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Great idea, though something I accepted about myself years ago is I always want to read at least some of the comments, even if they’re horrific and make me want to sand off my own eyeballs. It may be horrible a lot of the time, but the total boredom and loneliness of experiencing the internet without feeling the presence of others is somehow worse.

I know it’s ridiculous, just seems to be the way I am.

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.

Very neat!

For Safari users, don’t overlook that beautiful “Hide Distracting Items” menu which lets you block specific items elements on a per-site basis. Want to permanently hide a popover dialog? Hide it! Hide the comments section. Hide fog layers that obscure the content behind them. I use this all the time.

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.

uBO lite is available for safari though: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...

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

It's permanent. However, behind the scenes I'm sure it's using CSS selectors to identify the element you're blocking, and if the server changes that, then it wouldn't detect that exact element anymore.

Nice. Even when I like to read comments on a blog, I prefer them to be collapsed by default, so that the scrollbar is an accurate depiction of progress through the article.

I use ublock origin for that. Some examples from my filters:

     news.ycombinator.com##.subline > [href^="item"]
     news.ycombinator.com###me
     news.ycombinator.com###karma
     news.ycombinator.com###logout
     news.ycombinator.com##td:nth-of-type(3) > .pagetop
     news.ycombinator.com##.score
     www.youtube.com###comments > .ytd-comments.style-scope
     www.youtube.com###chatframe
     www.youtube.com###chat

Perhaps a little unrelated but I want to mention that I take great joy in maintaining an active comments section on my website: https://susam.net/comments/

The trick is to not auto-publish anything. Every comment posted to the website first gets written to a text file which I then review, usually during the weekends. I ignore all the spam, fix any obvious typos in the legitimate comments and then publish them to my website.

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've found this extension to be highly valuable on sports and movie/tv sites at thwarting spoilers and blabbermouths. Its value on political sites is much appreciated.

Find it somewhat ironic that the first screenshot shows stack overflow, the once place where comments are still potentially useful - if we ever visit the site again. Author if you are reading: maybe use a screenshot of somewhere else like Hacker News?

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

Pretty fun to see this, I've been doing the same for a while for a number of sites (e.g. YouTube) via just Ublock. May be a bit safer for those who don't want to introduce a new dependency into their environment.

I've used it for years. It's nice, works well. When I do want to read comments, I just click the button in the tool bar to turn them back on, which is simple and convenient.

There's irony for commenting about blocking comments.

In general, browser extensions are not to be trusted. Even if you trust them now, they could change owners. There are examples.

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.

Same. I have 4 browsers, 2 of them loaded to the teeth and the other 2 untouched since installation, one of them the one that I use for "mandatory" stuff or that you really need it to work, like banking or gov sites.

If you want something like this for Hacker News (and you should, this place is getting intolerable without a blocklist) I suggest Comments Owl for Hacker News (https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news)

Not my project, I just really like it.

I use uBlock origin to block certain trolls on certain forums because moderators won't.

And thus concludes the internet's decades long transition from a peer community of idea exchange ala UseNet to a broadcast messaging medium controlled by elites for their own benefit ala Bari Weiss' CBS. Welcome to the Dead Internet.

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.

Usenet kill file, IRC ignore list, email spam filters, web browser adblockers, disabling JavaScript, using Archive.org/.today to read content, using plain text and a remote host to parse URLs to forward the content to email, RSS readers, converting content based on CSS selectors or json (e.g. jq) to XML/RSS.

The internet has and will always be about increasibg the signal te noise ratio for the user. The fact someone resorts to blacklisting entire comment section tells us something about how they view the quality of these in general; subpar.

It isn't just LLMs which contribute to that. Troll farms do, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file

Not sure this particular thing concludes it

Feels like this will be especially valuable as more comments are just AI slop

Fake reviews too, whether human or AI.

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