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by alan-stark 1116 days ago
What's the value of bringing Facebook/Instagram mechanics into HN? Wouldn't that skew social dynamics away from egalitarianism, giving rise to "influencers", social bubbles and rise in clickbait? I think that not having a 'follow your friends' mechanism is a feature of HN.
2 comments

I want the opposite of that: "This guy is an asshole and I just don't want to see him ever again."
I have this half-baked idea for an anti-social media website where the only way to "engage" is by blocking people.
Some years ago I wanted to create LinkedOut. It was a privacy-conscious web site, where you couldn't spill any secrets because it wouldn't take any information. You got your page, which was blank, and stayed blank. A very anti-social network.

I'm pretty sure the domain name was taken already.

I mean, reddit is half way there, they just need to increase the pathetic limit of 1000 blocked users.
3-minute uBlock script:

news.ycombinator.com##:xpath(//span[contains(@class, 'comhead')]/a[contains(@href, 'user?id=USERNAME')]/ancestor::td[contains(@class, 'default')])

Replace USERNAME with the user you don't want to see.

Edit: it only works on comments, but you can just as easily make one that hides their submissions as well.

Shorter version:

    news.ycombinator.com##.default:has(.hnuser[href$="=USERNAME"])
Alternative version that just makes the text invisible so that you can still highlight it to read it if you really want to:

    news.ycombinator.com##.default:has(.hnuser[href$="=USERNAME"]) .comment > .commtext:style(color: #f6f6ef !important)
> Alternative version that just makes the text invisible so that you can still highlight it to read it if you really want to

Amazing! I had no idea uBlock could actually inject another style.

On slashdot you could mark people as friends and foes. You could then assign a penalty to posts by foes (and posts by foes of foes and posts of friends of foes, I think?) so they were unlikely to meet your 'show post' point threshold and would therefor be hidden.
Great idea! What about fade-away hnstyle with a color teint? Maybe updating à gist with Val Town and referencing that gist from a css file with Stylish? Or another way js only…

Edit: some can hack it to tint people they like.

This is HN. The corpo minimal social news site of the most successful VC incubator. Egalitarianism and HN barely overlap.