AdLock

A clean and user-friendly web is also a distracting web, without ads cluttering our screens and ruining our experience, we were free to consume useless content for hours, ruining our productivity.

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Inspiration

Inspired by AdBlock, the well-known browser extension that got rid of annoying ads and pop-ups. We realized that a clean and user-friendly web is also a distracting web. Without ads cluttering our screens and ruining our experience, we were free to doomscroll and consume useless content for hours, ruining our productivity.

We decided to build AdLock, the "Evil Twin" of AdBlock. Instead of removing annoyances to improve your experience, AdLock injects annoyances to ruin your experience, specifically on sites that you might be addicted to. It's a productivity tool powered by spite.

What it does

AdLock forces users into doing meaning work by making their favorite distraction sites as unusable as possible. Users set a focus timer, upon visiting a blacklisted site (e.g. Youtube, Reddit) while the timer is running, AdLock fights back.

Contextualized ads and pop-ups appear based on the content you're consuming. Your whole browsing experience is ruined, buttons and links redirect you to more 'productive' sites, as well as ruining your scroll-speed and latency.

Trying to cut your focus session and work short? You will be tasked to complete annoying captchas that deter you from going back to wasting your day away.

How we built it

We built AdLock using Vanilla JavaScript within the Manifest V3 architecture, utilized the Chrome Scripting API to inject the annoyances and override user interactions. We integrated OpenAI for the contextualized annoyances and use Chrome storage for state management.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successfully brought back the horrible experience and suffering of surfing on sketchy sites that riddled the page with ads and when you hadn't discovered AdBlock.

What's next for AdLock

We are planning to monetize our suffering with AdLock Plus, creating more annoying ads and pop-ups, making your browsing experience as horrible as possible.

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