What Nudge does

I just released a major update to Nudge, a Chrome extension to make the internet less addictive (install here). Here’s a guide to everything Nudge does.

1. Tells you when you’re getting sucked in

• Nudges you every 15 minutes on an addictive site:

• And when you quit a site but compulsively return straight away:

• Hover over a nudge and you’ll see a menu with an option to nuke all tabs of that site, i.e. close them:

2. Lets you switch off sites

• Addictive sites show a small off switch in the bottom-left corner, which looks like this:

• Click it, or use keyboard shortcut Alt + Down Arrow (Windows) or Option + Down Arrow (Mac) and that site will be switched off
• If you try to go back to the site, you’ll see a screen like this:

• The only way to switch the site back on is to drag the slider across

3. Gets rid of notifications

• Hides notifications in tab titles which pull you back to a site, like the ‘(1)’ unread message indicator and red dot in this image:

• Hides notifications on Facebook top-right icons like this one:

4. Lets you delete your Facebook News Feed forever, across all devices

• Install Nudge, go to Facebook, wait a few seconds and hit refresh
• You’ll see a box at the top like this:

• This will unfollow 100% of your friends, pages and groups, and permanently get rid of your News Feed, not just on desktop but also in Facebook’s mobile app and everywhere else (because it uses Facebook’s own unfollow feature)
• Once you’ve unfollowed, you’ll see a box with an option to ‘Auto-unfollow’ in future, which means that if you make new friends on Facebook (I hope you do) or ‘Like’ new pages, they’ll be automatically unfollowed
• If you’re wondering why you should do this, have a read of my article here

5. Hides distracting sections of websites

• Replaces distracting sections with a small question mark
• Here’s an example on Facebook, hiding two sidebars which are packed full of distracting information and links:

• Hovering over a question mark shows a menu where you can choose to show the section once or always:

• If you have an idea of a section of a website that you think should be hidden by default, let me know in the comments

6. Makes Facebook less addictive

• Facebook is a bad experience for a lot of people, hence why a few Nudge features specifically target the world’s biggest social network
• You can see the difference between normal Facebook and Nudge Facebook in the image at the top of this article
• One obvious change not yet mentioned is that Nudge changes Facebook’s blue bar to grey, to make the site less appealing and help the user avoid getting sucked in:

7. Lets you choose which features to use, and on which sites

• You can find Nudge’s options by right-clicking on the Nudge logo in your Chrome bar and selecting ‘Options’:

[Coming soon:] A scientific tool to make the internet less addictive

• You might be thinking: that all sounds great in theory, but does it actually work? So am I. Feedback from early users of Nudge is extremely positive, which is a good sign. But that’s not the same as rigorous evidence. That’s why — more than being about any one feature — Nudge is a scientific tool to create and test interventions that make the internet less addictive and make people happier
• The format of a Chrome extension is great for this because an extension can change a huge amount about a user’s experience of the internet in the Google Chrome browser, right down to the level of changing the designs that huge internet companies use to keep you hooked. This is much more than, for instance, any Android or iOS app could do to your experience of the internet on most mobile devices. That means Nudge is an ideal testing ground to figure out out how to make parts of the internet less addictive
• Put another way, Nudge aims to provide the counterpoint to the thousands of A/B tests run by tech giants like Facebook every day to keep you infinitely engaged
• All this won’t mean anything different for Nudge users — just that there’ll be evidence to back up the effectiveness of new and existing features

If you use Google Chrome, you can install Nudge here. I would love your feedback or any new feature ideas so email me at lou [at] nudgeware [dot] io with any thoughts.