Changing bad web browsing habits

Besides the typical resolutions like “eating healthier,” “losing weight,” and “reading more,” I don’t have any specific plans for myself in 2024. Last year, I made a change and stopped bringing my phone into the bedroom. This year, I plan to do the same for the bathroom (we all do it). Additionally, I have started running on a regular basis again, and I hope I can maintain this habit. That’s about it. Oh, and I also wanted to make some adjustments to my news media consumption.

In the past couple of years, too many times I caught myself sort of doomscrolling. I’m not even sure if that is the right word to describe what I do since it’s not really about “scrolling” but “searching” or “visiting.” I go to a news website I know is shit and get mad at their choice of words, the topics they decided to feature, the news they didn’t cover, and lament at the comments that are displayed — and tolerated — below articles.

These websites are mostly French news websites that seem to sometimes push stories only there to please a far-right readership. I have made the decision to stop visiting these websites and giving them traffic and attention. It will also prevent myself from getting more white hair by browsing their homepages for the wrong reasons only. Websites from the EBRA group and LVMH-owned Le Parisien come to mind.

I have a few gripes with the French media landscape in general: it is indeed pretty dire and mostly concentrated in the hands of a few billionaires, which let’s face it is never the promise of a good outcome. In 2022, a Senate commission looked into this situation. For the Financial Times, Leila Abboud wrote:

A parliamentary investigative commission on concentration in the media sector has summoned the wealthy industrialists who own many of France’s most influential news outlets and entertainment channels. It has subjected them to questioning under oath about why they invest in what are often small, money-losing operations unrelated to their core businesses.

A lot of these publishers — despite the disagreements I can have with their political views, which would be perfectly fine — are faulty journalistically speaking.

Avoiding the content from these websites is the obvious thing for me to do, but not the easiest. The impulse to look for things that annoy me is so strong that I keep finding myself typing the first letters of some of the URLs in the address bar of my browser. I let it autocomplete the rest and press enter without even thinking about it.

To help me stop this bad and persistent habit, I am using the redirect feature of the great Safari extension StopTheMadness Pro (such an apt name in this case). Since I can’t seem to avoid visiting some of these websites and fight my “addiction,” I am calling on the power of software.

Now, every time I nonchalantly type the URL of one of these news websites without even thinking about it, I am automatically redirected to the text-version of NPR. Why NPR? Well, I’m glad you asked.

  1. It’s a US-centric news website, which I think complements greatly my daily European and French-centric readings of the Guardian and France 24. I could redirect to France 24, but it’s a website I already have available among the browser’s favourites — with shortcuts both available on the new tab page and displayed when the URL bar becomes active — so accessing it that way wouldn’t really bring anything new on the screen.

  2. The text-version website of NPR is light, fast, and it’s a good reminder that not all websites need to be 10 Mb.

  3. I have found a new appreciation for NPR recently, following their recent stance regarding Twitter.

StopTheMadness also allows for extra CSS to be added on a per-site basis, so this is what I added:

*{color-scheme:dark light} body,a{background-color:unset;color:unset} a{text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px dotted #6A6C6E} header,nav,footer,.topic-date{display:none} li{margin-bottom:.5lh;font-size:1.15em;line-height:1.3}

The site now has an automatic dark mode and is easier to read without the default link style. Very happy with that.

On top of these redirections to NPR, reminding me each time that choosing to visit the previous sites was a bad idea, I have added a few other rules too.

For football coverage, I try to reorient all my sports website habits to the one website I like the most, again, to avoid finding myself “doomsearching” for disagreement in the comment sections of some websites (the site I like doesn’t have comments).

Also, Twitter links now go to a Nitter instance, making it easier to see Twitter profiles and, you know, tweets. YouTube videos are now watched within an Invidious page.

I like this setup so far. When I really need to visit one of these websites, for local news for instance, I just open a private browsing window, for which the StopTheMadness extension is turned off.

I also plan to diversify my list of redirections with destinations like The Forest, Matter’s Read Something Wonderful, or simply news websites that deserve my attention.