Gorged

What: Gorged remove feeds, recommendation lists, and other browsing/exploration-related elements from websites like Reddit and Twitter

Why: Social media was incredibly detrimental to my life, so I blocked it on my computer. But then I couldn't access these sites at all, even for productive/positive tasks. The better solution is to leave these websites accessible, but remove their features related to browsing and exploring. (I got the idea from a coworker who uses improvedtube)

How: Gorged offers several different installations, each of which use their own strategy.

As a browser extension for Google Chrome or Firefox (coming soon): Gorged removes distracting content from webpages as your browser loads them.
- Choose this installation for the easiest setup.
As a proxy: Gorged intercepts the network traffic on your computer, removing distracting content from webpages before they even hit the browser.
- Choose this installation if you want Gorged to work system-wide instead of in a particular browser.
- This can also be a good choice if you, like me, find browser extensions too easy to get around: use incognito, switch browsers, or disable the extension, and boom, in five seconds you're back to an attention-disrespecting web.
As a Tampermonkey script (coming soon): Same as the browser extensions, but via Tampermonkey.
- Choose this installation if you want to fiddle with Gorged.

See installation for installation details.

Site Modifications

Website	Effect
twitter	remove the homepage timeline
twitter	remove the "What's happening" block
twitter	remove the "Who to follow" block
youtube	remove the suggestion sidebar from videos
youtube	blank out the landing page
youtube	blank out the 'home' tab on the landing page
youtube	blank out the 'trending' tab on the landing page
youtube	blank out the 'subscriptions' tab on the landing page
youtube	blank out the 'library' tab on the landing page
youtube	remove the like/dislike bar from under videos
youtube	remove the subscribe button from video descriptions
reddit	blank the homepage
reddit	remove subreddit homepage feeds
reddit	remove after-post feeds
imgur	remove the homepage feed
imgur	remove the search bar
imgur	remove the right-hand sidebar from posts
imgur	remove the after-post feed
facebook	remove the homepage feed
⋆.stackexchange	remove the "Hot Network Questions" sidebar
⋆.stackexchange	remove the "Top Question" feed from the landing page
⋆.stackexchange	remove the "All Questions" feed under /questsions
⋆.stackexchange	remove the "Related" sidebar
⋆.stackexchange	remove the "Linked" sidebar
⋆.stackexchange	remove the "Question feed" RSS link
⋆.stackexchange	remove the yellow "sticky note" on the right side of the page
⋆.stackexchange	remove the left navigation bar
stackexchange	remove the feed on the landing page of stackexchange.com

Installation as a Browser Extension

Coming soon

Installation As a Proxy

Gorged runs on Python 3.8+ so make sure you have that first. Then clone this repo and install dependencies. Here, I do that with a Python virtual environment:

git clone https://github.com/quelklef/gorged
cd gorged/as-proxy
python -m venv venv       # These two lines only required if you
source venv/bin/activate  # want to use a virtual environment
pip install -r requirements.txt

Now we can start Gorged with

./proxy.sh

This starts the proxy, but your system won't be connected to it yet. You can route all your computer's traffic through the proxy or, if you're using a browser that supports it (such as Firefox), only your browser's traffic.

If you want to route all traffic, look for a system option called something like "Network Proxy"
If you want to do browser-local proxying, you have to set it up in the browser
- As of Firefox 85.0, naviage to Preferences > General > Network Settings > Settings
- As of Chrome ~88.0, browser-local proxies seem to to be unsupported
Having found the setting, select "Manual" or a similar option then plug in 127.0.0.1 for the address and 8080 for the port for both HTTP and HTTPS.

At this point, Gorged should be successfully intercepting all HTTP traffic, but attempts to connect to HTTPS websites will fail. We need to add mitmproxy, the tool that Gorged uses to intercept network requests, as a trusted source of HTTPS traffic.

If you're using a browser with its own certificate store, such as Chrome or Firefox, you'll need to manually register the certificate in the browser as well
- As of Chrome ~88.0, this is done in Settings > Security > Manage certificates > Authorities > import.
- As of Firefox 85.0, this is done in Preferences > Privacy & Security > Certificates > View Certificates > import.
If you're on a browser that uses the system certificate store, or if you set up the proxy system-wide, then you should register ~/.mitmproxy/mitmproxy-ca-cert.pem as a trusted certificate on your system.
- If you're using Ubuntu, instructions can be found here.

Installation as a Tampermonkey script