Show HN: Intent – A browser extension for fighting digital distractions | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Intent – A browser extension for fighting digital distractions

browsewithintent.com

21 pointsaaymeloglu7 comments

Hi there,

One of the developers here. The spirit with Intent is to use light touches to help you become more aware of how you spend your time online and thus make better decisions. We just released this and our number one goal is to get feedback about what is or isn’t effective for folks. We believe it’s a bit of a different take compared to products that either do heavy-handed blocking or focus on quantification without tools for follow-through, and we’re excited to see what people think!

Hello, another developer here. We thought it would be interesting to build something that didn’t depend on winning a technology war against distractions online. We’ll never be able to fully block sites (my fav example: the fb mobile apps are bundled with an ever-changing list of IPs), and we’re not sure we’d even want to, so instead we focus on the user and work to build a healthier relationship with the online world.[1]

It’s not going to work as quickly as blocking seems to, but we think it will be more effective over the long term. Hope folks like it!

(Personal anecdote: in building this I have completely changed my news consumption habits. I used to hit up the New Yorker/NYTimes/WaPo when boredom struck -- when I woke up, at lunch, in between tasks, etc. Working on this helped me realize that the return wasn’t worth the time investment, so now I set larger time chunks to read the physical New Yorker magazine and books. Much better!)

[1] Cal Newport calls this ‘controlled use’ -- http://calnewport.com/blog/2017/10/02/are-you-using-social-m...

I've been beta-testing this for a while and have found it very useful for its stated purpose (and have found the developers very responsive when reporting issues).

The feature that I feel lacks is that there's no way to properly quantify time spent on the iOS Twitter app (which I imagine could be approximated by looking at when I posted tweets or faved tweets); but besides that it's been a significantly useful browser extension.

Awesome! Just installed. I saw in the privacy policy that you only collect domains, not full urls. Do you also only collect/store domains of sites we're opting into track, or do you store all visited domains?

We store all visited domains (when not in incognito mode), minus a couple hardcoded categories like adult sites. We want to show you charts that reference your overall browsing habits during the review periods, and our settings panel gives you knobs to recategorize urls from your history, rather than sticking to our initial buckets.

As we mentioned in the privacy policy, we don't store your email address or any identifier that you'd typically associate with your account. We very much do not want it to be possible to tie a history back to a person.

Thoughts?

Thanks for clarifying! Sounds good to me

Loving it so far, thanks intent team

Reply on news.ycombinator.com