Show HN: To mute words on Twitter in batches, I created a browser extension
chirpsilencer.comHello HN community :)
For a while now I've been watching my Twitter feed fill up with more and more crap. The fact that it's now possible to monetise your tweets has made things even crappier.
At the same time, adding words to mute is a pain. First you have to find the option, buried deep in Twitter's settings, and then you have to add them one by one.
So I came up with the idea of writing a little browser extension that lets you add lists of muted words, which can come from more or less anywhere, as long as they're in a certain format (a multi-line text file or a JSON array).
The extension doesn't collect any data, you don't need an account to use it, and you can store your lists anywhere (although I'd recommend Github gist or Pastebin).
To be honest, I made this mainly as an exercise to learn how a browser extension works and how to make one, but if it's useful to people, that's great!
Feel free to let me know what you think and give it a try. If there's ever an audience for it, I'm thinking of taking it further by adding lists of people to mute, extracting your existing list of muted words from Twitter, etc.If you have any other ideas for development, I'd love to hear from you. Maybe make a platform to host user-generated lists. Thank you for your feedback! That was my first idea, but as I thought about it I said to myself, what's the most important feature? Having a browser extension that can take a simple txt file from the web. There are already some great tools for this (gist, pastebin in particular). Developing the infrastructure to manage the lists, although not very complicated, took a bit more time. Here I have a simple html page to present the extension, the extension itself is hosted by Google (and soon Firefox, I hope...) and... that's it :) But of course, if the idea takes off, I'll make it available! > For a while now I've been watching my Twitter feed fill up with more and more crap. I've seen multiple people saying this but I'm skeptical, really wondering if there's any way to prove that? It seems too likely to be confirmation bias - because many people hate or are upset with Elon Musk or with the changes he's made to Twitter.