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.

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'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.