Day 29: RIP Intention

I’m doing it. (Look top right of the screenshot.)

In some of my previous posts, I bemoaned my struggle around trying to decide whether to incorporate productivity / self-control features into Hide Feed because Intention, my other extension, seems much better suited for that task.

Well, today, I played around with adding a little section that tells you how many times and how long you’ve spent viewing your feed, and I’m excited about this direction with Hide Feed. This means that I’m officially tabling Intention because the feature set and use cases are largely redundant. I also think this will be my last major feature before actually launching (or at least soft-launching) Hide Feed because the product feels pretty solid.

Adding that usage stats feature adds a pretty significant use case to Hide Feed: Now, Hide Feed not only helps you avoid distractions, but helps you be intentional about how often and how much you view your feeds.

It still doesn’t have any sort of limiting behavior like Intention does, but even this seems like a big step towards helping people reflect more about how they’re spending their time. I’m actually not sure if I’ll implement limiting features — I want Hide Feed to have the feeling of a helpful butler (you enjoy the support it provides) rather than a chastising parent (you feel obligated to do something that you think you should do but don’t actually want to do). I think some people will find even the usage stats to be a bit too much because it’ll make them feel guilty about how they’re spending their time. I’ve included the ability to turn off the usage stats, but ultimately, I’m still not sure where I’d like to draw the line here.

Adding this feature also means that now, using Hide Feed makes sense on any site that sucks up your time, not just ones where the feed is a distraction from other tasks.

For example, I added support for Reddit a long time ago but removed it when I couldn’t think of why you’d go on Reddit except to go on the feed. The feed is basically the whole product for Reddit, whereas that’s not the case with other sites like YouTube (search and watch videos), Facebook (check notifications and respond to messages), etc.

Since Hide Feed has this additional use case of helping you manage your time and attention, it can basically be used for any site. I added Reddit back in, and I can think of a whole host of other sites where this would be useful: Hacker News, Product Hunt, news sites, ESPN, etc.

This means that I’ll probably start getting lots of requests for sites to add, which is one of the main reasons why I didn’t want to tread this territory with Hide Feed — I have to manually add support for each site because it requires that I identify the appropriate page elements to hide. This is actually a pretty tricky process because lots of modern single-page-app sites (like Reddit) will overwrite anything you inject if you choose a location inside of a container that’s being managed by a framework like React.

So here, I have to make a decision: Do I freeze the sites that are supported or keep adding more? Now that I have a framework in place, it’s relatively easy to add a new site (sometimes takes 20 minutes; sometimes takes 2 hours, depending on the site) but here’s the downside of adding more and more sites: People will expect that every site, once added, will be maintained. Sites change pretty frequently, and that means that the more sites I support, the more times I’ll find out that something is broken. Since I’m just one developer, I can’t afford to spend all my time putting out fires from broken websites.

Typing all this out is making me wonder whether I should revert the feature above because Intention can handle any site (since it hides the whole site rather than just a part of it by integrating with each site’s UI), but I think Nat had a good point in that Intention just feels way more heavy-handed than Hide Feed, which makes it a lot less appealing for people.

Even though Hide Feed blocks the feed, it somehow doesn’t feel like a barrier. Maybe it’s because it feels like I’m actually on the site (I see the URL, the toolbars, etc.) vs. Intention, which hijacks your request and loads its own page. That feels more like I’m being blocked. I wonder if this feeling also holds true for other people or whether it’s just me.

Anyway, I’m going to open this Pandora’s Box and see where this leads. Who knows, I may decide a month from now that this was a huge mistake and that I should’ve kept Hide Feed away from the productivity stuff, but I’m hoping that people will appreciate the lightweight nudges that are available to them and that I’m not wading into a world of maintainability hell.