TrumpKard Blocks Things on the Internet You Find Even More Annoying Than Ads
If you’ve ever been bothered by seeing the same thing on the internet over and over again, this browser extension might be able to help you out.
TrumpKard is a browser extension that can block whatever you want – whether that’s news about Donald Trump, Kim Kardashian or someone else altogether.
The idea was inspired by ad-blockers, says Robert Gold, the CEO of Wajam, whose subsidiary Lunaar Digital Experiences launched the browser extension.
“We said, ‘what else is annoying us when we get online?” he says. “One of the thing that really bothers everybody is you just get a constant amount of, I think you could say, craziness.”
It’s not just the content itself, he says, it’s the repetition.
“It’s just getting bombarded with the same things. If you’re looking in the news, you’re getting a look at Trump every single day about 10 times a day, if you’re looking at entertainment, it’s the same two or three people that have dominated the entertainment pages,” he says. “It really isn’t a great user experience because there’s some things that everybody finds annoying.”
That’s where TrumpKard comes in, says Gold. The goal is to “give people what they want to see and not get bombarded by the same monotonous content,” he says. “You can block 30, 40, 50 different things, you pick and choose what you want to block.”
Blocked items appear greyed-out, Gold says that TrumpKard originally removed articles and pictures entirely, but that made it hard to see that the extension was actually working.
It also keeps track of what’s being blocked and users can click on blocked items to make them appear.
It can give a sense of just how repetitive the internet can be – Gold says that after using it for just week, the app had blocked 3,000 mentions of Trump on websites he visited.
He says it’s a way for people to consume information that’s actually new and interesting without having to wade through the repetitive, annoying things.
“They weren’t going to read that anyways, they were just going to waste time picking through to get beyond that,” he says.
The extension is free and Gold says he’s not quite sure just how TrumpKard will be monetized.
