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My uBlock Origin filters to remove distractions

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Re: My uBlock Origin filters to remove distractions

#71

Personally, I can't stand how distracting YouTube thumbnails are. I found this list to block them from the sidebar when watching videos. ! Hide all of the recommended videos on the right side of the page, except for the first up-next video. ! If you have a tall monitor you may need to add more entries, this blocks the initial list on most resolutions. www.youtube.com###items > .ytd-watch-next-secondary-results-render…

I’m not very familiar with YouTube but can’t that enormous list be condensed to youtube.com###related?

Re: My uBlock Origin filters to remove distractions

#72

This is cool. I did something similar at one point. Unfortunately these websites change their basic layout so often that it felt like these fixes would work for 1 month max then I'd have to configure again. I ended up moving to news feed eradicator. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat... I let myself use reddit for 5 minutes every morning. It auto blocks the feed when those 5 minutes are up.…

> "Unfortunately these websites change their basic layout so often that it felt like these fixes would work for 1 month max then I'd have to configure again." You're exaggerating. My userContent.css is 60kB, and although breakages do happen indeed, it's occasional and nowhere near "redo everything every month". What I will reckon is a pain, are machine-mangled CSS classes (e.g. by packers for React / other frameworks…

Judging by some of the other examples here I’m guessing this is a case of writing fragile rules that e.g. count n and m items into a tree and test unnecessarily for incidental classes. If all you do is accumulate the often senseless outputs of the element picker I’d expect the gains to be short-lived.

Re: My uBlock Origin filters to remove distractions

#74

Tangentially: after you've blocked a very large number of ads and sidebars, one useful enhancement is to expand whatever text elements remain, to regain use of all that now-empty whitespace. Something like so: :xpath(//main/div):style(min-width: 80% !important) (I've been looking at going a step further for some sites, by annotating a "column-count:" [0] rule and making the screen look like a newspaper. (Narrow colum…

Are you at the point where you should be pouring this content into RSS, and styling it as columns in a reader?

(I really like the column idea, and I'm working back towards RSS, with a bunch of smart filters, being my primary way of interacting with anything I visit regularly. I never should have given it up).

Re: My uBlock Origin filters to remove distractions

#75
post #63

Personally I have to hide Stack Exchange’s trending questions on my work machine. Those things are catnip to me. askubuntu.com###hot-network-questions serverfault.com###hot-network-questions stackexchange.com###hot-network-questions stackoverflow.com###hot-network-questions superuser.com###hot-network-questions Also many sites disregard prefers-reduced-motion, so I’m often hiding visual distractions like endless caro…

for the longest time, i never paid attention to that column, as my brain has pretty much been trained that anything in that column is useless fluff. until one day when i actually read some of those questions and was surprised by the questions being asked. i totally get the catnip. luckily, i have an off switch and can avoid becoming addicted.

Re: My uBlock Origin filters to remove distractions

#76

Arc has native support for cosmetic improvements. Those are called Boosts and you can interactively create your owns in just a few clicks, and also add custom CSS/JS if needed. I use this extensively to declutter/dedistract most websites I visit: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Medium, Gmail, YouTube, and so on. It's a real life-changer! See the Boosts shared by other users here: https://arc.net/boosts

Arc is the best browser UI thus far. Everything else is still stuck in the late 2000s essentially

Re: My uBlock Origin filters to remove distractions

#77

Thanks! I do this all the time too :) . Makes for a more pleasant / less cluttered experience on sites I use a lot. I'll add that another thing that is pretty easy to do is to add a Dark Mode to websites that don't have one. All you need is a userContent.css/uBlock rule like @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { body { background-color: #111 !important; color: #eee !important; } /* etc, more stuff here depending on s…

Dark Reader extension does basically this (I think they either change colors or add the invert filter depending on what looks better?), but also has builtin CSS override rules for many sites. Love it.

Re: My uBlock Origin filters to remove distractions

#80

Thanks! I do this all the time too :) . Makes for a more pleasant / less cluttered experience on sites I use a lot. I'll add that another thing that is pretty easy to do is to add a Dark Mode to websites that don't have one. All you need is a userContent.css/uBlock rule like @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { body { background-color: #111 !important; color: #eee !important; } /* etc, more stuff here depending on s…

Dark Reader extension does basically this (I think they either change colors or add the invert filter depending on what looks better?), but also has builtin CSS override rules for many sites. Love it.

Sure. I prefer to minimize depending on more extensions (for futureproof-ness, performance, security). These days, { uBlock Origin, Vimium } is all I need :)
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