Hide posts from Startup News

December 14, 2021    Article    275 words    2 mins read

Though I’m not reading (and actually blocking visitors from there) Startup News anymore (thanks JWZ for the image), someone asked me if there is a simple way to use uBlock Origin to hide all posts created by an user, so here is a quick mockup for hiding posts from the orange site, posts that belong to a specific user or from a specific domain.

What is Startup News, you might wonder.

Startup News 💩 - Just a circlejerk for West Coast soiboi iToddler webdevs who hate software development but got into it anyway so they could be a part of hipster startup culture. The pretentiousness!

You will need uBlock Origin for this.

Hide posts from an user

news.ycombinator.com##table tr tr:has-text(giuliomagnifico):nth-ancestor(2)
news.ycombinator.com##table tr tr:has-text(giuliomagnifico):nth-ancestor(2):xpath(./following-sibling::tr[1])
news.ycombinator.com##table tr tr:has-text(giuliomagnifico):nth-ancestor(2):xpath(./preceding-sibling::tr[1])

Replace giuliomagnifico with the name of the user who should have all his posts hidden.

Hide posts from a domain

news.ycombinator.com##table tr tr a[href*="rferl.org"]:nth-ancestor(2) + tr + tr
news.ycombinator.com##table tr tr a[href*="rferl.org"]:nth-ancestor(2) + tr
news.ycombinator.com##table tr tr a[href*="rferl.org"]:nth-ancestor(2)

Replace rferl.org with the domain from which you want all the posts to be hidden.

You add the three rules to the My filters page in uBlock settings. Yes, there are 3 table rows that need to be hidden, one with the post name and website, one with the meta data and a spacer. The 90s called and want their table design back. There might be a better (read optimized) way to to it, if you add too many filter rules there will be a slowdown in applying them.

With proper filters Startup News might be a tolerable place. Just kidding, it’s a shithole.

Who would’ve thought!