Shut Up: Comment Blocker (rickyromero.com)

I've found this extension to be highly valuable on sports and movie/tv sites at thwarting spoilers and blabbermouths. Its value on political sites is much appreciated.

Very neat!

For Safari users, don’t overlook that beautiful “Hide Distracting Items” menu which lets you block specific items elements on a per-site basis. Want to permanently hide a popover dialog? Hide it! Hide the comments section. Hide fog layers that obscure the content behind them. I use this all the time.

Feels like this will be especially valuable as more comments are just AI slop

Find it somewhat ironic that the first screenshot shows stack overflow, the once place where comments are still potentially useful - if we ever visit the site again. Author if you are reading: maybe use a screenshot of somewhere else like Hacker News?

And thus concludes the internet's decades long transition from a peer community of idea exchange ala UseNet to a broadcast messaging medium controlled by elites for their own benefit ala Bari Weiss' CBS. Welcome to the Dead Internet.

Pretty fun to see this, I've been doing the same for a while for a number of sites (e.g. YouTube) via just Ublock. May be a bit safer for those who don't want to introduce a new dependency into their environment.

There's irony for commenting about blocking comments.

Great idea, though something I accepted about myself years ago is I always want to read at least some of the comments, even if they’re horrific and make me want to sand off my own eyeballs. It may be horrible a lot of the time, but the total boredom and loneliness of experiencing the internet without feeling the presence of others is somehow worse.

I know it’s ridiculous, just seems to be the way I am.

In general, browser extensions are not to be trusted. Even if you trust them now, they could change owners. There are examples.

I use ublock origin for that. Some examples from my filters:

     news.ycombinator.com##.subline > [href^="item"]
     news.ycombinator.com###me
     news.ycombinator.com###karma
     news.ycombinator.com###logout
     news.ycombinator.com##td:nth-of-type(3) > .pagetop
     news.ycombinator.com##.score
     www.youtube.com###comments > .ytd-comments.style-scope
     www.youtube.com###chatframe
     www.youtube.com###chat

I use uBlock origin to block certain trolls on certain forums because moderators won't.

If you want something like this for Hacker News (and you should, this place is getting intolerable without a blocklist) I suggest Comments Owl for Hacker News (https://soitis.dev/comments-owl-for-hacker-news)

Not my project, I just really like it.

[dead]

I've used it for years. It's nice, works well. When I do want to read comments, I just click the button in the tool bar to turn them back on, which is simple and convenient.

Perhaps a little unrelated but I want to mention that I take great joy in maintaining an active comments section on my website: https://susam.net/comments/

The trick is to not auto-publish anything. Every comment posted to the website first gets written to a text file which I then review, usually during the weekends. I ignore all the spam, fix any obvious typos in the legitimate comments and then publish them to my website.

Nice. Even when I like to read comments on a blog, I prefer them to be collapsed by default, so that the scrollbar is an accurate depiction of progress through the article.

1Blocker for iOS and macOS (and other fruit devices?) has comment blocking. Sites can be whitelisted if you deem the comments to be of high enough quality.

I need this on Reddit and Hackernews /s

Effing yes, I thought about installing or building such an extension myself.

Honestly, with the extreme moderation and censorship, these days I can only tolerate YouTube comments and their sickly positivity that rises to the top. Every other platform is a cesspool of bots and people trying to one-up each other, defending the indefensible just to have an argument or to show off how smart they are (Russeau spoke of this 200 years ago already)

And forums won’t save us, despite the nostalgia. I am part of a few that have survived from the early 2000s, and silly arguments that continue for weeks going nowhere are commonplace.

Web 2.0 was a mistake.