Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web (tweeks.io)
The modern web is so full of clutter and junk (banners, modals, feeds, and recommendations you didn’t ask for). Even a simple google search is guarded by multiple ads, an AI overview, a trending searches module, etc. before you even see the first real blue link.
Every day there's a new Lovable-like product (make it simple to build your own website/app) or a new agentic browser (AI agents click around and browse the web for you), but we built Tweeks to serve the middle ground: most of our time spent on the web is on someone else's site (not our own), and we don't want to offload everything to an agentic browser. We want to be able to shape the entire web to our own preferences as we browse.
I spent years working on recommendation systems and relevance at Pinterest, and understand how well-meaning recommendations and A/B tests can lead to website enshittification. No one sets out to make UX worse, but optimizing for an “average” user is not the same as optimizing for each individual user.
I’ve also been hacking “page fixers” as long as I can remember: remove a login wall here, collapse cookie banners there, add missing filters/highlights (first with F12/inspect element and eventually graduated to advanced GreaseMonkey userscripts). Tweeks started as a weekend prototype that turned simple requests into page edits but unexpectedly grew into something people kept asking to share. We hope you’ll like it too!
How it works: Open the Tweeks extension, type your request (e.g. “hide cookie banners and add a price/quality score”), and submit. Upon submission, the page structure is captured, an AI agent reviews the structure, plans changes, and returns deterministic transformations (selectors, layout tweaks, styles, and small scripts) that run locally. Your modifications persist across page loads and can be enabled/disabled, modified, and shared.
Here are a bunch of one‑shot examples from early users:
Youtube: Remove Youtube Shorts. Demo: http://youtube.com/watch?v=aL7i89BdO9o. Try it yourself: http://tweeks.io/share/script/bcd8bc32b8034b79a78a8564
Hacker News: Filter posts by title/url or points/comments, modify header and text size. Demo: http://youtube.com/watch?v=cD5Ei8bMmUk. Try it yourself: http://tweeks.io/share/script/97e72c6de5c14906a1351abd (filter), http://tweeks.io/share/script/6f51f96c877a4998bda8e781 (header + text).
LinkedIn: Keep track of cool people (extracts author data and send a POST request to a server). Demo: http://youtube.com/watch?v=WDO4DRXQoTU
Reddit: Remove sidebar and add a countdown timer that shows a blocking modal when time is up. Demo: http://youtube.com/watch?v=kBIkQ9j_u94. Try it your...
95 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 84.4 ms ] threadYou don't de-encode.
Telling me to install an extension without ever telling me what that extension actually does is the most rookie move ever!
I think it's better to use Tampermonkey/Greasemonkey. Rules are deterministic, you have full control, and you don't have to worry about monetization or malicious data collection in the future.
There have been multiple incidents in the past of extensions like these being sold off to sketchy third party companies which then use the popularity to insert malware into folks' machines.
I really recommend against this. The AI spin doesn't add much since most sites have had rules that work for years, they don't change that often. Please don't build up this type of dependence on a company for regular browsing.
Power users already know about customizing the Web with greasemonkey and those who don't really don't know why they would want this. It's trying to be all things to all people - it's an everything extension. You need to make this work BETTER than the free tools. And this is before even thinking about the legal grey area of modifying websites and then sharing modifications to those websites.
Some questions:
[Tech]
1. How deep does the modification go? If I request a tweek to the YouTube homepage, do I need to re-specify or reload the tweek to have it persist across the entire site (deeply nested pages, iframes, etc.)
2. What is your test and eval setup? How confident are you that the model is performing the requested change without being overly aggressive and eliminating important content?
3. What is your upkeep strategy? How will you ensure that your system continues to WAI after site owners update their content in potentially adversarial ways? In my experience LLMs do a fairly poor job at website understanding when the original author is intentionally trying to mess with the model, or has overly complex CSS and JS.
4. Can I prompt changes that I want to see globally applied across all sites (or a category of sites)? For example, I may want a persistent toolbar for quick actions across all pages -- essentially becoming a generic extension builder.
[Privacy]
5. Where and how are results being cached? For example, if I apply tweeks to a banking website, what content is being scraped and sent to an LLM? When I reload a site, is content being pulled purely from a local cache on my machine?
[Business]
6. Is this (or will it be) open source? IMO a large component of empowering the user against enshittification is open source. As compute commoditizes it will likely be open source that is the best hope for protection against the overlords.
7. What is your revenue model? If your product essentially wrestles control from site owners and reduces their optionality for revenue, your arbitrage is likely to be equal or less than the sum of site owners' loss (a potentially massive amount to be sure). It's unclear to me how you'd capture this value though, if open source.
8. Interested in the cost and latency. If this essentially requires an LLM call for every website I visit, this will start to add up. Also curious if this means that my cost will scale with the efficiency of the sites I visit (i.e. do my costs scale with the size of the site's content).
Very cool.
Cheers
I know linguistics is descriptive not prescriptive, but it's truly amazing to me the lengths people will go to swear.
Like some others here, Firefox is my daily driver and would look forward to anything you could bring our way.
Greasemonkey still works great, no?