Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Block positive reinforcement from HN with uBlock
Inspired by the nytimes post "Luddites don't want your upvotes", and presumably being a Luddite myself, I have used uBlock to block my Karma score at the top of the page. I found myself (on old account) reflexively checking my Karma score and found myself responding emotionally to it. I do not like this. Positive reinforcement can be a dangerous thing! And negative reinforcement make me feel a bit crap. I'm going to post what I think is the right thing, votes be damned! However I do see the use of downvotes for getting rid of stupid comments and spam as a good thing. I see the use of…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Block positive reinforcement from HN with uBlock launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1AW
I submitted a link, when someone clicks on it I get an up-vote for this article. I don't want people to misuse this I just want to bring attention to this problem. This is the link I used that up-votes this: http://news.ycombinator.com/vote?for=3742742&dir=up&...
2012 · its alternatives →
- 2
I wanted to find a way to use Instagram without ending up scrolling for two hours every time I open the app to see a friend's story. Most screen time apps I found focus on blocking the app itself instead of the addictive feed, so I created this app to allow me to keep using the "healthy" and "social" features and block the infinite scrolling (Reels) After implementing the block on Instagram Reels, I got addicted to YouTube Shorts and Reddit feed. So, I extended the app to cover these as well. To avoid replacing the scrolling for regular feeds, I also added a feature that shows a pop-up when…
2025 · scrollguard.app · its alternatives →
- 3
Commentblocks▲101Hey HN, I'm a freelance web developer and got tired of the endless email chains during website QA. Clients would send screenshots with red circles, or worse, Word docs with "the button on the page with the thing." I'd spend more time decoding feedback than actually fixing stuff. So I built Commentblocks. You add a script to your staging site, send clients a link, and they click anywhere on the page to leave a comment. That's it. No signup for them, no explaining how to use it. Each comment captures the exact element, viewport size, browser, and URL. Comments show up in a dashboard or can go…
Feb 2026 · commentblocks.com · its alternatives →
- 4
I'm a solo dev. A few years ago, I got addicted to Reddit. Spent months in that loop. Being a programmer, I thought I'd be clever. Redirected Reddit's domain to nowhere in my DNS file. Worked great until I'd just... open the file and undo it 20 minutes later. So I made it irreversible. Locked the DNS file so it can't be edited unless I boot my Mac in safe mode. And if I do that, there's a script that instantly locks it again. Haven't used Reddit since last year. Problem solved, right? Wrong. I just replaced Reddit with Twitch and YouTube. Started keeping streams running in the background…
Nov 2025 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Hi HN! I've been fed up with search results so much that I decided to make a giant blocklist to remove garbage links by using uBlacklist. I browsed other blocklists and wasn't very satisfied from what exists now; the goal of this one is to be super organized and transparent, explaining why each site was blocked via issues. Contributions welcome! Even though around 100 domains are blocked so far, I already noticed a big improvement in casual searches. You'd be surprised how some AI generated websites can dominate the #1 page on DuckDuckGo.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 6
I built this last year but never posted it anywhere, but now with Reddit hiatus it seems like the right time to give it a shot. The main goal of zsync is to foster high quality content and discussion. That's it. If it can't accomplish that, then to me it is a failure. I watched Reddit go from having high quality discussion in 2008-9 to devolving into the PC meme dumpster it is today [1]. HN still has the highest discussion quality of any "forum" I know of, but (1) it can sometimes randomly be very hostile/toxic to new tech, the most glaring example being crypto. (2) HN is basically a…
2023 · zsync.xyz · its alternatives →
- 7
PixelBlock▲117Just got around to updating this to support MV3. Has been featured on HN a few times. I make this in my spare time to support user privacy. Free extension (has been for years). Mods: Would be awesome if this could hit front page so people can benefit
2014 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →
- 8
Overlead▲146Here's the problem: I launched two products. I wrote blog posts. I posted on X, built in public. I tried running ads. And you know what actually got me customers? Replying to someone on Reddit who asked, "What's the best tool for this?" One reply. Three signups. I felt like an idiot for not doing it sooner. But here's the issue: I don't have time to refresh Reddit all day looking for these posts. I have products to build. Bugs to fix. Emails to answer. Life to live. So I built Overlead to do the searching for me. Overlead scans Reddit, Quora, and Hacker News (and many more to come) for…
Feb 2026 · overlead.co · its alternatives →
- 9
I figured, "what better way to look at a list of (hopefully) inspiring projects?" The upvotes work and are globally synced.
2024 · guycombinator.net · its alternatives →
- 10IA
Maybe you've had this experience too: You build something you're proud of, post it on HN with your low-karma account, and... crickets. Zero votes, zero comments. That's what happened to me last Monday. I posted my coding tool (XaresAICoder - an open-source browser IDE) that I'd built with AI assistance. In my mind it was revolutionary. On HN? Completely ignored. Then I wondered: How many other potentially great projects suffer the same fate? What "hidden gems" are we missing because they come from low-karma accounts? So I built hn-gems (with help from Claude and my own XaresAICoder). It…
2025 · hn-gems.sensem.de · its alternatives →
- 11
Nomoresurf▲87Block distracting websites & make it harder to unblock them
2022 · nomoresurf.com · its alternatives →
- 12IB
Hey HN community, I built a tool that helps optimize your post for hitting the first page of Show HN. How it works: I used a Hugging Face dataset of all Hacker News posts from the past 3 years and trained a model that predicts how successful your post might be. There's still a lot of randomness on HN, so nothing is guaranteed, but the tool helps optimize your post for higher odds. A couple of interesting findings: - GitHub repo links work x3 better than regular domains - Open-source tools have a steady virality rate (13.9% - one of the highest) - "I built" outperforms "We built" - Using…
May 2026 · wannalaunch.com · its alternatives →
- 13
Hey HN, A few months ago I noticed I was spending way too much time on YouTube + Reddit (like 4–5 hours per day). I tried a bunch of blockers, but most of them just hard-block everything… and when I actually need a YT for debugging, I end up disabling the blocker and never turning it back on. So I built ZenBlock to solve my problem: it blocks distracting sites, but when you try to open one, it shows a short breathing exercise, After that you can choose to get temporary access (5–30 min). The goal is to make you aware of distraction. this is more inclined towards Tech-wise: it’s built using…
Feb 2026 · zenblock.app · its alternatives →
- 14
Upvote.Team▲12Built this to solve the cold start problem for side projects. You browse/support posts from other creators across platforms (LinkedIn, Medium, Instagram, etc.), earn 1 credit to promote yours. Free, no ads budget needed. Just launched today – curious what HN thinks about the model.
Nov 2025 · upvote.team · its alternatives →
- 15SP
Hey, HN -- I just received the following email and I'm not sure what to do about it. Obviously I want to discourage requested-posting like this; is there some structured way that we can do that? One of the things I love about HN is how high the signal-to-noise ratio is relative to...pretty much the rest of the internet. I wouldn't ordinarily call someone out like this, but I want to innoculate HN against this sort of thing. ---- Hey doches, Not sure if it's conventional, but thought I'd ask anyway. Would you be open to posting about my product on Hacker News? I understand that similar to…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 16AB
i made an ai blocker blocks ai relate content. if want download it from chrome or safari extension store, consider donate :)
Feb 2026 · kiddokraft.org · its alternatives →
- 17IA
I built an archiver that tracked every HN item for 27 days (Dec 3-30, 2025) and captured 72k temporal snapshots to see how posts gain and lose attention. Key findings: - Early velocity (points/hour in first 2 hours) predicts final score with ρ=0.82. A simple classifier achieves 98.4% precision for viral prediction. - No Matthew effect: high-scoring posts don't get more upvotes per hour than low-scoring ones (ρ=-0.04). HN's gravity penalty actually works. - Yet extreme inequality persists: Gini=0.89, meaning bottom 80% of posts get <10% of total upvotes. Inequality without cumulative…
Dec 2025 · papers.ssrn.com · its alternatives →
- 18
humble-hn is a Chrome extension that hides the number of votes and comments of stories, and the karma of users on Hacker News. The objective of this extension is to remove the influence of these numbers on the perception of the content.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 19MF
Whether it is a designer ultra-tweeting about some conference she is at or a venture capitalist intensely describing his pursuit of the always-elusive "inbox zero", sometimes you just want to mute someone you follow on Twitter. This extensions allows you to do just that. You can easily put accounts that you follow in the penalty box, where they will be silenced and feel shame. When you have deemed their sins absolved, you can let them out, free to fill your Twitter stream again. Download: http://bit.ly/u1giXH Read About: http://bit.ly/tdqX6y Source: http://bit.ly/tmxvf1
2011 · bit.ly · its alternatives →
- 20UT
Hello HN! About 1.5 years ago we published an idea on how to improve the Hacker News ranking algorithm (https://felx.me/2021/08/29/improving-the-hacker-news-ranking...). The main idea was to counteract the rank-upvotes feedback loop by using attention as negative feedback. We received very valuable input from the HN community (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391659), and have since come up with something that we think could be a real contribution: the upvoteRate metric. upvoteRate is an estimate of how much more or less likely users are to…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 21DN
I've been trying to minimize my compulsive browsing of social media for a while, and tried a bunch of extensions and apps to block websites and such, but always ended up disabling them even if they were supposed to be "hard to disable". The fact is that sometimes you need to visit reddit for some info, but you don't want to get caught in an addictive loop. Disabling entire hostnames or trying to configure intricate block lists is annoying, and the end result is annoying. Parental controls don't work on me, and I resent them. I remembered what Tristan Harris once said on ways to prevent…
2023 · its alternatives →
- 22
Creator here. In a nutshell this extension is a "Like / Dislike" system but for website results. I miss the days of things like the YouTube dislike bar, where you can quickly assess if something is good or not. Currently sitting at ~90 users. To get it off the ground I've scraped the last year of HN to make a set of good links, and used a few content farm blacklists to make a set of bad links. Right now it's semi-useful and should only get better with time. There are some simple measures in place to prevent spam & abuse, but will cross that bridge if it ever comes. All feedback welcome!
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23AP
Hello! I’ve been reading Hacker News for years and have a bad habit of favoriting articles but never actually going back to read them. I finally built hnbuffer to scratch my own itch and help me work through that backlog. I also mainly built this as an excuse to learn/use some of the languages/frameworks/tools since I have another backlog of things I wanted to try too. It syncs your favorites into a queue with a reader mode and swipe gestures. The streak tracking is something I'm still experimenting with. Note: It requires an HN login to scrape the favorites list (credentials…
2013 · hnbuffer.com · its alternatives →
- 24
I've gotten more and more of these and A. I'm often not interested and B. they upset me more often than not. Since Reddit randomizes class-names and runs recommendations under different names this was more tricky than expected but it works reliably now.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- A Way To Hack HN's Karma alternatives
- I built an app to block Shorts and Reels alternatives
- Commentblocks alternatives
- I built a smart blocker after destroying my dopamine baseline alternatives
- A blocklist to remove spam and bad websites from search results alternatives
- Zsync, a Reddit Alternative with the Goal to Reward Quality Comments alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →