CAPTCHA Your Attention

Using CAPTCHAs to discourage doomscrolling.

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funni meme number 2

Inspiration

It's a story as old as time ⏰🧓. Well okay, maybe not that old, but as old as short-form content became popular. You sit down, idly pull out your phone and suddenly it's 3 hours later and you realise you're on YT Shorts, or Instagram Reels or whatever is the drug of your choice.

What's worse is that CURRENT SOLUTIONS DO NOT WORK!

Notifications and time reminders lead to alert fatigue. Your mind dismisses regular notifications and continues it's regular doom-scrolling path.

Time limits and app locks are too restrictive! Most of the time, you end up disabling them for "just this once" and forget to put them back on.

So I needed to find something that was just mildly annoying enough to pull you out of the 'scroll' flow of mind. And that something was...

CAPTCHA IMAGE

What it does

It's simple. Every few shorts, BAM! A CAPTCHA appears.

captcha memes continue

You need to solve a quick math problem before you can continue scrolling. Not too harsh, not too lenient—just enough to jolt your brain awake and make you reconsider your life choices.

Think of it like a mini "Are you still watching?" but instead of Netflix guilt-tripping you at 3 AM, it's me, your friendly neighborhood extension 🦸, making sure you don't scroll yourself into oblivion.

This is designed to show:

  • Non-Intrusive Overlays: The CAPTCHA is designed to be minimal and gentle.

  • Stats Tracking: The extension keeps track of key usage metrics, so you can stare at them and feel guilty. These are:

    • Total shorts scrolled
    • Time spent watching shorts
    • Number of CAPTCHAs solved
    • Physical distance of shorts you've scrolled

  • Increasing Difficulty: To combat Alert Fatigue, the CAPTCHA gets harder and harder the longer you watch shorts. This constantly keeps you breaking the scroll flow.

  • Customizable: Everything is customizable so it doesnt get too intrusive, leading to disabling of the extension.

How we built it

PRAISE BE TO WHOEVER FIXED MANIFEST DOCS

This was made as a Chrome Extension. I had a lot of fun making this with Chrome's Manifest V3. The documentation that was previously riddled with bugs has been fixed and I'm so happy about that.

I used JS to create the extension and HTML for the popup. Overall, no crazy technologies were used, but it did need me to code a LOT of functionalities to be compatible with Manifest.

I also extensively used Chrome's chrome.local.storage data to ensure everything was persistent across sessions.

Challenges we ran into

OKAY IM NOT KIDDING BUT I actually ended up doomscrolling several times when testing my own project 💀. Thankfully, the CAPTCHAs managed to stop me in time so I can personally attest they work, but it was still really weird to see how effective these algorithms are at keeping our attention.

I did run into a bit of a time crunch while creating the project. Manifest's security policies were a bit hard to navigate around, I couldn't figure out how to use libraries with content-scripts and that resulted in some friction. I also had to be extremely careful of not SPAGHETTIFYING my code, and I think I did an okay job of sticking to good principles.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Honestly, making something this useful to myself is something I'd consider a win. I can definitely see myself using this in the future to stop doomscrolling

What's next for CAPTCHA Your Attention

Expansion to Instagram and TikTok. And creating Android overlays, because very few people actually doomscroll on their PC.

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