Since you're asking for it, a request that I have is if there was a mobile-OS wide implementation of it, that'd be great. I've tried launchers like https://getsiempo.com (defunct?) and https://lessphone.app but walked away unimpressed due to a variety of reasons: The main one being having to change habits to adopt to the new UX, whilst solutions like blloc [0] look appealing from far-out, they need equal amount of buy-in. That said, I am all for zero-config solutions.

A personal hack, I want to share: I exclusively use distractive websites from the browser (no installing "fast", "always-on" apps), and I force clear cookies everytime tabs are closed.

That means, I'm forced to login to view any new comments, likes, messages, or notifications and that is enough of a detterent and an annoyance that I don't feel the urge to seek validation often by rechecking on number of upvotes, likes, or replies of the trails I leave on various social media websites like news.yc (which is amongst the cleanest social media websites out there, in that it doesn't employ any dark patterns to lure you in, but that karma count must keep going up, right? #growth-mindset).

Coming back to mobile, on Android, Google's digital well-being initiative [1] has help kick-start competing implementations. I particularly like OnePlus' version of it-- the Zen Mode [2]-- It requires no setup or configuration and simply learns to know what's causing distraction, shows you a pop-up warning about too much usage, and if enabled, it simply goes nuclear and denies access to the phone for 20m.

I'll keep an eye-out for Firefox and/or Brave versions of Motion. Any idea on timelines for those?

[0] https://www.blloc.com

[1] https://wellbeing.google

[2] https://www.androidcentral.com/oneplus-explains-how-and-why-...

I find your personal hack on mobile to be very useful myself too - I found myself to be so much less stressed and more productive after uninstalling apps like Facebook and Reddit on my phone, and disabling notifications on nearly all other apps. When I need to use Facebook, I would go to my computer.

The desktop problem is pretty solvable for programmers. I wrote a simple bash script to add/remove blocked sites to /etc/hosts. I mapped that script to aliases 'focus' and 'distract' that block and unblock sites, respectively (requiring the root password). Finally, I set up a root cron job that runs 'focus' every hour during desired time windows (for me that's morning until late evening on Mon-Sat inclusive).

That system works exceedingly well, but I can't port it to iOS.

Right now I use Lockdown (VPN-based) with a block list and it works okay, except when I want to unlock by disabling the firewall. There's no automatic reenable option making the whole system less effective. I considered writing my own VPN-based system but haven't got around to it. Would love to see Motion tackle it.

It is not trivial to build, run, and operate a nextdns-esque service. The founders, Olivier and Romain, are some of the world's best at what they do, imo.

That said, a client-side DNS re-write solution might be relatively cheaper to implement and might even be a tad-easier than deploying an global DNS resolver with per-user custom configurations and endpoints.

"Know when to be Achilles and know when to be Odysseus."

When it comes to online distractions and addictions, I've found anything that any tool that doesn't offer precommitment and restrictions of editing/removing the intervention will be ineffective in the long run.

If Odysseus could have untied himself from the mast, he would have.

Apps like these seem to be designed for our best selves, when we need help for our worst selves. My best self would probably be successful using this app. But my worst self, probably will ignore the prompts over time until I get annoyed and uninstall the app

My app of choice has been Freedom, where you can set a schedule and prevent quitting the app. I have had problems where I needed to get work done on a website and couldn't so I understand the use case. A work pass feature is something I'll suggest to the Freedom team. But for me as a customer, having success in not over-consuming distracting/addicting sites/apps is immensely more important than the infrequent inconveniences from having to access sites for business/work purposes.

One middleground we are exploring, though, is making it increasingly more difficult to bypass our interventions each time.

Idea: I think we need a cross-platform website/app restriction utility. At the beginning, you get to choose intervals where you can change your settings for free. Let's say the interval is 3 months, and your settings dictate that you can only spend 40 minutes on social media sites (with only 10 minutes during work hours, zero after 10 PM), and 50 minutes on news websites a day. You can violate a limit, but you'd have to donate money to a political party of your choice: the catch is that you'd have to donate the same amount to the opposing political party! The punishment amount increases the more you violate the terms of your 3-month agreement.

After the 3 months/year/whatever are up, you can change the restriction and punishment settings. Holiday exceptions can be pre-programmed, or selected from a default profile ("student" "professional with 3 weeks vacation" etc...). You can always make the settings more restrictive before the interval is over, but not more forgiving.

There would also be an agreed-upon penalty for deleting the program, so that you don't delete and redownload to avoid the restrictions.

1. The irreversible, binding contract element needs to be exceedingly clear and simple to understand as soon as someone opens the app for the first time (“you will not be able to contact us to reverse the contract, so choose your terms carefully”). Additionally, give users the reason why the contract is irreversible up front so that they understand the app’s foundations. I would want the contract to be irreversible, that’s a feature not a bug, but users should know that. Users who aren’t comfortable with that should ideally be offered a weak alternative as long as that doesn’t muddy the service. Otherwise, turn them away.

Even the button that users press to agree to a contract should be called the “No Way Out” button or something like that. However, great care should be taken to ensure that users who behave well don’t get punished (e.g. agreeing to pay $X if you don’t lose weight, and you lose weight but there’s a bug with reporting that, or the app doesn’t ping you enough to warn you to check in, or you don’t understand the consequences of not checking in, or there wasn’t enough granularity with the terms of checking in). Users who don’t trust the app as an automatic executor of contractual punishments should be able to designate a third party arbitrator, like a friend or parent, but that shouldn’t be the default option. Maybe the user’s friends will be lenient, but let them find that out.

2. They have both a “charity” and “anti-charity” option, which is fine. However, the structure of the “charity” option is problematic. It is not clear to users picking that option that their funds may go to a charity they actually dislike, making it more of an Anti-Charity. Additionally, for both the charity and anti-charity options, they should let the user choose their level of granularity. If a user wants to designate specific organizations, let them make that trade off. Maybe someone is willing to make a particular political party their anti-charity, but never in a million lifetimes the Coalition for Coal (made up). “Charity” and “Anti-Charity” are vague. There’s a fine line between motivating your users and provoking unmitigated rage in this space. If that’s hard with the “charity” and “anti-charity” categories, maybe they should be scrapped entirely.

3. It seems like they have UI, usability, and bug issues.

Again, I think that the concept behind their app is great, and they have a lot of potential, but there’s an opportunity for you to do everything they do but better.

But how do you plan to make money? I’m looking for a model that isn’t “we sell data on our customers”, which I see is prohibited based on the TOS. But what would be the road to profit and what safeguards are in place to prevent you from just selling to a less ethical company down the road?

https://github.com/SelfControlApp/selfcontrol

I was very concerned about this, but this is all I needed to hear. Thank you. This addresses a real market need.

I too have struggled and continue to struggle with wasting time on the internet. A couple of things that have helped me recently:

Removing the facebook news feed.[1] I can still use it for messaging, checking on specific people etc but the wall of information and addiction is gone.

Removing all but the single video you are watching on facebook [2]. Again, you can get to useful videos or search for something specific but now you don't fall into the 'youtube hole' when the first video finishes.

I suspect this will be something that everyone has to be conscious of all the time, much like being careful that you don't eat too unhealthily. I don't think any one tool will be a magic bullet.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...

[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/df-tube-distractio...

What will work is unfortunately a little more complex to build i.e. you need to change functionality on these sites forcibly e.g. disable autoplay on YT automatically, fetch and create a newsfeed on FB to replace the shit stock one etc etc.

You would then need to keep up with these assholes trying to block your extension at every turn.

Sadly, this is the only approach that will actually work short of serious legislation.

Its kind of complex but works perfectly in trials. We also have the YouTube recommendations hider feature in the app.

Give it a shot and LMK what you think.

I always assume my user is blackout drunk and generally not very thoughtful i.e. they know what they want but they want that shit on a plate with 0 effort.

It might be what you're looking for.

Your addon/extension should track the amount of time spent on each of these time-waster websites, and allow the use to render graphs showing how their usage over time has changes. Perhaps even allow them to set goals(e.g less than 30 mins a day max, and under 2.5 hrs per week max) and visually show how close they are to their goals via graphs and other visuals.

Not only would it show users how much your extension is helping them, it would also provide them motivation to use it more, not to mention giving you some nice looking visuals to use for marketing

I used StayFocused before that but I think this is a bit more effective in emphasising the specific point in time in which I start being distracted.

Would like to see extensions that doesn't block but make reading Facebook or other services extremely annoying. For example: I go to 9-5 job, and when I open Facebook all posts are from PornHub. Without a way to turn this off, so no one will open site like that... :)

Extensions written for Chrome can be hand-ported to Firefox in the span of ten minutes, even if you don't have unminified source code. There used to be an extension that automatically did it, but I can't remember what it's called. WebExtensions are pretty neat!

That's a good point - making Facebook annoying to be on is a solution. We currently let you block elements like the newsfeed. As we ourselves found out, however, we want Facebook to be easy to use when we need to do legitimate work, and only block us when we aren't. Thus, we came up with a middleground.

I once knew a guy that beat his own dad with a keyboard when he threw away his computer because he was spending all his time scrolling through FB. Internet addiction is very hard, extensions are one way to solve them (noprocrast setting on HN is another one...). Good that someone is tackling this problem. :)

Sensing if you spend time on browsing newsfeed or administrating Facebook pages, and distinguish between these different activities. Did you work for the last two hours in VS Code, and now you are browsing newsfeed? IRC? RSS? Anything other than working? In this case, it will automatically switch you over to the last used app, and inform the user about spending too much time using FB or anything other on nonsense. Automatically filtering every system notification, showing you the most important ones. Not using the computer for more than 30 minutes after 6 pm? It will let you do anything you want but notify about other activities, for example, 4 hours on Netflix, and it's almost 12am? Then it will tell you, that for the last four days you slept at that time. And ask if you want to spend more time on those activities or gradually turndown brightness of your screen, and put your computer to sleep... :)

I did something similar myself: https://github.com/genesisdotre/Bitcoin-Games-nLightning-Min...

(with lightning network, streaming satoshis per second)

Quick feedback: - load instantly (don't wait for page to load) - choose the whole day - I'm from Europe, using 24 hours clock here

(I would like to use it around the clock by default)

Once it's on other browsers I'd love for it to be able to sync between them, so that I can see cumulative stats across all browsers.

Everybody says that until they get a buyout offer from Google. I like the problem you've chosen but you're asking me to tie your tool into everything I do online. That makes you an acquisition target. So: are you going to turn down a big exit to keep this promise?

If your promise is genuine then there is no difference for you in doing so.

Feature request: There are some sites I consider as generally unwanted distractions always, and some that I consider as unwanted distractions only when I'm at work. How about differentiating between work/home modes, or allowing for profiles, or something similar?

That sounds very valid - when we built this, we had the working mentality, but unwanted distraction when relaxing would definitely be useful for ourselves.

Would love to see how you guys use the insights from the extension to potentially gamify productivity as well as to understand your thinking around how to minimize distractions on mobile.

The extension is free at the moment. We plan on releasing for other browsers in the upcoming weeks. We plan on monetizing either through a premium tier with productivity tools built for power users or charging a very low amount from every user.

Question unrelated to app, but to your experience: Why did options market making not work out?

A major reason is in crypto, people can already leverage 100x, and thus people who would normally use options for leverage no longer need it.

“We won’t sell your data” is just wishful thinking and we both know that. It’s only a matter of time before this turns malicious and starts spying on users or wasting their time for the sake of “engagement” (the very thing it’s designed to fight against).

We make life easier with things like: - versioning, - packaging extensions for different extension galleries, - collecting payments, - gathering analytics (extension views, installations etc.).

Ping me at niespodd@gmx.ch if interested.

The extension looks cool (outside of it being proprietary) and it looks like you did a good job on it! I'm just trying to think of reasons as to why YC is trying to mimic Softbank. The only reason I can think of is that extensions occasionally get sold for thousands to malware vendors and the like, but that doesn't seem like something that would bring that much of a return, and seems too user-hostile to be something YC would bank on.

Actually, if you read http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html and http://www.paulgraham.com/altair.html, this startup is the sort that pg was writing about. That's why I told these guys to include the bit about solving a problem they themselves had; it's a classic marker. See also http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html: "Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign."

It's a fun exercise to imagine a path from the small thing to a big thing. Can we do it in this case? I'd say so. Online distractions, addictions, and the exploitation of human attention by big-tech companies are a big deal. Reclaiming control over time and attention could be something that a lot of people care about.

My only other guess outside of the one listed is that it could be sold to Facebook or twitter after getting a large audience, because it aligns with historical acquisitions somewhat.

I'd be happy to be shown wrong in a year (I'd literally take anything over what I imagine is going to happen to it), but presently I'm mostly just confused.

Responding to the edits I only noticed after responding:

"Don't be discouraged if what you produce initially is something other people dismiss as a toy. In fact, that's a good sign."

I wasn't trying to discourage the people making the extension! I was mostly seeing if I could get any spare guesses as to what YC's mindset was when thinking about this.

Regarding whether what it's combating is a big deal:

Certainly, but I'm not sure if the solution to all of those is...a new big tech company, to put questions of profitability aside. It seems partially like bait to be acquired by a social media company, or Nielsen (which is a literal malware company at this point, they pay users to MITM their connections; a way to get the same data without paying seems like something they'd love).

The way YC looks for signal is different: simple and rooted in a few fundamentals. Do the founders seem effective? are they talking to users? and so on. The funny thing is, even though the fundamentals are simple and have been laid out in pg essays for a decade or more, it's surprisingly hard to reason with them. The mind doesn't like to stop with so little. I think that's why YC funding something like this feels paradoxical. (In the present case, it wasn't what they applied with but something they came up with later; but that helps make the point.)

"Bait to get acquired" would be considered a negative, since that's not how a business like YC ends up with the few big successes that make or break it. It's more like this: is there some plausible random world in which this thing ends up becoming a major breakthrough? It doesn't have to be probable, just fairly imaginable. And the founders have to seem like the kind of people who might, with luck, pull it off.

(Sorry for editing the carpet from under you! What I just wrote here was in response to your pre-edited comment too, but hopefully is still relevant.)

That last line in the second paragraph made it click for me, thank you! At first I was under the impression they were funded after the 6 MVPs, but it makes sense that they were funded before/during that! With that bit of context, "betting on the founders" in this case makes much more sense to me.