I've been trying to minimize my compulsive browsing of social media for a while, and tried a bunch of extensions and apps to block websites and such, but always ended up disabling them even if they were supposed to be "hard to disable".<p>The fact is that sometimes you need to visit reddit for some info, but you don't want to get caught in an addictive loop. Disabling entire hostnames or trying to configure intricate block lists is annoying, and the end result is annoying. Parental controls don't work on me, and I resent them.<p>I remembered what Tristan Harris once said on ways to prevent compulsive browsing: "turn your phone grayscale and disable notifications". I think that's a perfect solution, because it doesn't destroy your browsing experience, but subtly neutralizes some addictive aspects of social media.<p>So, I made an extension with exactly this kind of philosophy - "neutralize, don't block". It's called Detoxer and is available for Firefox and Chrome:<p>- Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/detoxer/<p>- Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/u/1/detail/detoxer/deajadijkgojokomggpflpibgoamepgi?hl=en-GB<p>It'd be cool if you guys could try it out and provide some feedback. If there are other subtle content changes that can be made I'd love to experiment with them, and this might help someone. If this extension is useful, I'm considering also making a mobile app.<p>Thanks!
You can actually setup ublock0 to do this for you too. At one point I'd used it to blur distracting sites, but like you, I found fully blocking the content(which the blurring effectively did) led to me disabling the block. I'll try this technique out, it's a good idea.<p>Here's how you can do it with ublock:<p><pre><code> www.reddit.com##img:style(filter: blur(10px);)
www.reddit.com##body:style(filter: grayscale(1);)</code></pre>