A street is as much a mean to an end as a laptop. I use streets to get from point A to point B, much like you use your laptop to arrive from state A to state B. I never have an intention to see ads when I go outside. Sometimes I use streets for fun, to stroll without aim, but never I go outside to "see some ads," much like you likely never open your laptop with an intention to see an ad.

These are not arguments but additional trails of my thoughts on the topic:

You went outside, you motivated yourself, and passing by a sign is not much now. My laptop is a bit of a promise of lazy direct access, which is more at odds with the ads.

Also street ads have been planned, there are usual spots and looks. Web is a bit wilder.

> I use streets to get from point A to point B

This is an excellent point to make: Streets are for getting from A to B, and ads don't impede that.

The Internet is for getting access to information, and many of the online ad formats do impede that.

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

I don't know if I would call it an accessibility problem for me personally, but yeah as someone who has trouble staying focused, a moving screen or flashy ad is almost impossible not to look at, and extremely intrusive. Using the web without an ad blocker is an absolute nightmare for me.

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

Most cities do limit the sorts of flowers they plant.

> We cannot make the entire world ideal for everyone.

Huh? So just f** accessibility and leave everyone on their own? I'd understand if you'd argued that it wouldn't be feasible to do a particular thing, but such general statements leave a very bad taste.

Yes!! It's hard enough to maintain attention as it is. Last thing we need is entitled corporations stealing it every chance they get for the sake of profit.

I have ADHD and as long as my wife insists on talking to me while I'm driving billboards are a rounding error (and to be honest I'm more likely to be distracted by interesting architecture than advertising)

It really disturbs your way in public space ?

Maybe i'm too oblivious to IRL ads.

I think it makes navigation harder for me; I notice that it's a lot harder for me to parse out actually relevant information in busy spaces like airports/cities. Particularly while doing something like driving, because I'm juggling a lot of information in those situations and paying more attention to the people around me, rather than just focusing on signs.

For a long time I thought that was all just due to crowds/stress and nothing else, but I'm increasingly convinced that part of it is just that it's harder for me to pick out when scanning a room where the signs are the indicate where I'm supposed to be. Also seems to make it more likely that I'll walk past an indicator or miss something while I'm trying to navigate the space. I'm always paranoid inside of these busier spaces about whether I'm going to miss something important and end up walking in the opposite direction of where I need to go.

It may depend a lot on not just the area but also what you're personally used to; navigation in these spaces are a skill that people get better at over time. I suspect that some of the difficulties become less difficult as people's brains get better at filtering things out or recognizing indicators that they need to zero in on. In the same way that after a while playing a game you start to instinctively zero in on certain UX choices or indicators in a level, people also instinctively start to zero in on how a city indicates important information (is the sign always green, does it tend to show up in a specific place). So this might also be more of an early-user UX problem for people who don't go into the city all the time or who are particularly susceptible to getting distracted by motion/colors.

----

There's a lot of research that brains are really good at learning to filter out advertising; part of the arms race in advertising isn't just with ad blockers, it's figuring out how to present ads in increasingly unusual ways where your brain won't just do pattern recognition and literally just refuse to process or register them. Human brains are heckin good at pattern recognition.

But that means that there is an arms race with advertisers trying to figure out what the next evolution is with billboards or how to trick your brain to register things, and it means that people who are less equipped to do that filtering or are just unfamiliar with the space often end up getting thrown in the deep end because their brains aren't trained to do that filtering yet, or are trained to filter different things.

It very much depends on where you live of course. Thankfully, most places regulate public advertisement to some extent, but the level of regulation will differ from place to place.

Seems like a you problem.