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Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by kibwen on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @05:56PM (#33616373)
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.
Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by kube-system on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @05:59PM (#33616403)
In my experience, the worst offenders are not billboards but signage for local establishments, which would usually be unaffected by a billboard ban.
Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by asdff on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @06:26PM (#33616680)
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_...

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by sidewndr46 on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @06:42PM (#33616838)
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.

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by ryeights on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @06:46PM (#33616877)
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?

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by brirec on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @06:02PM (#33616445)
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.
Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by kube-system on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @06:15PM (#33616569)
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...

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by chirau on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @06:09PM (#33616516)
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.
Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by nonameiguess on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @06:43PM (#33616851)
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.

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by kenjackson on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @06:45PM (#33616869)
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.
Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by function_seven on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @07:12PM (#33617121)
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...

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by jasmer on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @07:08PM (#33617094)
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.

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by macintux on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @05:11AM (#33620919)
> 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.

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by dymk on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @07:15PM (#33617163)
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.
Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by paulcole on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @07:12PM (#33617122)
> 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.

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by kibwen on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @07:41PM (#33617361)
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.
Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by paulcole on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @08:07PM (#33617556)
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.

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by kibwen on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @08:41PM (#33617777)
> 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.

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by serf on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @10:10PM (#33618341)
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.

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by paulcole on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @06:47PM (#33632719)
> 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.

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by HWR_14 on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @12:54AM (#33619409)
> 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.

Re:Why the Bucks Can’t Wear Cream Uniforms Anymore by f1refly on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @07:43AM (#33622111)
"I think we should improve society somewhat"

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

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