Ads are horrible. They seek to embed themselves in our minds, to guide culture and discourse against our own wills. It is imperative then to avoid ads as much as possible, as they slowly infiltrate every single part of our lives. Since advertisements are distressingly ubiqutious it is very difficult to find a comprehensive guide. Here I will document every way I avoid ads, in the hope that some people find it informative to avoid ads in their own lives.
There is probably the most information about this so I will keep this section quick. First off, please use Firefox, it is the only browser that can properly block ads. Brave browser claims to help block ads, but it has numerous issues, including inserting ads and affiliate links without the user's permission, having an uncomfortably close relationship to crypto, and the founders' reactionary views. So please use Firefox, if you can. If you install Firefox, in its settings page, under "Home", be sure to uncheck the box labelled "Recommended Stories", and under "Search" uncheck the boxes labelled "Show trending search suggestions", "Suggestions from firefox", and "Suggestions from sponsors".
In Firefox the most important extensions are uBlock Origin, which blocks all ads (including on youtube); the EFF's Privacy Badger, which block malicious trackers; and ClearURLs, which removes tracking elements from URLs. If you use twitter I would recommend the extension Control Panel for Twitter, which you can use to hide 'features' like grok alongside auto-hiding blue-check replies and tweets. If you use youtube, I would highly recommend the extension Sponsorblock which blocks sponsor segments on videos. If you read any news websites I would recommend using Web Archives, which will allow you to access archived versions of news stories with a click of a button, bypassing paywalls altogether.
For TV, movies, and games, I would recommend using qBittorrent. qBittorrent has its own search engine for torrents, to use it, click on "View -> Search Engine" in the qBittorrent menu bar. Before search will properly function, you need to install some plugins, I would recommend using Jackett. To install Jackett, just download and run the windows installer from that link. To hook Jackett up to qBittorrent, follow the instructions here. Be sure to hook up the API key, as listed on that site - it's an easy step to forget. (Note: I do not take any responsibility for any legal issues stemming from use of qBittorrent. Use it at your own risk.)
For music, the easiest tool to use is Soulseek. I would ignore all the community interaction on it though. For books, I would recommend looking at Open-Slum. Calibre is a good e-book reader for both Windows and Linux. For a Windows PDF reader, I would recommend Sumatra. For a Linux PDF reader, either Atril or Sioyek is good depending on your needs. (Again, I do not take any responsibility for legal issues stemming from the use of soulseek or open-slum.)
I see much less info on avoiding Ads on mobile devices - most people seem to be resigned to being shown the most brain rotting advertisements possible any time they pick up the rectangle that lives in their pocket. Half the time, mobile ads don't even seem to be selling any product; someone more conspiratorial than I am may conclude that the point of mobile ads is to slowly drive us all insane. It may be slightly inconvenient to avoid mobile ads, but it is certainly doable - I think it's worth it and hopefully this guide will convince you too. This guide only works on Android - on Apple there is no way to block ads, unfortunately.
Just like on the computer, I implore you: Please use Firefox. It may be slightly slower, but it is worth it to never see ads again. Either Firefox or Firefox Nightly work. Firefox nightly updates more and can be slightly buggy, but it also has more features. If you do install Firefox, in its settings page, under "Homepage", be sure to uncheck "Sponsored Shortcuts", "Sponsored stories", and "Thought-provoking stories". The biggest benefit of Firefox for Android is that it's the only mobile browser that properly supports extensions.
For extensions, most of my suggestions are the same as on the computer. For blocking ads, you'll need uBlock Origin. For blocking tracking, you'll need Privacy Badger and ClearURLs. If you read news, Web Archives is useful to bypass paywalls.
Now the hard part, what do we do for social media? It may come with some compromises, but for any social media, I would highly recommend using the mobile website instead of the app. uBlock Origin will easily block all the ads you would normally see, making the experience much better. For whichever social media you use, check if the mobile site satisfies your needs; if it does not, then check if there are any extensions that make the experience better. There may be some compromises, but in my opinion it is worth it to take control of your experience and stop the incessant awful ads. Here are some extensions you may find helpful: For twitter, Control Panel for Twitter is quite helpful. For tiktok, the extension tiknot will allow you to view videos without logging in. For reddit, OldLander will make the interface much more bareable (although some may prefer the newer interface instead).
For video and audio, I would recommend downloading F-Droid which has a huge repository of FOSS apps useful for a whole bunch of stuff. If you use youtube, the best FOSS youtube player available now is PipePipe, which comes with SponsorBlock built in. For music, I would recommend first installing the IzzyOnDroid repository, and then installing Seeker, which is a soulseek client. There are several torrent clients available on F-Droid as well, but I can't recommend any in specific since I do not use them. If you want to stream video and audio, a really useful tool is Jellyfin - some people recommend Plex, but I find that it's undergoing enshittification like most proprietary apps eventually do. (Same disclaimer, I do not take any legal responsibilty if you use these tools for piracy.)
For reading, the same website, open-slum, works. Unfortunately I still have not found a decent FOSS e-reader for android. I paid for Moon Reader Pro, which I use on a cheap android tablet. I find that it works well, but your mileage may vary. If someone wants to take the mantle of making a good fully-featured FOSS e-book reader for android, it would very much be appreciated.
Smart TVs are awful, and dumb TVs tend to be marked up in price and of lower quality. My first recommendation is not to use the Smart TV interface. My second recommendation is do not buy a chromecast, apple tv, roku, or anything else, including those cheap android tv boxes - you'll be shelling out $100+ for a device that will shoot ads at you all day.
My third recommendation is to buy a used cheap Thinkcentre on ebay instead. They're often sold on the cheap since businesses and educational institutions regularly liquidate huge amounts of them. You can often very good ones at the $40-70 range and sometimes even cheaper. They do not need to be particularly powerful, just powerful enough to play back video - and if you're worried about Windows 11 requirements, they also all handle Linux nearly perfectly because of their business and university affialations. They surpass all of the cheap TV boxes at a cheaper price point, so I would highly recommend using them. You can bypass all the ads you want just using the browser and downloaded video, and the interface will always be more extensible and performant than any TV box - you can even do light gaming on them if you wish.
It's quite distressing isn't it? The most common way of serving us Ads is through screens, but even if you stop all of those, you'll still be inundated with Ads on your day-to-day life. This reminds me of the time Justice Felix Frankfurter recused himself from a case about playing music on traincars. When we're at a store, how do we block music we do not want to hear? Other than wearing noise-cancelling headphones everywhere, I don't know - and that's quite distressing to me.
What about branding? Everywhere I go, I see labels everywhere, on the chalk and eraser next to me, on the shirts and we wear, on the computers we use, on the coffee we drink - even the table I'm sitting at currently has a brand logo etched onto it. Maybe we should always carry a collection of opaque black stickers on us, being sure to use them to block any label or brand we see. Certainly, I refuse to buy clothes that have prominent branding or logos, but what about when people choose themselves to be walking advertisements? I'm not sure what constitutes the difference between a fan and an advertiser anymore, between somehow who enjoys and someone who sells. On this note, there is no greater sign of the degradation of the public commons than Billboards - we send people in metal behemoths weighing several tons at 60 mph and find that it is worth distracting them just so we can sell 2% more tshatshkes - it's dire.
Take a minute sometime, and check, how many ads are around you? Look at your environment, your computer, your clothes, the good you carry - how much of the environment around you is dedicated to reminding you of brands - as if brands are the things that create the world around us. It's a step removed even from alienation - it's not only the factories and businessmen that produce the goods abstracting away the labor they exploit - it's companies whose sole purpose is to take mass-produced products from those factories and slip branding onto them to make them more palatable - how many steps away are we from understanding the exploitation that allows our world to appear in this bizarre manner? And what do we even gain from having a label or a brand on everything we do, from being constantly bombarded with advertisements none of us have really consented to see? I am not sure if it drives us insane, but it certainly steals our time and experiences - and that alone is enough for me to hate advertisements.