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Show HN: Feed Remover

github.com

85 pointszukerpie50 comments

Your own browser extension to get rid of unwanted social media feed! 5 minutes to setup, hours saved.

If I’m following this correctly, Brave supports something similar natively:

https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360018039072-How...

You are right. I'm using Brave and didn't know about it until now. I will give it a try as well.

Cool! Just curious, why do you query 10 times per second for a feed? This seems kind of excessive and maybe a bit bad for battery life, especially since this could be running in several tabs at once.

This is just the straightforward idea of waiting for some element to appear on the website. But once the element is found, this thing stops. It won't stop for YouTube if you are on Facebook though but it's just a first implementation and it could actually be very easy to recognize the site. Thanks for the helpful suggestion!

I wrote an extension that did something similar for Twitter, back when Twitter had "So-and-so liked this" tweet, which was inevitably something awful. It's archived now, because it's no longer relevant. But you might find something useful in the code.

I tried polling, but it was against the Chrome extension guidelines at the time, so I used a "mutationObserver" on page load and then a "scrollListener". I don't remember if I ever tried an "intersectionObserver" but that might be worth looking at.

https://github.com/rendall/twitter-like-hider/blob/master/co...

hey just curious, can't the mutationobserver catch this instead of that approach?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MutationObs...

Definitely! The current implementation is supposed to just do the work. It's not meant to be optimized or anything.

Added a quick domain check to avoid the issue that you've mentioned :)

I believe you could use a sub tree mutation observer instead of polling.

Yes, definitely use mutation observers. Far faster to react and doesn't require polling, they're better in essentially every way when things aren't changing many times per second.

I've been using an extension called News Feed Eradicator for like years now and its great! I was thinking of editing the code to put up like a math equation every time I need to disable it, but not sure if its open source. Seems like this tool might work!

News Feed Eradicator is open source: https://github.com/jordwest/news-feed-eradicator/

(and indeed great)

Do you know about some way to check whether what I install from Extension Store is exactly the same as on Github?

I think you could use the source code on Github and compile it and install it manually yourself on a browser

+1 NFE

people who like this kind of think might also like Clearspace [1] -- they've got some great tools to fight the attention-hijackers

[1] https://www.getclearspace.com

For YouTube there's a great plugin called DFToutube (Distraction free YouTube)

One of my favourite plugins of all time. YouTube becomes what I want it to become; just a pure search engine for videos.

If you enable everything in the config, it's beautiful.

Source: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...

CSS override works too

I feel the same though, those thumbnails steal your attention when you go to YT to do something

Do you mean the local overrides from the console? Or something else? It would be cool to learn about some different approach.

Injected a custom stylesheet via extension vs. removing elements. I messed around with YouTube before and they can detect when their dom changes. Not to say it's breaking but I thought it was interesting.

This is cool.

I use uBlock Origin to block GitHub's feed (I find it surprisingly distracting, and often right when I need to remain focused).

It would be great if you could include a before and after screenshot of your plugin in action. thanks

Thanks for the hint. Yeah, I will do this :)

I use a mix of Unhook and Focus Time to get rid of the feeds that annoy me the most.

Unhook looks nice, since it's only restricted to accessing YouTube. Strange that I didn't stumble upon it while looking for options.

You might be cooking something here, seems useful when you're on certain websites that stream sports and won't allow you to close the chat windows while watching.

Haha, that should be definitely possible, but would require a bit more knowledge :)

Such a good idea. Do you have any plan to polish this up and publish to an extension store?

The whole point is to actually have installed locally so you don't share any data with the developer of the extension. The problem with extensions is that in many cases the access that you give them is way too broad. If you install it by yourself, you control everything. The only thing that I thought about is maybe some kind of configurator that would allow you to pick some already existing rules that the users would share through github.

There isn't really a special protection if you install a extension in developer mode.

More the opposite because you have to totally trust the source.

Web stores search for certain malware patterns and get at leat some.

You're not wrong, but in this case the total source code is like 30 lines long so it's not hard to verify what it's doing yourself

But that is independent from the way you install an extension.

You gain no security from an unpacked extension.

Thanks for pointing this out. The whole discussion around "the developer doesn't see my data" confused me, as the question of whether the code is malicious is orthogonal to installation method.

Given that uBlock Origin can do this, I'd recommend that route. uBlock Origin is probably the most trustworthy extension I've ever run across, and Gorhill has proven that he is trustworthy over many years.

Looks complex. What are the advantages compared to Social Fixer? https://socialfixer.com/

The advantage that speaks to me, is that I control everything. I'm not sharing my data with the developer of the extension so it's one person less that I have to trust. I can also very easily adjust it to my needs, but I can program, so it's not valid case for everyone.

Honestly, really good idea for work machines. I need to go to YT sometimes but I'd be lying if I said those feeds don't get me to click.

Definitely going to try this for StackExchange

new reddit with their feeds kills the web for me

YouTube has a setting to turn this off already.

how?

if you turn off watch history, it gives you an empty landing page.

does this remove an entire feed or selective content in feed don't want to see?

The current version just grabs the whole feed and removes it from the website. If you can program, it won't be hard for you to extend it so you can remove only the content you want.

thanks appreciate response

Content blockers like uBlock Origin can do this. The two included in this extension become these cosmetic filters:

  www.facebook.com##[role="feed"]
  www.youtube.com###contents

The main problem that I have with extensions is: "It can: Read and change all your data on all websites" Having my own, local extension I don't have to actually think whether I added some sensitive stuff to be exempt from permissions or not.

At this point of time, uBlock Origin is probably more trustworthy than some browser (read Chrome) themselves.

It's only "your own" to you. Neither uBlock Origin nor your extension from Github are "my own". See?

LinkedIn:

.scaffold-finite-scroll__content { display: none }

uBlock Origin is weak when it comes to new DOM elements dynamically created after the page has ostensibly loaded. Most of its powerful "cosmetic filter" selection operators don't work on such elements. I suspect that could make it of limited use on a feed object in which new elements appear, if you want to filter specific elements. (Aren't "infinite" feeds lazily loaded by JS?)

Still, much smarter to try it first to see if it fits your use case.

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