Inspiration
Being swamped with posts, and reactions on Facebook about the US Elections. We thought about creating a Chrome extension, which would simply hide the posts related to the Election from the News Feed.
What it does
It hides content from Facebook, Twitter (presently) based on what we specify that we don't want to see:
- Hides images, videos deemed NSFW
- Hides posts on tags that we can specify
- Hides overly negative content
How I built it
A Chrome Extension, which has a Content Script injected into Twitter and Facebook. An Options page specifies the configurable settings (like which tags to use). Made use of Microsoft Computer Vision API's, and Algorithmia API's to determine tags for images, with which we decide to hide images or to show them.
Challenges I ran into
Most of the stuff works. The biggest problem we face are the Rate Limiting issues of the API's we are using. For development purposes, it is fine, but if we deploy to the Chrome store, we would need to probably pay for the API's. Some of the technical challenges we faced were:
- Finding the elements which signify a post. There was a lot of difference between posts containing links, images, and videos. Finding the right elements was a challenge.
- We tried getting tags for videos, but some of the Facebook videos are stored as blobs, and getting the source URL's for the videos was more complicated than we expected. We worked around this by using the still image of the video which is displayed as an overlay.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Everything worked mostly smoothly. We covered the original motivation for the project.
What I learned
Writing code in vanilla JavaScript, more about Chrome Extensions (specifically Content Scripts, and Option Pages).
What's next for Social Tag
Add more sites. Quora could be a candidate, as these days, most of our feed is full of Election related analysis and discussions.
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