With good tools, one person could probably maintain the deshittifier for a few sites, at least until the sites started getting adversarial about it.
And it has a much better interface than original Google. Every query starts with the equivalent of “I’m feeling lucky”, but then you can ask further questions.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38952526
[1]https://aftermath.site/the-internet-is-full-of-ai-dogshit
In the web Google is in part responsible for adding more content, they always suggested longer articles because it helped the algo get a better context. But for us humans it mostly doesn't make sense.
The same happens with books but I think we are at fault too, I would think twice about a book that is 80 pages, but the truth is that 80 pages could be a lot for most topics. I believe that the summarization capabilities of LLMs are gonna make a generation feel different about short content.
I wish there was a browser add-on that could regex-replace html source of the page. Then I could write my own deshittfier list. Since I couldn't find any, i'm guessing it's because the plugin APIs won't allow it.
There was a MITM app that could do this, AdMuncher, but then the web switched to HTTPS and it didn't work anymore.