
Show HN: Intent – A browser extension for fighting digital distractions - aaymeloglu
http://browsewithintent.com/
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aaymeloglu
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!

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javierjavier
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...](http://calnewport.com/blog/2017/10/02/are-you-using-social-media-
or-being-used-by-it/)

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zkms
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.

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dubin
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?

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aaymeloglu
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?

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dubin
Thanks for clarifying! Sounds good to me

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apoorv0512
Loving it so far, thanks intent team

