Every so often I look at what other small extensions in this space are building, not to copy them, but because someone chasing the same rough problem sometimes lands on an angle I hadn't considered. Clarity, a YouTube-only extension that hides AI-generated videos, has one of the better ideas I've come across: a community blocklist. I'm not building it into Zenfeed, and the reason has less to do with the idea itself and more to do with what Zenfeed promises to be.
What does Clarity's community blocklist actually do?
Clarity auto-detects videos it suspects are AI-generated on YouTube, and it also lets users label channels they believe are posting AI content; those labels feed a shared list that the extension checks against, so the detection improves as more people contribute to it. It's a free, YouTube-only tool with a small but real install base, and it doesn't require an account to use.
That's a different design from what most single-platform AI filters do. A lot of them ship with a fixed detection method and leave it there. Clarity's bet is that a crowd, over time, catches things a single static rule wouldn't — a new AI video format, a channel that slips past the automatic detector, a pattern nobody coded for on day one.
Why is that worth admiring?
Because it solves a real weak spot in any single-user, static approach: one person's fixed list can't learn from what a crowd of people are seeing in their own feeds, but a shared blocklist can.
Zenfeed's own Rest from AI is a timer, not a permanent block, and the detection underneath it is a local keyword and phrase sweep — it reads a post's text (and image alt text, not the pixels themselves) and checks it against a fixed list in keywords.js. That list only grows when I edit it, and it has no way to learn from a new AI pattern until I notice it myself and add it. A crowd genuinely catches things one list-editor misses. Crediting that clearly: Clarity's approach is a smart answer to a real limitation, not a gimmick.
So why isn't Zenfeed building something like it?
Because a shared blocklist needs a server to collect, store, and redistribute labels across users, and Zenfeed's whole design assumes no such server exists.
100% local. No backend, no tracking, no account. That's not marketing copy I'm reluctant to break for a good feature — it's the literal architecture. Zenfeed has no server today, and no code path that sends anything your feed contains anywhere. A community blocklist means a post you looked at has to leave your browser in some form, travel to a server, and come back changed by what other people reported. Even done carefully and anonymized, that's a real backend: something to build, host, and secure, and something that turns "no account needed" into "no account needed, but we do talk to a server on your behalf." That's a fair trade for a tool built around it from the start. For an extension whose whole pitch is that nothing you do in it ever leaves your machine, it would quietly undo the actual promise, not just the brand story around it.
- Detection improves over time as more people label channels
- Catches patterns a fixed rule set wouldn't anticipate
- Requires a server to collect and redistribute labels
- YouTube only, for now
- Nothing about your feed ever leaves your browser
- No server to build, host, secure, or trust
- Detection is static until I edit the keyword list myself
- Works across LinkedIn, X, and YouTube from one install
What does Zenfeed do instead?
The closest thing Zenfeed has to a blocklist is the one you write yourself: a custom keyword list, matched case-insensitively against a post's text, entirely on your machine.
It's the single-player version of the same instinct — you decide what counts as noise, instead of a crowd deciding for you — and it stays true to the part of Zenfeed I don't want to trade away, which is that your settings and your feed never touch a server I run.
A community blocklist and a local keyword list are both honest answers to "how do I decide what to hide." They're just answers built for different promises, and Zenfeed already made its promise.
None of this is a knock on Clarity. A shared blocklist is a genuinely smart way to make AI detection better than any one person's list could be on its own, and if I were building a single-platform tool from scratch with a different set of promises, I might build the same thing. Zenfeed just isn't that tool. It made "nothing leaves your browser" the whole deal a long time ago, and a good feature that breaks that deal isn't actually a good feature for Zenfeed, whatever it is for someone else.