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

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).

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-...

"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.