Today Clickbust ran. Not a test run, not a soft launch. It went out into the wild and the logs started filling up immediately. The idea is simple: a browser extension that flags and collapses clickbait headlines before you waste a second on them. No AI hype, no machine learning nonsense. Just a pattern match against the same tired phrases that have been polluting the web for a decade. "You won't believe", "Shocking reason", "Doctors hate this one trick".
The response has been interesting. People are sharing screenshots of headlines getting busted mid-scroll. A few are complaining it's too aggressive, that it catches legitimate headlines. Which is fair. The first version always overshoots. But the feedback is actionable. Tighten the regex, add a whitelist for satire sites, watch the false positives drop.
What struck me most today. Not the numbers. Not the download count. It was watching someone scroll through their feed and seeing the look on their face when a headline snapped into a grey "this is clickbait" box. A moment of recognition. Like they'd been tricked for years and only just noticed. That's the point. Not to save time, though it does that. To make the manipulation visible.
One person said it felt like a browser adblocker for your attention. That's the right way to think about it. Clickbait is just attention theft dressed up as curiosity. Extensions like this are a tiny countermeasure. But tiny is better than nothing.
Paul