

The Three Hour Hackathon to Cure Facebook Addiction - FaisalAbid
http://faisalabid.com/posts/509-the-three-hour-hackathon-to-cure-facebook-addiction
Just something my friend and I did this weekend. A stupid idea, but has the elements of what a real site could consist of. Payments, Datastorage, a pretty decent design.
======
Void_
\- Change your password to something random, store it in 1Password

\- Don't remember password in your web browser

\- Log out, only login if you really need to

\- Delete mobile app. Being bored on the bus is a great excuse to check
Facebook. Also, you won't have to face their idiotic ads

\- Keep the Messenger app, enable push notifications. "I have to read my
messages" won't be an excuse anymore, because you would have gotten a
notification.

\- Email people at their.name@facebook.com. You will get the response back in
your inbox. (If you're using Mountain Lion, you can set up contacts sync and
have Facebook emails of your friends in your Contacts.)

\- If you need IM, use Jabber protocol. Log in with
your.name@chat.facebook.com

\- If you're a member of some important groups, create an account with no
friends with only purpose to be member of those groups

I have this acquaintance that only uses Facebook for messaging. She never
posts anything, never comments, she is just somehow resilient to its charm. I
admire her endlessly for that, and I wish I had never succumbed to that
notifications icon.

Good luck.

~~~
stephengillie
_Being bored on the bus is a great excuse to check Facebook._

If you don't waste time checking FB when you're bored on the bus, you'll waste
time checking twitter, news, pinstagram, etc. Instead, _plan to use_ that time
by reading something you enjoy. If it's FB then why is that bad? It's moot
from a productivity perspective.

------
dreeves
Yikes, on an hour-adjusted basis you've shown us up brutally. We've put over
10,000 person-hours into <http://Beeminder.com>

But, especially now that we have RescueTime integration, I think our solution
is better! Here's what RescueTime generously said about using Beeminder +
RescueTime for this kind of thing:
[http://blog.rescuetime.com/2012/11/27/give-your-
productivity...](http://blog.rescuetime.com/2012/11/27/give-your-productivity-
goals-some-teeth-with-beeminder/)

------
noloqy
The noble thing would be to donate the money to charity. It doesn't feel right
to monetize on people's addictions, even if they themselves make the conscious
decision to accept the challenge.

~~~
FaisalAbid
Yup and thats what we plan to do. Were going to donate the money to the center
for mental health and addiction in Toronto.

We didn't write it on the website because we felt it would be too cheesy.

~~~
orthecreedence
I suggest you make a note of it somewhere. I went on the site and was thinking
"Where is my money going? If they just pocket it then I'm getting swindled."
It may be cheesy, but I think it's worth mentioning that you _aren't_
pocketing it =].

~~~
FaisalAbid
I guess you have a point. Will make the change.

EDIT: Change made.

------
motters
I like how they talk about it as if not using Facebook is some extraordinary
privation. I havn't used it for two years, and I officially closed my account
a year ago.

~~~
pessimizer
I closed my account over two years ago, and it really can be a hardship for
some people. If you're a non-smoker, it's hard to understand how being without
a cigarette can be an extraordinary privation.

~~~
pavel_lishin
It's not like going without cigarettes, but it's like refusing to have a
cellphone or voicemail.

Social events? Nearly every event I attend, I'm invited to via Facebook.

Family announcements? If there's a new baby in the family, I know about it
because of Facebook. (My wife's third cousins twice removed will not call her
to let her know, nor would I expect them to.)

~~~
pessimizer
I think it's more like going without cigarettes, in that it's an enormous
amount of useless crap information, some of it downright deceptive (i.e.
applications posting as your friends), randomly sprinkled with tidbits that
are slightly interesting, somewhat important, and rarely, downright vital. You
have no idea what's going to come out the next time you hit F5, so you keep
hitting it over and over again, although the vast majority of the output is
garbage.

It's a trained addiction, rather than a targeted means of communication like
cellphones, voicemails, or emails.

Caring that your wife's third cousins twice removed have had a baby, and
feeling like you have to know about it right after it has happened - that's a
symptom of facebook, not a problem that facebook is solving.

------
danso
Doing it in 3 hours is cool, but not really sold on the concept. A better
model would be to monitor rate of facebook activity (logins, posting,
messaging). There's a difference between using Facebook as a service and being
addicted to it...sometimes FB is the best way to reach people (who for some
reason don't want to use email anymore). The addiction part comes when you are
constantly posting and "liking" and responding, at random intervals throughout
the day (i.e. when you have a spare moment with your phone).

~~~
FaisalAbid
Thats a great idea. We were originally going to let the user use Facebook
authentication and do something there, but we didn't have time to implement
all that.

But going forward, if we actually want to keep the website up, then your idea
would make sense to implement and see how fast we can do it.

Thanks Danso for the advice.

~~~
jihip
Haha yeah, I think that's a great suggestion. I liked your original concept
too, but I'm a little too hesitant to actually close the account..

~~~
FaisalAbid
Come'on just 30 days. The world wont change :)

------
philfreo
> We also obviously built this on Node.js, anything else and it would take to
> much time to configure or setup.

really? node.js is the only way to deploy a web app quickly?

~~~
FaisalAbid
Ha, I knew someone would bring that up. No, obviously not. But my expertise
are in ColdFusion, and now Node.js for the past year, so compared to
ColdFusion Node.js is a breeze.

------
bubbleRefuge
<http://www.jetstrap.com/> Can you mock widgets using this tool or is it
mostly pages,layouts, navs?

~~~
yesimahuman
(Jetstrap creator here) - it's pages, layouts, and navs all with Bootstrap.
Think being able to drag and drop bootstrap components to a page and export
the HTML code.

------
pessimizer
>when someone loses a pledge, we will be donating it to
<http://www.camh.ca/en/hospital/Pages/home.aspx> Center for mental health and
addiction.

Give me a choice of charities (or open source projects) that my money goes to
(or is shared amongst), and take a cut for yourself. I'll be into you for
thousands in no time.

------
forgot_password
Heh, I found this amusing "We also obviously built this on Node.js, anything
else and it would take to much time to configure or setup." Couldn't you just
use a lightweight Ruby or Python framework (e.g. Sinatra)? And wouldn't any
simple data-store do? I'm surprised you even considered MongoDB...

~~~
FaisalAbid
For me, when doing Node development, usually my first instinct is to go for
MongoDB. I guess my post conveys that thought. But sure we could have used any
simple data store, and we did (parse).

As for Node.js, as I previously said in another comment, I am a former
ColdFusion developer, so again I bring many biases from that platform and
found Node.js to be super simple to use.

I'm not a Ruby or Python developer but I'm sure it would have taken someone
with those skill sets equally as fast.

------
afarrell
It seems like poor form to post publicly the names of people who are using
your app because they admit they've lost a bit of control over some part of
their lives. I'd make that optional.

If it is optional already, make it obvious that it is optional so that you
don't lose conversions on the front page.

~~~
FaisalAbid
You have a point I agree, we did have an option before but opted to take it
off at the last minute. Reason for that was we thought, hey its a name, were
not linking it to their page or anything. Lots of people have the same name.

But I see where you are coming from. Time to make some changes :)

------
sksksk
Cool idea, I'd up the stakes, and say that if you complete the challenge, you
get a share of the money from the people who didn't complete the challenge

~~~
FaisalAbid
LOL hilarious. Well right now we want the money to go to charity, but maybe
for our next weekend hack Twitaddict.io

------
MitziMoto
This is really awesome, and thanks for introducing me to Postmark, it looks
like exactly what I need for my current project.

~~~
FaisalAbid
No problem! PostMark is really slick, great interface too.

------
yesimahuman
Congrats on getting this out there and getting on the front page :) I'm
flattered you picked Jetstrap.

~~~
FaisalAbid
Thanks! Jetstrap was really core to this. We just dragged and dropped a few
things, and boom we have a decent looking website. The only HTML I did touch
on this website was when adding handlebars to do the dynamic stuff. Jetstrap
just made everything so easy.

------
wereHamster
You use stripe, so your market is US-only. You're missing out a huge chunk of
Facebook's user base.

~~~
FaisalAbid
I think stripe accepts credit cards from around the world?

------
ntide
You want to cure Facebook addiction?

Then delete your Facebook! I did it a year ago and I've never looked back.

------
misframer
Just curious, is there a reason why you used Parse and not something like
Cloudant?

~~~
FaisalAbid
Hey, good question. So we ended up using Parse really because thats the first
one that came to mind.

I didn't want to evaluate which is the better choice given our time. I knew
about Parse through word of mouth but never used it, so we just decided to
give it a try.

But thanks for introducing me to Cloudant, seems very cool.

------
QuantumGuy
Care to do one for social media in general(Google+,Youtube,Twitter,etc)?

~~~
FaisalAbid
LOL our next idea was Twitaddict.io. Sure we will do something next weekend!

------
parsnips
Nicely done. But I feel I'd lose too many fivers.

~~~
FaisalAbid
Haha! Thats what were hoping for :). The people who've signed up, were going
to start randomly checking their accounts from tonight so fingers crossed!

