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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.

Heh, this reminds me of that study that showed people would rather give themselves painful electric shocks than be alone.

https://www.science.org/content/article/people-would-rather-...

Yeah I’d be in that group, boredom sucks, I’d heaps want to feel what the shock feels like also out of curiosity too.

I mean yeah but that's not what the study says though... full link here: https://dtg.sites.fas.harvard.edu/WILSON%20ET%20AL%202014.pd...

Participants did not choose to give themselves electric shocks continuously. The average was around once during the entire 15-min window. It also showed a stark difference in gender: only 25% of women participants did it while 67% of men did it. All of them did not enjoy it (but that's obvious). 1 man shocked himself more than 190 times during the 15-min period, so the average data is much higher because of him.

So overall, it is correct that the human mind will seek stimulus (even negative ones) if they're bored/have nothing to do but nothing suggests they will give themselves continous painful "electric shocks than be alone".

Additionally, they were alone, but they also had no cellphones, no computers, nothing to engage their brains with other than the possibility to give themselves a small 4 volt shock. And most of them did it once and not again. I think it speaks more to human curiosity than the idea that you'll prefer pain to social isolation.

I'm kind of there with you... I will even actively avoid sites that don't have some kind of comments. Though I do wish more of them would load on demand, or even shift to another page for comments vs. loading a lot of JS or remote garbage first.

I had to break myself of that habit, because I too had that compulsion. I paid for it almost every time, though I admit the rare times it wasn't a total shitshow felt like winning the lottery.

HN comments are insightful. And while there is bot farms out there it’s important to know talking points of someone you disagree with to both consider their validity and to enable you to refute them well.

Some would disagree, but I'm squarely of the opinion that comments being inciteful and insightful are not mutually exclusive properties. This is only compounded when you're the kind of person who goes out of their way to try find meaning in what people say (and since that's subjective, you can basically find a perspective in anything if you try hard enough).

I find this to be kind of the whole reason why acting inciteful is socially problematic anyways: it derails conversations. It's also why I can consider it malicious: you can lay into this effect parasitically, with intention. You point to HN; I find that this idea is reflected in the HN guidelines as well (or at least the lessons from it are), but also that it's by no means immune.

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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.

I can't believe I didn't know about this. I had to track down mediocre extensions to try to replicate UBlock's element blocking.

I did find that Adguard was pretty okay, but this looks much nicer.

uBO lite is available for safari though: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...

Yeah it is now, but it wasn't at the time. I have both Adguard and uBlock Origin Lite installed now. uBlock Origin came out about six months ago (saw on HN): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44795825

I don't think it's actually permanent though, is it? The items will eventually come back.

It's permanent. However, behind the scenes I'm sure it's using CSS selectors to identify the element you're blocking, and if the server changes that, then it wouldn't detect that exact element anymore.

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'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.

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.

You have to be careful when you edit comments - you can be seen as editorialising, which can lose you protection against being liable for defamation in some jurisdictions. Probably not a huge issue for a small website, but now risk than I'd like to take

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.

There's irony for commenting about blocking comments.

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?

I might be misreading it, but that screenshot looks like an example of how you can disable the plugin for particular sites, like SO.

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.

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

It's less of a problem on Firefox because you aren't forced into auto-updating them. But yeah, Stylish is the biggest example that comes to mind.

I prefer using Greasemonkey / Tampermonkey but the ecosystem is full of sketchy scripts too and some people foolishly have auto-updates enabled. Also it's bizarrely really hard to get someone to use such a user script if they don't already have the parent extension installed, but if you package it as an extension on its own they'll try it much more easily.

Yeah, I use a separate unmodified browser for anything important, which are usually the same sites you don't need content blocking on anyway.

Same. I have 4 browsers, 2 of them loaded to the teeth and the other 2 untouched since installation, one of them the one that I use for "mandatory" stuff or that you really need it to work, like banking or gov sites.

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'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.

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.

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.

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

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

Fake reviews too, whether human or AI.

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.

Usenet had the Cancelmoose, so message sanitization has always been part of the Internet. In this case, I see this browser extension as purely a tool of the end user and not a blanket threat to the peer community at large.

Usenet kill file, IRC ignore list, email spam filters, web browser adblockers, disabling JavaScript, using Archive.org/.today to read content, using plain text and a remote host to parse URLs to forward the content to email, RSS readers, converting content based on CSS selectors or json (e.g. jq) to XML/RSS.

The internet has and will always be about increasibg the signal te noise ratio for the user. The fact someone resorts to blacklisting entire comment section tells us something about how they view the quality of these in general; subpar.

It isn't just LLMs which contribute to that. Troll farms do, too.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_file

>The internet has and will always be about increasibg the signal te noise ratio for the user.

And my point is that the signal used to primarily originate from peer interactions, not broadcasting. Look at Usenet, AOL's structure, or Web 1.0. There's an inversion in the modern era, where broadcast messaging is perceived as the signal, and peer interactions the noise.

Odd comparison. Admin cancels on Usenet were focused specifically and totally on individual, service-abusing or commercial "spam". While this is a tool that wipes out comment sections from view entirely.

Not sure this particular thing concludes it

I need this on Reddit and Hackernews /s

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