I am addicted to the internet. It is a ubiquitous and low-friction to satiate my need for curiosity, to distract myself from the the emotional undercurrent of my life, and finally to browse dank memes.
But internet addiction is completely at odds with who I want to be and what I want to achieve. Since I was 17, I’ve had ideas for fiction novels growing in my head. The constant distraction of sites like Reddit, YouTube, HackerNews, and even Lobste.rs has dulled this need, left me feeling like I don’t have enough time in life, and made me feel anxious.
To remedy this, I have tried several internet blocking apps, such as Freedom, OneSec, and ScreenZen. I recommend all of them; they are great. However, I found myself getting annoyed by them because they are as blunt as a hammer. They either block the entire site, or nothing at all.
In the year 2025, the internet is increasingly becoming unusable, with the exception of content from social media. My go-to technique of increasing the usability of an internet search has been appending site:reddit.com to any search term, to combat the low-effort/AI-generated blog spam that my search engine barrages me with.
So I need more nuance than these internet blocking tools provide; I need to be able to view individual posts or videos from distracting websites, without being tempted by the infinite-scrolling, AI-curated index pages.
So this led me to ponder; how can I block the distracting parts of Reddit and YouTube, while still ensuring that the sites are usable in case I need to get information from them?
This led me to using the uBlock Origin extension to create a set of rules that block index pages on both sites. Index pages are an old term for the part of a website that curates and lists the rest of the content in the website.
For Reddit, the index pages would be /, /r/all, /r/popular, and every subreddit. Were I to only block index pages on Reddit, I would still have access to the comment sections of each post, and wiki pages for subreddits. I think this is an excellent compromise.
In the case of YouTube, this would be the Subscriptions page and the root homepage, which is usually filled with recommendations.
How uBlock Origin rules work
- Lines starting with a
!are comments and are not evaluated by uBlock Origin - Lines starting with a
||are rules, and are blocked by uBlock Origin - Lines starting with
@@||are exceptions, and are allowed by uBlock Origin
Having added the extension, you can add uBlock Origin rules by opening the extension’s settings, and copy+pasting the rules into My Filters.
Reddit uBlock Origin rules
! Exception: Allow direct post links containing discussion
@@||reddit.com/r/*/comments/*$document
@@||old.reddit.com/r/*/comments/*$document
! Exception: Allow subreddit wiki pages
@@||reddit.com/r/*/wiki/*$document
@@||old.reddit.com/r/*/wiki/*$document
! Exception: In parens, list index pages to ignore, separator: `|`
@@||old.reddit.com/r/(digitalminimalism|nosurf)
! Rule: Block Reddit
||reddit.com/$document
||old.reddit.com/$document
YouTube uBlock Origin rules
! Block YouTube, except invidivual video pages and embeded videos
||youtube.com/$document
@@||youtube.com/watch?*$document
@@||youtube.com/embed/*$document
Thank you
I hope these rules are as useful to you as they are to me.