Would you find a browser extension that screens for toxic text useful?

Big no, I dislike everything about this - the assumed necessity of such a product or the implication that it does any good, the uncertainty of whether I'm reading has been censored at any given time, some vaguely undefined measure of toxic/negative, the probabilistic outcome of an NLP classification model, my browsing history being either sent off somewhere with every click (or having to run the model locally)...

This is a civil platform so I really struggle to express in writing how much I dislike this. However, based on experience there might a number of consultancies that would pay a lot of money for someone to develop this (or get paid for it depending on the company). It's so deeply slimy that I suspect it has already happened in many of those places.

I would not use such a tool that worked at the semantic level, but would probably think of using something that worked at the lexical level and gave me control over the words I want to ban.

For example: an extension that automatically hides HN posts whose title includes words I have manually blacklisted. Not even necessarily for being "toxic", but uninteresting to me.

Yeah.

I'll be honest: I've taken myself off of social media. HN is about the only one I can stomach, barely. I appreciate having a source of brief distractions, and toxicity is exactly counter to the point. Even as it is I need to keep myself out of some areas. (Holy cow does discussion of dating bring out the sense of entitlement and misogyny.)

I don't really want to depend on an AI to screen things, and if nothing else, it's a good reminder that I really should limit the amount of time I spend in the kind of vapid extemporanea that social sites bring. But I don't want to reduce it to zero, so I'd probably use a tool that made the vapid extemporanea less unpleasant.

The idea seems interesting to me. A model that detects click bait / vapid content would probably be even more compelling. In both cases it's hard to put a finger on what exactly you're training the model for.

In any case - if you made it I would at least be interested enough to check it out and see what kind of content it blocked.

As an aside I use firefox mobile which has pretty weak extension support. If the extension worked with firefox mobile that would be extra cool.

Nope. What you or your algorithm may find 'toxic', I might find interesting or useful.

You do know that you're edging into censorship territory, right? I could see this falling into the hands of repressive regimes. You want that?

How's your understanding of Moral Foundation theory?

https://moralfoundations.org/

And what do you think of the Liberty/oppression dimension?

No.

I'm an adult and can easily ignore things I don't want to read.

IMHO this is an awful idea at every level of analysis.

I would love some kind of extension which analyses the language used in an article and gives it some kind of quality score.

Examples of certain words and phrases which frequently appear in the sort of (low-quality political clickbaity point-scoring nonsense) articles I don't want to see are:

backlash, unacceptable, said on twitter, abhorrent, disgraceful, slammed, ought to be ashamed of him/herself, woke, snowflake, social media post, millennial, boomer, pariah, wave of protest, high horse, bandwagon, outrage

I would reach out to people who spoke at xoxo conference

Build it and find out!

Absolutely not.