[david_allison]

> "Hot Network Questions" are a distraction and take up too much horizontal space.

Well worth blocking these with an adblocker, if you don't already

[KabaKun]

Don't even need to do that - just go to site settings and use the preference to block them - https://stackoverflow.com/users/preferences/current

It requires being logged in but you don't have to worry about empty spaces.

[david_allison]

Didn't know this. Thanks!

[UweSchmidt]

Done, but now there is some empty space instead. Probably fixable with some custom CSS...