"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 🚀 . 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!

Tibert,

It’s in a bit of a strange position.

It blurs the Images, but doesn’t block the article or text?

Maybe for some people it can mean something, tho for me it’s a bit of a not interesting feature. Like what is the purpose of bluring the image if I still get spammed with the article?

And this may be the real issue where you didn’t get traction. The feature pretty useless for the majority of people.

aCosmicWave, (edited )

In the current form, it tries its best to blur the images and the parts of the article that directly reference the billionaire 😊. But I plan to add a whole suite of user options if there is sufficient interest!

FarceMultiplier,
@FarceMultiplier@lemmy.ca avatar

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

rtxn,

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.

inspxtr,

maybe even integration with uBlock if possible?

jtk,
@jtk@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

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.

Source - Add-on

aCosmicWave,

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)
Bishma,
@Bishma@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

How about instead of blocking them it offers recipe and serving suggestions for rich people?

WarmSoda,

It replaces ingredients with rich people’s names and products? That would be fun

qwet,

I think this is my favorite. Maybe make it dog food recipes, or alligators. The back of mind image of eating a billionaire is a little off-putting.

JadenSmith,

This is exactly what I need! Thank you. I’m sick of hearing about these few people, who think their word is better than ours because of their wealth and inheritance.

slimsalm,

I was also thinking it, but the thought of “building your walls up so high, that you eventually don’t know what is really happening around you” might become problematic. I am still thinking of how to implement it, I think such a projects is worth the effort, especially if you have full control of what you want to view.

SJ0,

I feel like any time you’re on establishment media, it’s all just an ad for the billionaires who own and control the outlets.

alberttcone,

Yes, dammit. In fact this is the final nudge I needed to reinstall Firefox after many years. Yours will be one of the first plugins in the install queue. Thank you, good sir.

eendjes,
@eendjes@feddit.nl avatar

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.

NightOwl,

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.

vd1n,

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.

NightOwl,

Reminds me of Black Mirror White Christmas episode. I could use that feature.

aCosmicWave,

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!

norske,

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.

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