Thank you for sharing what works for you. I think it's great other people have been doing this style of read-side filtering. It's a pity that there's no way to inject code into mobile apps safely (i.e. this is an easy path to app-store rejection). Perhaps there's no option there but to push `shouldFilter` out to a server where you can run the logic. My use of my phone is the weakest link in my filtering strategy.
Reels is able to keep me engaged because it is able to surface similar content I would like but from different users. And they have such a breadth of producers these days.
The X home feed algo is not so good apart from it being text only, even for infotainment content. YT shorts also does not work as good as the Insta algo
I black-hole plenty of sites via pihole above and beyond the typical adblock lists. On a very few rare occasions I have turned off the pihole to unblock a site because I was curious after following a link that was blocked by said pihole. Every single time I quickly learned why that site was blocked, and visiting that site gained me nothing.
People talk about social media is if it were passive, when its deep intel, deep analysis, manipulation. Where everything we do, is not just used to manipulate us, but in aggregate, improves manipulation overall.
It is amazing what toxins people will accept, if the toxins become baseline familiar.
As Terry Pratchett observed in a 1995 interview with Bill Gates: “There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net”.
Equal internet votes means any propagandist with a human or machine bot army can bias whatever they want. Now we have people with unimaginably large propaganda machines drowning out those who act with integrity, intellectual nuance and selflessness.
I definitely want an "overlay network" for those sites that have hijacked the term "social network". Also I'd like one for movie reviews too please.
To that end, I made a trivial Chrome extension and an equivalent CRUD backend that just helps me store lists of users I like and dislike. The former are highlighted, and the latter are simply removed from comments.
As an example, the user I'm responding to is someone whose comments I like so I have had them in my highlight list for two months now and not regretted it https://overmod.org/lists/view?pk=ELpqNsanTYP9_wZXNjdF-FcEOc...
My personal tool is particularly idiosyncratic but I think information sieving is particularly important these days, so I recommend everyone build something like this for themselves. One thing I've found it particularly helpful with is the usual outrage bait. But I also killfile users who I think particularly misunderstand the comments they respond to, and I also killfile users who express what I think are low-information views.