Hronrad

For those who don’t know, the Dissenter extension is a browser plugin that creates a comments section for any page on the internet, allowing for free discussion. It’s an incredibly valuable idea as more and more comments sections are disappearing for three principle reasons:

1. Some sites feel that the quality of the discussion on comments section is low and so they don’t want to do the moderation work required to host it and keep it clean. Anyone who has scrolled through a comments section knows that there is an enormous quantity of garbage, spam, and ad hominem. However, there is often meaningful insight from individuals in the community with expertise in the areas being discussed in the original article. It does not take much skill or time to skim past the garbage to find the meaningful commentary. Killing comments sections amputates an important part of free discourse in the internet.
2. Some sites are being threatened with demonetization by tech giants (especially Google, but also Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Apple) based on the content of their comments sections. It is easier for a small internet opinion site to ax the comments section than to devote full time staff to policing it for content disapproved by Google. It goes without saying that this disapproval often cuts one political direction only.
3. Some site, especially major news sites, would rather not have commenters either flatly disproving their reporting, or providing evidence that they don’t wish their audiences to see. It is a quest for more control over what the public is allowed to see and think about.

Most especially because of reason 3, Google and Apple acted quickly to block the extension from their extension stores. Dissenter responded by coming out with their own browser with the extension built in (a derivative of Chrome).

However, I wanted to continue using the Vivaldi browser, but still have the Dissenter extension. You cannot download the extension alone, only the browser, however, from the Dissenter site (that I am aware of).

You can find the code for the extension, though, on GitHub at https://github.com/gab-ai-inc/gab-dissenter-extension.

Once downloaded and extracted, go to the Build folder and within it to the “chrome” folder.  I copied all the content there into a folder I labeled “dissenter”.

In the Vivaldi browser, go to vivaldi://extensions.

Click “Developer mode” in the upper right corner.

Click “Load Unpacked”, navigate inside the new Dissenter folder and click “Okay”.

This will load the Dissenter plugin.