Personal Software Is Getting Cheaper to Build, So I Killed My LinkedIn Feed<br>Skip to content Personal Software Is Getting Cheaper to Build, So I Killed My LinkedIn Feed<br>August 9, 2026<br>Everyone has a website they wish they could change. Some features are exactly what you want. Others are sharp edges you merely tolerate. The reality is that rarely do these perfectly align between people.

The Good, the Bad, and the LinkedIn Feed

LinkedIn is polarizing. Many people ask “why even bother?” I do get genuine<br>value from it: job search tooling that works for me, and an easy way to stay in<br>touch with former coworkers. But I have never enjoyed the feed, never engaged<br>with it, and have quietly tolerated it for years. There are entire communities<br>dedicated to making fun of just how unhinged it can be (see:<br>r/LinkedInLunatics), and I do not,<br>will not, and never will interact with it.

That tolerance ended yesterday when LinkedIn led with this:

In the past, I’ve shrugged off the crypto scams, sigma-grindset posts, and<br>whatever else has been thrown at me. But for whatever reason, a post of<br>someone’s AI-generated comic of a recruiter splooging was the straw that broke<br>this camel’s back.

I knew a Chrome extension could hide the feed. I’d just never built one. The<br>upfront cost of learning the manifest format, content script lifecycle, and<br>extension APIs had always felt like more friction than the annoyance was worth.<br>This time, the distance between “I wish this site worked differently” and “now<br>it does” was about two prompts.

linkedin-feed-blocker

The result is intentionally unambitious. It hides LinkedIn’s main feed and<br>blocks the API requests that load feed content. Jobs, profiles, search,<br>messaging, and notifications are untouched.

GitHub:<br>andrewpollack/linkedin-feed-blocker

It’s Not Just About LinkedIn

I also posted the extension to<br>Hacker News. One comment in<br>particular stuck with me, from user<br>wxw:

The web, at least on the interface side, is really easy to customize these<br>days. Agents are pretty good at spinning out Chrome extensions. e.g. you can<br>easily reduce the intensity of feed-based UI by removing thumbnails,<br>grayscaling, etc.

The extension itself isn’t particularly impressive. What feels different is how<br>easy it was to build something I’d never touched before to fix something I’d<br>spent years tolerating.

User-controlled web customization isn’t new. Greasemonkey dates to 2004, and<br>tools like Tampermonkey, Stylus, and uBlock Origin have given technical users<br>various ways to reshape websites ever since.

What changed is the authorship cost for bespoke modifications. Previously,<br>building a browser extension meant learning the manifest format, content script<br>lifecycle, permissions model, and enough about the target site’s DOM to write<br>selectors that held up before solving the actual problem you came to solve. For<br>a personal annoyance, that overhead usually wasn’t worth it.

When making the change becomes cheap enough, tolerating the default is no longer<br>the only reasonable option. Instead of accepting every product decision made for<br>us, more of us can build a thin personal layer on top:

Want YouTube without Shorts? Block them .

Want every infinite-scrolling site to have a “next page” button instead?<br>Build it .

Want the LinkedIn feed to stop feeding you AI splooge comments? Remove it .

For a long time, websites have gotten increasingly sophisticated at changing<br>their interfaces to influence what users do. The authorship cost is now low<br>enough that users can start changing them back.

World of Warcraft and WeakAuras

For a final example, I want to talk about a dear hobby of mine:<br>World of Warcraft.

For those unfamiliar with the specifics of WoW, the game has a massive ecosystem<br>of community-created addons. These are Lua scripts that execute as part of the<br>game itself and can make substantial changes to how information is presented to<br>the player.

Below are several players’ views of the same game. The underlying world is<br>identical; what’s personal is the layer through which each player sees it.

Historically, though, creating an addon required at least some knowledge of Lua,<br>WoW’s APIs, and the addon ecosystem. You could customize the game, but there was<br>still a meaningful barrier to entry.

WeakAuras changed the<br>picture, not by eliminating that complexity, but by absorbing it into a better<br>layer.

WeakAuras is a powerful and flexible framework that allows the display of<br>highly customizable graphics on World of Warcraft’s user interface to indicate<br>buffs, debuffs, and other relevant information.

What WeakAuras provided was more than an easier scripting surface. It was a<br>stable abstraction layer with a visual editor, a portable serialization format<br>for sharing configurations, and a distribution ecosystem through<br>Wago.io where players could publish and discover<br>modifications. Someone solved a problem once, packaged it, and thousands of<br>other players could install or fork it, all without touching the...