I’ve never been a big fan of Valentine’s Day. Not because it celebrates love and all that. I just hate the idea of commercialising things for the sake of squeezing money out of people, plastering your every living experience with roses, red hearts, chocolates and cute teddy bears. Luckily we can customise our experiences online.
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For those of you who would like to maintain sanity throughout the next couple of days, we’ve made a list of tools you can use online to cull the Valentine’s Day spam, or anything else for that matter.
Social Fixer
Social Fixer used to go by the bold name of Better Facebook, and still it claims to be just that to this day. Essentially an app layered on top of your Facebook account, you can change the fonts, the colour, hide certain parts of the page and, importantly, filter stuff you don’t like.
The dashboard landing screen comes across as slightly complicated but would be well worth it once you’ve worked your way around it. It’s a really powerful tool!
UnSpoiler
Brought to you by the same people who made Unbaby, Unspoiler does just that: it replaces pre-assigned keywords with massive red lines slashed across your web pages. While not as subtle as Unbaby, it does work. You can of course toggle the keywords on or off as you like.
So below is a screenshot of what my Wikipedia page for Love looks like:
Read more 11 extensions designed to make your web experience less annoying
It’s still a bit clunky though. When I tried to go all extreme and block the word “Red” it picked up all the words containing that combination of letter. This means that words like Shared, Cared, Sponsored, and so on were censored. So I ended up assigning the words with a space at the front like: ” red”.
Facebook Post Filter
Similar but a lot lighter than Social Fixer, Facebook Post Filter is another extension that blocks customised keywords. It’s damn brilliant but unfortunately can’t seem to filter shares of existing content. It only filters original posts.
What’s really dandy about this one is the fact that unlike Unspoiler, it recognises the difference between words and syllables.
KillSwitch App
With a little bit more specificity and focus, KillSwitch is there to erase your ex romantic partner from your Newsfeed, Profile and all other things Facebook.
Using the app during Valentine’s Day could help take that sting away. You know, when you see pictures of your ex and the new partner deep in love from behind a lonely computer screen.
It removes all pictures, videos and wall posts where your ex was tagged in. You can if you really want to reverse the process eventually, so no harm no foul.
The Google Play link seems to be gone though you can still find it on iTunes.
You can also, more sanely, just remove your ex from your friends list but that some people find that more awkward or just mean.
TweetDeck’s Mute feature
If you’re more of a Twitter person and using the TweetDeck organiser, you can make use of a nifty Mute feature under Settings.
Because it’s an already baked-in feature, the censorship is quite seamless. You can for instance choose to bat the user who’s tweeting about unwanted stuff or just bat the source they’re tweeting about.
Some keywords to filter: Valentine’s, Valentines, V Day, V-Day, chocolate, partner, romantic, love, lovely, rose, roses, honey, flower, flowers, red, cupid. You get the idea!
Any other ideas to create a “clean” censored web experience? Let us know in the comments!
