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Comment by throwaway81523 | Hacker News Reader

I didn't know about this project and had for a while been thinking of writing something like it. Now maybe I know better. Oh well, thanks for all the fish.

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Something along the same line is StopTheMadness (get the new Pro version).

Also on some pages disabling JavaScript makes the experience better (although nowadays most pages just break), but if you don't have a way to easily disable it per-website you could check out my pet project https://noscript.it

Combined it with STM's automatic url-rewrite and you can get automatic per-site noscript even on the iPhone.

Shutting off JS often makes things worse. What I really want is an ultra-aggressive Reader Mode that doesn't get fooled by so many sites. That means it has to know how to extricate the relevant text from a bunch of specific sites. At one point I had a special proxy just to clean up a few sites that I was reading frequently, but it broke. I also fooled around with running a headless Firefox under Selenium to get the text out, but I got bored with that. I might try to get that going again, or might try to figure out how browser plugins work.

I've been toying with the idea of using headless firefox with UBO as a filtering proxy, but nothing has come of it so far.

I'm actually focused more on writing a quality search engine that ranks pages based on the amount of anti-user behavior, dark patterns, etc. a site has. Have a really crappy site with tons of ads, popup modals, and trackers? No clicks for you! So I'm doing something similar to what the author is doing I guess.

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