Thirteen years ago 🤯 I made a silly little browser plugin that got some Internet attention. It was featured on websites and a few big podcasts, and even served as inspiration for a WordPress plugin written by Jamie Zawinski. 😎 I’d occasionally see it pop up as a suggestion by Redditors and even learned of use cases I hadn’t anticipated – like preventing movie spoilers or making the site more suitable for classroom environments.
Reviews on the plugin page were overwhelmingly positive (many of them hilarious – one was even framed in my home) and I was delighted to see that the Internet could take a joke. On a serious note I also want to make it very clear that the term “herp derp” here meant “saying something meaningless”. I later learned there can be different interpretations of the term that don’t carry the same spirit – to be whimsical, silly, and most of all harmless. (this is why we can’t have nice things)
On the technical side the biggest surprise was that Google’s DOM structure stayed extremely stable throughout the whole run and only needed one update. I’m amazed it ran as long as it did with so little effort from my side.
Now that we’re in 2025 I think YouTube has improved comment moderation. Features like “Top comments” seem to help, and in this era of LLMs the accuracy of “quality scoring” should increase as well.
So with that, it’s time to say farewell to Herp Derp for YouTube! I mean, herp derp. 👋
