cogsci folk and good random human psychologists would have predicted no change in my internet news reading behavior.

Your model of human psychologists needs updating, then. Books on hypnotism that I read when I was 11 discuss needs substitution, secondary gain, etc. that would be relevant to making such a prediction. Any good human psychologist knows to look for what gains a behavior produces.

Of course, maybe you meant "good (random human) psychologists", not "good, random (human psychologists)" - i.e., psychologists who study the behavior of random humans, rather than people who help individual humans... in which case, that's a really low bar for CT to leap over.

Also:

it would have failed if I had kept reading internet news sites.

This is also a really low bar, unless you specify how long you would stay away from them. In this case, three years is pretty good, but just getting somebody to stop for a few days or even a couple months is still a relatively low bar.