Something like an ad-blocker for related links?

May 1, 2014 4:10 PM

Is there a way to block links to other articles from showing up on the web?

Basically every webpage in the world (yeah, you too, metafilter!) has various collections of links to other articles, whether they be "popular" or "recommended" or "trending on the web" or "related" or what have you. I am a fundamentally good person who cares deeply about my work, and yet even I can be distracted down the infinitely-branching, dopamine-jostling rabit-hole. Is there any trick I can use to block out these parts of webpages, so that I can enjoy a single article in calm peacefulness and return safely to the rest of my life?

I'm imagining this would have to be implemented on a constantly-updating per-site basis, so I'm not optimistic it exists. Firefox is my browser of choice, but please feel free to include answers for the benefit of other people as well.

One note I can offer: Blocking all javascript on nytimes.com does prevent many kinds (though not all) of links to other articles from showing up, at the expense of making a small number of pages simply not work.

Maybe something like one of these greasemonkey scripts? Something analogous to Shutup.css?

red-herring: the answers to this askme just cover hiding the images, not the links themselves

posted by spbmp to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I don't know of any such thing exactly, but I'd suggest sending the articles to something like Pocket or Instapaper, then reading them later at leisure on a tablet.

The Pocket version of the article will be clutter free, including usually free of those related article links. You will also be pushing those articles out of your at-the-computer-trying-to-work time, and into your on-the-couch-relaxing time. Also something like Pocket can be a lot quicker and more convenient for actually working through batches of articles.

If you really want to read the article right now, but uncluttered, Readability had a browser add-on that removes cruft in the same way.
posted by philipy at 4:43 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Best answer: You might find the Element Hiding Helper for AdBlockPlus addon helpful.
posted by Aleyn at 4:43 PM on May 1, 2014

You can add a whole bunch of stuff to AdBlocker's blocked list, assuming you use it. Just right click over an element and you can probably block it. I've blocked things like annoying gif logos this way.
posted by 2bucksplus at 5:11 PM on May 1, 2014

Response by poster: Heh heh, this is fun, thanks Aleyn. Older? Newer? bye bye! (and even wonderfully fast with the keyboard) Shift-Cmd-K, S
posted by spbmp at 5:22 PM on May 1, 2014

Yeah, use the element hider. FWIW, the vast majority of those "Related Stories" page units are from either Taboola or Outbrain, so you may be able to get by in blacklisting the JS that pulls them in with Ghostery, RequestPolicy, etc.
posted by rhizome at 6:31 PM on May 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

If you don't want to see links you could just turn off their underlining and set their colors to your basic text color. Do this in Firefox via
Preferences -> Content -> Colors
posted by Rash at 10:48 AM on May 2, 2014

Response by poster: Probably-impossible challenge: the grid of related videos that comes up when a youtube video ends.
posted by spbmp at 3:27 PM on May 10, 2014

You want Youtube Center, which has this feature. It's available as a user script and as an experimental addon for Firefox and Chrome.
posted by Aleyn at 9:13 PM on May 10, 2014