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Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web

tweeks.io

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Re: Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web

#41

Post by freshtake »

This looks cool and could be a much needed step towards fixing the web.

Some questions:

[Tech]

1. How deep does the modification go? If I request a tweek to the YouTube homepage, do I need to re-specify or reload the tweek to have it persist across the entire site (deeply nested pages, iframes, etc.)

2. What is your test and eval setup? How confident are you that the model is performing the requested change without being overly aggressive and eliminating important content?

3. What is your upkeep strategy? How will you ensure that your system continues to WAI after site owners update their content in potentially adversarial ways? In my experience LLMs do a fairly poor job at website understanding when the original author is intentionally trying to mess with the model, or has overly complex CSS and JS.

4. Can I prompt changes that I want to see globally applied across all sites (or a category of sites)? For example, I may want a persistent toolbar for quick actions across all pages -- essentially becoming a generic extension builder.

[Privacy]

5. Where and how are results being cached? For example, if I apply tweeks to a banking website, what content is being scraped and sent to an LLM? When I reload a site, is content being pulled purely from a local cache on my machine?

[Business]

6. Is this (or will it be) open source? IMO a large component of empowering the user against enshittification is open source. As compute commoditizes it will likely be open source that is the best hope for protection against the overlords.

7. What is your revenue model? If your product essentially wrestles control from site owners and reduces their optionality for revenue, your arbitrage is likely to be equal or less than the sum of site owners' loss (a potentially massive amount to be sure). It's unclear to me how you'd capture this value though, if open source.

8. Interested in the cost and latency. If this essentially requires an LLM call for every website I visit, this will start to add up. Also curious if this means that my cost will scale with the efficiency of the sites I visit (i.e. do my costs scale with the size of the site's content).

Very cool.

Cheers

Re: Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web

#42

Post by jmadeano »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #35

What a terribad front page! Telling me to install an extension without ever telling me what that extension actually does is the most rookie move ever!

Fair feedback. If you scroll down (or press "See it in action") there are some examples.

We definitely could invest more in a flashy landing page, but we're early, and we've focused more on trying to build a product that is useful than one that is well-marketed. For Silicon Valley, we have our priorities reversed, but I enjoy the product building :)

Re: Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web

#44

Post by jmadeano »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #40

I let GPT build a quick extension just a few weeks ago. It destroys instagram, linkedin and removes shorts from youtube. It's super easy, mostly just injects css into certain sites. Works great! I prefer it over trusting a third party with everything I do, those extensions have a scary amount of access and I never know who runs them.

I run this one, but valid that you don't know or trust me ;)

Totally hear you on the permissions/access, and there isn't really a workaround:

In order for us to be able to execute your scripts that do powerful things (send notifications, save to local storage, download things, etc.), our extension needs to have those permissions itself.

I started off doing the same as you, having GPT to write scripts for me, and you can go a long way with that. I personally ran into the ceiling and felt I could build out a more robust solution, but it serves your needs well, by all means

Re: Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web

#46

Post by jmadeano »

andy_ppp wrote: post #33

I would love it if I could process the actual contents of the feed with some rules... for example "Hide tweets about politics or woke/anti-woke culture wars or generally things designed to wind me up including replies to my tweets".

We'd love to do something like that! We can currently do things like "Hide content that mentions the word {X}" or "Hide content from {author}". Basically, behind the scenes it will implement a set of keywords to filter.

The limitation here is that the AI agent sees your page once and has to write a static script that applies generically.

What you're requesting would require an LLM call on every page request dynamically (rather than a static generated script) to categorize the content. It is possible and something we want to achieve, but we're not there quite yet.

Re: Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web

#47

Post by dang »

jasonjmcghee wrote: post #28

Isn't the opposite of enshittify, deshittify? You don't de-encode.

I confess that was my suggestion. While you are morphologically correct, I am unsure that this is the very best kind of correctness. It sounded funnier to me!

Re: Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web

#48

Post by jmadeano »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #34
jmadeano wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, this wouldn't be possible without the investment/cloud credits. And that is a shame because I think this is something that should exist in the world (even if I'm not the one building it). We're trying to make the most of the system. I'm honestly not certain myself how we'll monetize this, but I have had a lot of fun building it and using it myself, and seeing how others use it. As you said, if we continue do…

I wish you all the best, genuinely. Enjoy the work, the learnings, and experience. Hope to be taught something by what you discover.

Appreciate it!

Re: Launch HN: Tweeks (YC W25) – Browser extension to deshittify the web

#50

Post by bradly »

jmadeano wrote: post #21
bradly wrote: post #19

Where is your privacy policy and terms of service? I do not see either on your site.

Oh great point! We do have the privacy policy included directly on the site but I cut out a lot of the onboarding content if you don't have the extension installed. Working on it now! Edit: The site is an entangled mess of state machine and I don't want to break anything right now (+ I'm trying to keep up with all the comments + traffic) so I can just put it here for now: https://www.tweeks.io/privacy We care a lot a…

> Definitely open to feedback here!

Sure.

Know your audience. HN users are going to be focused on two things: how the your browers data is used and how you stop an agent from taking account numbers, inputted passwords, etc.

From the linked privacy policy:

   > Share data with third parties except our API service
It would be helpful for you to share the privacy policy of the API service as well.

   > When you use our script generation functionality:
   >    Generated Code: We retain rights to use, modify, distribute, and commercialize any scripts generated by our service
   >    Sharing Rights: Generated scripts may be used to improve our services, shared as examples, or incorporated into our script library
Anything you make is or can become public. I would revisit this decision and prioritize keeping users' data private.

Also, I would encourage you to understand your technology, even your marketing site, to be able to add a link to Privacy Policy and ToS in the footer without the burden of "an entangled mess of state machine" and the risk of breaking anything. If the marketing site technology is outside the scope of your expertise, consider how much worse would a static page would be?

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