The change as a function of the site owner's decision, however, would hopefully have a chilling effect on people's need for social reinforcement in the form of like chasing, and the associated cases of suicide that have happened as a result of not getting that reinforcement.

I suspect that's where instagram is aiming, and they probably see a point nearing where that'll be forced on them by european government(s) attempting to reduce the amount of high profile 'social media' suicide.

An optional opt-in system like your implementation is great, but sadly doesn't tackle that problem.

Am not sure if you are joking. As someone who does not use social media much, are people so hooked that withdrawal would cause them to commit suicide?

I don't think that that is what was meant. When your social media activity doesnt earn likes is an example of not receiving reinforcenent.

Social media is both seen as contributory to rising suicide rates among youth, and integrated into suicide attempts (eg live broadcast)

I use like/dislike in my news reader to tell it what kinds of stories I like or don't like and it seems to do a pretty great job of finding me stuff I want to read.

On sites like this one, I don't cast a lot of votes up or down with one exception. If I post a comment, I upvote every single reply for two reasons. One, I'm happy that somebody chose to reply and two, it helps me keep track of new replies. It might be a misuse of the voting system here, but as far as I can see, there isn't a better way of spotting replies.

Instead of an extension that only works in one browser, why not a blocklist that can be loaded into most adblockers?

There’s an adblock filter for comments[1] which works pretty well. This is thematically similar.

[1]: https://mute.bradconte.com/

"Why not" doing it yourself, then?

Because I have no interest in it, nor have I expressed any. I posed a question (with my reasoning), not a criticism.

I'm actually modifying the site DOM to remove the dark patterns. There's no request for remote content that I can block in most (all?) cases. This is fundamentally different than an ad blocker. It's closer to a curated selection of grease monkey scripts

...or a greasemonkey script.

I'm definitely not installing an extension just for this.

A set of greasemonkey scripts could work but my intended audience is more casual than greasemonkey users. Having a curated set of scripts bundled into its own extension makes the marketing story and installation flow easier.

I also think the security will be better on my extension. You have to give greasemonkey edit permissions for all websites whereas I have a PR in the works where you only grant permission to the sites you want to disengage from. Even now it only asks for permissions to the subset of sites it modifies. Due to the nature of how web extension manifest permissioning works, greasemonkey can't offer this. If you look at their permission model it says "This add-on can: Access your data for all websites". IMO that's way more dangerous than your paranoia about a new extension with tight permissions.

...or a modified hosts file.