advertising for a VC firm.

[kibwen]

> the truth is

You appear to be quite confident in believing that this is the truth. I don't support HN, in fact I frequently denounce it (though I will say that dang is one of the better moderators I've seen). The reason to participate here despite that is because sacrificing power for the sake of principles is a losing strategy, despite what idealists would prefer to believe. You can't affect the world by running off and being a hermit in the woods; you must go to where the people are.

[HWR_14]

> they hate the ads they hate and (at best) pretend the other ads aren’t ads.

Alternatively, you could have an ad-blocking browser and not see the ads at all.

[f1refly]

"I think we should improve society somewhat"

"Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent"

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

[kenjackson]

I'm probably the only person, but I feel like the tradeoff in value I get for advertising is reasonable. Would the world be a better place w/o ads? Maybe, but I don't see how you avoid a world where there are competing products and one tries to convince you somehow to use their product/service. It seems almost as natural as requiring payment for providing a service.

[function_seven]

Billboards are unique in my opinion. They're public and cannot be avoided the same way television commercials, magazine ads, or website banners can.

If you drive down this street, or live near that intersection, you're advertised to and that's that.

Some places do ban billboards, and they look really nice to my eye. Whereas a magazine can decide to have or not have ads, and a video provider can choose to be ad-free or ad-supported, so too should the public be able to decide if billboards are allowed in their town or state.

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...

[jasmer]

You'd be surprised at how ineffectual a lot of advertising is.

Billboards should be just wiped out, there isn't any real utility from them, and for the most part they just make things very ugly.

Having giant ads in public spaces is ridiculous.

You really notice it when you go to a place with not much in the way of regulation and they are everywhere.

Around Paris they have giant neon signs on top of residential buildings, which is really odd because they have more awareness of that stuff, it feels very cyberpunk to me, as far as I know they don't even have that in most of the US even where giant road signs exist.

A small icon on the exit sign is fine for practicality.

Paradoxically, there are ways to make digital ads much more efficient but the system is a giant cluster of a mess. It's hard to fathom but many big companies just throw money out the window and hope that it sticks even with 'great reporting' it's a lot of fuzz, and nobody wants to own up to it - the exec at the company, the agency, the ad buyers, and the marketplace, they are in a weird kind of systemic collusion about it all kind of 'pretending'. Of course some entities are very effective about it as well but the amount of 'bad dollars' out there actually makes efficient spending hard.

There are also very bad issues of scale, and a lot of small businesses just can't compete, in an ideal world there would be a 'locality' effect priced in. The 'invisible hand' just doesn't work very well with most kinds of ads.

[macintux]

> Billboards should be just wiped out, there isn't any real utility from them, and for the most part they just make things very ugly.

When traveling interstates across the U.S. they’re valuable, because they let you know what you didn’t think to search for online to visit along the way.

(Plus obviously searching for places to visit while driving is dangerous, or merely seriously inconvenient if you have to frequently stop to conduct said searches.)

I’m a fan of old-fashioned billboards on the interstate in rural areas where local orchards/attractions/restaurants need to get the word out. I just don’t want digital billboards blinding me at night.

[dymk]

Billboards serve only as a distraction to drivers and take away from the natural beauty of the landscape, making it look like a capitalist dystopia.

[knaekhoved]

My moral belief is that being blasted with blinding amounts of light amounts to trespass and/or assault, and fully justifies a forceful response against the source of aggression (namely, the billboard). Obviously this is not going to be accepted as a legal argument, but if I'm not worried about the legal repercussions, I feel more than justified in taking matters into my own hands - for example, by cutting power to fixed billboards or by damaging vehicle-mounted billboards when sufficiently low-legal-risk.

There may or may not be groups of people doing this already and posting about it in certain venues...

[cwkoss]

Would be pretty dank and cyberpunk if someone built an onion-service ADsassination market, where you could put bounties on ugly public-space ads and a decentralized network of spraypaint-drone operators could deface those ads to earn crypto.

[neilv]

* That does sound cyberpunk techno-corporatist-lawless dystopian, but what I think would be infinitely more awesome is getting government regulations and human sentiment all aligned with not having ads in public spaces.

* Recent HN discussion about the infamous AP writings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32790951

[danuker]

> getting government regulations and human sentiment all aligned with not having ads in public spaces.

Money is speech in the US. And corporations have more of it than their advertisement recipients, which is why we see ads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo

[hypertele-Xii]

And corporations get their money from customers, so the solution is simple: Buy brands you don't recognize.

[eastbound]

Bounties for citizenly public actions. But how do you prove it’s you?

Maybe book a time slot. If the light disappears in this time slot, you get the bounty.

[LordDragonfang]

That's basically the premise, yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market

[dymk]

Spraypaint a private key (or any unique symbol, really) to prove you did it.

[codalan]

Would need to be an agreed-upon message encrypted with the vandal's private key.

1. Person wanting defacement would indicate the amount for the bounty, along with the message to be posted on the defaced property

2. Vandal contacts payer and agrees to conditions. He/she also gives the client their public key

3. Vandal performs defacement, then add the specified message to it, encrypted in his or her private key

4. Vandal notifies the person paying the bounty that the job is complete, sending him/her a picture of the defacement with encrypted message

4. Payer decrypts message, verifies it matches, then pays out the agreed upon bounty to the vandal

[hypertele-Xii]

Cryptotags.

To be honest, that's what spray tags look like to me already, random, meaningless, unique. I've photographed hundreds of tags and have never seen two alike.

Now, hacking the ad screen with a virus that displays a unique artwork... that'd be cool.

[cwkoss]

I'm hoping the defacement would be more contextual and sardonic, like devil horns on people or changing Coca Cola to Cloaca

Privkey QRs would be a bit ugly

[knaekhoved]

I recently saw a giant plush coca-cola can with the text changed to "cloaca" in some guy's car. Is that a known joke? I thought it was pretty funny