Day 24: I can't decide what I want Hide Feed to be

I feel like the last several days of writing have been pretty bleh and I wanted to make up for it starting today, but I’m completely pooped after making the trip from LA to Austin and I can’t find the energy to write one of the more structured posts that I have swirling in my head. So today will be a stream-of-consciousness/word vomit kind of post!

Yesterday, on my last full day in Austin, I went over to Nat Eliason’s Cup and Leaf cafe. A friend introduced me to Nat’s writing maybe a year or two ago, and I’ve really enjoyed reading about the way he think about personal knowledge management and all the other things around entrepreneurship and productivity he writes about. He works out of his tea cafe (how cool is it that he actually brought a physical location to life from his online business) and when I came in that day, he was also manning it so he made my tea and we chatted a bit. I had actually visited the shop for the first time the previous week so this was my second time dropping by. Sometimes you meet people whose work you’ve followed online and find that their Internet persona is strikingly different than their real-life persona (often in a somewhat unflattering way) — not the case with Nat. He seemed just as thoughtful as he comes across in his writing, and I was really glad I decided to go say hi before leaving Austin. Should’ve done it sooner!

Anyway, I showed him Hide Feed while I was there and asked him what he thought about it. He liked the concept, and when I asked him if he had suggestions for what else he’d find interesting to take the place of the feed because I’ve been thinking recently about how there’s a lot of potential there because it’s a surface people will see many times a day.

He said that a todo list could be interesting there because it could help remind people what they want to do before they show their feed and start browsing. I’ve considered that idea before, but I had let it go as it made Hide Feed feel too much like a self-control tool.

But maybe I’m wrong. I’ve been trying to create this distinction between things that are appropriate for Hide Feed and things that are appropriate for Intention with self-control falling in the domain of Intention. But this isn’t the first time that I’ve had people mention that they think self-control can be a great use case for Hide Feed.

One of the reasons I’ve been hesitant to go down that path is because in my mind, Intention is a much better solution. Intention requires users to pre-commit to a time duration for using a website and after their time is up, it kicks them back out. I showed Nat the current build of Intention as well, and he mentioned that it feels a bit heavy-handed, which is definitely true. It feels much more like a roadblock than Hide Feed because it hides the entire website rather than just the feed portion of it. That’s also one of its advantages — since it shows its own screen, there’s a ton of room to show stats and things like a todo list.

I suspect that I may be getting too fixated on what I think people should want rather than what they actually want. Maybe it’s telling that I stopped using Intention on my browser when I stopped developing it.

My thoughts around this feel quite cluttered and I really am not sure whether I should try to make Hide Feed the Ultimate Extension or give Intention a try for a few weeks after getting Hide Feed to a good place and launching it.

I’m going to list the advantages that Intention has over Hide Feed in being a self-control tool:

Works with any website that the user wants, not just the major ones that I have to manually add support for
Works with any page of the website, not just the ones with the feed
Has a full screen to show dashboard / stats rather than just the feed area

Okay, this post probably makes no sense because it barely makes any sense to me but this is where my mind’s at. I’m sleepy so good night!