[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Atmana (YC S21) - An app to help cut down...
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Launch HN: Atmana (YC S21) - An app to help cut down on compulsive
porn usage
Hello HN, I'm Tejas from Atmana (https://atmana.org/). We have an
app and community to help people cut back on their compulsive (or
just excessive) use of pornography and other digital activities
like social media and gaming. Our community currently has 100k
members. Compulsive porn usage is a taboo topic. Millions of
people want to get away from this behavior, but it's an
embarrassing problem to discuss socially. Those who are struggling
tend to get anxious and lonely which increases the chances that
they further indulge in compulsive porn watching. This is the
classic addictive cycle. After discussing with many psychologists
and psychiatrists, as well as our users, we have built features
that help the user with: (1) Accountability: accountability to
one's goals is quite important to succeed. With this in mind, we
have a buddy system. Users can add a friend who controls the
content allowed on the device and gets daily reports on what kind
of content was accessed. (2) Judgement-free support: we have a
community of over 100,000 people who are trying to overcome their
porn problems. Users can participate anonymously in our community.
This reduces shame/stigma and helps people get support from peers.
(3) Blocking: We have an inbuilt blocker in our app which cuts out
all ways to access porn and we have built it quite robustly so that
there are no easy ways for most users to bypass it. I've spent the
last 3.5 years working on apps to do with habits. A colleague and I
got started with building apps that we ourselves wanted for
becoming healthy, like an app to gamify going to the gym everyday
and an app to wake up early. After failing to monetize any healthy
habit apps, I decided to work on reducing harmful habits, hoping
this would be easier to monetize. I had personally benefited by
cutting down porn in my life and it was quite difficult to quit
this behavior. Hence I decided to help others who had a similar
problem and launched NoPo, a porn de-addiction app. After a year of
building many features, I closed it down due to lack of engagement.
But after speaking to over 200 users of NoPo, I realized what our
app didn't do, which was: not showing the user their progress, not
keeping the user accountable and not blocking porn on the device.
After fixing all these issues, I launched BlockerX
(https://blockerx.net/), my fifth app, which users are finding
valuable in overcoming their porn related problems. Blocking adult
content effectively is quite challenging as users will always find
ways to bypass the blocking. The difficulty is to make the blocking
robust enough that the user can't bypass it, but at the same time
that the blocking only happens on adult content and not others
(minimizing false positives). We have done a bunch of optimizations
on our Android and iOS apps to make it just right - we consider
multiple signals before blocking to ensure the blocking is accurate
most of the time. We have a freemium model. Advanced features on
the app require a premium subscription (like ad free experience,
unlimited blocking, syncing of blocked items list across devices)
but main functionality, e.g. blocking of adult websites, is free to
use. Also, our marketing is currently oriented towards 18-to-30
year olds but this is just a starting point. We recognize that
these problems are not limited to any age group and want to help
everybody we can. We would love to hear from all of you. If you
have faced problems with porn or have seen someone you know face
this problem, feel free to share your experiences and feedback.
Thanks!
Author : zero_billion
Score : 135 points
Date : 2021-07-27 12:47 UTC (10 hours ago)
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Could a user download an app like reddit and watch porn through
| that app? What about x-rated images on Twitter, Instagram, 500px?
| zero_billion wrote:
| on android, adult content within social media apps will also be
| blocked. but, in iOS it's quite difficult, user will be able to
| access adult content on apps.
| yourad_io wrote:
| Suggestions for landing page copy:
|
| - I would change the hero text "Helping Millennials Overcome
| Digital Addictions" to just "Overcome Digital Addictions"
|
| - "millions" is not consistently capitalized.
|
| - "Know more" -> "Learn more"
| zero_billion wrote:
| sure, thanks so much. will correct these rightaway!
| crackercrews wrote:
| What is it like to work at a company where you have to think
| about porn all day long, in your quest to help other people from
| over-consuming it?
|
| Is it ever harmful for employees, who may be recovering from
| addiction?
| Debug_Overload wrote:
| Is this YC's version of getting in on the NoFap (and the porn
| "addiction") woo-ism? Such an odd thing to see on here.
|
| Anyway, on a technical level, how do you deal with apps like
| Reddit/Twitter which have tons of porn content without the user
| leaving for external links that you can block? How do you monitor
| that?
| zero_billion wrote:
| We do enforce NSFW filtering among platforms that provide a
| NSFW filtered option. E.g. youtube has such an option. It's
| quite challenging with reddit and social media sites. we have
| some indirect ways of blocking some of the social media content
| but in most cases. Users can also completely block "risky"
| apps.
| AkshitGarg wrote:
| Along with this, you could maybe also enforce google safe
| search or similar for search engines? As far as I know,
| Google allows such a thing
| zero_billion wrote:
| yes, we do enforce google and bing safe search.
| mbd0 wrote:
| If you can have a presence in Utah or really anywhere in the
| Mormon Belt (Idaho, Utah, Arizona) you'll likely find many
| willing early adopters for this. It's pretty common to see
| billboards on the freeway for adult site blockers, etc.
|
| Specifically near Brigham Young University in Provo...
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| This is a refreshingly wholesome startup. Well done!
|
| I am really interested in the social media blocking. I have been
| quitting social media for 5 or 6 years now. The hardest for me
| was Quora, I think. I don't know why, they where like the mafia:
| "Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in" What
| worked for me was blocking them on the router and the hosts
| files[0]. This meant there where two steps to unlocking a blocked
| site. And for extra friction I used a long router password and
| don't save it. The longer it takes you to reach the thing, the
| more opportunity to change your mind.
|
| The good news is that social media addiction is relatively quick
| and painless to cure. I stopped missing them after about a week.
|
| And there are a lot of positive outcomes from quitting this stuff
| (especially for doomscrollers and dopamine junkies ;) I have been
| quitting a lot of stuff recently like sugar, sweeteners, coffee,
| carbs and processed food! And for a little while it's rough.
| Quitting anything will be rough for at least a few days. But as
| you strip away more sources of artificial dopamine stimulation,
| the body compensates, or maybe you just become more sensitive to
| it. Real life starts to give you some of that dopamine buzz that
| you where chasing online (or in a can of diet soda!)
|
| But but now I start to feel little dopamine kicks whenever I take
| some small positive action like doing some exercise or fasting,
| or walking past the junk food.
|
| [0] crowd sourced hosts files to block ads, social-media and
| porn: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
| zero_billion wrote:
| great to know that you were actually able to quit social media
| and other heavy dopamine stimulants. this is inspiring!
|
| any specific resources/framework/books that helped you along
| this journey?
| irthomasthomas wrote:
| Off the top of my head no, most of my insight came from
| observing addiction in others, and experimenting over the
| course of a decade. However, the two books which I guess
| started me on this journey are Why We Get Fat by Garry Taube
| [0] and The 4 Hour Body by Tim Ferris [1]. Both of these
| books take a scientific approach to diet (which is governed
| by habit and addiction, after all).
|
| I will say this, I am convinced that for a lot of addictions,
| all you can do is substitute one addiction for another. But
| if the new addiction is something healthy, then I think that
| is fine. But if you do become a diet addict, keep it
| scientific, don't follow every blogspam diet fad.
|
| For social-media, I substituted a typing instructor game. So
| when ever I felt the urge to go doomscrolling or something, I
| would fire up a typing game instead. I keep a windows VM on
| hand just to play TypingMaster. It takes 3-5 minutes to
| complete one of the training sessions (which is probably less
| than you would have wasted on twitter). This helps kill the
| urge, and break the cycle. Plus it makes me a better typist.
| And when you can do 90wpm on QWERTY, switch to DVORAK.
|
| If you have a common chemical addiction like smoking, coffee,
| pain killers, alchohol then the only safe approach is the
| taper/step down. Measure how much you take now and then
| commit to reducing that amount by about 10% per week. So you
| smoke 18 a day instead of 20 in your first week. That's not
| so hard, right? Whatever you do, NEVER try cold turkey
| quitting any chemical, at least not before seeing a doctor.
| Chemical withdrawals range from terrible headaches for
| coffee, to deadly DTs from alcohol.
|
| [0] http://garytaubes.com/works/books/why-we-get-fat
|
| [1] https://fourhourbody.com
| Y_Y wrote:
| I love your typing idea. I do something similar, but with
| puzzles on lichess.
| vmception wrote:
| "Helping Millennials overcome digital additions"
|
| A lot of millennials go visit their parents and see they could
| use this even more as the parents lack the social reinforcement
| to standardize or smooth out behaviors. (While younger people may
| have equally problematic social reinforcement that enables
| behaviors)
|
| Do you think your messaging can incorporate a broader audience?
|
| Like, an older parent or person might see your site as just
| validation of millennial problems, while seeing no introspective
| duty for themselves.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Is this done without any tracking or collecting any data on
| users? Anonymity is _really hard_ and even huge companies get it
| wrong pretty often. Without anonymity I can 't see it being a
| good idea but maybe it is just because I use a lot of energy on
| privacy.
| zero_billion wrote:
| we don't store any of the browsing activities and signing up
| with email is optional. Signing up with an account helps sync
| preferences across devices and users can choose to do that.
| Niglodonicus wrote:
| A buddy system for curbing porn watching inevitably leads to the
| unfortunate and desperate scenario where you and your buddy close
| your eyes and swap hands.
| f6v wrote:
| Isn't it like dieting? What I mean is that digital escapism is a
| symptom, not a problem. Before social media existed, people used
| to fill up their time with: 1) Having many children 2) Watching
| TV 3) Excessive alcohol use etc.
|
| Media addiction is a manifestation of something, not the root
| cause.
| retrac wrote:
| Yes probably many analogies to dieting. I doubt it would help
| everyone stick to a diet but I bet many would benefit from a
| timelock on their fridge door from 8 pm to 6 am :) Putting up
| roadblocks to slow yourself and remind you of what you
| committed to before is sometimes an effective strategy, in my
| experience.
| bob33212 wrote:
| Yes it is very similar to dieting. Generally people get
| Bored/Nervous/Sad/Angry and try to eliminate that emotion with
| a hit of dopamine via some external input like
| Food/Sex/Drugs/Entertainment instead of recognizing the emotion
| and dealing with it another way
| Meditation/Mindfulness/Therapy/Fixing a Life problem.
|
| Removing all carbs from your home forces you to get out of the
| house to get junk food. During that time or because of the
| effort involved you may be able to control your emotions and
| make a better decision. The problem with porn is that it is so
| easy to get another way Phone, Another computer, saved locally
| on your hard drive.
| zero_billion wrote:
| quite true, porn is definitely very hard to stay off of as
| it's easily accessible at any time from any device.
| legerdemain wrote:
| You could make porn a special occasion to look forward to
| by only consuming porn content in person, in real life,
| outside the home, at peep shows and striptease clubs.
| 13of40 wrote:
| Since we're being open and honest in this thread, when
| anyone says "porn" should I be reading it as "masturbating
| to porn" or are there a significant number of people
| looking at porn just for the quick hit of seeing sexual
| stuff?
| globular-toast wrote:
| Yes, it is like dieting, but I don't agree that it's
| necessarily a symptom of some underlying problem.
|
| I used to think fat people were fat simply by choice. I mean,
| they are the only ones lifting the fork, right? But I no longer
| think it's this simple. We are the result of billions of years
| of evolution in a world where food was scarce. Those who didn't
| compete for food perished. Those who ate as much as they could
| when it was available survived. Nobody got fat because it was
| simply not possible.
|
| Sex is similar. We are descended from males who mated with as
| many women as they could. Maybe not all men are like me, but
| there is a part of my brain that literally wants to mate with
| every attractive woman I see. Obviously this is not possible
| for many reasons, but like all men, I do have as much sex as I
| possibly can, it's just not that much (not more than once a
| day). But you can read stories from rock stars and the like who
| do have access to much more sex and it can ruin their lives.
| This high availability is analogous to the high availability of
| food in modern times.
|
| Porn provides this high availability for normal people. It's
| like constantly available junk food. Even if I don't go looking
| for it, I am surrounded by it everywhere I look. Every other
| Youtube video is a woman with cleavage in the thumbnail. It's
| like being a fat person constantly surrounded with a buffet
| wherever I go. And remember, it's porn. It's not like I'm
| surrounded by cabbages and carrots, I'm surrounded by cakes and
| biscuits.
|
| I fail to see how climbing a mountain or starting a business or
| any of the other wholesome pursuits you might be thinking of
| would curb the desire to eat or mate. The underlying problem
| here is deeply rooted in our animal brains. The best way to
| curb the eating problem is to ensure food isn't available.
| Don't keep any ready-to-eat food in your house. The best way to
| curb the sex problem is exactly the same.
| throwaway306744 wrote:
| > Sex is similar. We are descended from males who mated with
| as many women as they could. Maybe not all men are like me,
| but there is a part of my brain that literally wants to mate
| with every attractive woman I see.
|
| Not quite. We are descended from sexual pairs whose children
| survived long enough to reproduce. Often, it took at least
| both mother and father to keep children alive. And human
| female reproduction selects for males who stick around,
| primarily by hiding most signs of ovulation, unlike many
| other mammals with obvious signs of momentary fertility.
|
| But you're not wrong either. Both male and female
| reproductive strategies want to maximize number and viability
| of offspring, but the female cost is much higher than the
| male cost in time and energy, so males can theoretically roam
| more easily. In the past, mobility and low populations
| generally limited that ability (though Genghis Khan managed).
| That's the disconnect between prehistoric and modern humans
| that porn and dating apps exploit.
| legerdemain wrote:
| > like all men, I do have as much sex as I possibly can
|
| Uhm... uhhh... How can I put this... I'm not sure your
| universal characterisation is universal in reality. Far from
| all men are sex fiends and horndogs, only the vocally
| dissatisfied ones seem to be.
| zero_billion wrote:
| i do agree this could be a symptom of another problem like
| depression etc. But, this is not true for all people. There are
| people who were perfectly normal and started watching porn out
| of curiosity or for entertainment and it became an escalating
| and eventually a compulsive behavior.
| bityard wrote:
| > Media addiction is a manifestation of something, not the root
| cause.
|
| I only partly agree. I have two children. We are loving parents
| and provide them with a stable house, lots of food, plenty of
| attention. They have friends, toys, games, books, musical
| instruments, bikes, and a whole neighborhood to explore. We are
| an extremely typical middle-class household.
|
| But left to their own devices, they will happily spend every
| waking hour in front a screen, watching videos or playing video
| games. There most certainly _is_ something incredibly mentally
| addicting about passive content consumption. It doesn't need a
| root cause, just like you don't need one with alcohol and other
| substance addiction.
|
| (And because this is HN, I am obliged to point out that I'm not
| saying media addiction can't be triggered by some other factor.
| Only that a trigger is not required to cause the addiction.)
| [deleted]
| brutusborn wrote:
| I agree with your view on the addictiveness of media, exept
| that the addiction has no root cause. My experience with
| alcohol and other substance abuse problems is that there is
| always an underlying psychological root cause. I beleive the
| same to be true of media addiction; excessive use to the
| point of "addiction" is escapism from some psychological
| distress.
| belorn wrote:
| With all due respect, kindness and context that I do not know
| you, your kids, family context, views or environment.
|
| In my experience, kids who has plenty of access and exposure
| to multiple different hobbies tend to chose to spend their
| time on hobbies rather than passive consumption. I know one
| example where the parents goal was a minimum of 2 hobbies at
| any time when the kid grow up so that if they lost enthusiasm
| for one they can always refocus on the other. Together with
| school activities, homework, and dedicated (and planed)
| social time between the parent and child, there simply isn't
| much time to choose passive content consumption.
|
| Every family is different and it is not a universal cure for
| anything, but I think it demonstrate that kids do not simply
| choose passive content consumption out of an addiction. They
| chose it when it seems like the best option among the
| accessible/experienced alternatives.
| Shindi wrote:
| > There most certainly _is_ something incredibly mentally
| addicting about passive content consumption. It doesn't need
| a root cause, just like you don't need one with alcohol and
| other substance addiction.
|
| One of the problems with porn is that it's so easily
| accessible. With alcohol or cigarettes or dieting it helps to
| have the thing out of site, ie don't buy it. But with porn,
| you can hop on any of the many available devices and in
| seconds get access to new videos every day. Also porn is very
| easy to hide. it's a lot harder to hide cig smoke, being
| drunk or high.
|
| I think that's the beauty of this app - it has a strong
| blocker that makes porn not as accessible and the community
| aspect makes it hard to hide.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I have wondered if this is materially different from previous
| generations children sitting glassy-eyed in front of the TV?
| I certainly spent at least a couple of hours a day doing that
| as a kid, with the added minus of having little control over
| what was on, or any way to block advertising... I suppose it
| did expose me to a lot of things I wouldn't have voluntarily
| sought out, though.
| nicoburns wrote:
| A couple of hours a day isn't great, but it's probably
| fine. That leaves you plenty of time for other things. Some
| kids these days spend far far longer than that in front of
| screens.
| [deleted]
| w_t_payne wrote:
| A nuanced and sophisticated approach should be able to identify
| and address the more problematic aspects of this activity whilst
| also acknowledging that people engage in it for many valid
| reasons.
|
| So, for example, it would be heart-warming to see efforts like
| this coupled with measures to help tackle some of the
| underling/driving issues that affect individuals such as unmet
| emotional needs, loneliness and emotional insecurity. Harm-
| causing factors from the broader social context also need to be
| explicitly identified and tackled, such as those social and
| cultural systems that weaponize and exploit naturally occurring
| human behaviours in service of various systematic and abusive
| control mechanisms.
| yourad_io wrote:
| How does the blocking work on a technical level?
|
| How do you prevent uninstalling?
| kmnc wrote:
| How many people who struggle with porn are actually just using it
| as a replacement for dealing with more destructive addictions?
| This was the issue for me, as a problem gambler porn became a
| scapegoat that I had more control over then gambling. It became a
| scapegoat for other things as well like not taking care of
| myself.
|
| The thing is, it was only when I decided to stop having an
| unhealthy relationship with porn full of negativity and self
| hatred that I began to focus on my actual issues.
|
| I use porn multiple times a week now, but I make sure to enjoy
| it, and make sure to think positively afterwards. It is
| incredible how just shifting your perspective can change things.
| Porn was not the problem, thinking it was is what put me in a
| cycle of self hatred.
|
| Now don't get me wrong, building up willpower and having a
| foundation to change your life is very powerful, but make sure
| you are changing the right thing.
|
| A healthy relationship with porn and self love has actually been
| incredibly beneficial to dealing with my real addiction:
| gambling.
| zero_billion wrote:
| thanks for sharing your experience. i guess it's different for
| different people. i have heard stories of young men who had
| erectile dysfunction. They could not get an erection with their
| partner but could an erection with porn. quitting porn has
| helped many such people overcome ED. before anyone asks, this
| relation of erectile dysfunction to porn is not yet proven.
| hopefully there will be more studies on the same in coming
| years. so, i would say for some quitting porn in itself
| improved their life conditions.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Do you have any science on that? A friend mentioned this to
| me, so I looked it up, and I could find no evidence (from
| reputable sources) that it's true. There does appear to be an
| increase in ED in younger men in recent years, and also a
| decrease in sperm count, but not one of the sources I found
| mentioned anything about porn usage being related.
| zero_billion wrote:
| true, i haven't found any research paper on this too. But,
| I have seen this being shared in our community posts.
| keyb0ardninja wrote:
| https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/research/
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ru3RQbsaYfM
| keyb0ardninja wrote:
| https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/research/
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ru3RQbsaYfM
| bambax wrote:
| > _quitting porn has helped many such people overcome porn_
|
| Sure. Is this a typo though? What do you mean exactly?
| zero_billion wrote:
| corrected this. i meant quitting porn has helped many such
| people overcome ED.
| joey_bob wrote:
| Probably a lot. On another level, do you think there is a
| universal ordering of addictions, or might it depend somewhat
| on individual proclivities? Say, might ones real addiction be
| porn, and they use gambling as a less harming replacement? The
| caveat being the maximum levels of practical harm are much
| larger for some addictions than others.
| erklik wrote:
| This is really interesting. Glad to see a new solution.
|
| I do wonder if there's a way to take constant screenshots of the
| screen, use a ML model to recognize any "porn" and then disable
| it.
|
| It's a terrible idea but my mind immediately went to it.
| zero_billion wrote:
| we did explore this option but screenshots drain down the
| battery heavily and hence, we had to drop this. we are still
| exploring this based on a certain risk score depending multiple
| factors like time, location, website accessed etc.
| rockbruno wrote:
| I know this isn't your fault, but I dislike society's tendency of
| trying to band-aid things instead of solving the actual issue.
| People wouldn't be addicted to sex if the media wasn't shoving it
| down your throat 24/7. If I open Netflix now, I guarantee at
| least half of the recommended shows are about sexual
| relationships, if not porn/sex worker stories explicitly. You
| can't get away from it.
| renewiltord wrote:
| > _People wouldn 't be addicted to sex if the media wasn't
| shoving it down your throat 24/7._
|
| What evidence do you have for this?
| ge96 wrote:
| This is a sci fi thing (literally black mirror) but one day
| when we have AR contacts, I would like to see what life would
| be like if I replaced women to look plain to me, like how I
| would be disinterested in men personally. Then I can live my
| life not being distracted, like in a work place, they'd just be
| another person I work with, no urges. I know I'm a creep for
| thinking that way.
|
| The other part of me that thinks this it's like giving up. I
| think to truly not care you need true abundance (action).
|
| Also extremes like pre-scanning incoming images on social media
| for semi-mature content and then blocking it, I do see that
| aspect.
|
| It is a thing though "simping" i.e. OF or Hololive on YT(this
| is less sexual more on the social replacement aspect), etc...
| getting sucked into that... thankfully I have not personally
| done that. But I am still a lonely man that is true. Couple
| minutes of the pixel release and I'm on my way.
| [deleted]
| goto11 wrote:
| Sex existed (and made people obsessed) before mass media.
| ekster wrote:
| > Sex existed before mass media
|
| Reading the comment you are replying to, I don't think they
| were trying to say it didn't, but that it's different now
| (for the reasons they enumerated)
| rockbruno wrote:
| While probably true at some extent for adults, I don't think
| 14 year old kids were masturbating 24/7 in medieval times.
| The situation is definitely worse today
| DeusExMachina wrote:
| Pervasive sexually explicit imagery definitely didn't.
| _game_of_life wrote:
| I have some ancient greek pottery that would VIGOROUSLY
| disagree with you. Also fertility statutes. Also a mural I
| got from Kanamara Matsuri (Japanese penis festival) last
| year.
|
| Pervasive sexually explicit (by today's standards) imagery
| most definitely has existed to varying degrees throughout
| antiquity.
|
| I like the idea of an app to help porn addiction though.
| People can become addicted to anything, and another tool in
| the toolbelt for those people is nice and wholesome IMO.
| zero_billion wrote:
| not just imagery, but high definition videos that mimic
| reality with VR headsets etc.
| zero_billion wrote:
| that's true. our modern society is overly stimulating and using
| our innate instincts to attract attention.
| brk wrote:
| I disagree. I personally think it would be less of an issue if
| it wasn't treated as such a taboo topic. Particularly in
| America, many people get far too worked up (IMO) about basic
| issues of sexuality or displays of anything mildly erotic in
| mainstream media.
|
| Also, FWIW, I do not see any of these Netflix show
| recommendations with significant sexual undertones. Then again,
| we also do not watch any of the fake reality TV, "dating"
| shows, or other drama-based programming.
| ekster wrote:
| This would be easy to test, do less prudish countries have
| less porn addiction?
| throwawayswede wrote:
| Wow. You could not have chosen a worse more condescending way to
| introduce your useless product.
|
| What we have here is a glorified set of blockers that could be
| replaced with a couple of PAC files and a pihole/nextdns. The
| screen time stuff is builtin to iOS and Android.
|
| If you really think you have a problem with some addiction, TALK
| TO A PSYCHOLOGIST. From my experience with cognitive behavioral
| therapy, it's usually the problems have nothing to do with your
| will-power or the phone/app/game/site itself. It could even have
| many other side effects on your life that you can't see like
| anger. There's absolutely nothing that can replace personal
| treatment with a psychologist. People invest money in many things
| and I think getting help from a real qualified psychologist
| rather than a faceless corporation and an "app" is probably the
| most important investment one can do, besides getting a place to
| live.
|
| Don't fall for bullshit products like this one. They're usually
| done by scammers capitalizing on the pains and misfortune of
| others.
| zero_billion wrote:
| i appreciate your feedback. thanks!
|
| we do have a feature where users can talk to a coach and get
| their problems addressed.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| What are you replacing porn with? Addiction or not, porn is a
| symptom of urban life, the tabooization of sex (paid or not) and
| the death of social clubs. Is there research that shows that such
| "blocking" interventions make people happier?
| root_axis wrote:
| What does porn have to do with "urban life"? I also don't see a
| connection to social clubs. Could you elaborate on this?
| epx wrote:
| Any habit taken mostly by men will be demonized.
| zero_billion wrote:
| after speaking to users, we figured out that what to replace
| with is best left to the user based on their choices. a lot of
| our users keep posting in our forums that they took up weight
| lifting, exercises, meditation etc. to distract them from their
| problematic behavior. as to studies, there is very little
| research on impact of porn. but, our users seem to be happy
| when they make progress and stay off porn for a long time. for
| some of them, it's very measurable as there is prevelance of
| problems like erectile dysfunction (ED), finding partner
| unattractive sexually etc. which affects person's sexual life.
| overcoming porn has improved sexual life of many people based
| on experiences shared by them.
| crsv wrote:
| So that's a "no" to the question of whether there is any
| empirical evidence saying that this intervention has a
| positive effect. Got it. No evidence.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/relevant-research-and-
| articl...
|
| > 56 neuroscience-based studies [...] All but one provide
| support for the addiction model as their findings mirror
| the neurological findings reported in substance addiction
| studies.
|
| > Over 60 studies reporting findings consistent with
| escalation of porn use (tolerance), habituation to porn,
| and even withdrawal symptoms
|
| > over 40 studies linking porn use/porn addiction to sexual
| problems and lower arousal to sexual stimuli
|
| > Over 80 studies link porn use to poorer sexual and
| relationship satisfaction
|
| > Over 90 studies link porn use to poorer mental-emotional
| health & poorer cognitive outcomes.
|
| > over 40 studies link porn use to "un-egalitarian
| attitudes" toward women and sexist views
|
| > Got it. No evidence.
| zero_billion wrote:
| i guess these are studies that indicate the harmful
| effects. but, the question was about whether quitting
| porn can make people happy. i guess that's not
| quantified. also, happiness is quite difficult to
| quantify in general.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| The username and the obsessive refs by the person you're
| responding to make me want to totally dismiss him. You
| see that kind of stuff a lot with this particular topic.
|
| HOWEVER, many people simply _want_ to change their own
| behavioral patterns and have a hard time doing it. Will
| they be measurably "happy" if they succeed? That's not
| the point. There's value in being able to do something
| (or stop doing something).
|
| None of these things are ever going to be "quantifiable"
| in a practical sense.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| > The username and the obsessive refs by the person
| you're responding to make me want to totally dismiss him
|
| How rational of you.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| Can it make you happy? Probably not. Can it make you
| _more_ happy? Almost guaranteed.
| yaseer wrote:
| This isn't an 'intervention'. These are individuals
| choosing to make a change in their habits.
|
| It's for that person to decide whether changing their
| habits is a positive goal to pursue.
| ripughna wrote:
| It's absolutely an intervention in the technical sense of
| the term.
| zero_billion wrote:
| it's an intervention only because the user is looking for
| an intervention to overcome some behaviors that are
| negatively impacting their life.
| JackFr wrote:
| "Happiness" is one of the very few areas where self-
| reported data is still very good data.
| zero_billion wrote:
| i second that.
| zero_billion wrote:
| i mean, it's quite qualitative at this point. this is not
| well understood yet. hopefully, in the coming years, there
| will be more data on the same.
| ekster wrote:
| I live in a place where sex isn't taboo (paid or not), there
| are social clubs although I am not sure what the connection is
| there, and we still have pornography technology that sometimes
| people get compulsive about. Before this, I lived a rural
| lifestyle and there was also access to porn there.
|
| This app also doesn't seem to work as an intervention, it is
| something the person themselves chooses to use or not.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| The important thing is many people WANT to reduce their
| consumption of this stuff but have difficulty doing so. It's a
| perfectly valid endeavor to provide tools or interventions that
| help them to do this. Not every therapeutic tool has to be
| backed by hard "research".
|
| There are definitely various forms of internet addiction which
| are growing rapidly and it appears traditional psychiatry
| hasn't been able to keep up. A community-based approach to
| address this problem for folks with common goals seems like a
| good idea. I don't know how I feel about this as a YC "start-
| up" but there's nothing wrong with the concept which at least
| tries to solve a real problem.
| pts_ wrote:
| You got to automate it as much as possible to remove a Quitters
| Inc. like situation.
| zero_billion wrote:
| haha. didn't quite get what you want us to automate?
| pfortuny wrote:
| This is such a laudable aim. Hope you succeed.
|
| Compulsive behaviour of any kind is terribly harmful and
| undesired porn watching is even worse because it is humiliating
| (to oneself) and destroys self-esteem...
|
| Wish you the best.
| zero_billion wrote:
| Thanks for your kind words and support. the shame and guilt
| associated with this makes it very traumatic for some people.
| throwawayswede wrote:
| > the shame and guilt associated with this makes it very
| traumatic for some people.
|
| It's laughable that you think the solution to a problem like
| this is to share one's own vulnerabilities with a faceless
| private company.
| dang wrote:
| You shouldn't be posting mean and snarky one-liners to HN,
| let alone shallow dismissals of someone's work. All that is
| against the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Even so I
| have some sympathy with the point behind your point and it
| makes me want to write something.
|
| It's true that our society has commodified and mechanized a
| lot of what used to be, and arguably should still be, human
| relations. But we shouldn't let the good be the enemy of
| the better. Your comment reminds me of a Launch HN from
| last week of a startup that provides advances to blue-
| collar workers on their wages (in a better way than payday
| loans). They had a story of some guy who ran out of gas,
| signed up for their app from the side of a highway, and got
| enough money to get gas and keep going. My first thought
| was: people shouldn't be paid so little that that can
| happen to them in the first place. On the other hand, those
| economics aren't going away soon, and it was much better
| for that man that the app existed, instead of staying
| stranded on the side of the road.
|
| In that case the active ingredient (the drug, one might
| say) was money and in this case it's sex, but either way,
| the startup is (presumably) doing some good, even if the
| broader context isn't changing much. I'm sure a lot of us
| feel queasy about the mixture of for-profit companies and
| helping people--but this is the nature of the web of
| economic and social relations in which we're all embedded.
| Non-profits have their own problems and it's certainly not
| the case that they are somehow immune from that web or pure
| of it. Quite the opposite.
|
| One other thing: to say we're all embedded means we're
| _all_ embedded. That includes you; I mean, you 're
| expressing your desire for supportive relations to be free
| of profit motives on a forum operated by a company with
| profit motives--not only that, the very company that funded
| just the startup you're dissing, and why? Profit motive. I
| think it's important for people who care about human
| relations not to take the stone-casting attitude of
| pretending to be pure and denouncing others, as if they/we
| weren't also implicated in the system that has these
| properties. To pretend otherwise is self-deceptive and for
| my money that can only add problem, not solution.
|
| If we can't allow profit motives to be mixed with nobler
| motives and call that a relatively good thing, the endgame
| of that stance is to leave _nothing_ but profit motives. Of
| the available options, I think we should take the impure
| mixed bag.
| csande17 wrote:
| Sure, all of humanity is inherently tainted by profit
| motives or whatever. That doesn't change the fact that
| trusting a Y Combinator startup with this kind of
| sensitive private medical information is a uniquely
| terrible idea. That information is going to leak, whether
| intentionally (maybe they'll "pivot" to selling it) or
| unintentionally via security issues like poor internal
| access control.
|
| Doctors also earn money, but they're human beings with
| actual identities, not legal entities that don't even
| list contact information on their website, and they're at
| least sort of bound by professional oaths and privacy
| laws.
| zero_billion wrote:
| support groups do help. it's proven to be effective with
| substance abuse addictions. we are helping people with a
| support group where users can share and help each other.
| throwawayswede wrote:
| They're sharing on your "platform". The only reason for
| you to do this is because it's profitable to you for some
| reason, hence, you're capitalizing on people's pains.
|
| Support groups help in real life, not over some app where
| a faceless entity's purpose of existence is to extract
| your money.
| lolc wrote:
| Eh, that's a low bar. By that metric therapists also
| capitalize on other people's pain.
| edgyquant wrote:
| They do but there's nothing wrong with that. Everything
| in life is an economic transaction if it involves more
| than one person. The other poster is just being pedantic
| and a bit mean.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| xwkd wrote:
| I truly appreciate your recognition of the problem and your
| sincere attempt at rectifying some of the behaviors that every
| generation is struggling with right now. I'd like to share some
| of my own personal experiences with the hope that it might
| influence your efforts in a positive direction.
|
| The reason that I don't watch porn anymore has very little to do
| with personal discipline and more to do with a reframing of the
| people that produce it. Porn commoditizes a powerful part of the
| human experience. It is, in effect, prostitution. In order to
| recognize this, I had to have enough life experience to
| understand what sex is and is not, how people trade parts of
| their soul for money, and how people compartmentalize and lie to
| themselves. I also had to understand something about what keeps
| that machine running. That takes time.
|
| I used to watch a _lot_ of porn. I 'm not sure that I would be
| able to fully convey and distill all the lessons I've learned
| since then to a version of myself that is 15 years younger and
| internally screaming for the kind of gratification that sex can
| bring. The only real way to absorb everything that you need to
| know is by actually living the experience. I needed to relate to
| people, to get messy and make mistakes and actually live and
| learn lessons about myself that you can't absorb through a
| computer monitor. Women are different when they're actually there
| with you in a way that you can smell, taste, and touch.
|
| Once you realize that the heart is involved and that's the way
| that it should be, then you start to look at the Riley Reids or
| Sasha Greys of the world through a different lens. You see what
| they've sacrificed. It's not sexy anymore.
| diag wrote:
| Sex is just an activity. It's a workout and feels fun and
| exciting. The fact that you think a person sacrifices their
| heart for sex mean you don't have a healthy relationship with
| it. It's not a one sided thing, of giving or taking, it's
| consensually shared between people.
|
| Sex can be, and I think should be, an emotionally fulfilling
| experience, but it's not a requirement as long as each person
| gets their needs met.
| xwkd wrote:
| I can appreciate that you have a different view from mine,
| but I am feeling like you didn't quite understand what I
| wrote. That's okay. Your judgement is totally valid, and I
| hope that as your view evolves, you continue to publish it.
| zero_billion wrote:
| thanks for sharing your experience. this is helpful!
| nonbirithm wrote:
| Unfortunately, there is a lot of porn that is created without
| using real actors, like drawing or writing, which reframes the
| commodity as something the author did because they like drawing
| or writing, not because they sacrificed their physical body and
| entered an actual industry. Many of these works have themes of
| sex positivity and belonging, and so my mind creates an
| exception for them, because I make the excuse that "it's not
| pornography at the lowest level, it's art with the occasional
| pornographic content."
|
| Maybe those artists sacrificed something too, but I don't see
| how it's any different from any average author sacrificing his
| life to write an all-ages novel.
|
| The worst thing about porn addiction is that there are no
| physical dealers or substances involved. As long as your body
| is intact, all you need to become addicted is a screen and
| enough privacy, two things that are almost always available
| right before you go to sleep. And even without a screen, you
| can still use your imagination. Getting past that means finding
| other things in life to do that are more satisfying.
| xwkd wrote:
| This is true, and I wouldn't worry about the author or artist
| sacrificing aspects of their soul in the same way that I
| would a porn star. Hell, they produced art. Good for them I
| guess.
|
| Even with erotica though, the insidious thing about chronic
| masturbation is that you just can't see the effect that it
| has on you. It's happening under the surface. It's happening
| to your heart. Your inescapable subconscious conscience is
| going to find a way to give you feedback, and it's going to
| be hard for you to see it.
|
| People have written about sexual sublimation (in its various
| forms) for thousands of years because _eventually_ some
| people have enough experience under their belt to look back
| and make the connection. You can 't really expect a 15-year-
| old with an infinite porn machine to think to themselves,
| "Hmm, maybe it would be better for my heart _not_ to mash my
| junk today. " They're hungry, man. They're starving. And in
| 2021 we're doing everything we can to ensure that teenagers
| don't make the mistakes that they need to make in order to
| break free from that tap.
|
| (Not to mention absent fathers, social changes, etc.)
| retrac wrote:
| May I posit that, while they technically meet the definition
| of "pornography" in most dictionaries (and sometimes common
| use) that written erotic stories simply are in a different
| category altogether in many ways? Now, as a fair disclaimer,
| I personally have no moral objection to people getting erotic
| pleasure or stimulation from such media, in the abstract. I
| think it might actually be a net-healthy thing in some
| limited contexts.
|
| But I do worry about how what sex acts are depicted as normal
| might scramble our interpersonal relationships. I worry about
| how implausibly beautiful people might damage our self-
| esteem. And the increasing integration into "endless
| scrolling" with a social aspect and the clicky-clicky
| dopamine feedback cycle is the death blow.
|
| Most of these concerns are close to nil with an erotic short
| story, by comparison. To brutally chop this down to a simple
| idea: Monkey see, monkey do. Monkey think abstractly through
| imagination, monkey imagine but not see and so not do.
|
| After all, don't you think it's telling that, while teen
| girls are hooked on the image-pornography of fake stardom
| lives on Instagram, and teen boys are hooked on OnlyFans
| content and half-clad Twitch streamers, that there is (to my
| knowledge) no epidemic of compulsive erotic story writing and
| reading to go with it? Oh, I'm sure some people do spend 12
| hours a day at that, but it seems not to tickle our brains in
| quite the same way. Such things are merely sporadically
| titillating, not horrifically and compulsively addictive, at
| least for the typical person.
| jeffrwells wrote:
| CovenantEyes has pretty advanced blocking/monitoring tech with a
| similar accountability system, you may want to check it out.
|
| They use a VPN config on iOS to monitor traffic, and on MacOS
| make their monitoring app very difficult to uninstall without an
| uninstall key (which notifies your accountability partners)
| zero_billion wrote:
| true, they do have a good blocking system. i have tried their
| products.
| emacsen wrote:
| Some of this is interesting, such as the social media aspect, but
| I'd like to understand exactly what your motivation is and where
| your funding is from.
|
| One of the things few people know about the new "porn addiction"
| websites, including NoFap and "Fight the New Drug" is that there
| are connections between these groups and the LDS (ie Mormon)
| church.
|
| It's less about "addiction" than creating a stigma around
| pornography use by wrapping it in pseudo-science.
|
| While pornography can be addictive, there are other models than
| absence and restriction that are shown to help all addiction (not
| just pornography), and I'm wondering if you'd looked into them,
| or (frankly) if this is just another LSD-funded scheme to turn
| people off of the idea of porn.
| zero_billion wrote:
| we're completely bootstrapped and haven't taken any external
| funding yet. we aren't sponsored by any church etc. and have no
| religious affiliation.
|
| restriction might help all addictions. But, we need to start
| somewhere, and we have chosen this specific problem. we plan to
| launch solutions for compulsive usage of technology products in
| the coming months and years.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| > we're completely bootstrapped and haven't taken any
| external funding yet
|
| Didn't you take YC money? That sounds external and not
| bootstrapped to me. Unless they've changed the rules.
| zero_billion wrote:
| sorry, I missed YC. Other than YC we haven't taken any
| external funds. I forgot to add this as technically the
| funds still haven't hit our account (still paperwork is
| pending).
| borski wrote:
| Fair point, but I'd assume the parent meant outside of YC.
| To my knowledge, YC doesn't have any connections to LDS or
| the Mormon church. :)
| keyb0ardninja wrote:
| No pseudo-science is required when you've real solid science:
|
| https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/research/
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ru3RQbsaYfM
| belorn wrote:
| There is better unbiased sources for science, and the best is
| simply the medical definition in DSM-5 (Diagnostic and
| Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition) or
| ICD-11 (eleventh revision of the International Classification
| of Diseases).
|
| There is no addiction or compulsion unless the person is
| experiencing direct negative consequences to one's physical,
| mental, social, or financial well-being. I.E, no professional
| following a medical definition would touch a diagnosis of
| pornography compulsion unless there is clear documentation
| that the viewing has been causing negative consequences for
| the individual. Most likely they would not diagnose anything
| related to porn usage at all since neither the international
| standards nor World Health Organization recognize the
| diagnosis.
|
| What a lot of people also try to imply is that all porn usage
| causes negative consequences. It is a bit like the
| prohibition tactic implying that any alcohol consumption
| causes alcoholism and significant bodily harm. Naturally we
| won't find a study saying there is no correlation between
| alcoholism and alcohol consumption, and some of the studies
| is likely to imply that consumption of alcohol _may_ cause
| alcoholism. What the more insightful studies show is the risk
| factors that makes a person more likely to become addicted or
| get compulsions and what factors gives protection against it.
| The usual finding in such studies are environmental factors
| rather than simply consumption.
| huanwin wrote:
| There are definitely groups out there pushing a religious or
| prudish agenda.
|
| I'd like to offer my own anecdote, as a completely secular
| person whose lifestyle would probably invite condemnation, if
| not horror, from e.g. LDS. I won't describe exactly why they
| might feel that way, but let it suffice to say that I have
| spent non-trivial time around people who have done what some
| call victimless crimes, among other and more legal behaviors.
|
| I find that I feel better emotionally and perform better
| professionally (and academically, when I was in school) when I
| refrain completely from this vice. I also find that I have much
| less intrusive thoughts of the sexual variety, especially at
| inappropriate times about inappropriate people.
|
| I understand your concern that pseudoscientific and/or
| religious groups might be exerting this influence. I just
| wanted to give an example of the opposite.
|
| See these videos [0] [1] where people in the gaming community
| (which in my experience is very often agnostic, if not atheist)
| have essentially a group coaching session with a psychologist
| for their undesired relationships to porn. Very rarely do they
| mention religion, but quite often do they mention emotional
| distress, life difficulties, social struggles, and difficulty
| stopping a behavior they find distressing. Whether or not it's
| an "addiction" (and scientific discussions related to the
| debate) I find irrelevant -- they personally wish they could
| stop and have trouble doing so.
|
| I appreciate your efforts to, as I perceive it, point out
| potential sources of bias or misinformation. I just wanted to
| offer a totally secular view of the benefit of and reason why
| an app like this might have funding and a market.
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/e1ndqAkiQZo
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/lUVeUSIlQiI
| lolc wrote:
| As somebody who had a porn addiction (as in: I feel my
| consumption negatively impacted my life) I don't understand why
| some commenters here say it's "only" treating a symptom.
|
| Sure, if I'd felt more engaged in other areas during my youth, I
| might not have started consuming porn. And I might not have
| stopped consuming if it weren't for changes in my life that
| prompted me to do so. But please, when treating addiction you
| can't try to solve all the other problematic patterns in a
| person's life. Often only after resolving the addiction people
| are enabled to address their other pain-points.
|
| If this app -- and I wouldn't trust that thing on any of my
| devices -- helps people get off porn when they want to get off of
| it, I don't see how this is problematic. Or any more problematic
| than the use of apps for making life decisions in general.
|
| There are many ways to manage one's habits and if something else
| works for you, good for you. That doesn't invalidate the approach
| chosen for the app.
| jchallis wrote:
| Hi Tejas - I hope you are very successful in this venture.
|
| I can offer a potentially helpful data point. I was on a flight
| once next to a gentleman who was quite high in his local LDS
| church (not bishop but next level down?). He railed against porn
| addiction specifically as the root cause of many sorts of pain,
| and wished there was a tool just like this to help his flock
| avoid the porn demon. He worked with quite a few young men who
| actively struggled and I think a positive tool like this could
| have helped those guys get what they need. If you are looking for
| funding, I would definitely consider that a lot of deep pocketed
| folks are LDS church fathers.
| marius_k wrote:
| Great, I hope I will be able to quit Hacker News!
| benlawraus wrote:
| Can this be adapted to keep our kids away from porn?
| throwawayswede wrote:
| You can raise them well. Porn is not the issue, replacing
| reallife with porn is.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Congratulations on the HN launch, Tejas. This has been quite many
| years in the making! Kudos for persisting.
|
| > _Compulsive porn usage is a taboo topic. Millions of people
| want to get away from this behavior, but it 's an embarrassing
| problem to discuss socially. _
|
| Definitely: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoFap/ Some folks clearly
| signal a need for this no doubt, while others who've quit porn,
| report substantial improvement in their personal relationships,
| as well.
|
| > _Blocking adult content effectively is quite challenging as
| users will always find ways to bypass the blocking. The
| difficulty is to make the blocking robust enough that the user
| can 't bypass it, but at the same time that the blocking only
| happens on adult content and not others (minimizing false
| positives). We have done a bunch of optimizations on our Android
| and iOS apps to make it just right - we consider multiple signals
| before blocking to ensure the blocking is accurate most of the
| time._
|
| I co-develop an open-source content-blocker for Android based on
| DNS and IP addresses. The top feature requests have always been
| around blocking porn and social media. We rely on publicly-
| curated blocklists for that, so that's one source of lagging
| indicator where some domains pass through.
|
| Besides, for an Android app to track user's habits (
| _accountability_ ) is achievable, but letting a user never bypass
| it isn't do-able at all, because the phone and all its _Settings_
| are in control of the users themselves. As one example, if users
| set DNS to point to _family.cloudflare.com_ , they can also unset
| it just as easily. If the user needs to start the app to track
| porn/social-media usage, they can also force-stop the app just as
| well.
|
| A hardware-based firewall like _firewalla_ or _PfSense_ can be
| more powerful in terms of preventing a bypass network-wide, but
| it isn 't mobile, and its effectiveness is limited to home
| networks.
|
| So: I am curious (and you stress more than once in your post) how
| does BlockerX accomplish preventing its users from bypassing
| block protections?
| zero_billion wrote:
| thanks for your kind words and comment.
|
| As to how we prevent bypasses, we have a many little things
| that overall work really well. E.g. in iOS, if user disables a
| vpn profile, we have a way to enable this in a few seconds. in
| android, with a few additional permissions, we can block force
| stop and many such ways of bypassing. there are 100s of
| loopholes with a blocker. we have meticulously plugged many of
| them one by one. and we're still continuing to plug each day.
| esrh wrote:
| Something that interests me is that you mention porn specifically
| in your title and write about it a lot in your body text, but the
| website itself seems to have a MUCH broader scope. It seems like
| there's a disconnect between the marketing and what your
| intentions are.
|
| Are you developing this with preventing porn addicting in mind
| first, or are you treating all addictions equally? (IMO, social
| media addiction is a bigger problem, but as you probably know
| several good blocking programs exist)
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Is porn really a problem, or is this an excuse to inject big
| brother into peoples lives.
|
| I've always considered it incredibly creepy and suspicious that
| people even want to get into "nofap enforcement movement". This
| is like religious morality policing you would find in places like
| Iran.
|
| I don't like it. And think one should do some soul searching over
| why you need to push your morality on others.
| zero_billion wrote:
| I honestly don't think there is any policing. there are groups
| like nofap because people who fundamentally believed that they
| wanted to quit porn came together and there's no force. people
| do this voluntarily based on their own choice.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| If it was voluntary, there would be no need for a app. It's
| policing and enforcement. Of some personal morality.
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| Would you say the same about quitting smoking? Or harder
| drugs?
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Yeah, probably. Who you who didn't like smoking. Doh,
| Godwin'd. Anti drug people are the worst kinda
| authoritarians too.
| dogorman wrote:
| So you think everybody who goes to Alcoholics Anonymous
| is a closet Nazi? Is that your deal? Get a grip, please.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| Not claiming this at all, didn't mention alcohol. What I
| am proposing is many groups (esp religious 'addiction'
| services) _organizing_ come from a place of
| authoritarian, paternalistic and moral policing of those
| they believe are "weak".
| dogorman wrote:
| > _Not claiming this at all, didn't mention alcohol._
|
| Wait, so you claim it of people who want to quit
| unspecified "hard drugs", but not alcohol specifically?
| Attendance to alcoholics anonymous is voluntary (usually,
| though sometimes a court compels it.) Use of this
| application is also voluntary. So what's the fundamental
| difference here?
|
| > _groups (esp religious 'addiction' services)
| _organizing__
|
| If this is really key to what you're getting at, then it
| makes no sense for you to exclude Alcoholics Anonymous
| from your ire since that is an organized group that is
| religion-adjacent if not outright religious.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| You are missing what I'm saying. It's not about a
| particular substance. All power to folks who want to face
| their demons. I want people the be healthy, like anyone
| else. This isn't about the people wanting to quit.
|
| It's about the people that are building structures to
| enforce their own morality and dressing it up as helping
| addiction. Those that prey on those wanting to quit.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't respond to bad comments by breaking the site
| guidelines yourself. That only makes the thread even
| worse.
|
| " _Don 't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them
| instead._"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| read_if_gay_ wrote:
| You're conflating liking the act and liking the
| consequences of the act.
| zero_billion wrote:
| even with the app, only those who think our app will help
| them will install. it's not for everyone. we are firm
| believers in the free market economy and we are in no way
| saying that porn is bad or immoral etc. we are only
| assisting people who need help in quitting a problematic
| behavior.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| You say this, but you appear to have dedicated your
| profession to blocking porn. (Multiple apps). I have
| trouble believing that this is not a moral crusade for
| you, dressed up as "helping people recover". You are just
| setting up a censorship regime, which does not deal with
| the supposed underlying issues. I'm sorry for not
| assuming good faith here.
| dogorman wrote:
| > _I'm sorry for not assuming good faith here._
|
| You're not sorry.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > even with the app, only those who think our app will
| help them will install.
|
| I already asked upthread, but since this is here: how do
| you intend to insure this? For example, how do you insure
| that minors who have this app installed by their parents
| or guardians will be able to remove or bypass it,
| particularly without the parent being able to detect that
| (and thereby prevent it via threats)?
| bserge wrote:
| Can I ask, how are you blocking it?
|
| Also, it seems rather strange to me that you focus on
| porn when social media is a bigger problem.
|
| But that's probably because of my own bias, I've been
| trying to quit Reddit and other garbage for years.
| zero_billion wrote:
| our block depends on the device, on android it's dns and
| showing an overlay on adult contnet. in ios it's through
| dns/vpn.
|
| regarding social media - that's next on our list! porn
| was the 1st use case and we plan to help people limit
| social media and gaming in the coming years.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| (Not optimistic, but I figure it's polite to ask rather than
| assume malice by default:)
|
| How do you intend to insure that your software cannot be used to
| deny access to porn (and other objectionable content) to users
| who _do_ want to access it, especially but not exclusively minors
| whom the software is used against by their legal guardians or
| other 'legitimate' authority figures.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| I'm very curious what's your marketing strategy going to be? I
| have a feeling word-of-mouth isn't gonna work very well
| zero_billion wrote:
| that's true - our space is inherently non viral. we have so far
| gotten users organically through play store and google search.
| we are experimenting with paid marketing channels for growth.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| There are many organizations (worldwide) that deal with
| digital addictions; it might be worth reaching out to them as
| well, or getting known in those circles.
| zero_billion wrote:
| that's an interesting idea. will explore this further. do
| reply if you know any such organizations at the top of your
| head.
| erklik wrote:
| > our space is inherently non viral
|
| There are communities on the internet that are specifically
| for these issues. Light advertisement with the consent of
| various moderators would not be bad idea. /r/NoFap comes to
| mind specifically, but also various religious communities
| where the desire for NoFap extends more from religious
| obligations would still find this interesting, I imagine.
| zero_billion wrote:
| that's true. a few of our competitors are quite strong in
| religious channels to promote their products. this is
| definitely an interesting channel to explore. as to
| /r/nofap - for some reason this channel doesn't show in the
| sub reddits where ads can be shown. it could be due to
| adult words used in the forum (just a guess, not sure what
| the reason is).
| yourad_io wrote:
| Would you consider advertising on porn sites?
| zero_billion wrote:
| that's actually a good idea. however, 99.5+% of those who
| watch porn might not have a problem with it and hence,
| might not need our solution. but, worth exploring, this
| could be similar to running banner ads where a small % of
| impressions result in click.
| [deleted]
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