Some 15 years ago I implemented a rule to avoid going down the interesting-links-in-emails rabbit hole: I could only open URLs that I listed the day before. The list could be as long as it needed to be, the stupid links from emails could also make the list, but there was no clicking on stuff that I didn't put on the day before.
The stupid links immediately lost their fake relevance and urgency, so even if they were on the list, the next day I largely ignored those. (Also, this being in 2001, when I ran out of stuff to do on the internet (whoah!), I started inventing new stuff for the next day's list, like "what does McDonald's sell in India".)
You know, I've used a related rule from time to time: I turned the bandwidth limit for my browser down to a only a handful of kilobytes/second. When clicking on that stupid link was 15-second wait, the rabbit holes broke and I found that I put a lot more time into what I actually was there for.
This blazing fast "have what you want and have it right now"-type mentality with information that the internet has given us sometimes caters more to stupid curiosity than it does to real learning.
As it turns out I do the exact same thing with both Reddit and Youtube. I don't click on links/videos, they both just get saved for later. This process takes maybe 10 minutes tops. When I have critical mass (every few days) I'll look back through what I've saved and read/watch maybe 1/3 of it, deleting most of the rest since I know I won't get to it or it isn't interesting any longer.
I think that the layout of these types of websites makes it hard to prioritize; we just instinctually click on the first interesting thing.
When I was there in 2008, the Maharaja Chicken Sandwich was the flagship offering at MacDonald's Hyderabad. Not bad, but it didn't feel very MacDonald's either.
This is basically a manual version of Stallman's email-web-browsing daemon. See https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html and search for "I am careful in how I use the Internet".
This is a great idea. I find that there is a spectrum between planning, routine and impulse in my life. This moves impulsive action to planned action. When I move toward planning and away from impulse I am less of an automaton and a pavlovian dog. Being able to implement long-range planning is one of the things that makes us human after all.
The stupid links immediately lost their fake relevance and urgency, so even if they were on the list, the next day I largely ignored those. (Also, this being in 2001, when I ran out of stuff to do on the internet (whoah!), I started inventing new stuff for the next day's list, like "what does McDonald's sell in India".)