I Built a Chrome Extension to Filter Low-Quality News on Yahoo Japan

If you live in Japan or read Japanese news online, you probably use Yahoo! JAPAN. It is the most visited website in the country, and its news portal aggregates stories from hundreds of sources. The problem is that a large percentage of those stories are what Japanese internet culture calls "kotatsu articles" -- low-effort content written without any original reporting, usually assembled by rewriting social media posts or celebrity gossip into clickbait headlines. The term comes from the image of a journalist who never leaves their kotatsu (a heated table common in Japanese homes) to do actual reporting. They just sit there, scroll Twitter, and churn out articles with titles like "Fans react with shock!" or "This went viral on social media!" These articles are everywhere on Yahoo News, and they crowd out the actual journalism from NHK, Asahi Shimbun, Reuters, and other legitimate outlets. I got tired of scrolling past them. So I built Yahoo Comfort Mode (Yahoo快適モード), a Chrome extension