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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Instant type addons.mozilla.org into searchbar
Bro I thought this was satire!💀This is real??? I need this plugin!
Thank you for this, @[email protected]! I added this extension to my Firefox install because I am really sick of the same thing.
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?
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
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.
KNOW THY ENEMY
I think this project is a terrible idea (no offense OP, since I can see this comes from a level of frustration). Simply burying your head in the sand does not make these people go away. It doesn’t stop their abuses of power. It doesn’t make them any less of a bunch of douchebags. We the public need to know what they do.
I can see a (theoretically) positive outcome in media realizing that these articles don’t get the clicks they used to (if, i dunno, 30% of users use this extension).
“The clicks” don’t matter when these individuals own the media outlets and the social media platforms.
Having to constantly see what dumb bullshit Elon is saying or doing isn’t going to change anything in this world except the quality of my mental health. Some of us are just tired
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.
Can I get one that applies to millionaire celebrities?
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 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.
