Useful if stressing.

Occasionally there is some grotesque crime story whose headline I don't need the slightest reminder of.

It's the same with the Ignore feature: there are posters whom I'd rather not read, but I don't put them on Ignore; I just don't read their posts.

But to each their own.

what’s left has a couple that don’t do me amy good

Cat. I learned to go through the account feature and now block the words that lead to topics I have no interest in.

. . . Threads for tweets, cat videos, reposts from Reddit, etc. I generally come here for real news and, while I won't say that I've never looked at the odd "fluffy" post, that's not at all my main interest. It would be nice not to have to wade through all the trivia to get to the meat.

At the top of your screen on any page to the right of your screen name you will see an option for your "my account." If you click that and toggle the tab underneath that says "trash can,' you will see an option to auto-trash by keyword. Some words are so generalized that you will find that you are losing content you might WANT to see, though, so I don't use this. But, if seeing the occasional cute or interesting non-political post in the "latest thread" or "greatest thread" scroll bothers you, that would be the way to individualize DU for you.

Personally, I'd hate to miss some of the "just interesting," "cute," or other nonpolitical content. I think it can cool off a lot of heated debate which is not infrequent here but also occasionally give a laugh or two. But to each their own.

I try - really hard - to give everyone a shot at making their point. If an OP is just too offensive, I close it and move on. From that point, it's marked as having been read and I'm not tempted to re-open it.