Some ideas

[jrossfeld]

I was thinking of doing something similar, but came across this and wanted to comment. I love this though and thanks for doing it!

• Have you considered using something more like an ad blocker model of having a blacklist of sites to minimize the server stress?
  • Example: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10eA5-mCZLSS4MQY5QGb5ewC3VAL6pLkT53V_81ZyitM/preview
  • I like that this list categorizes sites also based on type of content.
• My plan was to literally call bullshit on some of these sites and slap a poop emoji on them. That and make sure you saw a popup if you tried to go to the site so you could get the warning before reading. This might be fun and a good way to get some attention.
• Giving people a way to edit the list of accepted sites would be helpful just in case someone wants to use it but has exceptions or visits sites not on the list already.

I may have some time to help on these, if you're interested, but wanted to throw them out there, just in case.

[dchersey]

This is awesome --- I also was thinking along these lines :)

Any thoughts on what it would take to generalize this beyond facebook, to call out info appearing in blogs, comments, etc?

[jrossfeld]

Facebook wraps every link in its own url which they're parsing out here, but many other sites may not do that and you'd have to check every outgoing link. You'd probably have to have some exceptions for dealing with special links or url shorteners too, since those will make it trickier.

It's basically what an ad blocker does anyway. Checking it before you click on it is ideal since some people never click them and just skim through, but I'd also want to have some sort of popup warning if you actually clicked the links which you could do when the page loads to handle cases where the original link is not clear (like with url shorteners).

The more I think about it, the approach here is going to be good for some cases where you can scan the post and run it through the server, but I still think there may be room for another tool for doing a bit more aggressively. It may still make sense to keep them separate and attack the problem from a few angles.