zero_billion

congrats on the launch, Aditya!

thanks for sharing this. we have seen this problem first hand in our community.

thanks for your suggestion.

great to see that you're making progress. do checkout BlockerX to see if it might be helpful. all the best on your journey!

Atmana is a combination of 2 sanskrit words. there's nothing hindu about the name at all.

DSM-5 and ICD-11 are incredibly slow and it takes years and may be decades for them to be able to write to manual on something new like compulsive usage of digital products etc. it's hard to rely on them for newer problems that don't have lots of research done on them.

thanks, will check out these books.

great to know that you were actually able to quit social media and other heavy dopamine stimulants. this is inspiring!

any specific resources/framework/books that helped you along this journey?

sorry, I missed YC. Other than YC we haven't taken any external funds. I forgot to add this as technically the funds still haven't hit our account (still paperwork is pending).

thanks for sharing your experience. this is helpful!

we're completely bootstrapped and haven't taken any external funding yet. we aren't sponsored by any church etc. and have no religious affiliation.

restriction might help all addictions. But, we need to start somewhere, and we have chosen this specific problem. we plan to launch solutions for compulsive usage of technology products in the coming months and years.

true, i haven't found any research paper on this too. But, I have seen this being shared in our community posts.

corrected this. i meant quitting porn has helped many such people overcome ED.

it's an intervention only because the user is looking for an intervention to overcome some behaviors that are negatively impacting their life.

yes, we do enforce google and bing safe search.

our block depends on the device, on android it's dns and showing an overlay on adult contnet. in ios it's through dns/vpn.

regarding social media - that's next on our list! porn was the 1st use case and we plan to help people limit social media and gaming in the coming years.

i second that.

support groups do help. it's proven to be effective with substance abuse addictions. we are helping people with a support group where users can share and help each other.

haha. didn't quite get what you want us to automate?

i appreciate your feedback. thanks!

we do have a feature where users can talk to a coach and get their problems addressed.

thanks for sharing your experience. i guess it's different for different people. i have heard stories of young men who had erectile dysfunction. They could not get an erection with their partner but could an erection with porn. quitting porn has helped many such people overcome ED. before anyone asks, this relation of erectile dysfunction to porn is not yet proven. hopefully there will be more studies on the same in coming years. so, i would say for some quitting porn in itself improved their life conditions.

even with the app, only those who think our app will help them will install. it's not for everyone. we are firm believers in the free market economy and we are in no way saying that porn is bad or immoral etc. we are only assisting people who need help in quitting a problematic behavior.

i guess these are studies that indicate the harmful effects. but, the question was about whether quitting porn can make people happy. i guess that's not quantified. also, happiness is quite difficult to quantify in general.

thanks for your kind words and comment.

As to how we prevent bypasses, we have a many little things that overall work really well. E.g. in iOS, if user disables a vpn profile, we have a way to enable this in a few seconds. in android, with a few additional permissions, we can block force stop and many such ways of bypassing. there are 100s of loopholes with a blocker. we have meticulously plugged many of them one by one. and we're still continuing to plug each day.

sure, thanks so much. will correct these rightaway!

I honestly don't think there is any policing. there are groups like nofap because people who fundamentally believed that they wanted to quit porn came together and there's no force. people do this voluntarily based on their own choice.

that's true. a few of our competitors are quite strong in religious channels to promote their products. this is definitely an interesting channel to explore. as to /r/nofap - for some reason this channel doesn't show in the sub reddits where ads can be shown. it could be due to adult words used in the forum (just a guess, not sure what the reason is).

that's an interesting idea. will explore this further. do reply if you know any such organizations at the top of your head.

that's actually a good idea. however, 99.5+% of those who watch porn might not have a problem with it and hence, might not need our solution. but, worth exploring, this could be similar to running banner ads where a small % of impressions result in click.

quite true, porn is definitely very hard to stay off of as it's easily accessible at any time from any device.