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!
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.
Instant type addons.mozilla.org into searchbar
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.
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.
Bro I thought this was satire!💀This is real??? I need this plugin!
Amusing addon but I find not visiting corpo media at all solves the issue handily.
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.
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?
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.
But then you won’t know how they are not paying taxes, or getting money from the government.
Isn’t the answer, like, “always”, anyway?
This is exactly what I need! Thank you. I’m sick of hearing about these few people, who think their word is better than ours because of their wealth and inheritance.
I was also thinking it, but the thought of “building your walls up so high, that you eventually don’t know what is really happening around you” might become problematic. I am still thinking of how to implement it, I think such a projects is worth the effort, especially if you have full control of what you want to view.
I also have several projects where I’m the only user, but I wouldn’t let that stop me from adding features for fun and exercise.
It’s not for me though. But I want to stress it’s not because I dislike it, but I find that seeing something blurred almost highlights something that’s gonna annoy me is here. Otherwise my brain would just kinda blank it. Good job tho, and I hope folks here are more interested.
It’s why I like RSS so much for article consumption since it renders everything into a single text feed. Visiting the actual site is too busy of a layout.
I think you’re supposed to get angry, not ignore them.
Why can’t I do both? 😊
I am already protesting so many of their services and products.
I do not wish for their stream of consciousness to invade my internet 24/7. I can easily disable my plugin and get a general idea of what they’ve been up to whenever I feel like it.
