FeedZen - News Feed Eradicator for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, Youtube & More on iOS.

We’ve noticed that a lot of people have cut down their social media addiction by using Newsfeed Eradicator for Facebook, a chrome extension.

We have just launched FeedZen, a News Feed Eradicator for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit & More for Safari on iOS.

“I’ve been using various apps to circumvent the amount of time I spend on Reddit and Twitter, but they all outright blocked everything - and I’d find myself “reloading without content blockers” or disabling them altogether whenever I got a direct message on either. Now I can still respond to people and view linked articles and tweets directly but I’m not tempted to scroll mindlessly for hours on end. Thanks!” - akrabu139, Apple App Store

“Stops me from endlessly scrolling through my newsfeed without blocking the events/pages I need to monitor for work” - Emptysignifier, App Store, Canada

We hope that it will be able to help more people to stay focused and more productive.

Check it out here: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1319991355

Enjoy!

Susanna - https://feedzen.app/

1 Like

This is true that many are giving up on the social platforms because of the news feed eradicator and that is why the use of the social media platform is less as compared to previous times.

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certainly, this is a good article about social media addiction boiling down to the contents of the news feed:

Hi @susanna.sek!

Nice to see your product able to eradicate some more of those attention-grabbing, distractive content feeds for Safari and iOS. The site looks well-designed.

As you may know - and as stated in the description of the Apps & Tools category - advertising your product to our community also entals being open to honest feedback on the Humane Tech aspects where you can still make improvements. And I have some of that feedback I’d like to provide.

But first a technical issue I noticed. I am on a Linux machine with Firefox, and when I scroll your site, my CPU starts taking up a continuous 40% of processing power, and laptop fans start blowing. Something very heavy is on your site, and I think it is the scrolling content being displayed in the smartphones. You should take a look at that.

Now to the actual feedback:

Business model / pricing

One thing where you can improve is in Transparency. The first thing I always do when looking at a product website is to determine what the business model is. How do you intend to earn money? And at first I overlooked that, started to read the Privacy Policy and couldn’t deduce from that. Until I saw ‘In-App Purchases’ on the AppStore page. Then I reread your landing page and I found the small-font text “Premium required to unlock remaining blockers.”.

IMHO being transparent and clear entails making this much more clearer. It is not something to be ashamed about, or that should be hidden from view. The best would be to have a Pricing table: Free mean you only get FB eradicator, then $ XX (per month?) for Premium and unlock the rest.

Also there should be info on the payment method being used (unless that is all integrated in AppStore).

Finally, and important, since you are a commercial company: Who are you? What is your company name, registration number? Do you have an office? How else can I contact you, besides the email address? Who are the founders, the team?

Many people don’t realize it, but by installing a browser extension or App you give a lot of trust to the software provider, who could theoretically install a Bitcoin miner, or a backdoor on your device. Not you, of course, but it would help if you conveyed that trust to the user. As awareness of privacy and security grows, this can become your companies’ USP.

Privacy Policy

The Privacy Policy (PP) text looked quite good, actually. The text is readable by normal users, and does not contain overly complex legalese.

Yet - and this applies to any post-GDPR human-readable PP - it is probably drafted by a lawyer, and the more casual writing style can still contain a lot of loopholes that are easily overlooked by a layman user.

There is no mention about Personally Identifiable Data (PII) being used for tracking or advertising, which is quite good. And on the site in the FAQ you also mention that Apple Content Blocking disallows user tracking (though this should be better explained or have a link to a relevant article on how that works).

But in the PP you could be more explicit. Explicitly state that no information is provided to 3rd parties and that you take care to not provide 3rd-party tracking and data collection. What I notice is that you use Google Analytics (GA) and Firebase for analytics to provide your Service, which makes me think that Google still gets to know my detailed browsing behavior!

That last point is really important. If I were your customer I would really hate that if that was the case. I know GA has an anonymous operating mode, and you probably use Firebase as your backend, server-side application. Google can de-anonymize what it receives through these services. You could get rid of GA (e.g. replacing by a self-hosted Matomo.org), but for Firebase that would be more difficult, then.

Final thing on the PP: Why do you host it as PDF on Google Drive and not as a regular web page?


Hope you appreciate my feedback :slight_smile:

2 Likes

Is there anything similar but for android?

Also., I highly recommend changing your pad and cell to grayscale it makes it far less addictive lessening the dopamine hit we get from the colors, this is especially true for children.

I have a couple of open-source demetricators and one eradicator on awesome-humane-tech but they are not entirely what you are looking for. If someone has an open-source project that works for Android I’d be interested to add to the list.

Hi @aschrijver, I’m Hamish, creator of FeedZen :slight_smile:

Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback! It’s really useful and I have taken what you said on board made some changes to the site to reflect your points.

Firstly - I think you’re right, it must be the auto scrolling behaviour. I’ll need to take a look into how I can improve that - I hadn’t noticed - thanks!

I’ll address some of your other feedback now:

Business model

You’re right that it looked a bit disingenuous making the premium text smaller. Have updated this to more clearly represent the pricing structure. You’re right that payment is all dealt with by Apple within the app itsself.

Regarding the company, I am just a sole programmer so I have added my twitter handle to the footer.

Privacy Policy

I have updated the privacy policy to reflect that fact that FeedZen never tracks or views users browsing behaviour, as well as added a link to the FAQ.

Regarding why it’s hosted on google Drive - it was just easier and quicker. I have updated it so that it acts like a new page.

I have also made some improvements as users were finding it difficult to understand it’s limited usage with Safari.

I hope that answers some of your questions! Thanks again for the feedback.

Would this be something you’d be interested in adding to your https://humanetech.com/take-control/ page, under Remove social media from your phone or Download apps and extensions?

1 Like

Hi @Jbjusten

Unfortunately there isn’t anything for Android. Being a google product, google doesn’t allow content blocking tech which is why you can’t download ad blockers on google chrome. AdBlock Browser gets around this by creating their own browser, however this is not something I have planned for FeedZen at the moment.

Re. the greyscale - do you mean in the app itsself? Thanks for the idea, however I don’t really envisage that anyone would get addicted to the app, as it’s an app that sits passively in the background. There is rarely a need to enter feedzen after it has been initially setup. The colours are there for quick reference so that users can quickly select the right blocker.

Cheers!

Super @hamishjohnson, that you made these improvements already! This is exactly why we have created the Apps & Tools category on this forum.

I can’t tell you what is required to be mentioned in the Take Control section of the Center’s website. The HTC operates independently of the CHT, so you should probably reach out via the contact form on humanetech.com to ask.

Community-wise for special cases and larger products / services, we have the Exemplars category (but still have to highlight how we treat these cases).

We are also developing our own Community Website and Awareness Program in which we may start campaigns to promote Time Well Spent softwares (if you want you can join the Campaigners team and help set this up).

Also we have an idea to start a Certification and Logo Program with checklists, guidelines and reviews of appropriate Humane Tech related software and deal out Global Awards (and on the other end of the spectrum we could also create a Hall of Shame).

Yes. Note that for ad-blocking there are more options on Android, like using Blokada, which blocks ads for all your apps (and does not require root-level OS access). See awesome-humane-tech.