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Show HN: Feed Remover
Your own browser extension to get rid of unwanted social media feed! 5 minutes to setup, hours saved.
- ge96 3y agoCSS override works too I feel the same though, those thumbnails steal your attention when you go to YT to do something
- zukerpie 3y agoDo you mean the local overrides from the console? Or something else? It would be cool to learn about some different approach.
- ge96 3y agoInjected a custom stylesheet via extension vs. removing elements. I messed around with YouTube before and they can detect when their dom changes. Not to say it's breaking but I thought it was interesting.
- jawmes8 3y agoDefinitely going to try this for StackExchange
- theptip 3y agoIf I’m following this correctly, Brave supports something similar natively: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018039072-How-do-I-block-additional-page-elements- https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018039072-How...
- zukerpie 3y agoYou are right. I'm using Brave and didn't know about it until now. I will give it a try as well.
- chrismorgan 3y agoContent blockers like uBlock Origin can do this. The two included in this extension become these cosmetic filters: www.facebook.com##[role="feed"] www.youtube.com###contents
- zukerpie 3y agoThe main problem that I have with extensions is: "It can: Read and change all your data on all websites" Having my own, local extension I don't have to actually think whether I added some sensitive stuff to be exempt from permissions or not.
- lancesells 3y agoLinkedIn: .scaffold-finite-scroll__content { display: none }
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 3y agouBlock Origin is weak when it comes to new DOM elements dynamically created after the page has ostensibly loaded. Most of its powerful "cosmetic filter" selection operators don't work on such elements. I suspect that could make it of limited use on a feed object in which new elements appear, if you want to filter specific elements. (Aren't "infinite" feeds lazily loaded by JS?) Still, much smarter to try it first to see if it fits your use case.
- shepherdjerred 3y agoSuch a good idea. Do you have any plan to polish this up and publish to an extension store?
- zukerpie 3y agoThe whole point is to actually have installed locally so you don't share any data with the developer of the extension. The problem with extensions is that in many cases the access that you give them is way too broad. If you install it by yourself, you control everything. The only thing that I thought about is maybe some kind of configurator that would allow you to pick some already existing rules that the users would share through github.
- croes 3y agoThere isn't really a special protection if you install a extension in developer mode. More the opposite because you have to totally trust the source. Web stores search for certain malware patterns and get at leat some.
- RheingoldRiver 3y agoYou're not wrong, but in this case the total source code is like 30 lines long so it's not hard to verify what it's doing yourself
- croes 3y agoBut that is independent from the way you install an extension. You gain no security from an unpacked extension.
- rpdillon 3y agoThanks for pointing this out. The whole discussion around "the developer doesn't see my data" confused me, as the question of whether the code is malicious is orthogonal to installation method. Given that uBlock Origin can do this, I'd recommend that route. uBlock Origin is probably the most trustworthy extension I've ever run across, and Gorhill has proven that he is trustworthy over many years.
- sailorganymede 3y agoI use a mix of Unhook and Focus Time to get rid of the feeds that annoy me the most.
- zukerpie 3y agoUnhook looks nice, since it's only restricted to accessing YouTube. Strange that I didn't stumble upon it while looking for options.
- quotz 3y agoI've been using an extension called News Feed Eradicator for like years now and its great! I was thinking of editing the code to put up like a math equation every time I need to disable it, but not sure if its open source. Seems like this tool might work!
- aghilmort 3y agodoes this remove an entire feed or selective content in feed don't want to see?
- cvhashim04 3y agoYou might be cooking something here, seems useful when you're on certain websites that stream sports and won't allow you to close the chat windows while watching.
- zukerpie 3y agoHaha, that should be definitely possible, but would require a bit more knowledge :)
- Beijinger 3y agoLooks complex. What are the advantages compared to Social Fixer? https://socialfixer.com/ https://socialfixer.com/
- zukerpie 3y agoThe advantage that speaks to me, is that I control everything. I'm not sharing my data with the developer of the extension so it's one person less that I have to trust. I can also very easily adjust it to my needs, but I can program, so it's not valid case for everyone.
- jsf01 3y agoCool! Just curious, why do you query 10 times per second for a feed? This seems kind of excessive and maybe a bit bad for battery life, especially since this could be running in several tabs at once.
- zukerpie 3y agoThis is just the straightforward idea of waiting for some element to appear on the website. But once the element is found, this thing stops. It won't stop for YouTube if you are on Facebook though but it's just a first implementation and it could actually be very easy to recognize the site. Thanks for the helpful suggestion!
- rendall 3y agoI wrote an extension that did something similar for Twitter, back when Twitter had "So-and-so liked this" tweet, which was inevitably something awful. It's archived now, because it's no longer relevant. But you might find something useful in the code. I tried polling, but it was against the Chrome extension guidelines at the time, so I used a "mutationObserver" on page load and then a "scrollListener". I don't remember if I ever tried an "intersectionObserver" but that might be worth looking at. https://github.com/rendall/twitter-like-hider/blob/master/content_script.js https://github.com/rendall/twitter-like-hider/blob/master/co...
- joshxyz 3y agohey just curious, can't the mutationobserver catch this instead of that approach? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MutationObserver https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MutationObs...
- zukerpie 3y agoDefinitely! The current implementation is supposed to just do the work. It's not meant to be optimized or anything.
- zukerpie 3y ago
- absoluteunit1 3y agoFor YouTube there's a great plugin called DFToutube (Distraction free YouTube) One of my favourite plugins of all time. YouTube becomes what I want it to become; just a pure search engine for videos. If you enable everything in the config, it's beautiful. Source: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distraction-free/mjdepdfccjgcndkmemponafgioodelna https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...
- RiOuseR 3y ago[dead]
- nomilk 3y agoThis is cool. I use uBlock Origin to block GitHub's feed (I find it surprisingly distracting, and often right when I need to remain focused).
- robswc 3y agoHonestly, really good idea for work machines. I need to go to YT sometimes but I'd be lying if I said those feeds don't get me to click.
- 4b11b4 3y agoYouTube has a setting to turn this off already.
- firemelt 3y agohow?
- monsieurgaufre 3y agoif you turn off watch history, it gives you an empty landing page.
- firemelt 3y agonew reddit with their feeds kills the web for me
- killingtime74 3y agoIt would be great if you could include a before and after screenshot of your plugin in action. thanks
- zukerpie 3y agoThanks for the hint. Yeah, I will do this :)
- vernal 3y agopeople who like this kind of think might also like Clearspace [1] -- they've got some great tools to fight the attention-hijackers [1] https://www.getclearspace.com https://www.getclearspace.com
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]