ad-accelerator VS under-new-management

A few months ago I made a free open source extension to speedup youtube ads that I shared here & hit the front page. Within a week a guy (who commented on my show hn thread) copied it and promoted his version on reddit which went viral and has 300k+ Users [1]

But why copy a free open source extension instead of just contributing? Well... a few weeks later he was trying to sell it on multiple sites for 5 figures. Maybe they still own it but I couldn't help but notice that the registered developer for his extension on the chrome store has also changed since it was originally published.

[1] https://github.com/rkk3/ad-accelerator/blob/main/lessons_pos...

> They "probably" had your idea in the back of their mind for 10 days, and didn't remember that?

That was just a cheeky response they gave me after I reached out on Sunday (8 days after my post).

> Document their timeline, versus the timeline you made and continue to make your updates.

They first posted theirs 4 days after my Show HN which went viral on r/webdev. I assumed they had just come to it on their own and I didn't realize they had seen & commented on my work until Sunday (8 days after the Show HN).

I mention this in the referenced post https://github.com/rkk3/ad-accelerator/blob/main/lessons_pos...

>Is there a feature you could add? Like muting the sped up ads?

Muting the ads was in the original. But in terms of another feature another member of the community contributed a PR that adds support for Hulu.

This is a cool idea!

However, I have a number of reservations:

1. Firstly, the JavaScript code in the release version of the extension is 12MiB. This is a lot of code, with much of it in a bundled form, making it very difficult (if not almost impossible) to verify them against the originals in the case of React, lodash, etc.

2. It seems like the code uses an external API[0] to find the current owners of the installed extensions. While I appreciate that this may be one of the only ways to do it (since I imagine Google themselves would not appreciate an extension programmatically accessing the Chrome Web Store to find new developers) - and as far as I can see from the published code, it doesn't send any identifying data beyond what a normal Web request does, hence why I'm not identifying the site by name here - I would still urge caution as it might still cause alarm to someone examining their Web traffic and seeing a suspicious domain name, as the sort of person who would be interested in this extension is probably also the sort of person who would do that.

[0] https://github.com/classvsoftware/under-new-management/blob/...