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"Block The Rich" is like an ad-blocker, but for obscenely wealthy people with overinflated egos.

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 πŸš€ . 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 πŸ™„).

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!

184 comments
  • 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.

  • I get it, so I installed the extension and browsed with it today. My feedback is that I feel like blocking individual words like Elon or Bezos would be required to make this meaningful at all. I still saw a bunch of stuff about them that the filter didn't catch because they are so ubiquitous that you don't need to say their full name to communicate who you're talking about.

    At the same time, while I almost always don't care and don't want to hear about a piece of Elon news, it doesn't mean I'm not interested in Twitter developments, but I think the filter will block most if not all links/info about Twitter since it's intrinsically linked to Elon's persona.

    At the end of the day I think it's a cool idea, but I don't think you can effectively block these guys via this method without blocking any mention of any platform they're associated with, which isn't really what I want.

    • Thank you so much for trying it out! This truly is a very early prototype I quickly threw together. Given how much interest Lemmy has for the extension I will keep actively developing it. Maybe someday I can reach a state where the extension will be actually useful to you.

    • Doesnt work

  • Will you be providing how many times each rich asshole was blocked, perhaps a monthly report? Because that's the icing on the cake.

  • Create a filter for uBO maybe? I run a number of specialized filters in uBO. A "block the rich filter" would be good. The advantage there is content can be removed from view completely, not just blurred.

  • I like the idea behind this extension and would love to use it. However, I would really appreciate the ability to tweak the blocklist. Not that I enjoy seeing or hearing about Trump everyday, but I do want to stay in the loop with the ongoing court cases he's getting rammed with. If I never hear or see Elon, Zuck, etc. again then I'd be happy.

  • I love the concept!

    For me, the button of the extension doesn't work to toggle it on or off, so I can't find a way to view the blurred text without disabling the extension completely. So that would be a bit frustrating - sometimes I might want to read it, as in this post. If it's upgraded with an easy on/off toggle I'll probably start using it. :)

    Blurred text also makes me somewhat curious by nature - a feature request would be to keep blurring images, but instead of blurring the text just changing the name of the person into "some asshole" or something like that. So that you get the substance of the headline without having to deal with the people.

  • Lots of people say that we shouldn't be ignoring troublesome topics. I disagree.

    Exposure and anger won't fix anything. It'll only degrade our quality of Life. It's just like reading about plane crashes won't get us anywhere ( unless it's part of your job)

184 comments