Conversation

Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
I love the move this project makes of injecting new nouns and verbs into pre-existing habits and environments. A new kind of controllable peripheral vision. I'm not very task-ish, so this makes me wonder: what else might I want to throw in these slots? e.g. favorite art/poetry?
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Jason Yuan
@jasonyuandesign
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Introducing Hijack Your Feed—an extension that replaces ads on your Twitter feed with tasks from your todo list ⚡ hijack.social
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1:13 AM · Jan 3, 2021Twitter Web App
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
Replying to
@andy_matuschak
There's lots of ways to frame this kind of project. I don't "reclaim your attention" is quite right: there's a "productivity" orientation, a sense of "should" there that doesn't feel quite right. I vibe more with something like… offering nucleation sites for alternative actions.
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
As
@rsnous
points out, sometimes endless scrolling happens because there's a vague dread that when it stops, something unknown and probably less hedonic will happen. Making alternatives concrete ("order cat food") might make the dread less diffuse.
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Omar Rizwan
@rsnous
·
- one story I could tell about this is about 'dread' (twitter.com/left_pad/statu) where you dread / put off switching from scrolling Twitter to do whatever task; Twitter is this immersive medium that's hard to leave
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
Should the whole OS be "in the feed"? I notice feeds produce a change in consciousness. I feel e.g: frenetic, impatient, restless, reactive. Some activities really lend themselves to that mindset (e.g. triaging email)—those are good candidates! Others benefit from stillness.
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Andy Matuschak
@andy_matuschak
Yeah. I’m excited to make an Orbit home screen widget for that reason. The home screen seems like a good place for this type of intervention, though it can’t “interrupt” non-halting behavior like this project.
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Dave Guarino
@allafarce
Replying to
@andy_matuschak
I've thought about this myself. Some ideas have been: - Long form academic articles (with pic of abstract) - Wikipedia articles - Satellite imagery (click to explore) - Songs / new records from Bandcamp to listen to - Prompt to send a postcard to a friend
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Dave Guarino
@allafarce
(Also the "negative space" of using a browser extension shim here is interesting. I've toyed with using that + a simple NLP algo that detects snark and sarcasm, for example, to remove them from my timeline.)
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Carlos De la Guardia
@dela3499
Replying to
@andy_matuschak
One semi-joke answer is: professionally-made ads targeted at you - commissioned by you. So, for me, one might read: “Dive into Richard Dawkins books on evolution! Understand it in your bones, so you can apply it to your AGI research!” [a compelling image]
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Carlos De la Guardia
@dela3499
I think there are a variety of ideas which could be made more consciously available, perhaps in an especially aesthetic way. Ideas about how to make decisions, what your future could look like, things you’d like to do, people you want to spend time with, etc.
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