Take control of your digital world

Case Study: Substack

Substack is very helpful in giving all kinds of info. Who subscribed? What post got what amount of views? How many people subscribed after reading this or that post?

My monkey brain translates this directly to “AM I POPULAR?!”, bouncing me right into scarcity mode. Scarcity mode is all about playing safe & not making mistakes. Fuck that. I want to write for my sake, and if it’s valuable to others then that’s a bonus (preferred indifferent). Also, this kind of repeated “social feedback” is bound to warp you over time, as you get rewarded for appealing to whoever reads you.

As such, I’ve decided to go blind, by blocking all the substack statistics. It makes the page look more minimalistic as a bonus. I like taking control of my digital life, a topic I might explore more thoroughly in a future post.

This current post will be a technical how-to guide on how to make substack behave. The principles apply to any webpage, so you might want to follow along even if you aren’t a substack author.

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Before & After

Before:

After:

Note: The top bar buttons turned out a bit wonky. But they are functional, so whatever.

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How to

Here are the steps I use to make webpages less addictive:

1. Opt-out of most notifications. You don’t need 95% of them. They can usually be found under Settings > Notifications or similar

2. Install browser addon uBlock Origin.
   uBlock Origin lets you filter out ads and other annoying parts of webpages.

If you’re only interested in how to filter Substack, continue reading under “Editing filters directly”

If you want to learn how to filter out parts of web pages yourself, continue reading. I will tell you how you can add filtering rules that will block whatever you want, including ads, annoying features and similar. Here are the steps:

1. Locate the ublock origin widget & click it:

   

2. Click the pipette icon to go into element picker mode:

   

3. Hover your mouse over an element you want to filter away, such as this “Need Help?” text. Click on the element:

   

4. This view will pop up:

   

5. Here’s what the buttons do:

   1. Clicking “Preview” enter preview mode. Here you can see what the page would look like with the filter.
      Clicking “Preview” a second time exits preview mode
      When I enter preview mode I see the page without the “Need help?” text:
      

      

      Before ——> Filter preview

   2. “Create” creates a new filtering rule, hiding the “Need Help?” text whenever you go to the site. If you fuck up and add a filter you regret, read about how to recover under “I want to go back to normal!”

   3. “Pick” lets you pick a new element to filter

   4. “Quit” exits this mode, so you can go back to your normal life.

   5. The list of “Cosmetic filters” are suggestions for what “filter rules” to apply. If the preview looks wonky, try selecting a different cosmetic filter. Repeat until the preview looks good, and then press “Create” to save the filter rule.

Editing filters directly

1. Locate the ublock origin widget & click it:

   

2. Click the cog icon to open settings:

   

3. Select “My filters” in the top bar:

   

4. If you want your substack to look like mine, add the following lines:
   substack.com##[href="/publish/stats"]

   substack.com##[href="/publish/subscribers"]

   substack.com##.big.post-stats > .post-stat

   substack.com##div.post-stat

   substack.com##.post-links

   substack.com##.big.post-stats

   substack.com##div.post-stats

   substack.com##.referrer-links

   substack.com##.resources

5. Press the “Apply Changes” button in the top left.

6. If you want to go back to how things were, follow the instructions in “I want to go back to normal!”

I want to go back to normal!

Ok, so you are unhappy with a filter you’ve added. No problem. Here’s how to go back to normal:

1. Locate the uBlock origin widget & click it:

   

2. Click the cog icon to open settings:

   

3. Select “My filters” in the top bar:

   

You now see a long list of all your custom filters, marked with the dates they were created on. Here’s an example from my filters:

In this example, it seems like I removed the youtube voice search button roughly a year ago. If I want it back, I just delete that line and press “Apply Changes” in the top left of the window.

If you are unsure about which line to remove, look for the date when the change was introduced, or remove all lines starting with the website you want to restore to normal. Or, if you’re really stuck, remove all the filters and then press “Apply Changes”!

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