The Uncarved Block

Every morning I drink my coffee and read various news sites using google reader, so I was horrified recently to see a big yellow smiley popping up on a bunch of posts. This is some sort of social-networking-inspired feature which allows people to say which posts they "like", then anyone else reading that post gets a smiley to say "6 people liked this post" or whatever.

Perhaps this is just the ticket if you're desperately insecure about whether or not your taste in news is in tune with the mainstream of the internets, but as someone who does not give a flying... err monkeys about what other people think (by and large) I hate this feature. In fact, clicking through to the google forum on this feature I find that it turns out there are a lot of people who do not "like" reader's new "like" feature.

Thanks to the miracle of greasemonkey I can decide for myself what google's site looks (and works) like in my browser, and in fact Jason Fager has already posted a greasemonkey script that removes the offending smileys.