Let's Ban Billboards

https://iambateman.com/articles/billboards

by iambateman • 1 year ago

359 277 1 year ago

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?

sidrag22• 1 year ago

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.

dankwizard• 1 year ago

I hadn't considered trying to apply uBlock Origin to my real life.

iambateman2• 1 year ago

This made me laugh. :)

delichon• 1 year ago

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.

bdangubic2• 1 year ago

anarchy, eh? lawlesness is what you pitch is?

Vaslo• 1 year ago

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.

__MatrixMan__6• 1 year ago

What kind of "bottom up" perspective gives a damn about protecting billboards?

erelong2• 1 year ago

yeah I don't think it should be banned

tombert• 1 year ago

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.

wormius2• 1 year ago

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.

charcircuit• 1 year ago

People without money to spend can use debt to amplify their message.

blahaj• 1 year ago

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.

llimllib• 1 year ago

Maine banned billboards state-wide a long time ago and it’s great

Vermont, Alaska and Hawaii have as well, according to the internet

josephg2• 1 year ago

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.

brewtide• 1 year ago

I rarely leave the state, and I'm always aghast at the real world. Shh. It's nice and quiet here!

scottcha• 1 year ago

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.

anon7000• 1 year ago

There are a couple in downtown Seattle maybe it’s on I5? Example: https://maps.app.goo.gl/W6HbwSC4eFYYG3sW8

c22• 1 year ago

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

ssimpson• 1 year ago

the mountain to sound green way, billboard free, is amazing, green, and beautiful. more places should do this.

Twirrim• 1 year ago

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

thierrydamiba• 1 year ago

Billboards must be terrible for property value, I’m surprised that alone hasn’t caused them to become more sparse.

amazingamazing• 1 year ago

Where’s the specific bill to support?

nmcfarl• 1 year ago

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.

iambateman2• 1 year ago

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.

MarcelOlsz2• 1 year ago

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.

adonovan• 1 year ago

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.

kelnos10• 1 year ago

I do find billboards annoying, but they're like 2% of the problem.

lolinder3• 1 year ago

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.

mplanchard• 1 year ago

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.

kyralis• 1 year ago

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.

Sparkyte2• 1 year ago

Just ban all advertising.

conductr2• 1 year ago

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.

Taek10• 1 year ago

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.

kelnos10• 1 year ago

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.

Sparkyte2• 1 year ago

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.

ftmch• 1 year ago

How would this be enacted in a free society?

Taek10• 1 year ago

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.

tptacek11• 1 year ago

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").

gkoberger• 1 year ago

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.

paulryanrogers• 1 year ago

Commercial speech has limits, even as the first amendment is interpreted today. Well, for now at least.

nobody99995• 1 year ago

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.

[0] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/commercial-speech/

[1] https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/valentine-v-chresten...

ceejayoz4• 1 year ago

Step three seemed to pass First Amendment muster for cigarette companies.

Taek10• 1 year ago

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)

kortilla5• 1 year ago

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?

ceejayoz4• 1 year ago

They said "often", not "always".

Even then, you've probably not picked the best plumber this way.

Teever• 1 year ago

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.

__MatrixMan__6• 1 year ago

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.

whall63• 1 year ago

What is an advertisement? Let’s see if we can define this before deciding on an all out ban.

Retr0id3• 1 year ago

paid advertisement is easier to define, I think. If entity A pays entity B to show/tell me something, that's an ad.

trgn• 1 year ago

You know it when you see it.

Taek10• 1 year ago

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!

godelski• 1 year ago

  > Let’s see if we can define this

From Webster's

  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].

[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.

kelnos10• 1 year ago

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.

morsecodist2• 1 year ago

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.

Taek10• 1 year ago

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.

markdown2• 1 year ago

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.

kelnos10• 1 year ago

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.

alexashka• 1 year ago

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.

asdf69694• 1 year ago

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

283042834092342• 1 year ago

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.

_blk• 1 year ago

Sounds like another problem that capitalism solves without unnecessary overregulation: just don't buy (overly) advertised goods.

callc• 1 year ago

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.

welshwelsh• 1 year ago

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.

BurningFrog• 1 year ago

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!

__MatrixMan__6• 1 year ago

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.

bentobean3• 1 year ago

You’re right. New plan: let’s ban all paid advertisements except for those that are approved by a committee of government officials. /s

kelnos10• 1 year ago

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.

Taek10• 1 year ago

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).

horsawlarway• 1 year ago

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.

BobbyTables2• 1 year ago

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.

ranger_danger• 1 year ago

The states that have banned billboards seem to get by just fine though.

dietr1ch• 1 year ago

You assume that advertisement is the only way of discovering business, which is not true.

wat100002• 1 year ago

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?

asdf69694• 1 year ago

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

rayiner2• 1 year ago

You probably don’t need advertising now that the internet exists and people can just research what they need.

harshreality• 1 year ago

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.

colordrops• 1 year ago

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?

dclowd9901• 1 year ago

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.

RajT88• 1 year ago

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.

JumpCrisscross2• 1 year ago

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.)

bentobean3• 1 year ago

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.

nkrisc• 1 year ago

And yet murder is illegal even if the victim walked into a dark alley alone.

kelnos10• 1 year ago

I'm pretty serious about it. The world would be a much better place without advertising.

saintfire• 1 year ago

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.

anonzzzies• 1 year ago

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.

stana• 1 year ago

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.

nodesocket• 1 year ago

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.

pj_mukh• 1 year ago

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.

seaparter• 1 year ago

I don't know, all the billboards I ever see are for restaurants, concerts, and ambulance chasers. Let's ban Meta and Google instead.

cyberjerkXX2• 1 year ago

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.

BugsJustFindMe3• 1 year ago

harmless

It's not harmless, so your objection is irrelevant.

rayiner2• 1 year ago

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).

CobrastanJorji• 1 year ago

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.

tim333• 1 year ago

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.

ryandvm• 1 year ago

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.

ripped_britches• 1 year ago

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

the__alchemist• 1 year ago

Vegas

levocardia• 1 year ago

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.

tptacek11• 1 year ago

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.

josephg2• 1 year ago

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.

janosett• 1 year ago

Feels like a possibly important but unrelated issue. Is there some connection to billboards?

tptacek11• 1 year ago

It's discussed in the article.

erelong2• 1 year ago

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.

nashashmi• 1 year ago

The most basic billboard is a sign for your business. Can’t ban that.

ceejayoz4• 1 year ago

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.)

MarcelOlsz2• 1 year ago

Sopot in Poland banned all billboards. I'm excited to visit and see how it feels. Amazing I reckon.

monktastic13• 1 year ago

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.

nobody99995• 1 year ago

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

a5seo• 1 year ago

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-...

neves• 1 year ago

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.

Terr_• 1 year ago

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.

BrenBarn• 1 year ago

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.

eru5• 1 year ago

The whole proposal is economically illiterate.

If billboards have negative externalities, then tax those; don't ban them.

ccleve• 1 year ago

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?

eru5• 1 year ago

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.

MyOutfitIsVague• 1 year ago

What's the tax value of "my city looks like a garish parade of bullshit I don't need"?

eru5• 1 year ago

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.

trollbridge• 1 year ago

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.

mrguyorama• 1 year ago

That's funny, because Maine just puts up DOT programmable signs with funny puns about "Click it or ticket".

dec0dedab0de3• 1 year ago

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.

lolinder3• 1 year ago

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.

dec0dedab0de3• 1 year ago

nobody is telling drivers they are terrible people for using a GPS

markdown2• 1 year ago

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.

dec0dedab0de3• 1 year ago

that is a silly argument. If you put up a billboard on someone else’s property without permission that would be illegal. If you drop a pamphlet on the ground in your own yard that is perfectly legal.

In your perfect billboard free world, would you also ban signs outside of a business saying what is on sale? what about signs outside a private residence?

What kinds of property would be allowed to display what kinds of sign?

I could see telling government agencies they cant rent billboard space out on the side of the road, but if someone puts a billboard on their roof or the edge of their property I think it would be gross to stop them.

Jimmc414• 1 year ago

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.

lolinder3• 1 year ago

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.

cryptonector• 1 year ago

TFA is not about the content of speech on billboards.

brailsafe2• 1 year ago

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.

robotresearcher• 1 year ago

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?

brailsafe2• 1 year ago

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.

Alex3917• 1 year ago

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.

lenerdenator• 1 year ago

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.

Hammershaft• 1 year ago

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.

monocasa• 1 year ago

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...

dumbfounder• 1 year ago

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.

Beijinger• 1 year ago

"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...

system7rocks• 1 year ago

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.

mrexroad• 1 year ago

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.

notepad0x90• 1 year ago

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.

jakecarpenter• 1 year ago

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.

colechristensen• 1 year ago

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.

sethherr• 1 year ago

Let’s ban design review boards that mandate aesthetic choices on siding.

xigency• 1 year ago

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.

dwaltrip• 1 year ago

Are there any new ballot initiatives for ideas like this? I would support this in a heartbeat.

forgetfreeman3• 1 year ago

Billboards would be a fine start. Next let's ban paid speech in general.

foobahify• 1 year ago

That is harder. I think HN litigated this pretty hard in another thread, but delineating paid vs non-paid is not always clear.

forgetfreeman3• 1 year ago

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.

fragmede• 1 year ago

Is this happening before or after the debt reckoning?

stevage• 1 year ago

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.

xrd• 1 year ago

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.

wpollock• 1 year ago

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.

sakesun• 1 year ago

While I think what proposed will never happen, this item is full of interesting debate.

rgovostes• 1 year ago

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.

zzo38computer• 1 year ago

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.

tmikaeld• 1 year ago

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.

alecco• 1 year ago

This gets flagged to third page? (6h, 308 points)

perilunar• 1 year ago

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.

xenospn• 1 year ago

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.

Ekaros• 1 year ago

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.

tbyehl• 1 year ago

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

beAbU• 1 year ago

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.

anonu• 1 year ago

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.

Let's Ban Billboards

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