The Rise of Sanityware: Reclaiming Digital Sanity in an Enshittified World

The Rise of Sanityware

If you walked into a library and the librarian took you to look at five other books before handing you the one you asked for, you would leave. Yet, this is exactly how we navigate the web today. We have normalized hostile user interfaces designed to obstruct your navigation on a webpage with engagement traps.

Once upon a time, the interface existed solely to bridge the gap between intent and action. A cursory look at the past and it becomes clear that the original architectural promise was that the software acted on your behalf. It was an "I ask, you give" relationship which has turned into a "I ask, you interpret the meaning, you nudge, you optimize retention, you sprinkle adverts and you incentivize me to interact before giving me something back."

I don't know about you, but I feel slightly uncomfortable with this new reality. Moreover, this philosophy is permeating every layer of the stack. I feel stupid as a user when I look up something, because I am treated as an imbecile who doesn't know what they want. Is it fighting me? We are living through the era of The Great UX Gaslighting. It began early, gained momentum in the 2010s and by God has it picked up pace after 2020.

It isn't just that the web has become enshittified (a term we all learned back around 2023 and have since watched become a prophecy, thanks Cory Doctorow)...it is that the fundamental incentive of the web has shifted from being tool-based in principle to being feed-based. Let's name names.

Can you believe those claims today? No news feed, no sponsors and no distractions? I look up one word on Google in 2026 and get served with an hallucinated AI Overview, three rows of sponsored camouflage, one organic result followed by a people also ask accordion that expands infinitely - a fractal of distraction designed to keep me on the results page rather than sending me to the source.

The Operating System has suffered the same fate. You know about Windows with its stubborn Copilot push into everything recently. Between the unkillable AI integration and system-level notifications begging me to buy OneDrive storage, the OS has become adversarial. There are adverts in the search feature, which btw, doesn't work. Recently I've even read about system updates that brick the shutdown feature, or a patch that prevented users from using Snipping Tool. At least in my online reading, the sentiment is that Windows seems to have abandoned user-friendliness in favor of shareholder-friendliness.

Tell me this, why does Everything index and search my subfolders much better than the OS's native tool? ⚠️ Usability Violation! This violates Jakob Nielsen's usability heuristics. When a system overrides your explicit command ("Show me this file") with implicit fuzzy logic ("You probably want to buy this storage"), it strips you of agency.

Facebook will sue me if I wrap up this list without giving them an honorary mention. Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook have all the features you would expect in a textbook that teaches you dark patterns. WhatsApp wants to turn into a super-app with communities and desperately counts on you making friends with an AI instead of your friends and family. Instagram wants to run your feed between ads and not the other way around. Facebook is blessed with hilariously bad moderation, rampant scam adverts and a feed designed to keep you hooked, as opposed to a feed that ranks your connections higher.

My favorite usability heuristic from NN Group is called aesthetic and minimalist design. This principle states that, "Interfaces should not contain information which is irrelevant or rarely needed. Every extra unit of information in an interface competes with the relevant units of information and diminishes their relative visibility."

Read that again and write down on a piece of paper how many websites in the current climate even try to abide by that principle. Maybe I'm just being optimistic because their priorities have changed.

Rise of Sanity Ware

So, what do we do? We cannot re-architect the servers of Mountain View or Redmond. We cannot change their OKRs which probably prioritize time on site over user satisfaction. But we control the client. We are seeing a massive resurgence in what I call Sanityware.

I define this as software designed for subtraction. Unlike traditional tools that add capabilities, Sanityware strips away the hostile architecture of the modern software to reveal the utility buried underneath.

The Sanityware stack is well-known among power users. We start with the grandfather of the movement - uBlock Origin. Power users utilize tools like NextDNS to enhance their security and block pings to servers they don't want. We add tools like sponsorblock to reclaim our time. Several people maintain lists of these incredible tools. We might even use alternative frontends like piped or revanced on mobile.

On web, especially, Sanityware can perhaps be layered by their point of intervention. For instance, Layer one are network interceptors (Pi-hole, NextDNS) that kill requests at the DNS level. People are increasingly gravitating towards these to conver their new "smart" devices into their "dumb" versions, smart TVs being at the top. Layer two refers to content blockers in general that operate on the DOM before rendering. This can also include scripts that turn off or on browser features while Layer three can include behavioral modifiers (browser extensions) that manipulate the application's logic after it has loaded to better align with user intent.

As gimmicky as it might sounds...perhaps a robust defense of one's sanity requires a multi-layered strategy in 2026. The sanityware hall of fame also include system tools like ShutUp10 for the "No" button Microsoft forgot to include(Winhance is another popular option) and browser extensions like:

• Consent-O-Matic cause clicking "Reject All" 50 times a day is a bit tedious.
• uBlacklist which I affectionately call the gardening shears for your search engine.

I am still adding to this list so suggestions are welcome!

Reclaiming the Library!

But listing tools isn't enough and sometimes you have to pick up a shovel and clear the path yourself. This brings us to a project that is admittedly personal. I didn't build it to sell a product, I built it to scratch my own itch because I was sick of the noise.

Why? YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world. For many of us, it used to be a library for learning and entertainment. But it treats itself like a casino only optimized for retention.

Why you need it in 2026

The Anti-Shorts Protocol ❌

If you are searching for thermodynamics - you want a lecture, not a 15-second clip? YSF nukes them from search results.

Visual Hygiene 🙏

YSF gives you grid view in search results. It also strips off automatic sections like "people also search for". It removes live videos, verified creators, mixes and so much more. It makes the interface boring.

Strict Keyword Matching 🎯

It re-implements the logic that search engines abandoned and offers you an option to demarcate results that do not strictly contain your search query.

DOWNLOAD NOW!

FOSS • Privacy friendly • Mozilla recommended

On a strictly visual level, using tools like this cleans up the screen real-estate. But think of it this way...it also starves the feedback loop. You don't end up clicking on any of that recommended content the algorthm provided because you never saw it in the first place. And that is the ultimate goal here. To be able to look at a clean feed, on YouTube or otherwise is such a relief. Seeing a results page stripped of its desperate algorithmic pleas is jarring in the best possible way. It forces the content to stand on its own merit, stripped of the flashing lights added to artificially inflate its value.

This is the core promise of sanityware in my opinion. Clarity should be a feature. It feels like walking back out of a casino and returning to the library, where the only thing that matters is the book we came to find.

🤔 Goodhart's Law

The law states, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." In the early days of a platform, user satisfaction is a good measure of success. But once the platform matures and Wall Street demands growth, user engagement (time on site, clicks, ad views) becomes the target. At that point, the company will do anything to juice that metric, even if it means destroying the user satisfaction it was originally supposed to represent.

This is why Google's search results page became a destination in itself, not a map to somewhere else.

Leaving thoughts

The most annoying thing about corporate surveillance to me is the arrogance of the prediction mechanisms. These algorithms build a model of me based on my clicks from three years ago and then try to trap me in that loop forever. They show me music they think I'll like, and news they think I'll engage with, and videos they think will enrage me enough to keep me hooked to their platforms. They are actively trying to flatten my personality into something easy to monetize.

As most people I've seen say out loud, "Privacy as a concept is way beyond hiding secrets. A part of it also means preserving your capacity to change. To be surprised. To be inconsistent."

If I could tell every human one thing, it would be to actively refuse to be a predictable data point. Mess up their metrics. In whatever way you are capable of.