February 2022—I built Unclutter because I’m frustrated about the state of the modern internet.
Ad-blockers are an absolute requirement to get anything done. But their curated blocklists don’t remove attention hacks that distract you with anything but the text you actually want to read.
A solution are “reader modes”, often built into browsers. Yet they have their own set of problems. Often some paragraphs, images, or interactive graphs are removed accidentally as well.
Most disappointingly, reader modes remove all semblance of the original design of the website you’re reading. It makes all articles look the same, the same type of boring that makes reading seem like a chore.
March 2022—I launch the first version of Unclutter on Reddit to great success! Particularly demo videos seem to do well.
One benefit of building completely custom DOM analysis code is that it can be orchestrated so that the removal of distractions is animated. Check out the video on the website.
The first release is really quite basic otherwise. I open-source the project so that users can report issues on certain website — and people do — they create 100s of reports.
July 2022—I realize there’s more to fix about reading on the web. Saving articles for later, creating highlights, but above all, incentivizing actually reading stuff instead of adding to the read-it-later pile endlessly.
A core piece of my approach is effortless highlighting: select any statement in an article that you find interesting or want to remember, and it’s saved and categorized instantly for you.
This is the time of growing AI capabilities (before ChatGPT), so I also add a “related” feature that shows you similar highlights you’ve saved before, to give a sense of your interconnected knowledge base.
December 2022—Eventually, after difficulty monetizing the extension, I focus on other projects.
People still use the reader mode of the extension, but I remove the experimental AI & account features.
The project has an unexpected outcome: someone from Jangle Inc loves the project and reaches out, and we work together. They’re building a hardware tablet for reading, later known as the Daylight Computer.
