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Tim Retout: Blocking distracting news links
“You are what you eat” – but perhaps this is even more true of our information diet. It is hard to strike a balance between remaining a well-informed citizen versus spending hours ingesting unnecessary news about issues and events we can’t affect. But I’m increasingly convinced that my hours lost to doomscrolling are down to design choices by web publishers rather than a failure of individual willpower.
We have created an “obesogenic” information environment
I don’t think it is just me – I think our information environment has been progressively altered over time as news sites look to maximize engagement. Even outside of social media, the invisible hand of the market for eyeballs forces sites to optimize for browse time or risk irrelevance.
Even as newspapers find it increasingly difficult to fund good journalism through advertising in an online world, especially local journalism, they need to keep readers on their sites, clicking through as many articles as possible. Clickbait headlines, “urgent” flashing live icons to draw the attention, and many opportunities to leap from one article to another, and another.
But this design approach even extends to news organisations with a different funding model, like BBC News, which is a public service (state-owned but arms-length) organisation funded through a mandatory television licence – a matter of controversy in some quarters. And it extends even to sites where I pay a subscription fee; I might get adverts removed, but I am still bombarded with the same design philosophy; too many opportunities to be pulled away from what I’m reading towards some other unrelated article.
Even if I try and limit my exposure to algorithmic “discovery” of new news, via RSS feeds or similar, if I’m reading the full article in a browser then I am prompted to read more stuff that I didn’t intend. This defeats the benefit of curating a set of feeds, because you still 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 love them dearly and the same issue very much applies elsewhere.
I’ve taken a screenshot of a random BBC News article in mobile view (my preferred doomscrolling user access device), and measured approximately what proportion of the full length of the page is taken up by each section. This is a fairly in-depth news article, so I reckon if anything the figures would be worse than this on shorter articles.
(These numbers will not sum to 100% for reasons which are obvious if you look at the crossbars. Also they’re approximations.)
Less than half of the page (44% if you exclude the inline related links) is actual news text/images; the rest are links trying to help 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 sometimes leaves me exhausted – it must take subconscious mental energy to ignore, or I spend too much time trying to keep on top of things.
And remember, this is a publicly-funded site that does not rely on advertising!
Blocking out the noise
If you are technically-minded, you can use an ad-blocker such as uBlock Origin to take back some control. Applying the following lines as a custom filter (Settings > My filters) brutally cuts out almost all of these links:
bbc.co.uk##aside
bbc.co.uk##footer>div:has(h2)
bbc.co.uk##[data-block="uploaderEmbed"]
bbc.co.uk##[data-block="links"]Caveat emptor: I have not road-tested this for more than half an hour, so who knows what consequences this could have on your web browsing. In particular, international readers outside the UK will likely be redirected to bbc.com, the commercial arm of the BBC, where these rules will need adapting.
Is it unethical to use an ad-blocker to remove these links? I would argue not. I am not depriving the BBC of any revenue, because I pay my licence fee. I might reduce the amount of time I spend on their website, but if anything the subjectively better experience might encourage me to consume more news from them, not less. In other circumstances (outside the UK for instance, where the BBC relies on 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 innocuous “related stories” links as a mechanism to grab my attention, and it’s gone too far.
If you are a normal person just browsing the news and looking to discover the latest important stories relatively quickly, I can see that these types of links might actually be useful for discovery; but I’m actually reasonably sure that I’m not going to miss out on anything major. You still have the option of the news home page if you want to be presented with more news for example, and it feels natural to go back to there when you’ve run out of stories to consume.
But it shouldn’t be down to individual responsibility to ignore or geekily block these types of link; news sites with alternative funding models should find better metrics for engagement than “hours spent on site” – how about optimizing for customer mental wellbeing, or minimizing time required to catch up with the news? There’s no need to maximize clicks and eyeballs. This is a societal level issue, because we are all going mad with news over-engagement.
Product managers, over to you.
