Do people on the internet bring you down?  It happens to me a lot.  I’ll read an article, and before I know it, my eyes will have wandered down into the comments, and I start to get upset with trolls, upset about how intolerant some people seem to be.  Upset with our education system, upset with stupidity, and even a little upset with there, their, and they’re.  Often upset about an oversimplification of complex things.  I try not to let this stuff get to me, but sometimes it’s hard, especially first thing in the morning.  I just don’t want to hear what random people on the internet have to say.

So I use Shut Up, which is a lovely lightweight Chrome extension that removes all comments from web pages: YouTube, the Daily Camera (it’s our local Boulder, CO paper and has the worst comments ever), the Radavist (apparently I like pretty bicycles more than I like other people who like pretty bicycles), etc..  Shut Up misses a couple of sites and isn’t perfect, but it’s free.  Maybe you’ll find that it has a place in your life too.

It strikes me that this may seem antisocial.  Facebook’s article last week about “echo chambers” has made me a little more aware of the possibility of over-curating our inputs.  But eschewing web comments is not the same as reducing diversity, it’s reducing the volume of input from the whole diverse internet.  Toward what seems like, for me, a much more manageable flow.

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about tiny robots.  Next Level Cubelets Part II soon!