Shinigami Eyes
March 19, 2021 10:52 AM   Subscribe

Shinigami Eyes is a browser addon that highlights transphobic and trans-friendly social network pages and users with different colors available for Chrome and Firefox.
posted by simmering octagon (18 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite
 
It's brilliant on Twitter. Been using it for a couple of months and it's very good at pointing out danger Will Robinson.
posted by MartinWisse at 11:28 AM on March 19, 2021


It's brilliant on Twitter. Been using it for a couple of months and it's very good at pointing out danger Will Robinson.

Yeah, it's great alternative to shared block lists since they tend to be too opaque for my taste.
posted by simmering octagon at 12:02 PM on March 19, 2021


It’s fantastic for tumblr and Reddit too
posted by FritoKAL at 12:29 PM on March 19, 2021


Is this... a Death Note reference? Will it cost me half of my remaining lifespan to download this browser addon?
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:42 PM on March 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


What's the origin of this extension's name?
In the Death Note manga/anime, "having the shinigami eyes" means being able to see people's names and remaining lifespan just by looking at them. In a similar way, this extension allows you to see a person's trans acceptance orientation just by looking at them.
From the link.
posted by i used to be someone else at 1:14 PM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


I was very sceptical about this but I gave it a go and my own twitter profile popped as green and honestly, it felt like I'd been given a badge of approval. I'm looking forward to testing it out.

And yes, it is a Death Note reference - it says so in the FAQ.
posted by AFII at 1:15 PM on March 19, 2021


Ooo, has it been updated? Last time I took a look at it it seemed like it'd gone a bit fallow (not that that's terrible if it continues to operate, naturally, but browser extensions tend to have a bit of a limited shelf life).
posted by CrystalDave at 1:50 PM on March 19, 2021


Hmm. I'm neutral, which is appropriate, as I've averaged fewer than 3 tweets a year for the dozen years I've been on, and those have only been personal. However, an NB activist friend of mine also came up as neutral. I've submitted eir profile as friendly, not sure if there's anything else I can do.
posted by Four Ds at 1:56 PM on March 19, 2021


Is this... a Death Note reference?
Yes.

Will it cost me half of my remaining lifespan to download this browser addon?

No, but as a browser extension it might cut your battery life in half.
posted by pwnguin at 2:04 PM on March 19, 2021


has it been updated?

It has sporadic, but fairly recent commits in its GitHub repo, FWIW.

(And along the lines of "don't read the comments": its open issues are a shitshow of TERF-ey what-about-ism.)
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:12 PM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


It seems to me that something more like a distributed hash table with some kind of consensus model might be better than this naive implementation. It will not scale.

That's a good thing to know, but for right now, this is protecting people and making things just a titch safer. I'll take it.
posted by kalimac at 6:57 PM on March 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


This is a great idea, but just a minor quibble - I wish they had used a different shade of red. The "red" they use is quite difficult to differentiate for someone with deuteranopia (aka red-green color-blindness), which includes up to 8% of the XY-chromosome-equipped population (depending on where you are).
posted by Umami Dearest at 7:51 PM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Umami Dearest -- One can change the colors! Going to the preferences...thingy...for the add-on, there is a choice of:

bright green/deep red (default)
purple/mustard-yellow
pale teal/orange

(I do not have any color-blindness, colors are described as I see them.)
posted by kalimac at 8:21 PM on March 19, 2021 [2 favorites]


I've been using it for a couple of years and I like it. I don't get a lot of value out of the "trans friendly" signal (a lot of people are trans friendly but still jerks who I don't want on my twitter feed) but the "anti trans" signal is a really helpful warning. Any time someone is marked in red I check their feed, and if there's any corroborating evidence of transphobia (almost always yes, sadly) I mute preemptively. It's made my twitter life so much safer
posted by the tulips are too red in the first place at 10:17 PM on March 19, 2021 [6 favorites]


I really enjoy that this is curated by humans and not algorithm. I've been using it for months and I trust the people who curate the list. This works for all kinds of links across the web, not just social media handles.
posted by subdee at 8:06 PM on March 20, 2021


Another really useful one, that **is** decided by algorithm, is BotSentinal for twitter. It classifies accounts by how often they break the TOS as a proxy for how likely they are to be bots and trolls, and also tracks topics that are made to trend by bots.

https://botsentinel.com/
posted by subdee at 8:09 PM on March 20, 2021


FYI for shinigami eyes they don't classify an account as 'friendly' just for not saying anything hateful. This is about sustained efforts in the fight for trans rights online, I'm okay with it being limited to a few accounts that have that as a focus. Seeing the red is more helpful anyway. Lots of posts spread by red accounts are just innocuous statements not related to trans stuff at all. But it gives you another data point to consider when weighing up their opinions and, if this is an issue that will hurt you, an idea of which blogs to avoid.
posted by subdee at 8:14 PM on March 20, 2021


as someone who is visibly trans online and with a public face on account of my job, this has been an invaluable extension. i've been using it for a little over a year and have yet to see a false positive, whether in green names or red names.
posted by Aya Hirano on the Astral Plane at 9:41 AM on March 22, 2021


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