Building a text-only, moderation-gated reader for Hacker News
I run a strict content whitelist on my phone so that I can browse an internet that I deem safe for myself and my child. This means that I cannot access a website that is not on the whitelist. I've been doing this for about a year and it's been great; my laptop is there if I ever need to read anything and I get the benefit of my phone being a bit "dumb". One problem I have had, though, is that on news aggregate websites that I find interesting, like Hacker News, I can't actually read all of the articles that are posted without using my laptop. I wanted to solve this problem, so I did!
I built a reader at /reader on this website for that very reason. The idea was that I would input a URL and the reader would just output any text that was on that page and format. Great! Done. Well, actually, as I thought about it more, there are plenty of websites that are primarily text-based and unsafe. So I had to get back to the drawing board.
Since I wanted to build this to be specific to Hacker News, I thought that I could just gate the content to allow anything that was previously on Hacker News. This was easily verifiable via HN's public search API. Hacker News already filters out inappropriate content, so this helps a ton. But, there are still some things that pass through the filters that I wouldn't want my child to one day read.
So, in comes OpenAI's moderation API. With this API I can check any text (or image, actually) that has been extracted from a URL and it will deem whether the text is safe or not. I'm sure that there are ways to break this API but for my use case it was enough.
To make my life a bit easier I also created a shortcut on iOS to pull up the new /reader page and search with whatever I have in my clipboard currently. This makes it easy for me to read whatever I want with the peace of knowing that the content I am reading is safe!
I think in the future we will see more in the arena of internet safety. Sometimes I think we give children (and adults!) too much freedom to browse. Obviously, freedom is a good thing. But we should be thinking about safety and the things that we actually want in our lives. I don't want to be surprised anymore!