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Comment by alan-stark | Hacker News Reader

What's the value of bringing Facebook/Instagram mechanics into HN? Wouldn't that skew social dynamics away from egalitarianism, giving rise to "influencers", social bubbles and rise in clickbait? I think that not having a 'follow your friends' mechanism is a feature of HN.

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I want the opposite of that: "This guy is an asshole and I just don't want to see him ever again."

I have this half-baked idea for an anti-social media website where the only way to "engage" is by blocking people.

I mean, reddit is half way there, they just need to increase the pathetic limit of 1000 blocked users.

Some years ago I wanted to create LinkedOut. It was a privacy-conscious web site, where you couldn't spill any secrets because it wouldn't take any information. You got your page, which was blank, and stayed blank. A very anti-social network.

I'm pretty sure the domain name was taken already.

Great idea! What about fade-away hnstyle with a color teint? Maybe updating à gist with Val Town and referencing that gist from a css file with Stylish? Or another way js only…

Edit: some can hack it to tint people they like.

3-minute uBlock script:

news.ycombinator.com##:xpath(//span[contains(@class, 'comhead')]/a[contains(@href, 'user?id=USERNAME')]/ancestor::td[contains(@class, 'default')])

Replace USERNAME with the user you don't want to see.

Edit: it only works on comments, but you can just as easily make one that hides their submissions as well.

Shorter version:

    news.ycombinator.com##.default:has(.hnuser[href$="=USERNAME"])

Alternative version that just makes the text invisible so that you can still highlight it to read it if you really want to:

    news.ycombinator.com##.default:has(.hnuser[href$="=USERNAME"]) .comment > .commtext:style(color: #f6f6ef !important)

> Alternative version that just makes the text invisible so that you can still highlight it to read it if you really want to

Amazing! I had no idea uBlock could actually inject another style.

On slashdot you could mark people as friends and foes. You could then assign a penalty to posts by foes (and posts by foes of foes and posts of friends of foes, I think?) so they were unlikely to meet your 'show post' point threshold and would therefor be hidden.

This is HN. The corpo minimal social news site of the most successful VC incubator. Egalitarianism and HN barely overlap.

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