sean cassidy : Genius Blocker

I was listening to Reply All today and they were talking about the context of this Sara Morrison tweet about Genius's web annotation tool. Apparently, a lot of people are mad about Genius essentially adding a comments section to people's websites and having each word and sentence criticized when they didn't agree to it¹. I hate comments on sites so I totally understand.

Naturally, I wanted to look into it to see if I could put control back in the hands of the content creators. Turns out it's real easy. Here's the code:

var geniusBlockerObserver = new MutationObserver(function(mutations) {
    mutations.forEach(function(mutation) {
        if (mutation.addedNodes.length > 0) {
            for (var i = 0; i < mutation.addedNodes.length; i++) {
                var item = mutation.addedNodes[i];
                if (item.tagName !== undefined) {
                    if (item.tagName.startsWith("GENIUS")) {
                        document.body.removeChild(item);
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    });
});

geniusBlockerObserver.observe(document.body, {childList: true});

Simply put this in a JavaScript file on your site, or put it between two <script> tags and that's it! No more philistines commenting on your beautifully purple prose. Here's a simple copy paste solution:

<script
src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cxxr/GeniusBlocker/master/genius-blocker.js"></script>

You can also grab the code for GeniusBlocker on Github.