March 2022—I built the Unclutter browser extension because I was frustrated about the state of the modern internet, particularly about news and article websites.

Nearly all news is irrelevant of course — the only noteworthy part about news and hence directly in its name is its “newness”. Which according to the Lindy Effect means literally nothing.

Try reading a newspaper with a one month delay and you’ll pick up the same essential information. But it will be much easier to ignore irrelevant stuff which everyone else has forgotten by then.

But unfortunately there are cases where being “informed” is useful: I can think of local communities and direct business interests, where you want to connect with others and contribute.

For this you need to read at least some articles. Which sucks on the modern internet.

Ad-blockers are an absolute requirement to get anything done, but their curated blocklists cannot remove many attention hacks like layouts that make the actual text incredibly small, autoplay videos, or intriguing but useless “related articles”.

A solution to this are “reader modes” like the ones built into your browser. But they have their own set of problems. Often some text paragraphs, images, or interactive graphs are removed from the page along with the things you actually want removed.

But most disappointingly in my opinion, reader modes remove all semblance of the original design of the website you’re reading. It makes all articles look the same, the same type of boring that makes reading seem like a chore.

There is a reason why magazines spend a lot of time on branding and design.

Finally we come to a solution, or at least something that you can do to fix the situation for yourself.

With the Unclutter browser extension, there’s now a middle-ground between ad-blockers and reader modes. A reader mode that makes articles look good, and an ad-blocker that makes pages easy to read.

Check out this video to see it in action.

But it doesn’t just make articles look nice and lets you focus. The text and colors are customizable, you get a table of contents and reading time, can save articles for later, select any text save it as a highlight, or see social comments if you want.

And everything you read gets intelligently organized for you.

I hope it lets you rediscover the joy of reading, like it did for me.