About 8 months ago I got pretty tired of seeing billionaire spam online. I could not bear to read about yet another rich guy who launched themselves (or their $200,000 car) into outer space 🚀 . I did not care about their expert opinion on the latest meme coin back then. I do not care about their expert opinion on the dangers of AI today.
So… I developed a tiny, free, and open source Firefox browser add-on called “Block the Rich”. It is completely local and private. No data is tracked. No data is phoned home.
The concept is pretty simple: whenever I load a web page, the extension quickly analyzes the content and intelligently blurs out any references to the Forbes Top 10 Billionaires. Some former and wannabe billionaires are blurred out of courtesy as well (I’m looking at you Trump and Kanye 🙄).
This project is a very early prototype that I built in the span of a few days. I have so many awesome ideas for enhancements but the truth is that the wind got completely knocked out of my sails when I put myself out there on Reddit many moons ago. There was absolutely zero public interest. To this day my wife and I are the only ones using the original prototype.
People of Lemmy, do you think there is a place on the internet for such a project, or is it time that I let it go?
Edit: I am blown away by the support from you all. Thank you! I am so excited to start polishing this baby up!
My only request would be to have a version that not just blurs the parts but completely removes the DOM elements where they are mentioned.
maybe even integration with uBlock if possible?
I wrote a plugin similar to this a long time ago because uBlock couldn’t do it, at least not efficiently. I mentioned it in another comment already so I won’t repeat everything.
The thing I made turned out to work better for getting rid of links you never want to see (facebook, twitter, quora, etc). You can apply whatever CSS you want to matches, so you can blur using a transform, redact (color: black; background-color: black), hide (visibility: hidden), remove (display: none), etc.
I even showed it to gorhill but I don’t think he looked to hard at it and suggested I try something in uBO I already knew didn’t work effectively.
This is a great suggestion and is pretty similar to what some of the other commenters also requested. I am thinking to support multiple modes:
- Blur The Rich (current prototype)
- Block The Rich (your request)
- Mock The Rich (replace the names of these billionaires with less flattering nicknames e.g. “Space Karen”, etc)
Great idea. Could be cool to blacklist people. Say you’re reading an article and think to yourself “damn, that man or woman is a muthafucka!” Then you just highlight their name, right click, and bam! The summaremoved ain’t to be seen agin.
I laughed out loud at this suggestion. Love it. I can imagine this could lead to some confusion if a user blocks a common name, like John Smith… but let me give it some more thought!
Reminds me of Black Mirror White Christmas episode. I could use that feature.
I’ve always believed it would be useful to have a thing like this but for brand logos.
But instead of blurring or blocking the brand logo like an adblocker what it does instead is show you the face of the top shareholder in that brand. Remove the brands and show the assholes that own them. Where it’s not a single person you replace that brand with the name of the hedgefund or bank that owns the investment.
It would bring people’s attention away from brand consumerism and to a constant consciousness of the ruling class looming over them in everything.
But then everything everywhere would look the same - whatever random picture it uses for Blackrock
Probably the ugly face of Larry Fink! 😬
The way I would like to see it done is that any company name can be hovered over and the top 5 shareholders pop up and if applicable it tells you who the parent company is.
Do celebrities please. I don’t want to see a post about how stupid the Kardashians are every 5 mins.
Hell yeah there is. The only billionaire news I care about is some future article that talk about how they lost all their wealth because they finally had to pay their taxes or some shit.
Instant type addons.mozilla.org into searchbar
Bro I thought this was satire!💀This is real??? I need this plugin!
Thank you for this, @aCosmicWave@lemm.ee! I added this extension to my Firefox install because I am really sick of the same thing.
Lolz, it is crazy what one needs to do to prevail sanity these days
not seeing does not equate to not existing.
let us not blind ourselves to their antics. awareness is key to prevent ourselves from being exploited.
I get the sentiment but I more attribute it to giving a child too much attention. People keep clicking and talking about them so they stay relevant. Not only does this feed their ego it drives the hype machines ad revenue
Exactly, you have to see what they’re doing to know how to counter it (or even know that it exists). Living in a bubble isn’t going to help us. Maybe you should install this on your kid’s computer?
Can I get one that applies to millionaire celebrities?
Back when Reddit was good because Apollo still worked, I had all kinds of keywords blocked (Trump, Elon, John Cena, Kardashian). The idea of being able to bring that to the entire experience of browsing the web is very appealing.
Amusing addon but I find not visiting corpo media at all solves the issue handily.
I try to avoid corpo media as well! But still… if you sort this community by the Top posts in last 24 hours there are a handful of posts about Elon Musk and friends. At least those of us who browse the desktop version of Lemmy can ignore such posts.
I like the idea in principle, but I think it’s important to know what the most powerful people on the planet are doing for our own sakes. Admittedly, a lot of it is marketing bullshit, but it’s kind of important to see that so you can see through it and find the true motivations as well. Like their “effective altruism” bullshit.
I’m actually ancap and all that, participating in barking contests over economics against those illiterate in it, sometimes, but:
It does have the use you describe, like watching\reading\listening to propaganda to “read between the lines”.
Only the fact is that this is expected, and such news are like a DDOS attack, you won’t preserve your sanity to make any use of them.
The idea is good, and also maybe not using mainstream social media too.
I get it, so I installed the extension and browsed with it today. My feedback is that I feel like blocking individual words like Elon or Bezos would be required to make this meaningful at all. I still saw a bunch of stuff about them that the filter didn’t catch because they are so ubiquitous that you don’t need to say their full name to communicate who you’re talking about.
At the same time, while I almost always don’t care and don’t want to hear about a piece of Elon news, it doesn’t mean I’m not interested in Twitter developments, but I think the filter will block most if not all links/info about Twitter since it’s intrinsically linked to Elon’s persona.
At the end of the day I think it’s a cool idea, but I don’t think you can effectively block these guys via this method without blocking any mention of any platform they’re associated with, which isn’t really what I want.
Doesnt work
