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This is great stuff, Harry. Congratulations on the launch.

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-...

Thank you so much for sharing these tips and suggestions on mobile. Mobile is definitely on our todo list, more so Android than iPhone. Like you mentioned, Android's digital well-being initiative helps better products emerge. Unfortunately, Apple still does not allow developer access to screen time functionatlities, and the only way to mimic that is through MDM, which not only is a bad workaround but also has been banned by Apple.

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.

What about a DNS based approach on iOS? You don't need MDM, just a VPN extension. You could send push notifications when your DNS server detects a site to block and mimic the same UX you have with a browser extension.

You are correct - that would work to send reminders (notifications). However, we wouldn't be able to prevent people from using their apps. This is definitely something we are considering.

Love the idea. Absolutely needed. You should at least offer the VPN solution, even if it's not as feature rich as the desktop extension.

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.

Thanks. Yes - it's definitely an area we will tackle very soon. We just recently got our extension to a state where people are finding it useful; we plan on using our learnings on desktop and apply them to mobile.

You could effectively block the network connectivity for them though by mapping domains to 127.0.0.1. Why wouldn't that be just as good? nextdns.io does a really good job of running such a service.

> nextdns.io does a really good job of running such a service.

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.

Agreed; it's definitely not trivial. We will definitely tackle mobile very soon, and this is a potential solution. Thanks!

Thanks for the suggestion - yes that is definitely something we've thought about and will possibly implement. We'll be tackling the mobile problem soon, and we hope to use our learnings from desktop to find the most effective solution in mobile.

I have this idea I like to think about from time to time.

"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.

Thank you letting us know your thoughts; you definitely raise some valid points on how much control we should give to our users. In our case, our philosophy is that our product should assist users in making the correct decisions, instead of forcing decisions upon our users.

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

Will be sure to keep an eye on Motion and how the product evolves. Good luck with the product you all.

Thanks!

From my experience, it's better in the long run to apply brute force restrictions on programs. It's too easy to modify and delete Stayfocusd though.

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.

Thanks for the suggestion! We've actually experimented with a similar concept - hold people accountable to their goals through social accountability, where friends can "watch over" each other and win/lose points (or money, in your case). Definitely interested in this concept.

I like the idea of looping in friends, I just wouldn't make the dollar payouts to them. I can imagine people enjoying sending money to their friends, partly for ironic comedic value (lol look how helpless I am, haha now we have a funny story of how I can't control myself and you're a terrible watchdog - maybe I'll even screenshot and post my failure so that our other friends can ironically enjoy this). For similar reasons, I also wouldn't pay my future self with the money. I can imagine people appreciating that as a way of forced saving, and you don't want them to appreciate the monetary loss at all. In fact, you want them to hate it - hence part of the punishment being a donation to a group that they don't like. The great thing about that is that the cost of the punishment could far exceed the monetary value of it - if you really hate a political party, the perceived cost could be 5x the dollars donated. Good luck with your program, and shoot me an email if you're interested in discussing further. My HN email address is in my profile.

That makes sense; I know people who've tried out this app called StickK where you donate to anti-charity if you don't follow habits. Definitely something on our minds.

Thanks for the share, Stickk looks interesting. Stayfocusd + Stickk, with cross-platform usage tracking, would be the holy grail. Another thing to note is that Stickk has a lot of user complaints, so there’s a lot of room for competition if they don’t iron out the kinks.

That's a very interesting thought. Yes agreed - StickK has a lot of user complaints so we would need to execute much better. A lot of these complaints arise from the fact that StickK literally puts you in a binding contract to pay the money - which may be necessary to enforce their kind of product, but also gets a lot of users angry and confused.

I looked at some of the negative reviews, and they seem to have a point.

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.

Thanks so much for this! I've saved this analysis and will keep it in mind as we decide to move toward this direction. Agreed with all three of your points; we can definitely have better execution on all these fronts.

This looks well packaged, and I can see the argument that it may be easier to use than the competition.

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?

Was my first thought, as well. However, making something previously un-monetizable with a much better UX can unlock new opportunities. Craigslist sublet board → Airbnb

We fully agree with this! Thanks!

Hi! 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.

as somebody with ADHD i use SelfControl and it's my savior. On the Android side i use a VPN that im connected to all the time that has a dual purpose, to block ads and to control what i do (i installed it on a super cheap VPS). And on my smartwatch i use pomodoro timer to keep me productive. I'ts hard and i fail a lot but it helps.

https://github.com/SelfControlApp/selfcontrol

Thanks for sharing that - I also know friends who use the VPN method on mobile. I myself used Forest as my pomodoro timer; one problem I had was often times I would forget to turn it on.

> We do not collect the URL or content of sites you visit.

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

Thanks; it's something we would want ourselves when we download an extension, so we built it into ours.

I really like developments in this space.

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...

Thanks for sharing! Agreed that both of these solutions are helpful, and I've seen many friends using them. For me personally, I wanted a more all-in-one solution, so we actually built hiding things like the Facebook newsfeed and Youtube recommended videos into our extension.

Be careful — Motion is an active Apple trademark in software (it’s a motion graphics package that works as a companion to Final Cut Pro).

Thanks for the heads-up!

The problem isn’t time spent on these sites, it’s finding better quality ways to spend the time. That’s the real challenge. Solution needs to be pull to something better not push away from something worse. Not that the push is necessarily bad but it’s not the full answer.

I agree with your point about finding better ways to spend time, but I also think that any LESS time spent on facebook and the like is a VERY positive thing. And despite being skeptical when reading the first few sentences of the original post, I think his app actually sounds like it does something valuable.

That's actually something we actively think about and have tried a failed solution in the past; we implemented a feature where you can find other productive things to do - the implementation wasn't good and we plan on giving this concept more tries in the coming weeks.

Couldn't agree more. This was fairly revelatory for me and I've been able to find more productive ways to spend my time recently. I even (shameless plug) wrote about it in a blog post: https://timwhite.digital/distractions

That's awesome! I have a question (we ourselves have been thinking very hard on this) - when you are about to start something distracting, and you catch yourself, how do you find and get yourself into a more productive alternative?

I would just get annoyed with the prompts and uninstall. This approach doesn't, hasn't and won't work.

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.

Agreed that we definitely have a lot more work to do. We currently let people change functionality on these websites - such as blocking the newsfeed. I like your suggestion that we should not only hide it, but also replace it. We'll think about that more.

Yup, I've built 2 products that crossed 50M users. One was a browser extension in the years before the iPhone.

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.

I definitely agree with you that for a lot of users, we need to make everything as easy as possible.

You should take a look at Baitblock (https://baitblock.app). We're working on something called the "Intelligent Blocker" (not yet in production, almost complete) that understands how you get to distractions in the first place. Then it removes the distracting types of comments, posts, search results, recommendations, links etc from the internet while you're working on studying.

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.

Looks great. I'm on Firefox so will wait for a version there.

I built an extension called Hide Feed that replaces the feeds to stop you from being distracted before it even happens: https://hidefeed.com/

It might be what you're looking for.

I just tried it. Unfortunately it does not seem to work with my use case where I use youtube to play music in a background tab while working on other things. I want it to block me from actively watching videos but playback in the background is fine in my case.

Check out Leechblock delaying page feature. There is a checkbox for "Count time spent on these sites only when browser tab is active"

Thanks for recommending that. We actually do one better - we not only count time when browser tab is active, but also stop counting time when we don't detect activity or video playing for longer than 5 minutes :)

Thanks for the suggestion. I see, that's very valid. I've added it to our todo list - don't block if it's not the active tab.

Hey guys, I have an idea/suggestion for you guys; you might already be doing this or it might just not be a worthwhile idea, but it sounds useful to me:

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

Definitely! Thanks for the idea. This is on our roadmap and we plan on implementing it next month.

Started using it about a week ago and it's super effective.

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.

I'm glad to hear that; thank you. Please let us know how we can make it better.

looks great! I'll try it when its usable from firefox, I'm not touching chrome, sorry :)

Firefox coming soon!

What about other browsers? Or other online distractions that aren't related to web browsers? For myself, extensions like this doesn't work at all, and for most addicted will not work as well.

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... :)

What I currently do is block on /etc/hosts. But like the OP says I don't actually want to perma block these sites, I do get real value out of them maybe 5 minutes a day. It just needs to not turn into 20 minutes. But you can use /etc/hosts perhaps if you really want a less easily turned off block.

Definitely agree with your sentiment; I probably only need Twitter for 10 minutes on most days. Yes - we are working on making it harder to ignore our extension when a person's being distracted. The key is really to build a good classifier of when a person's being productive or not on a distracting site. We currently let the user decide that when we intervene.

Me, too. I blocked reddit in hosts, so now I am here

use git to track /etc/hosts changes and you can get some stats out as to how well it works for you over time, or recognize patterns!

Thanks for letting us know. Extensions for other browsers are in the works, and will be available soon.

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.

Great! I really like the idea, but for users that are addicted from social media or from visiting that "one and only" website this isn't enough. They will uninstall extension, remove /etc/hosts or move to another browser to look on Facebook.

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. :)

Definitely agree with you that this is very hard and intricate - we are continuously thinking about how to balance between intermediate interventions/reminders and solving the most serious social media addictions.

Just a loose thought. It would be awesome to have a desktop app with minimal settings that would learn your habits and adapt to them. Something that will not block access but assist you with cutting your time spent on unnecessary tasks. Essentially, something that you already build, but without browser extensions and working on all system apps.

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... :)

Thanks a lot for all these ideas; can definitely be a great approach. Desktop and mobile are our two biggest directions. It is definitely on our minds to bring functionalities of our extension onto apps on the computer, and be more intelligent on how we intervene people and bring them back to productive work, like the ones you suggested.

I wouldn't personally use a proprietary extension with access to every tab, but:

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!

Yes - we definitely plan on turning on Firefox and other browsers soon. As you've mentioned, there are tools out there that makes this neat.

Excellent execution.

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)

Looks promising, just installed.

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.

Thank you! That is certainly on the todo list.

We firmly believe in data privacy, and promise that we will never sell user data.

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?

Thanks for voicing your concern. I don't believe we need an acquisition. As mentioned, 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. We are confident in our ability to generate revenue without selling user data.

In that case will you add to your data policy that user data is destroyed in the event of a transfer of ownership?

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

I use this product and I love it. It’s the small nudge I need to stay on task everyday. Recommend everyone gives this a try.

Thanks; please continue giving us suggestions on how to improve.

I tried this out now, and it seems really useful, both at work and outside work.

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?

Thank you!

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

This is a very useful tool, Harry. Appreciate the detailed writeup and thoughtful explanation.

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.

Thank you! Definitely.

I always find apps like this bizarre. How about practicing willpower? The shortest answer between A (wanting it) and B (having it), is to just do it. And when you fail, non-judgmentally self-analyze and try again.

There are countless examples of products that help people who can't "just do it". Nicotine patches, non-alcoholic alcohol, direct deposit savings programs, exercise buddies, etc. Everyone needs help, everyone has weak points. No shame in using technology to assist you in one of the hundreds of points in your day that require willpower.

That's actually similar to what my other co-founder told me when I tried to make this! It turned out, however, that our own willpower can be supplemented by tools. For example, sometimes I don't realize I've been on Twitter for 30 minutes - and as soon as I'm made aware of that, I leave. I think often times, it's about awareness rather than being forced by a piece of software.

You know willpower is a finite resource, right? This is targeted at people for whom the majority of waking hours is spent in front of a screen.

Thank you so much. It just installed it and I find the idea super cool. One suggestion, though: make it possible to enable 'hide news feed/recommend/...)' by default. Good luck!

Thank you! Yes - we are planning on implementing something along the line of remembering the last time you hide newsfeed, video recs

Congrats on shipping! I've just installed and I'm curious on how do you plan to monetize this extension (since it's free and doesn't collect the URLs of the sites visited).

They had a line in the post that explained that:

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.

Ouch, thanks! I missed that.

Just installed and this looks great. Good job on thinking it out more than other extensions.

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

Thank you.

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.

I will not use chrome but I’d love to try your extension. Could you add a way to get a reminder from your team when Firefox or safari support is available?

We have an informal manual list of emails of people who have requested Firefox. Please email harry@inmotion.app and I'll add you to the list. Thanks!

This is good stuff, just tried it! looks very promising.

Thanks! Love to hear what you think

Fantastic work, Harry! This is a great product!

Thank you! Would love to learn your thoughts :)

I like the idea! Looks similar to focus mode from Google's digital well-being, which I use often.

Thanks!

The fact this is VC funded is a red flag. There’s no reason why such a simple tool needs VC-level funding, and as a consequence the VCs also won’t be happy with the (relatively) low revenue from a paid product compared to a scummy product that stalks users.

“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).

Thank you for raising this concern. I believe YC sees value in our work not because they see money in us selling data; but rather they realize how big a problem we are solving, and, if we solve it correctly, how much value and time we bring to each person. A paid product can certainly generate much, much higher revenue than a product that sells data - Grammarly and LastPass are perfect examples of this.

Congrats Omid and team! I’ve been using it everyday. Probably saves me an hour

Thank you! Really glad to hear that.

Thank you! Glad it's been helpful!

Awesome! Just installed it, looking forward to seeing how it works.

Thanks! Please let us know your thoughts :)

Hmm, are there any plans to solve this problem for mobile?

Yes! It's on our roadmap. Android is easier than Apple due to developer API constraints, but we plan on tackling the mobile problem very soon (in the next 1-2 month).

Great to hear. Already enjoying the app. One concern a friend brought up is that he says he has security concerns about the extension in terms of tracking keypresses (triggered by dialogue box that said all data is read and can be changed when installing the extension). Thoughts?

Is it possible to hook into the chrome app in android and do timers and also freeze the page?

@qiyuxuan96 Hi there. I am developing a cross-browser extension development/deployment SaaS. Would you be interested in hearing more?

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.

I've been thinking on this for a few minutes, and I'm realizing I have no idea on what criteria YCombinator funds anymore. This seems like something the Pinboard Investment Co-Prosperity Cloud might have funded.

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.

Was about to post something similar. They might start with only a chrome extension though, while the big vision is much broader?

The vision is definitely much broader :) The immediate steps are desktop and mobile.

YC has always funded startups where the initial idea seems small but the founders seem effective and it's possible to imagine a path from the small thing to a big thing. That's one of YC's favorite kinds of startup to invest in. The fact that they seem odd and not worth funding is an advantage!

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.

Exactly that! You can start from simple extension and in few years have full fledged solution for internet addiction worth millions. For this to happen you have to find great founders, that keep on going no matter what. :)

I wasn't implying that YC had changed, just that I can't tell what the reasoning is anymore. The second link is an interesting thing to link, because the reason I included the last line (along the lines of "I guess it could be sold to a malware vendor or something") was more or less because I was thinking on that; I took my time to think, and couldn't find many optimistic things.

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).

I'm no expert in YC's business, but I think the confusion might be coming from thinking about this too similarly to how later-stage investment works, where there are fewer investments to place and more information available, and therefore more up-front analysis. It's not feasible to do that in YC's case, where they fund hundreds of startups a year. Nor can such analysis apply anyhow—there's too much uncertainty at the earliest stage.

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.)

(It's no problem! I edit after posting about as much as anyone, so I definitely understand it! I appreciate the depth of response; I just made sure to wait a bit before forming a response to this one; it's fun to watch the stages a comment goes through, sort of like watching thought in process but more refined. Thanks for putting so much thought into your responses!)

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.

I think yc would consider all those acquisitions you mentioned to be failures. One of the best things about yc is they are happy to get behind interesting projects built by interesting people and see what happens.

_I_ would consider all of those acquisitions to be failures, but YC has funded advertising companies and other "What if we sell user data?"-style companies in the past, so I'm not entirely sure. (Kuhcoon comes to mind, which was a notable backfire.)

Yeah I’m wondering what was written on the “how does this become a $100m business” field on the YC application form.

There's nothing like that in YC application form.

This is a serious problem we experience personally, and we know it’s a painful one for millions of others. We have the opportunity to help people claim back a significant amount of their time each day. The initial product is simple, but there are many other ways to expand and tackle this problem. Safe to say selling data or being acquired by malicious vendors is off the table.

Launch HN: Motion (YC W20) – defense against online distractions and addictions