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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.

To block websites you can use a browser extension (such as Block Site), a proxy server (such as Squid), but there is also the option of editing the hosts file, a method that consumes very little RAM and, unlike the browser extension, will work for any browser or program Keep reading Block websites: hosts file

The Google business model is based on collecting personal data from users, selling it to third parties and serving ads. The company also enganges in surveillance programs, develops artificial intelligence programs for military purposes and exploits its users, among other things.

It is one of the most powerful companies on the planet. However, Google is a giant with feet of clay that can be annihilated.

Finish off its ad revenue

Google makes money by serving personalised ads based on the information it collects from its users. If people don't see ads, Google doesn't make money. Blocking ads is a way to prevent tracking and make Google lose money, but if you visit Google's pages, Google will still get information it can sell to advertisers. So the easiest thing to do is to block ads and avoid Google sites.

Another idea is to click on all ads with the AdNauseam extension, which also hides them from us so that we don't find them annoying. This method means that Google makes less money from ad clicks and that Google's servers have a little more workload (minimal, but it does add to their costs).

Filling Google's servers with crap

Google lets you upload almost anything to their servers (videos, files, etc.). If the content uploaded to its servers takes up a lot of space and is junk that scares people away from its services (videos with robot voices speaking nonsense, hundreds of videos with noise that take up gigabytes upon gigabytes), the cost of maintaining the servers increases and the company's profit is reduced.

If this is a globally coordinated effort by multiple users, Google would have to start restricting uploads, hiring people to find junk videos, blocking people and IP addresses, etc., which would increase its losses and reduce its profits.

For example, I can create 15-minute videos every hour and upload them to YouTube automatically or semi-automatically. The videos should take up a lot of space. The more resolution, the more colours, the more sound variety, the more frames per second, the more money YouTube will spend to keep those videos on its servers.

The video I show below was generated automatically with ffmpeg. It is only two seconds long, but it takes up 136 MB. A similar 15-minute video would take 61.2 GB.

Keep reading How to destroy Google