- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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?
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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
That’s kinda the point. Being able to see just how few people own literally everything and thus are influencing opinion through means that people currently completely overlook is powerful. Advertising is literally propaganda. Consumer culture is propaganda. When you cut through that and make people conscious of it on a constant minute to minute basis you will see rapid radicalisation occur. Our society relies on a system of carefully designed barriers that create separation between the people and the ruling class in a way that is unnoticeable to the average person without prompting.
Think of it like pulling back the curtain in the wizard of oz for people.
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.
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.
Reminds me of Black Mirror White Christmas episode. I could use that feature.
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!
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.
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.
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)
Bro I thought this was satire!💀This is real??? I need this plugin!
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).
Finding this information is tough, but I searched to see what the most popular extension installed in Chrome is. One of the top extensions is Google Calendar. Even with it’s popularity, it only holds a 20% stake in calendar apps, and even then that doesn’t tell you how many people have actually installed the extension for Chrome. Basically what I am getting to is that the number of people who install extensions is really small. Like way, way smaller than us tech-savvy people might imagine, so OP’s extension isn’t going to affect click-throughs in the slightest bit - it would be a rounding error for some of these sites.
“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
They are counting on you to be tired. That’s on purpose.
If you already know you’re not going to/can’t directly do anything about what they do anyway, every shred of attention they grab from you is a win for them and a loss for you. That’s personal, and anything that can be done about it, should be done. You’re going to hear enough about them to know to avoid their products and vote against them anyway.
You know market share, marketing tactics use “mind share”, this would work great against that.
I actually agree with you in theory! But in practice, the super rich seem to crave so much of our attention. We are all being inundated with their daily stream of consciousness and that’s what I’d love to help put a stop to.
For example, I truly believe that a certain manchild destroyed nearly 2 decades of brand recognition (twitter) just so he could take over the headlines yet again. I do not use his platform anymore, nor do I really care what he chooses to call it tomorrow.
People like that are not worth our brain cycles.
Know they enemy for what? So we can continue doing nothing about it? This thread is full of lames.
Instead of simply blurring them, it’d be technically possible to feed their images through a stable diffusion prompt, like “humanoid lizards” or “frantic lemmings”…
Also, I understand that a large language model could be made to rewrite articles about them with a matching prompt.That would be very silly, of course.
Amazing. Love it!
Please don’t do this! Rich people love living in obscurity, it keeps attention and anger from their stupid decisions away from them and on to some scapegoat. This is like the opposite of the Streisand Effect and will only serve their interests. I know it’s annoying to keep seeing the same billionaires in the headlines but the alternative is to be passive about their awful projects and the harm they’re doing to the world. You’ll only be doing them a favor with this addon.
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So disable it when you want to. Y’all are making this way too complicated for no reason.
Nah that’s alright. It’s not like we can do anything about them anyway. I’m just going to ignore them.
Except Musk. Musk loves any kind of publicity and he understands that people love to look at clown billionaires. It’s a great disarming tactic. The public sees him is that harmless prankster and not a threat.
I can understand where you’re coming from in terms of PR circle-jerking, which I am beyond over, but it keeps getting pushed at me for some reason by content
aggravatorsaggregators. But sometimes we need to know when the ultra-privileged are actively undermining things the rest of us depend on, or might depend on if they were ever allowed to exist. Those issues need as many eyeballs as possible. So how would you separate the one from the other?My solution is to block them from my consciousness by default. Then when I feel like catching up I’ll temporarily disable the plugin (I just added this feature). This way I can have the best of both worlds!
Well, while I acknowledge that it’s important to know what the rich are doing to undermine society, I like that the app would give me control over what I’m seeing, and when I see it. I think if it gives the option to unhide stuff so that I can digest it when I am best able to, than it is a good thing. Like a NSFW filter. It could just have a “show billionaire related content” button on it. Besides, if their mucking about is impacting something that’s important to you, it’ll probably be referenced in content you’re actively seeking.
Do celebrities please. I don’t want to see a post about how stupid the Kardashians are every 5 mins.
It’s pretty easy to block the sources of such news. I certainly don’t see any of it. I operate on the assumption that the kardashians all died from full blown AIDS. I might not be right today or tomorrow, but soon.
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Thank you 😊
I haven’t gone through all the comments yet, and I’m sure someone has already asked, but - Any hope of getting this as a chrome extension so I can use it in Brave?
Really too bad that old extension died that let you use Firefox extensions on Chromium browsers. That thing was awesome. But yes a Chromium version would be great. This + Brave would be an amazing duo.
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 also have several projects where I’m the only user, but I wouldn’t let that stop me from adding features for fun and exercise.
It’s not for me though. But I want to stress it’s not because I dislike it, but I find that seeing something blurred almost highlights something that’s gonna annoy me is here. Otherwise my brain would just kinda blank it. Good job tho, and I hope folks here are more interested.
It’s why I like RSS so much for article consumption since it renders everything into a single text feed. Visiting the actual site is too busy of a layout.
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.
I like the idea in principle, but I think it’s important to know what the most powerful people on the planet are doing for our own sakes. Admittedly, a lot of it is marketing bullshit, but it’s kind of important to see that so you can see through it and find the true motivations as well. Like their “effective altruism” bullshit.
I’m actually ancap and all that, participating in barking contests over economics against those illiterate in it, sometimes, but:
It does have the use you describe, like watching\reading\listening to propaganda to “read between the lines”.
Only the fact is that this is expected, and such news are like a DDOS attack, you won’t preserve your sanity to make any use of them.
The idea is good, and also maybe not using mainstream social media too.
what the most powerful people on the planet are doing for our own sakes
Ahahahahah hahhahahahaha hahah haha hah hahh…
Good one!
Can we please not bring this type of reply over from Reddit?
This
No, I mean that for our own sakes, we need to know what the most powerful people on the planet are doing.
They’re not doing anything for us.
Can it auto unblock when the news is that they are going to prison? I want to read and re-read those types of stories
