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Slowness, pollution, consumerism

Digital ads make you buy useless things you don't need and waste precious time. In addition, ads cause pages to load more slowly and create huge CO₂ emissions (both directly and indirectly).

Ads that kill

Advertisements have always been used to manipulate our perceptions using psychology. Advertisers sold tobacco as a symbol of liberation, unhealthy foods as if they were healthy... Then health problems and death followed for people who were convinced by those ads.

You pay for them with your money and time

If you buy a product advertised on the Internet, the part that companies spent to produce and propagate the ad is paid by you: with your time and money (we are talking about a billion-dollar industry).

Censorship

You can't express unconventional political opinions, nudity is not allowed... Advertisers don't like to take risks, everything has to be under control. If they don't like you, your video will be demonetized, it won't appear in the search results. Anything that doesn't contribute to consumerism must be ignored, because it doesn't make them money.

Zero privacy

With the rise of targeted advertising, many companies monitor everything you do on Internet, creating psychological profiles that allow advertisers optimise ways to manipulate you.

A life without ads

For all these reasons, I block ads on websites, videos (including sponsorships), etc. With the time I save, I can find the information I'm looking for more efficiently and read articles or watch videos without waiting. This has allowed me to learn more in less time and to spend more time doing what I really like.

If I buy something, I try to buy it wisely:

• What are the ingredients?
• Are there higher quality options?
• Where was it produced?
• How much does it cost?
• ...

If I like something and I want to support it, I do it directly (without intermediaries) so that they get more money than they would if I gave away my time to abusive advertisers.

Of course, advertising on the Internet will continue to exist, because there will always be sponsored articles, corporate-funded videos or things like that. Luckily, it is possible to avoid many advertisements using programs like uBlock Origin and Piped.

Did it ever happen to you that you copied text from a webpage and when you pasted the text it was modified, or nothing at all appeared? This happens because the page in question executes JavaScript code that modifies the clipboard.

To avoid that, you can disable JavaScript or change your Firefox settings this way:

1. Type about:config in the address bar.
2. Press Enter and then the button Accept the Risk and Continue.
3. Type dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled in the search box.
4. Double-click on that preference, or press its Toggle button to change its value to false.

This way, the web pages you visit will not be able to modify your clipboard. Note that some web applications that modify the clipboard with JavaScript (such as Collabora) will no longer be able to do this, so their paste functionality will no longer work properly.

Reddit is paying the price for ignoring the users' protest against latest changes made by the company.

On the one hand, many people have moved to platforms such as Lemmy, which has tripled its user count in a short time:

On the other hand, the Reddit site was taken offline by protests in which more than 7000 Keep reading Reddit loses users and money for ignoring the complaints of its own users

Thousands of Reddit communities will stop being accessible tomorrow in protest against the decision to charge millions of dollars to apps that use the API. As a result of the policy, many apps will stop working.

However, while some people are recommending that people stop using Reddit, the protest is limited to two days. The problem with doing a temporary boycott is that it sends this message to the owners: a lot of people are angry, but after two days they're going to come back and we're going to keep making money. Reddit stopped being free software years ago and it's not going to stop censoring information they don't like.

I support boycotting Reddit, but I think it shouldn't just last two days; it should be permanent. There are several programs similar to Reddit that are free and respect the privacy of their users: Lemmy, /kbin, Postmill, Lobsters, Tildes...

Lemmy and /kbin, unlike Reddit, are free and federated, so the administrators of a node cannot censor information from nodes they don't control or impose anything on them; each node has its own policy.

Invidious developers have received an email from YouTube asking them to stop offering the program. According to YouTube's legal team, they are in violation of YouTube API terms of use, which is impossible, as Invidious does not use YouTube API.

They also claim that Invidious “is being offered on invidious.io”, which is also untrue, because that website does not host any instance of Invidious. As of today there are 40 websites hosting public instances of Invidious, over which the Invidious team has no control, as Invidious uses the free AGPL license. Even if Invidious were illegal in the United States, it is hosted on the Tor network, the I2P network and in many countries, making it virtually impossible to make Invidious disappear. In addition, its code can be found on several development platforms and is on lots of computers.

Invidious has neither agreed to YouTube's API terms of service nor YouTube's terms of service. YouTube allows access to content hosted on its servers via the HTTP protocol, so Invidious is not committing a computer crime; it is simply safeguarding the right to privacy and freedom.

Google (the company that controls YouTube), on the other hand, does not respect privacy, censors, requires the use of proprietary software, exploits its users, develops artificial intelligence software for military purposes, has a huge ecological impact, to name just a few examples. That's why there are people who think that Google should be destroyed.

Fortunately, even if Invidious were to disappear, there are other free projects such as Piped, NewPipe and youtube-dl. Will Google also threaten the developers of these projects and their millions of users?