> the real product has little to do with the task you came to the site for, so everything is trying to distract you away from that task
This is really the biggest thing I had against the reddit redesign (and why I love the simple UI of Hacker News). It cleared away space for ads on either side, made the platform as a whole better suited to image- or video-content (dissuading users from using text posts on the site for discussion), and ultimately felt - exactly as you described - "distracting". It made it blatantly clear that the site was for upvoting pictures, getting inundated with political propaganda from whichever side is currently paying more, and ultimately wasting the user's time.
Facebook is feeling the same way.
I've literally gotten to the point where I separate "good content" from "time-wasting content" by browser - anything that I can consider educational, time-sensitive, or otherwise important (... I have a list of pinned tabs; Schwab, ThinkOrSwim, Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal) goes in Opera.
Anything that I save solely for my spare time goes in Firefox. All of my social media accounts go in firefox (google is the only thing I knowingly allow to track me between sites in Opera). Reddit and Hacker News go in Firefox (although sometimes I browse HN without logging in in Opera, so that I don't have to switch browsers to log into news sites with paywalls).
It makes it really easy to keep myself focused when I need to do something important, and it also makes it easier to live with some of the more annoying (but security-bolstering) browser settings I currently use.
This is really the biggest thing I had against the reddit redesign (and why I love the simple UI of Hacker News). It cleared away space for ads on either side, made the platform as a whole better suited to image- or video-content (dissuading users from using text posts on the site for discussion), and ultimately felt - exactly as you described - "distracting". It made it blatantly clear that the site was for upvoting pictures, getting inundated with political propaganda from whichever side is currently paying more, and ultimately wasting the user's time.
Facebook is feeling the same way.
I've literally gotten to the point where I separate "good content" from "time-wasting content" by browser - anything that I can consider educational, time-sensitive, or otherwise important (... I have a list of pinned tabs; Schwab, ThinkOrSwim, Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal) goes in Opera.
Anything that I save solely for my spare time goes in Firefox. All of my social media accounts go in firefox (google is the only thing I knowingly allow to track me between sites in Opera). Reddit and Hacker News go in Firefox (although sometimes I browse HN without logging in in Opera, so that I don't have to switch browsers to log into news sites with paywalls).
It makes it really easy to keep myself focused when I need to do something important, and it also makes it easier to live with some of the more annoying (but security-bolstering) browser settings I currently use.