A challenge I’ve frequently faced while using social media platforms like Discord or YouTube is standing out in the crowd of thousands of users and comments. These platforms generally don’t utilize methods to reward thoughtful discourse, but instead promote whatever garners the most short-term attention (spamming memes or generic responses). That left me wondering how I could programmatically boost the amount of attention that my messages get.
After brainstorming some ways of accomplishing this, I decided to create a browser extension that prepends a string to the beginning of each post to visually distinguish them. I primarily use this arrow character ‘➤’ before each message since people are drawn to things that are pointed at, as well as the fact that it looks cool. In order to tell the extension which textbox the prepended string should be entered in, a query selector string must be provided. The extension simulates a keypress upon clicking on or returning text in the desired textbox.
The reception to this project has been mixed because some people find it distracting that I put an arrow before my messages, but this just tells me that it’s accomplishing what I set out to do. Others think it’s a unique personal flare that allows them to easily identify my posts. Regardless, I think this project has been a success. It was fun making it and learning about browser extensions.
