Blocking distracting news links | Tim Retout
“You are what you eat” – but perhaps this is even more true of our<br>information diet. It is hard to strike a balance between remaining a<br>well-informed citizen versus spending hours ingesting unnecessary news<br>about issues and events we can’t affect. But I’m increasingly<br>convinced that my hours lost to doomscrolling are down to design<br>choices by web publishers rather than a failure of individual<br>willpower.
We have created an “obesogenic” information environment#
I don’t think it is just me – I think our information environment has<br>been progressively altered over time as news sites look to maximize<br>engagement. Even outside of social media, the invisible hand of the<br>market for eyeballs forces sites to optimize for browse time or risk<br>irrelevance.
Even as newspapers find it increasingly difficult to fund good<br>journalism through advertising in an online world, especially local<br>journalism, they need to keep readers on their sites, clicking through<br>as many articles as possible. Clickbait headlines, “urgent” flashing<br>live icons to draw the attention, and many opportunities to leap from<br>one article to another, and another.
But this design approach even extends to news organisations with a<br>different funding model, like BBC News, which is a public service<br>(state-owned but arms-length) organisation funded through a mandatory<br>television licence – a matter of controversy in some quarters. And<br>it extends even to sites where I pay a subscription fee; I might get<br>adverts removed, but I am still bombarded with the same design<br>philosophy; too many opportunities to be pulled away from what I’m<br>reading towards some other unrelated article.
Even if I try and limit my exposure to algorithmic “discovery” of new<br>news, via RSS feeds or similar, if I’m reading the full article in a<br>browser then I am prompted to read more stuff that I didn’t intend.<br>This defeats the benefit of curating a set of feeds, because you still<br>get dragged away to random articles.
Only 44% of BBC News is news#
To show you what I mean, I’m going to pick on the BBC, although I<br>love them dearly and the same issue very much applies elsewhere.
I’ve taken a screenshot of a random BBC News<br>article in mobile<br>view (my preferred doomscrolling user access device), and measured<br>approximately what proportion of the full length of the page is taken<br>up by each section. This is a fairly in-depth news article, so I<br>reckon if anything the figures would be worse than this on shorter<br>articles.
(These numbers will not sum to 100% for reasons which are obvious if<br>you look at the crossbars. Also they’re approximations.)
Less than half of the page (44% if you exclude the inline related<br>links) is actual news text/images; the rest are links trying to help<br>you find the next thing to read/watch. I do not want this.
I’m sure this A/B tests well in terms of reader figures, but it<br>sometimes leaves me exhausted – it must take subconscious mental<br>energy to ignore, or I spend too much time trying to keep on top of<br>things.
And remember, this is a publicly-funded site that does not rely on<br>advertising!
Blocking out the noise#
If you are technically-minded, you can use an ad-blocker such as<br>uBlock Origin to take back some control. Applying the following lines<br>as a custom filter (Settings > My filters) brutally cuts out almost<br>all of these links:
bbc.co.uk##aside<br>bbc.co.uk##footer>div:has(h2)<br>bbc.co.uk##[data-block="uploaderEmbed"]<br>bbc.co.uk##[data-block="links"]
Caveat emptor: I have not road-tested this for more than half an<br>hour, so who knows what consequences this could have on your web<br>browsing. In particular, international readers outside the UK will<br>likely be redirected to bbc.com, the commercial arm of the BBC, where<br>these rules will need adapting.
Is it unethical to use an ad-blocker to remove these links? I would<br>argue not. I am not depriving the BBC of any revenue, because I pay<br>my licence fee. I might reduce the amount of time I spend on their<br>website, but if anything the subjectively better experience might<br>encourage me to consume more news from them, not less. In other<br>circumstances (outside the UK for instance, where the BBC relies on<br>advertising), the balance might be different.
Product managers, please find better metrics#
I lament the state of the internet in 2026. I now can’t unsee these<br>innocuous “related stories” links as a mechanism to grab my attention,<br>and it’s gone too far.
If you are a normal person just browsing the news and looking to<br>discover the latest important stories relatively quickly, I can see<br>that these types of links might actually be useful for discovery; but<br>I’m actually reasonably sure that I’m not going to miss out on<br>anything major. You still have the option of the news home page if<br>you want to be presented with more news for example, and it...