Shut Up: Comment Blocker

i think what you're describing is actually the more interesting problem this tool accidentally surfaces. it's not really about comments being good or bad, it's about the gap between what you want to be doing and what you find yourself doing.

most tools in this space treat it as a willpower problem: block the bad thing, problem solved. but the compulsion you're describing is a signal, not a bug. the boredom and loneliness without comments suggests the underlying need is real, it's just being met in a low quality way.

i've been thinking about this a lot in the context of attention generally. the tools that actually help aren't the ones that block things, they're the ones that make you more aware of the pattern so you can consciously choose. realizing you've been reading youtube comments for 20 minutes is fundamentally different from having youtube comments blocked. one builds a skill, the other is a crutch you'll uninstall in a week.

Heh, 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-...

I'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.

I had to break myself of that habit, because I too had that compulsion. I paid for it almost every time, though I admit the rare times it wasn't a total shitshow felt like winning the lottery.

HN 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.

I 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.

I don't think it's actually permanent though, is it? The items will eventually come back.

You 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

I might be misreading it, but that screenshot looks like an example of how you can disable the plugin for particular sites, like SO.

It'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.

Yeah, I use a separate unmodified browser for anything important, which are usually the same sites you don't need content blocking on anyway.

Usenet 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.

Not sure this particular thing concludes it

Fake reviews too, whether human or AI.