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Show HN: Left Buzzfeed to launch this

getrather.com

98 pointscmb32060 comments

Using an ordinary English word with no capitalization for your product's name makes the marketing copy hard to read.

I first parsed "Why rather kicks ass" as "Why rather kick ass" and thought "yeah, why not go kick some ass (?) instead of sitting behind my computer like I've been doing all day".

Then I realized you meant "Why our product (which is named "rather") kicks ass".

This might also be a sign the copy is focusing too much on themselves, and why they kick ass... rather than why you can kick ass if you use it. A subtle difference.

A subtle but crucial difference. Kathy Sierra gave the canonical presentation on this in 2009

http://businessofsoftware.org/2010/05/kathy-sierra-at-busine...

I'm sure people can find the team page fun, but I saw it as uninformative; I see three co-founders and all I know at a glance is that one guy used to be with BuzzFeed. The front page of the site is also fun, but it's also informative.

I was also a little confused about why the LinkedIn URLs don't point to the public page but rather the URL used by those already logged into LinkedIn. I'm thinking this was probably just overlooked. I happened to be logged out, clicked on one of the icons, was required to log in, and because I use the 2-step authentication I wanted to just get back to browsing HN because all I had was just a low level of curiosity about the people behind the product.

Example: The icon for Peter Marquis links to http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=32333289 while it could have been linking to http://www.linkedin.com/pub/pete-marquis/a/9b3/489 (or better yet the /in/ URL which would give all users the information, whether they're logged in or not.)

Bookmarked the site. I'll check it out soon enough. Good luck!

Not to downplay the OP's product (the launch page is very well done, btw), but this reminded me of the well-publicized winning TV-themed hackathon entry earlier this year by a teenager:

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2013/05/meet-17-year-old-sa...

Again, it's not a downplay of the OP's achievement, but a remark on how such a seemingly simple service is in high demand, such that a total underdog could win a hackathon with it. With some more work and thought to its features, this could be a real product for highly-social-networked people, and obviously not the kind of thing that the social networks will themselves create.

Yeah. Rather is based off this, which we made EVEN before the 17 year old awesome spoiler chick. http://ilovechrisbaker.com/unbaby-me/

A few suggestions and issues:

I can't figure out how to add my own keywords. All I can do is choose from the predefined lists like "popular" etc.

The scroll bar is very faint, almost to the point where I didn't realize I could scroll and thought the UI had broken when the "replace content" box was pushed off screen by kill list selections.

On Facebook, when you replace content I see the rather logo and an "undo" button. I'd like to see a "why?" link or text description explaining what kill list was matched for that particular content to be replaced. I had a friends post, seemingly about nothing, replaced and I couldn't figure out why.

1. type in the large box what you want to block. The box says, "What do you want to block?"

2. We're rolling out that feature soon.

Thanks for number 1. I read that box several times over and just assumed it was a header. I never saw the cursor blinking until you told me I could type there.

What is the eventual revenue model for this? It seems this is going to take quite a bit of computing to remain a free chrome extension for too long.

Revenue? What are you talking about? Big Exit™ is where it is at these days.

Big ExitTM's Big ExitTM will come from suing everyone who says Big ExitTM. I have no idea how to superscript

Unicode 0x2122 ⇒ ™

Until this post, I thought this was just someone making a little tool to fix their own problem.

targeted advertising and selling annonymized data are two ways that make sense

I can see selling replacements.

Like you don't want to see the Red Sox, maybe the yankees pay to replace all things red socks.

That would completely defeat the purpose of the extension.

Well, if I say that I'd rather see Yankees news instead of Red Sox posts, different baseball sites could pay to have their Yankees content be what replaces the Red Sox content.

I sent this to someone who complained on Facebook about not being able to block Buzzfeed posts. I then made a joke that I now am seriously disappointed in the Buzzfeed/Bleacher Report SEO team about: How is there not a Buzzfeed about blocking Buzzfeed? Even if it's just something like "1500 Reasons Blocking Buzzfeed Won't Make Your Facebook Better."

I'd like to see something that makes people more comfortable with the idea of unfriending folks that overpost annoying things, rather than covering up and hiding content over and over.

That said, the technology behind this looks like it could have a lot of practical uses. I especially like the example with TV show spoilers.

I have a pretty unusual spoiler avoidance routine for which this would be great. I live outside the US and have an account for NFL Gamepass and love football. There's essentially no spoilers here at all which is great but my US bound friends on Facebook tend to spoil stuff.

I typically watch the early games on Redzone live and then all the late games on Monday (as 30 Minute cuts) and the SNF+MNF game on Tuesday (+Thursday game on Friday)..basically I avoid FB on Mondays (and sometimes Tuesdays)

There are social consequences of unfriending someone, regardless of how annoying their posts are. De-friending someone is the digital equivalent of saying "I don't want to be your friend anymore". If you don't want to come off as abrasive, simply block the user from your feed.

The writing on the site is creative and funny and the tag line at the top is to the point which is great:

"Replace anything you want in your social feeds with things you'd rather see, like cats."

Rarely do you see something like that which is so easy to understand.

One thing I would do (in addition to [1] below) is to have other words quickly replace "cats" perhaps by striking the word "cats" and overwriting with the new word. People get the joke with cats but it's probably not a bad idea to intersperse some serious stuff (right their in the tag line) as well.

[1] The word "rather" as others have mentioned needs to be distinct in typography so people understand it's the branding. Bold, different typeface, different weight, a graphic etc.

Cool concept. I toyed with a similar concept on Pinterest when my wife got sick of seeing things for workouts, abs, core excercises, and the like. It's only a proof of concept bookmarklet and they may have changed up their source since I created it, but feel free to check it out and run with it:

https://github.com/cballou/Pinterest-Keyword-Removal-Tool

It searches for cards containing specific keywords and removes/hides the entirety of the card from the DOM so you don't have to look at it. It worked seamlessly with their infinite scrolling from my initial testing.

So much for changing the world, making a dent in the universe and all that, eh? How can someone build a COMPANY around a feature that does something so inconsequential and is basically "cute" at best? This is neither revolutionary nor innovative in my book.

I don't get it. No offense, but if this gets funding, then the Silicon Valley echo chamber has officially spread east and legitimate tech companies are doomed.

There are too many of these fly-by-night half-baked apps out there that people think they can become a millionaire from.

I can't wait until all this hype ends so people working on REAL problems can get back to doing REAL work.

Whatever you are doing is likely not as important or helpful as you think it is.

Yeah, you're right. Creating, supporting and maintaining nationwide systems and applications for everything from medical research and detecting fraud to enhancing the entire way the IT infrastructure of our nation's largest government and commercial agencies operate piece by piece is not very important.

Sorry, but what I do is far more meaningful than a COMPANY that creates an APP that replaces one picture with another. That is a feature, not a company. I'm sorry if honesty hurts your feelings, but this is not a world-changing application and it's hard to believe someone formed a company around it.

I'm hoping they "pivot" into something else with real meaning.

Why don't you tell us more about your super amazing company you started. Do a show hn.

Well that was a pretty mean thing to say. Not everything needs to be a cure for cancer or fix peak oil. We need some room for leisure. If the author had fun making something that provides him with some cash, I don't see what the harm is. That just leaves more easy "real" problems for people like you to go out and solve.

It's not mean, it's the truth. How many of you are going to pay for this? Honestly. This is a feature, not a COMPANY. Plain and simple.

I mostly agree, but if it's only as inconsequential as we think then it'll fail anyway, so no reason being upset about it.

Just a note. Im using a large browser window and your main container width being 1158px is really big for a non responsive site. I opened the window and both ends were cut off.

Other than that, cool concept. I'll install.

Interesting project, which might help serve to mute my Twitter feed the same way Tweetbot does.

Unfortunately, its filters make a really obvious mistake, which is to include very normal queries; I mean, c'mon, I hate baseball and everything, but does it seriously make sense to filter tweets with the words "yankees, tigers, indians(!), pirates, and giants"?

I'd really love a way to save and export filters, so I could use them in, say Tweetbot. Maybe you could set up a platform that allows user-created filters.

We currently allow you to add any keywords you want. We'd like to eventually allow rather to communicate with things like tweetbot, so tweetbot can just pull from what you hate, etc.

I think what he's suggesting is that a topic-based filtering system would be more ideal than a key work based one. I don't want to have to spell out "block yankee's, tigers, indians, pirates, and giants". I just want to say "block all baseball", or "block all sports", and have the system know that posts about the yankee's, tigeers, indians, pirates, or giants are inclusive in these categories.

Great idea! How much of my data are you mining?

EDIT: Not much, it seems! http://getrather.com/privacy-policy.php

If it's just "some of it", they're doing something wrong.

I think it's a great start. Some immediate thoughts that struck (you prolly already know these anyway):

- more suggestions! let me just click to make the list longer or look for suggestions related to other things I've picked

- suggest replacement content too (e.g. themed image rss feeds that you know will generate good replacement content)

- allow me to right click on a word or piece of content or something and add it to my 'replace' list

One of your product quotes is "Whoever made this deserves the friggin nobel prize" which is a response to a person who said "what will these azn's think of next" and linked to http://www.geekstudent.com/index.php?tag=bubble-wrap

Are you sure "some chick" on twitter actually said that?

hmmm. Maybe I got my links screwed up. I'll fix that. Anyway, here's another one: https://twitter.com/CLAYMOORE/status/306965801494257664

Nice extension! Small suggestion to get more installs: https://developers.google.com/chrome/web-store/docs/inline_i... - We use it on http://www.synergyse.com

Congrats on taking the leap.

One quick thought though: A fun side-project does not a company make.

Good luck, and let us know how we can help. But I'd start thinking real hard about how to make money (companies that want to block porn, but not all of tumblr (or reddit))

Replace spoilers with ads like:

"Don't get SPOILED. Use ziplock bags for freshness".

Replace breaking bad spoilers with low winter sun. AMC would eat that up.

Yes, context driven adverts. Not sure how much that's worth, but it's worth pitching to someone like Fox Sports or AMC.

Love the concept. Good luck :)

+1 there is some pretty annoying stuff I'd like to zap (annoying "go pray now", "Jesus 4 the win" etc. stuff mostly)

Atheism. So edgy.

It has nothing to do with being "edgy". It has everything to do with not wanting to be flooded with Bible verses, prayer requests, and mindless proselytizing. It's obnoxious.

I rarely browse social media on browsers, but if I did I'd use this to help block spoilers. I turned my phone off the night of the Breaking Bad finale because I wasn't able to watch it live.

interesting but why is this a remote service that needs to parse in-browser content? if filtering is keyword based (as opposed to ml based), why not filter locally instead ?

Very similar to Jeter Filter (http://www.jeterfilter.com/), but more general! I like it.

Seems similar to a concept something i helped work on in 2009: http://mymentalspace.com

You had me at "Left Buzzfeed".

That's where he lost me.

He didn't leave because he could no longer live with himself for working for those bottom-feeders, he did so because he saw a profit opportunity elsewhere.

What's wrong with Buzzfeed?

"43 Things That Are Colossally Stupid But That We've Gussied Up With Click-Bait Headlines To Trick You Into Viewing Them"

Is this a company or a fun side project?

The team page is enjoyable.

you had me at leaving buzzfeed

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