4 ms·
Shut Up: Comment Blocker
- cf100clunk 8mo agoI've found this extension to be highly valuable on sports and movie/tv sites at thwarting spoilers and blabbermouths. Its value on political sites is much appreciated.
- kstrauser 8mo agoVery neat! For Safari users, don’t overlook that beautiful “Hide Distracting Items” menu which lets you block specific items elements on a per-site basis. Want to permanently hide a popover dialog? Hide it! Hide the comments section. Hide fog layers that obscure the content behind them. I use this all the time.
- jjice 8mo agoI can't believe I didn't know about this. I had to track down mediocre extensions to try to replicate UBlock's element blocking. I did find that Adguard was pretty okay, but this looks much nicer.
- throawayonthe 8mo agouBO lite is available for safari though: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...
- jjice 8mo agoYeah it is now, but it wasn't at the time. I have both Adguard and uBlock Origin Lite installed now. uBlock Origin came out about six months ago (saw on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44795825 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44795825
- nozzlegear 8mo agoI don't think it's actually permanent though, is it? The items will eventually come back.
- kstrauser 8mo agoIt's permanent. However, behind the scenes I'm sure it's using CSS selectors to identify the element you're blocking, and if the server changes that, then it wouldn't detect that exact element anymore.
- OGEnthusiast 8mo agoFeels like this will be especially valuable as more comments are just AI slop
- cf100clunk 8mo agoFake reviews too, whether human or AI.
- WD-42 8mo agoFind it somewhat ironic that the first screenshot shows stack overflow, the once place where comments are still potentially useful - if we ever visit the site again. Author if you are reading: maybe use a screenshot of somewhere else like Hacker News?
- robrain 8mo agoI might be misreading it, but that screenshot looks like an example of how you can disable the plugin for particular sites, like SO.
- mrexcess 8mo agoAnd thus concludes the internet's decades long transition from a peer community of idea exchange ala UseNet to a broadcast messaging medium controlled by elites for their own benefit ala Bari Weiss' CBS. Welcome to the Dead Internet.
- jama211 8mo agoNot sure this particular thing concludes it
- cf100clunk 8mo agoUsenet had the Cancelmoose, so message sanitization has always been part of the Internet. In this case, I see this browser extension as purely a tool of the end user and not a blanket threat to the peer community at large.
- Fnoord 8mo agoUsenet kill file, IRC ignore list, email spam filters, web browser adblockers, disabling JavaScript, using Archive.org/.today to read content, using plain text and a remote host to parse URLs to forward the content to email, RSS readers, converting content based on CSS selectors or json (e.g. jq) to XML/RSS. The internet has and will always be about increasibg the signal te noise ratio for the user. The fact someone resorts to blacklisting entire comment section tells us something about how they view the quality of these in general; subpar. It isn't just LLMs which contribute to that. Troll farms do, too. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file
- mrexcess 8mo ago>The internet has and will always be about increasibg the signal te noise ratio for the user. And my point is that the signal used to primarily originate from peer interactions, not broadcasting. Look at Usenet, AOL's structure, or Web 1.0. There's an inversion in the modern era, where broadcast messaging is perceived as the signal, and peer interactions the noise.
- 8mo ago
- perching_aix 8mo agoPretty fun to see this, I've been doing the same for a while for a number of sites (e.g. YouTube) via just Ublock. May be a bit safer for those who don't want to introduce a new dependency into their environment.
- bevelwork 8mo agoThere's irony for commenting about blocking comments.
- jama211 8mo agoGreat idea, though something I accepted about myself years ago is I always want to read at least some of the comments, even if they’re horrific and make me want to sand off my own eyeballs. It may be horrible a lot of the time, but the total boredom and loneliness of experiencing the internet without feeling the presence of others is somehow worse. I know it’s ridiculous, just seems to be the way I am.
- tracker1 8mo agoI'm kind of there with you... I will even actively avoid sites that don't have some kind of comments. Though I do wish more of them would load on demand, or even shift to another page for comments vs. loading a lot of JS or remote garbage first.
- hsbauauvhabzb 8mo agoHN comments are insightful. And while there is bot farms out there it’s important to know talking points of someone you disagree with to both consider their validity and to enable you to refute them well.
- perching_aix 8mo agoSome would disagree, but I'm squarely of the opinion that comments being inciteful and insightful are not mutually exclusive properties. This is only compounded when you're the kind of person who goes out of their way to try find meaning in what people say (and since that's subjective, you can basically find a perspective in anything if you try hard enough). I find this to be kind of the whole reason why acting inciteful is socially problematic anyways: it derails conversations. It's also why I can consider it malicious: you can lay into this effect parasitically, with intention. You point to HN; I find that this idea is reflected in the HN guidelines as well (or at least the lessons from it are), but also that it's by no means immune.
- Defletter 8mo agoHeh, this reminds me of that study that showed people would rather give themselves painful electric shocks than be alone. https://www.science.org/content/article/people-would-rather-be-electrically-shocked-left-alone-their-thoughts https://www.science.org/content/article/people-would-rather-...
- amelius 8mo agoIn general, browser extensions are not to be trusted. Even if you trust them now, they could change owners. There are examples.
- zadikian 8mo agoYeah, I use a separate unmodified browser for anything important, which are usually the same sites you don't need content blocking on anyway.
- Contax 8mo agoSame. I have 4 browsers, 2 of them loaded to the teeth and the other 2 untouched since installation, one of them the one that I use for "mandatory" stuff or that you really need it to work, like banking or gov sites.
- Jach 8mo agoIt's less of a problem on Firefox because you aren't forced into auto-updating them. But yeah, Stylish is the biggest example that comes to mind. I prefer using Greasemonkey / Tampermonkey but the ecosystem is full of sketchy scripts too and some people foolishly have auto-updates enabled. Also it's bizarrely really hard to get someone to use such a user script if they don't already have the parent extension installed, but if you package it as an extension on its own they'll try it much more easily.
- eddythompson80 8mo agoI use ublock origin for that. Some examples from my filters: news.ycombinator.com##.subline > [href^="item"] news.ycombinator.com###me news.ycombinator.com###karma news.ycombinator.com###logout news.ycombinator.com##td:nth-of-type(3) > .pagetop news.ycombinator.com##.score www.youtube.com###comments > .ytd-comments.style-scope www.youtube.com###chatframe www.youtube.com###chat
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo agoI use uBlock origin to block certain trolls on certain forums because moderators won't.
- krapp 8mo agoIf you want something like this for Hacker News (and you should, this place is getting intolerable without a blocklist) I suggest Comments Owl for Hacker News (https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news) Not my project, I just really like it.
- breakingrules3 8mo ago[dead]
- swills 8mo agoI've used it for years. It's nice, works well. When I do want to read comments, I just click the button in the tool bar to turn them back on, which is simple and convenient.
- susam 8mo agoPerhaps a little unrelated but I want to mention that I take great joy in maintaining an active comments section on my website: https://susam.net/comments/ https://susam.net/comments/ The trick is to not auto-publish anything. Every comment posted to the website first gets written to a text file which I then review, usually during the weekends. I ignore all the spam, fix any obvious typos in the legitimate comments and then publish them to my website.
- Anonbrit 8mo agoYou have to be careful when you edit comments - you can be seen as editorialising, which can lose you protection against being liable for defamation in some jurisdictions. Probably not a huge issue for a small website, but now risk than I'd like to take
- pavon 8mo agoNice. Even when I like to read comments on a blog, I prefer them to be collapsed by default, so that the scrollbar is an accurate depiction of progress through the article.
- PlunderBunny 8mo ago1Blocker for iOS and macOS (and other fruit devices?) has comment blocking. Sites can be whitelisted if you deem the comments to be of high enough quality.
- N_Lens 8mo agoI need this on Reddit and Hackernews /s
- sph 8mo agoEffing yes, I thought about installing or building such an extension myself. Honestly, with the extreme moderation and censorship, these days I can only tolerate YouTube comments and their sickly positivity that rises to the top. Every other platform is a cesspool of bots and people trying to one-up each other, defending the indefensible just to have an argument or to show off how smart they are (Russeau spoke of this 200 years ago already) And forums won’t save us, despite the nostalgia. I am part of a few that have survived from the early 2000s, and silly arguments that continue for weeks going nowhere are commonplace. Web 2.0 was a mistake.