Most keyword-muting guides are written for one specific site — Reddit, Twitter, YouTube. But the underlying need is usually broader: a word, a name, a topic you don't want to see, no matter which site it shows up on. News comment sections, shopping sites, forums, work tools, niche communities — anywhere text renders in a browser, the same problem shows up.
This is a general-purpose guide to muting words at the browser level, on any site, using ElementHider — not tied to any single platform's quirks.
Three Ways to Mute Something
1. Keyword matching (the default)
Type a word or phrase and ElementHider scans visible text on every page you load, hiding, blurring, or (with the Supporter Pack) replacing any element that contains a match. This covers the vast majority of cases — comment sections, article previews, forum posts, product listings.
Add the word or phrase
Type it into the extension popup. No site restriction needed unless you want one — a keyword applies everywhere by default.
Choose case sensitivity
"Ignore case" is on by default, so Spoiler and spoiler both match. Turn it off for something like an acronym where case matters (IT the department vs. it the pronoun).
Choose exact match if the word is short or common
Short keywords can over-match inside longer words. "Exact match" (word-boundary matching) prevents ad from also matching "advice" or "add".
2. Point-and-click CSS selectors
Some things aren't a word at all — a specific widget, a recurring ad slot, a "Recommended" sidebar, a comment section you never want to see on a particular site. ElementHider's point-and-click picker lets you click any element directly on the page and generate a CSS selector rule for it, without knowing any CSS.
This is the right tool when the thing you want gone is a page layout element rather than specific text — it'll keep working even if the text inside that element changes.
3. Regex matching (Supporter Pack)
For patterns rather than fixed words — phone numbers, prices above a threshold, any of several spelling variants of a name — regular expressions match a pattern instead of one literal string. This is a Supporter Pack feature since it's a meaningfully more advanced tool than most users need, but it's the most powerful option when a single keyword rule can't express what you're trying to catch.
| Method | Best for | Plan |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword | Specific words, names, phrases | Free |
| CSS selector (point-and-click) | Recurring page elements/widgets | Free |
| Regexp | Patterns, variants, and structured text | Supporter Pack |
| Groups (toggle sets of rules at once) | Organizing rules by topic/site/season | Supporter Pack |
Organizing Rules as They Grow
A handful of keywords is easy to manage in one flat list. Once you're filtering dozens of things across many sites for different reasons, a flat list gets unwieldy fast — which is where Groups (Supporter Pack) come in: bundle related keywords together and toggle the whole bundle on or off in one click, instead of hunting down and re-adding individual entries.
Tip: A useful pattern is one group per reason, not per site — e.g. "Work stress" (news, market terms), "Spoilers" (shows you're behind on), "Shopping noise" (ads, "sponsored", "you might also like"). Toggle a group off the moment the reason no longer applies.
Test Mode Before You Commit
Before hiding something for real, ElementHider's Test Mode outlines matches on the page without removing them — useful for confirming a new keyword or selector catches what you expect (and nothing you didn't) before switching it to Hide or Blur.
The Bottom Line
Whatever site you're on, the same three tools apply: keywords for words and phrases, CSS selectors for page elements, and (for more advanced cases) regex for patterns — all under one consistent interface, working the same way everywhere instead of needing a different trick per platform.