Show HN: A Chrome extension to block users on Hacker News
github.com
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Discourse and logical thinking are the basis of modern society and all of it's afforded comforts. If the inventors of the past had coddled themselves in a hugbox for their entire lives we would still be saying things along the lines of "A train can never go more than 10 miles an hour", "there wont be a market for more than 10 computers in the world", and "you wont ever need more than 64k of ram" because there would have been no one who would have heard--or even said for that matter--"No!"
If someone disagrees with you, just explain your points rationally and calmly. If it something you are passionate about, like the OP has pointed out in https://xkcd.com/386/, then isn't it worth the 15 minutes it will take to explain your viewpoint as I am doing here?
No-one is stopping HN users from commenting, they're just allowing themselves the opportunity to easily ignore it. I don't see anything wrong with that. Why is someone obliged to spend 15 minutes of their time indulging you?
A famous Aristotle quote that you may not have heard of: "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
If you disagree, that is fine! No one is saying you must agree with everyone, just endorse the possibility they are presenting and think reasonably about the evidence they provide to support their claims. Who knows, they might be right.
Do you think Roman forums would have yielded the intellectual progress they where responsible for if people just ignored everyone they didn't agree with 100% of the time?
But there are many viewpoints, and to consider all of them would take an excessive amount of time.
As such, it seems there may be uses in narrowing down the ones to consider in some way.
One option I've considered would be to focus on the boundary of what viewpoints one considers to be plausible.
So, in each "direction", the viewpoint that, of all the ones which seem implausible, seems the least implausible, and also the viewpoint that, of all the ones which seem plausible, seems the least plausible.
Another idea might be, if one has already considered a viewpoint, and the viewpoint isn't changing, there might cease to be much use in considering it further (suppose, for example, that one can pass an ideological turing test of it with flying colors). Does it not seem implausible that it might not be worth spending more time on exposing oneself to that viewpoint?
After all, I doubt you believe that you have an obligation to consider the viewpoints of off brand viagra sellers whenever you receive spam in your inbox.
Take, for example, doctors washing their hands. Once, it was crazy take to mandate this. Literally, Semmelweis was driven crazy from proposing this and becoming ostracized. Read the NPR story "The Doctor Who Championed Hand-Washing And Briefly Saved Lives", it will give some insights into this.
If you limit things you expose yourself as what you see is "correct" then you will never come to learn something new.
Why do you feel obligated to indulge me?
This is how ideas are shared. Everyone should keep an open mind, even if that means you are upset by someone else from time to time.
That's probably why OP wants to block certain people on HN
(That said, I don't personally see the need for it on HN. The obvious trolls get killed, and it's easy enough to ignore people who are simply annoying.)
Not only does much of the public discourse consist of people talking past each other, but the need to create "safe spaces" where we can be sure not to hurt anyone's feelings.
It gets tiring to read such posts, and after the first couple they provide no value. Why not skip them?
Had I not been able to come to the conclusion you had on my own, I might have endorsed something that was ultimately worse than another solution.
Why not, I bet you can do that just fine without a tool? Do you always have to reply to everything that you read?
It's funny what you consider "recent": http://catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html
Wait, shit...
This is coming from someone with showdead on, FWIW. I rather like seeing the things that others have deemed "not worth seeing".
FYI I also have "showdead" on and like the approach taken with Enhancement Suite.
The biggest reason I had for writing this extension is when certain users spam a thread with their repetitive points. At that point, it's easiest to just block them. (Though blocking doesn't hide their comment completely, so it's easy to toggle people back on.)
There are certainly commenters who don't contribute to a given discussion, but I personally think that the reaction of "block them so I never have to see them again!" is extreme and probably not really conducive to the spirit of community.
All the logic is included in a simple JS file: https://github.com/morgante/hn_blocklist/blob/master/src/inj...