How to get rid of information noise

The scene of action is the Internet, the duration of the action is our days, the amount of new data appearing every minute is thousands of gigabytes! The data flow that falls on a person today is huge. Different aggregators replicate information, social networks are all in reposts, news sites make rewrites, then it all comes in the form of mobile notifications ... Of course, I’m exaggerating a bit, but choosing what is really necessary and interesting, among information noise, is really becoming more and more difficult.

On domo.com , there is an interesting section with infographics. And one of them, Data Never Sleeps, shows how much data popular services generate every minute.


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Just imagine: 350000 tweets every minute, 300 hour new videos on Youtube! Although now the numbers have certainly grown. And these are just a few popular services. And how many entries in blogs, forums, comments, articles in general are unlikely to be calculated.

Theory

Why waste time on something that you are not interested and do not need? Life is still not as long as it seems ...

Probably many have seen this "calendar of life." They say he drives depressed. Above in the picture is mine. As you can see, a third of life has already passed. When I first saw him and realized this, I decided that I should try to get rid of everything that does not bring me any visible result, in general, in everything. In fact, you can write a separate note about this, but now it's about something else.

It is difficult to find a modern user who would not have heard or did not use ad blockers on the Internet. I have been using the same AdBlock since its inception. It’s already unusual for me to see a page hung with banners and contextual advertising. I know that "site owners must also somehow earn", etc. And I’m ready to see ads if the ads are good (yes, it happens), or it will not look like an advertisement, or if the content has value and is interesting to me.

By the way, here is a fresh article about how blockers "change the world." This proves once again, at least to me, how important it is to choose what you are going to read or watch in order to maintain clarity of mind, so to speak.

Decision

Therefore, in order not to be distracted by uninteresting information on advertising, but also not to get here at the same time, I began to look for a solution.

I wanted a simple solution with a minimum of actions and settings. As a result, Ghostery extensions, the famous AdBlock and Adguard for Mac, are the most suitable. They block advertising, tracking and so on. But they do not block uninteresting content to me! For example, I am not at all interested in news and posts about medicine, finance and our show business ...

Therefore, I made my bike - a browser extension that removes uninteresting content and advertising from the pages, by keywords - Riddut . A little shuffling, from a small script that deletes posts from the VC tape, I got an extension for Chrome, Safari, Opera and Firefox, which is not a shame to show. Now the AdBlock + Riddut bundle solves the problem of banner ads and uninteresting content.

Now the extension removes ads from Yandex, Google, Bing and adds negative keywords to the queries, and you know, interesting new sites began to appear in the search! Can "clean" the tape VKontakte, Facebook, Twitter, Odnoklassniki. And filters any items on other pages. All you need is to add a word to the extension and it will disappear from the browser. Yes, this decision in the forehead, but it works. It looks like this:



If I have time, I’ll add the removal of counters and trackers, as in Ghostery and the white list for words.

Expected results

All this is of course a purely subjective experience, but after I added about 15-20 words and worked like that for a few weeks, I began to find interesting news, sites, and I began to stick less on social networks. At first, there may be a desire to find out “what’s gone there,” “but I didn’t miss something interesting.” But making sure a couple of times that the content you really need is gone, you will see familiar sites in a new light.

Now I use 3 extensions: AdBlock, Ghostery and Riddut to remove ads, get rid of tracking and uninteresting posts. But I'm still looking for a better solution ...