Every major website you visit is designed to keep you there longer than you intended. YouTube autoplays the next video. Twitter shows you an algorithmically-selected "For You" tab engineered to maximise time spent. Reddit surfaces promoted posts and infinite scroll. Facebook shows you a right-column feed of suggestions for accounts you don't follow.
None of these things appeared because someone thought they'd improve your experience. They're there because engagement is the metric, and engagement means eyeballs on screen for as long as possible.
Distraction-free browsing is the practice of removing these engineered hooks so you can use the internet as a tool rather than a slot machine. Here's how to do it, site by site.
The Two Methods: Keyword Filtering and Element Hiding
ElementHider gives you two complementary tools for distraction removal:
- Keyword filtering: type a word or phrase and any page element containing it disappears. Great for hiding content categories (e.g. hide anything mentioning "Sponsored" or "Promoted").
- Point-and-click hiding: click any element on a page and ElementHider creates a CSS rule that hides that element type everywhere, on every visit. Great for hiding structural UI elements like sidebars, recommendation panels, and footers.
Used together, these two tools can reshape almost any website to show only the content you actually came for.
Site-by-Site Distraction Removal
YouTube
YouTube is arguably the most distracting website on the internet. The homepage exists purely to pull you in; the sidebar on every video page recommends something else; Shorts autoplay in a loop.
- Click-to-hide the recommendations sidebar on video pages so you watch what you came to watch, nothing else.
- Click-to-hide the Shorts shelf on the homepage if you find it pulls you into an infinite loop.
- Add keyword Promoted to hide sponsored video cards in search results. The same approach works if you're trying to avoid spoilers on YouTube.
- Use click-to-hide on the homepage's algorithmically-suggested categories (the pill-shaped filter tabs) if you want a calmer browse.
Twitter / X
The "For You" tab is designed to surface content you didn't ask to see. The Trending panel shows you what everyone else is talking about, whether you want to know or not.
- Click-to-hide the Trending / What's Happening sidebar permanently.
- Click-to-hide the Who to Follow suggestions panel.
- Add keywords to filter topics you want to avoid: Promoted Ad. See our guide to keyword filtering on the Twitter/X feed for more detail.
- Use keyword groups (Supporter Pack) to toggle entire topic filters on and off.
New Reddit's layout is considerably noisier than Old Reddit: promoted posts, community awards, and a sidebar full of trending communities all compete for attention.
- Add keyword Promoted to hide all sponsored posts in your feed.
- Click-to-hide the right sidebar if you only come for the main feed.
- Filter specific community flairs by keyword if a subreddit you like has a flair type you always skip. The same keyword approach lets you block spoilers on Reddit before they spoil a match, episode, or release.
News sites
News sites earn money by keeping you reading, so they surface "You might also like" panels, comment counts designed to provoke you into engaging, and breaking news banners that auto-refresh.
- Click-to-hide related articles panels and the comments section if you find yourself disappearing into comment threads.
- Add keyword Breaking if you'd rather read considered analysis than hot takes.
- Pin rules to specific domains so they only apply on the news site, not everywhere.
Using Site-Specific Rules
One of the most useful ElementHider features for distraction reduction is site-specific rules. When you add a keyword or click-to-hide an element, you can pin the rule to the current domain so it only fires on, say, youtube.com, not on every site you visit.
This keeps rules scoped to where you need them: hide YouTube's recommendation sidebar everywhere on YouTube, while leaving similar-looking panels on other sites untouched.
Tip: Use Test Mode first. Toggle it in the extension popup and matched elements are highlighted in green instead of hidden, so you can see what a keyword or click-to-hide rule matches before hiding it.
The Mindset Shift
Distraction-free browsing is about using the web with a specific purpose: visiting YouTube to watch a video, opening Twitter to check on people you follow, or reading the news without getting pulled into a comments section.
Removing those extra panels leaves the parts of the site you actually went there to use.
ElementHider's rules are persistent and sync across your devices, so you set them up once and they apply automatically on future visits.
Getting Started
The fastest way to start is:
- Install ElementHider on Chrome or Firefox.
- Open YouTube and click-to-hide the recommendations sidebar on a video page.
- Open Twitter and click-to-hide the Trending panel.
- Add Sponsored and Promoted as global keywords.
That setup takes about five minutes and stays active across every session.