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!
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?
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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)
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.
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.
This would be a useful additional feature, I think the shock value of the method I’m suggesting would have potential to interest at least some press outlets (probably not the major ones who would recognise it as damaging to the people they represent though). You need some novelty in this kind of thing to get it to spread.
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 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.
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
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Know they enemy for what? So we can continue doing nothing about it? This thread is full of lames.
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.
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.
Yep, it’s an easy fix. There’s better ways to get information about events that matter to you than corporate sponsored fear-mongering… I mean “the news.”
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
But surely people who would consider installing this extension are not the same people clicking and talking about “them”? Or are people really addicted to reading and reposting Musk etc… and need an intervention?
But then you won’t know how they are not paying taxes, or getting money from the government.
Yeah, the anger is the fuel you need to take these fuckers down.
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.
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!
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.
I couldn’t agree more. Describing the billionaire stream of consciousness that we’re being inundated with as “a DDOS attack” is brilliant. That is exactly how I see it.
I want to take back some control over when I choose to read about these people.
what the most powerful people on the planet are doing for our own sakes
Ahahahahah hahhahahahaha hahah haha hah hahh…
Good one!
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.
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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This is awesome. I made a block list for all the Trump domains for similar reasons.
This is from 2020 so there could be more but i cannot fathom owning close to 3500 domain names. that’s gotta be close to 100k per year just for the registration fees.
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
