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Show HN: Combat social media addiciton with foreign wikipedias

1 pointsby amosjover 3 years ago

1 comment

amosjover 3 years ago
Greetings HN,<p>This is an app I built to help me combat the (previously!) firmly-established habit of pulling out my phone to read the news &#x2F; reddit whenever I had 5 minutes of downtime. The idea is to channel that energy in a more productive direction: instead of opening XYZNews for the nth time I&#x27;ll try reading wikipedia - but in a different language. That way I&#x27;ll learn something new about the world, practice that language, and not blindly stare at the news feed hoping something interesting came up since the last time I looked at it 1 hour ago.<p>The app offers sources of content in a foreign language (by default wikipedia but any website can be added) and a built-in dictionary, which is activated by double-tapping a word [1]. It&#x27;s actually worked quite well, and though I do still read HN I&#x27;ve drastically reduced the number of times I compulsively open news websites.<p>Fun fact, some wikipedia versions (e.g. Italian) have a &quot;quote of the day&quot;. Those have become my favorites. Otherwise all pages have an &quot;article of the day&quot; which is often interesting.<p>As mentioned the websites are configurable. The languages&#x2F;dictionaries are hardcoded (mostly wordreference), but trivial to add by modifying the source. The built-in browser is sometimes buggy and gets dizzy if it follows too many redirects, but it builds in Android Studio and otherwise works fine most of the time[2]. Any feedback welcome!<p>(note: no ads, no sign-in, no data is collected by the app)<p>(disclosure: I&#x27;ve allowed myself to resubmit this because the last title did not show the relevance to the subject of battling social media addiction, which I think is of interest. I believe this is allowed within the site&#x27;s guidelines)<p>[1] Although e.g. Chrome has a built in integration with wordreference, it still requires too many clicks.<p>[2] might crash if you cross the international dateline in a canoe. I mean it might. If you try please let me know.