Since I was a kid, I've tried to avoid wearing clothes that display their manufacturer's logo. At the time I would've said something about not wanting to be a walking advertisement for a brand. My thoughts on the matter have gotten more nuanced over the years, but I still don't think that kid-me was wrong.
As I write this, I can see the tiny piece of electrical tape that covers my beloved 24" 4k monitor's logo and power LED. I'm grateful to the manufacturer of what may be the world's only reasonably priced external retina monitor, but I don't think that that quite earns them the right to have their logo in my field of vision the entire time I'm sitting at my computer. It's good to be able to discover who made a device, and preferably get an exact model number, but that information belongs on the back or the side, not somewhere where it can vie for my attention multiple hours every day.
I usually don't spend much time thinking about the subject. The most recent occasion for it to rise to conscious attention came last fall when I finally got around to putting a new coat of paint on my bicycle. (I'm happy to report that spray paint plus clear coat is more than sufficient unless for some reason your bike's paint job needs to stand up to very close inspection.) When I was done I was expecting to notice that the bike was now green instead of purple, but for a while the only thing I could see was that all the stickers that I'd gone blind to had been replaced with a solid color.
Thus reminded of how much conspicuous branding irks me when I'm in a mood to notice it, I went inside and taped over all the logos visible in the kitchen. Electrical tape works for dark appliances and for power LEDs; printer paper and scotch tape work when you need to blend in with a white surface. I had already peeled the label off the disposable (yet refillable!) soap dispenser. Kudos to the fridge manufacturer for only putting their name on a sticker inside the door.
After the kitchen was finished, I decided to do the same thing to the web. I've been using the resulting adblock filter list for several months with surprisingly little incident.
I started out making rules for sites I use myself. Because I wanted to share it eventually, I looked up a list of the most-visited sites online* and added rules for them, too. Then, I deleted most of the site-specific rules because I'd found it was possible to write a few generic rules that cover a large portion of pages on the web.
The main problem I've noticed is that the logo in the site header is usually also the only link back to the home page. I've gotten used to Ctrl-L (Ctrl-Backspace)+ Enter but have yet to develop muscle memory for Vimium's gu. Some sites have minor layout issues, as can be expected when you're hiding random elements, but I have yet to find anything that's truly broken.
To be clear, I'm not saying that this is a good idea. It's an interesting idea and I want to see where it leads. Join me if you feel like it.
* If you need that list, AFAICT Tranco is the reputable provider; they were also basically impossible for me to find.âŠī¸
2026-04-27
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