cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/1891205
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?
It’s interesting, to say the least, but I feel like it’s missing a feature, or the concept is niche…
What kind of user do you expect would download this? I am going to try it tomorrow to see if it changes anything
The concept is hilarious and really presses the spite dopamine button in my brain.
I like this! Thanks for posting. I don’t know anything about compiling an add-on, but it looks like it would be super easy to update the list (add twitter or reddit as things to block any mention of). So I guess my question is, how easy is it to just edit https://github.com/aCosmicWave/blocktherich/blob/main/blocktherich.js to update the add-on?
Looking at the code, you should just need to add to the constant object at the top of the blocktherich.js file.
I’m definitely going to use this. I do not understand how people care about famous people at all. Can you extend the extension to apply to literally anything like it. I don’t care about celebrities, their babies, what they ate for lunch, etc.
I think that expanding it to allow for custom blocking patterns will make it more appealing in general. Like being able to add your rich_person_of_choice to the list or the ability to block a company (Meta anyone?) might both be useful features.
Not sure if it fits your plans though or how hard it’s going to be to implement.
