I made an extension that randomizing all links on Amazon. This makes an interesting experience for the user to unwillingly broaden their horizons as to the type and quality of items that they browse on Amazon. The extension could make for either a completely annoying time or a surprisingly helpful one.

Here is the link for the Chrome Web Store: Anti-zon Extension

Here is the zip with the extension files Antizon

Here is the video: https://vimeo.com/267329809

The best idea I came up with for my final project is an extension for Youtube. This extension would take the a huge aspect of what makes youtube so popular and flip it upside down and that would be the the idea of the “You” in Youtube and personalizing what videos you see on the daily. What if every video you clicked on sent you to a random video and there was no way to subscribe to a channel to keep seeing their content. It would almost force the user into viewing new videos and expanding their horizons instead of pigeon-holing themselves into one type of videos. The subscribe button would be unavailable and maybe using a random function can somehow give a person a random video per every click of a video link

1. Make it so you can filter all posts that may come up on an “explore” page with hashtags or keywords. Gives user a chance to say what they do and what they don’t want to see ever while on social media
2. Get rid of the way that people can buy like, followers, friends. Doesn’t promote the idea of information stealing and fake accounts and just makes the numbers of followers just a bit more realistic.
3. Being able to manipulate the layout or interface offered in social media. Being able to personalize your social media in a way in which you can make some aspects of an interface bigger or smaller depending on how important that is you would be a cool without having the option of completely removing something. This would include being able to simply rearrange things on your interface as well.
4.Not having “recommended posts” based on data tracking
5. Show only what relates to you. not having a friend of a friend post on your timeline
6. Keeping business things separate from casual social media

– Chase and Maggie

For my observe this is an explanation for something I’ve seen over the course of months concerning facebook and the presentation of memes. I had to do this one right after I found out about it because without it, meme culture on facebook seemed to be having these weird features about them and says a lot about what Facebook is turning into. With the growing amount of memes on facebook, they actually attempted to fight against the amount by changing their post algorithm to favor posted videos instead of picture. Before knowing this I would click on a meme in what would appear to be in image format just to realize it was a video going for several seconds and I thought it was stupid. I would wonder why people just made me look at a video of a still image but come to find out they just want their meme to be seen and passed around more easily. In response facebook makes still image videos go under the category of spam and are blocked. Still before seeing this post I would see similarly still images of a meme in video format but with faint triangular shapes floating around the screen overlaying the video and again wondered its purpose but here it is. This is showing how software shapes the user, or in a sense how user shapes the software. The user’s of facebook desperately want to turn facebook into memebook so they are doing what they can do find the loopholes in facebooks algorithms to get the posts they want to put up to be able to stay up and circulate. This also shows how facebook would actually filter out some people’s posts just because they want their site to have a certain kind of material. This is seriously the battle of the ages and I’m wondering what other implications will facebook come up with to decrease the number of memes and how the community will try to work around it.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/shh-no-more-talking/bgfcpmpmhkimdfjkdhbmgdgadbimjhkl?utm_source=gmail
This is my Project 4 turned into a extension as well: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/no-more-clickbait/leglelmelehodakligpgbgbfabcinofd?utm_source=gmail

In my project 5 I chose to replace the places of input on a multitude of websites with a link to an image that tells the person to be quiet. On social media there is a tendency to respond to every little thing you see and this extension makes it so that you can’t respond to things that you see online that may trigger you or give you an opportunity to trigger someone else. My extension is made to keep people quiet and just go with the normal flow of information without responding to thing or interacting too much with the other people around the website.
I used the new stuff Ben taught me utilizing the click function thing to make it so when you press inside of the text box it links you to somewhere else

// ** CHANGE @NAME, @NAMESPACE, and @DESCRIPTION
//
// ** If using for Tampermonkey, you can just paste this into
// ** the Tampermonkey editor
//
// ** If using for Chrome, CHANGE FIRST PART OF FILENAME
// ** (before the .user.js) and edit in a code editor like Atom
//
// ** EVERYTHING BETWEEN ==UserScript== lines is read by the browser
//    as configuration information for the userscript
//
// ==UserScript==
// @name NO MORE CLICKBAIT
// @version 1.0
// @namespace chaseisgod.com
// @description demonstrates a userscript method for altering websites
// @require http://arts445.courses.bengrosser.com/files/ready-vanilla.js
// @require http://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.3.1.min.js
// @run-at document-start
//
// **WRITE MATCH STATEMENTS TO MATCH WEBSITE URLS (FOLLOW MY EXAMPLE)
//
// @match *://*.youtubecom/*
// @include *://*.youtube.com/*
//
// ==/UserScript==// -----------------------------------------
//
//
//
//
// Basic Userscript Template
//
// This code demonstrates a general method for creating browser Usercripts
// that utilize jQuery to modify pages, whether static or dynamic. This
// can be used in Tampermonkey (which is how we'll start), or later,
// in Chrome extensions.
//
// written by grosser for ARTS 445: Net Art, sp '18



// this line (and the last one in the file) open and close
// an 'immediate invoked function', which keeps our
// code separate from other code running on the website
// just leave it here
(function() {

// jQuery on 'j' to avoid conflicts with page jQuery
var j;

// PUT YOUR CODE within main() below
function main() {

    // setup jQuery on j to avoid any possible conflicts
    j = jQuery.noConflict();

    // outlines all existing <a> tags in red
    // running .each() on a jQuery search executes the included function
    // individually for each element it finds that matches the search
    // (e.g. in this case, it runs the function redBorder() for each 'a'
    // tag). the parameter name 'e' refers to the found element
    //
    // j('a').each(function() { redBorder(this); });

    // this line sets up a continuous search for new elements on the
    // page that might get inserted later. so, in this example, any
    // HTML with an 'a' tag that gets inserted *after* the page loads
    // will call redBorder() for each one in turn. this way you can
    // catch and change anything that happens after the page load
    // (e.g. a new news feed story on the Facebook newsfeed0
    ready('.style-scope .yt-img-shadow', function(e) {hideElement (e); });
    ready('span', function(e) {hideElement (e); });
    ready('yt-formatted-string', function(e) {hideElement (e); });
    // this function could do anything with the results it receives
    // 'jnode' refers to the jquery object the initial jQuery search
    // found, so we refer to it and then continue on with familiar
    // jQuery statements
    function hideElement(e) {
        j(e).hide();
    }
}


// run the main function
main();

// utility functions we'll use during the semester
// are below. for now it's just another version of
// contains we can use to test string content

// cleaner syntax than match()
    String.prototype.contains = function(it) { return this.indexOf(it) != -1; };


// close the opening invoked function
})();

In this project I got rid of all thumbnails for videos to get rid of clickbait videos that just want to trick you into watching something that you didn’t really want to watch. Also I got rid of the “trending” video texts and other things that try to push you into watching certain types of videos. This usually leads to a monopolization of views and likes because of people not knowing what they’re getting into because youtube and channels work together to put them in a situation they did not ask for. No More Clickbait makes it so you don’t have to worry about being visually tricked.

My project 0 for this week is a rather simple one that I think most people don’t realize they are obsessed with right along with me. This would be the Youtube subscription tab, whether on the computer or mobile device. Whenever I have free time or gaps between classes the one place I go to look at to fill some time up would be my Youtube subscription tab. I always look for if my favorite people added some new content that could entertain me for the brief time I have to sit around. Most of the time I don’t even consciously check it because its so integrated in my daily routine that I think absolutely nothing of it. In a way in almost makes me less interested in whatever else is trending or new to the site because I’m so ingrained in the the content I’ve already subscribed for so it almost discourages me even wasting my time in the trending tab. It kinda contributes to the idea that software makes things so personal that you become pigeon holed in doing things one time of way or staying in one particular area of subject or content. Most of the channels I’m subscribed to area for video games and tournaments which is because related content that come up on the side for suggest videos all come up with similar channels thus why I don’t have a huge diversity in the things I watch anymore.

For this observe its a combination of both an obsession and how software constructs a user. I’m talking about what is known as a “tier list” when it comes to competitive gaming. The one I show is for a fighting game called Dragonball FighterZ. A tier list for competitive gaming is to show how how popular certain characters are over others and ranks them accordingly in groups called tiers. The one offered by the site eventhub tracks this popularity and updates it daily and shows the changes and popularity over days as well as weeks and months. This contributes heavily to how competitive games are played, mainly because there is a common misconception that the tier list shows how powerful a certain character. This is important for this game in particular (only being a few weeks old) because when people see this they are more inclined to use the characters who are top tier and “overpowered” and less inclined to the lower tiered characters who apparently have something wrong with them. Sure there is some truth in them that some characters do more damage and are easier to use than others but it doesn’t mean that a low tier character with not as much damage or utility in the hands of someone who practices them a lot can’t completely decimate someone who uses top tier characters. Its very crucial to this games online diversity because when I play I see so many of the same characters over and over again who just so happened to be the best tier and it makes it so boring. Due to this game being new and people learning new things about it, the tier list can change drastically in the matter of a day which is why I find it so interesting to check up on frequently to see who everyone thinks is badass one day and who is completely “unusable” the next day.

/ ==UserScript==
// @name Crunchy Roll
// @namespace http://chaseiscool.net/
// @version 0.1
// @description Messin’ with stuff
// @author Ya boy Chase
// @match http://www.crunchyroll.com/*
// @grant none
// @require http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
‘use strict’;

var j = jQuery.noConflict();

setInterval(fadeOutIn, 3000);
function fadeOutIn() {
j(‘a.js-simulcast-series-link’).fadeOut(2000, fadeBackIn);
}

function fadeBackIn() {
j(‘a.js-simulcast-series-link’).fadeIn(); }

j(‘a’).hide();
})();

For this project 0 I chose the “Video” section of the Facebook mobile app. It is a tab where people can look at trending videos and like and save them. I found this particularly interesting because it makes it so the user has a Youtube-like part of the app in which they can find and search for videos. I feel like this is a sort of rip-off like Facebook has been doing for quite some time now like with the recent update for adding stories like you would on snapchat. You can even add videos that you can’t watch at the time or want to come back to later to a “Watchlist” that would be similar to something offered on netflix. Facebook is trying to become an “everything app”, making it so you don’t want to use other applications because it has everything you might need right there on it. You can have stories, post pictures and text, watch movies, and sell and buy things like you can do on a couple of other popular apps just put in one. Facebook is trying to monopolize the mobile app industry with one rip-off at a time.

 
j('#tech-specs-table-left #tech-specs-table-right .a-text-bold p').css('border', '1px solid red')

 
j('h3:contains("Arts")').css('background-color', 'lightBlue')