About 8 months ago I got pretty tired of seeing billionaire spam online. I could not bear to read about yet another rich guy who launched themselves (or their $200,000 car) into outer space ๐ . I did not care about their expert opinion on the latest meme coin back then. I do not care about their expert opinion on the dangers of AI today.
So... I developed a tiny, free, and open source Firefox browser add-on called "Block the Rich". It is completely local and private. No data is tracked. No data is phoned home.
The concept is pretty simple: whenever I load a web page, the extension quickly analyzes the content and intelligently blurs out any references to the Forbes Top 10 Billionaires. Some former and wannabe billionaires are blurred out of courtesy as well (I'm looking at you Trump and Kanye ๐).
This project is a very early prototype that I built in the span of a few days. I have so many awesome ideas for enhancements but the truth is that the wind got completely knocked out of my sails when I put myself out there on Reddit many moons ago. There was absolutely zero public interest. To this day my wife and I are the only ones using the original prototype.
People of Lemmy, do you think there is a place on the internet for such a project, or is it time that I let it go?
Edit: I am blown away by the support from you all. Thank you! I am so excited to start polishing this baby up!
It's in a bit of a strange position.
It blurs the Images, but doesn't block the article or text?
Maybe for some people it can mean something, tho for me it's a bit of a not interesting feature. Like what is the purpose of bluring the image if I still get spammed with the article?
And this may be the real issue where you didn't get traction. The feature pretty useless for the majority of people.
In the current form, it tries its best to blur the images and the parts of the article that directly reference the billionaire ๐. But I plan to add a whole suite of user options if there is sufficient interest!