A friend amidst addictive yet useful internet tools.

Latest Version

Version

1.0

Update

November 6, 2020

Size

228KiB

Developer

Sober Media Extension

Social media sites are always trying to grab your attention, and often they use it to slowly and subtly influence you. Many of these subtle influences are not in your best interest.

Here's the experience of this extension:

You land on your typical social media site. The home feed starts off blurred so it won't distract you in a case where you're on that site for something else. The sideline items are blurred too (what's trending, who to follow, birthdays, etc). If you want to see anything blurred, you can just click and it will un-blur. In this case you want to browse your feed, so you click the feed to un-blur it, and then start scrolling through posts. Most of the posts have all of their content blurred except for the name of the poster. This is helpful because you really don't want to spend your time reading about what your high-school friends friend thinks. If you want to, you can just click. As for your best friends, they are automatically un-blurred because you clicked the trust-token next to their name earlier. Some time passes and you notice at the bottom left corner of the screen is a timer; it's designed to be un-invasive with muted colors, and somehow only updates when you aren't looking. This timer shows you've been on the site for 45 minutes today and on social media sites in general for almost 2 hours. Maybe it's time to do something else... like go for a walk.

--- How it Works ---

This extension does two major things to help you defend yourself from social media addiction and manipulation:

1. It blurs just enough content to let you choose what to interact with. There are plenty of fine-grain settings so you can change what is and is not blurred.

2. It has a timer (that can be disabled) that helps you keep track of how much time you've spent on social media sites.

--- Additional Features Include ---

* The ability to blur links to sites you deem unworthy (with optimized blurring features for two well known search engines [names omitted due to chrome web store policies])

* A timer you can add to any page you'd like to keep track of your time on

* A \"Trust Token\" system for Facebook and Twitter which allows you to automatically un-blur content from those you've deemed trustworthy

* Special blur features for seven of the most popular social media sites [names omitted due to chrome web store policies. You can see the list in one of the screenshots]

Source Manifest.json

{"update_url": "https://clients2.google.com/service/update2/crx", "name": "Sober Media", "version": "1.0", "description": "A friend amidst addictive yet useful internet tools.", "permissions": [ "tabs", "storage", "" ], "background": { "scripts": ["background/background.js"], "persistent": true }, "icons": { "256": "images/sober_media256.png" }, "browser_action": { "default_popup": "popup/popup.html", "default_icon": { "256": "images/sober_media256.png" }, "icons": { "256": "images/sober_media256.png" } }, "manifest_version": 2}

Download CRX(228KiB)