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!

  • @[email protected]English
    12•1 year ago

    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).

    • KonQuestingEnglish
      5•1 year ago

      “The clicks” don’t matter when these individuals own the media outlets and the social media platforms.

    • @HazdazEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      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.