Jeff Johnson

A semi-popular StopTheMadness feature request is to hide certain words or phrases on the web.

I'm not sure how it's supposed to work, though. The behavior is clear on a social network such as Mastodon or Twitter: hide the entire post containing the muted words. But the web in general doesn't come in such well-defined chunks.

If you visit a news story containing muted words, it's likely that the story is *about* the topic that you want to hide. Am I supposed to blank out the entire web page?

Nov 14, 2024 at 6:02pmWeb
Show threadJeff JohnsonNov 14, 2024

Or do I just blank out the muted words and leave the rest of the web page intact? Both approaches seem somewhat pointless.

Indeed, either approach seems to draw undue attention to the blankness, the missing words. What you want is to not have your attention drawn to them.

Show threadDr. Juande Santander-VelaNov 14, 2024
@lapcatsoftware maybe only work on known search engines?
Show threadRoNov 14, 2024
@lapcatsoftware Maybe it could work how the Blocktube extension works for YouTube? Hides channels and video titles with that keyword from search, recommendations and the homepage but if you’re on that url it will function normally.
Show threadForce of HabitNov 14, 2024
@lapcatsoftware Why do we use ducking? ;)
Show threadtgtNov 14, 2024
@lapcatsoftware I'm not sure if this is quite what people are asking for, but it sounds like one of my favourite uses for StopTheMadness. I use site-specific CSS to remove things from the home pages of (mostly) news sites, e.g. the article cards on the home page of Ars Technica. I can often tell something's missing, but it helps me avoid certain topics. I'd love to not need to write the CSS myself, but can't see how it could be automated well
Show threadJeff JohnsonNov 14, 2024
@tgt The Hide Page Element feature can often help with that, to avoid writing CSS.
Show threadtgtNov 14, 2024

@lapcatsoftware I'd forgotten about that, but I have a feeling I tried it and found that few sites were marked up well enough.

I tend to block using something like <container I want to hide>:has(a[href*="twitter"]) and a Hide Page Element that could filter using part of a URL might be nice

Show threadDelisaNov 14, 2024
@lapcatsoftware lol I also can’t tell what they actually want here, though I did write myself a tiny extension to replace “the economy” in webpages with “the soul of our undead ruler”
Show threadJaanus KaseNov 17, 2024

@lapcatsoftware I have a content blocker and people sometimes ask for that

Content blockers can’t remove content but I anyway thought about how it should work

It makes sense on news sites where you want to remove headlines/links to news about some topics, which means removing the container element for that item

There is no way to do that universally on all sites, you need to reason about the DOM, and DOM elements for containers are different between sites