• 

  see how much your friends have scrolled

• 

  video blurred, grayscale applied, and slowed down

• 

  modify the effects as well as blocked websites

Use your energy to do work, don't just create Friction.

Find yourself on Instagram Reels all day? Can't escape the Twitter drug? We'll help you break that habit with a bit of social friction.

Here's how it works:

• Get all your friends together in a group.
  • You can set your group's timezone as well as a designated no-friction rest period.
• Anytime someone scrolls on a website like Twitter or Instagram, the distance they scrolled is tracked.
• The more distance that the group scrolls, the more "friction" is added to everyone's trackpad.
  • This means over time, if people are doomscrolling a lot, it becomes harder & harder to scroll....
• And if you're addicted to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, we'll also make them slower and blurrier (+ greyscale them!) over time.
• You can customize all the settings. Choose whether to make your reels and shorts blur, slow down, turn black-and-white...or all of the above!
• Also, specify a list of websites to apply friction on. Spend too much time scrolling Hacker News? Just add it to the blocklist.

That way you put your energy towards other things, not just creating friction.

Behind-the-scenes

We've got a couple of things happening behind the scenes to make this happen:

• A PostgreSQL database being accessed / edited by a collection of Vercel Serverless Functions (via Prisma).
  • We're hosting this database on Vercel's Serverless Postgres.
• A Chrome extension built using React
  • This Chrome extension hijacks the wheel and onScroll events to produce the friction effect

Built at TreeHacks 2024 by @janetguo, @sampoder, and @maggie-j-liu

Built With

• chrome
• postgresql
• react