Free Internet Plugin by HackerNoon

Pardon the 3rd person self reference 🥺

HackerNoon, the company behind the technology publishing platform with 15k+ writers and 3M+ monthly readers, launched The Free Internet Plugin in the Chrome Store. This browser plugin removes known paywalled content from Google search results.

The app description reads, “If you don’t want to pay for the story, the headline shouldn’t be an option. The business model of paywalls—i.e. annoy the user with a bait-and-switch ad a hundred times, when they convert and pay every month until they die—hinders the internet’s ability to be a free and open experience. Hacker Noon believes that if the user doesn’t want to run into a paywall, they should be able to filter paywalled content out of its search results and newsfeeds. This plugin removes known paywalled sites from your Google results.”

The Free Internet Plugin has been open sourced under the MIT License on the Hacker Noon GitHub account, and is looking for more open source contributors to remove paywalled sites from social media newsfeeds and other search engines. This open source project could go any number of directions towards open sourcing the internet.

According to How I Hacked My Brain To Trigger My Most Productive Coding Stint Ever, the lead developer on the project is a 17 year old named Guy Torbet, who built the first version of the application in just 6 hours.

“For the curious mind, there is more free content available on the internet than ever, and yet as internet users, we run into paywalls more often than ever before," said HackerNoon Founder and CEO David Smooke. “With The Free Internet Plugin, we are giving people the option to choose what type of content is allowed and not allowed in their search results.”

About The Free Internet Plugin

A free Internet is a better Internet. The Free Internet Plugin removes known paywalls from your search results. It’s open sourced on HackerNoon’s Github.

About HackerNoon

How hackers start their afternoons. HackerNoon is built for technologists to read, write, and publish. We are an open and international community of 15k+ contributing writers publishing stories and expertise for 3M+ curious and insightful monthly readers. Founded in 2016, HackerNoon is an independent technology publishing platform run by David Smooke and Linh Dao Smooke. Write anywhere, publish on HackerNoon.