Dopanope - Put your impatience to good use and stop mindless browsing | Product...

Put your impatience to good use and stop mindless browsing

Heya Product Hunt! 👋

Dopanope is a Chrome extension that helps you stop wasting time on the internet.

It works by decoupling the action of going to your favourite time-wasting website (Reddit, Twitter, Facebook?) from the neurological reward (the dopamine hit you get when you check social media), by putting a randomized wait time in between. Basically, it puts your impatience to good use. 👀

I originally built Dopanope for myself, because I was spending unconscionable amounts of time on Reddit and Twitter. The worst part is, I was not even enjoying it, or consciously taking a break. I was joylessly doom-scrolling, mostly, to avoid doing something else I should have been doing. 🤦‍♀️

Dopanope was really useful to me, so I thought of shipping it as a product!

Here's how it works 🔎:

1. When you try to access a distracting site, it makes you wait for a random period of time. 2. Immediately, you start getting impatient. And no, you can't switch tabs -- if you do, Dopanope pauses the countdown till you return to the tab. 3. Most times, your impatience will win! If you still wait for the countdown and then access Twitter, then it's a conscious choice.

How's Dopanope different from the other blocker extensions out there? 💁‍♀️

There are tons of blocker extensions, and if you're reading this, you've probably tried several! This is how Dopanope is different:

✅ It forces you to stare at the most boring screen in the world -- because if you switch tabs, the countdown is paused. ✅ It randomizes the time delay, taking advantage of the Endowed Progress effect. ✅ Doesn't completely block the site -- because every time an extension tried to do this, I'd just self-sabotage by taking it as a personal challenge and try to get around the extension's block. 🫣

So Dopanope combines several tiny psychological tricks, to make a simple but effective solution for my (and hopefully your!) browsing problem.

Please try it and let me know what worked -- and what didn't! 🤓