Why Hushdot's dashboard refuses to have a dashboard.
Every extension we looked at when we were designing Hushdot had a dashboard. We realised the dashboard was the problem.
When we were designing Hushdot, we spent a week looking at every serious ad-blocker and privacy extension in the Chrome Web Store. All of them had one thing in common: a dashboard.
The dashboards were beautiful. Rolling graphs of trackers blocked, kilobytes saved, requests dropped, time reclaimed. Some had gamification. Most had per-site statistics, quick allow-list toggles, privacy-score explanations, filter-list management, and a shop tab.
We noticed something. People who use these extensions enthusiastically visit the dashboard a lot. And the people who visited the dashboard a lot were, almost without exception, also the people most likely to uninstall after three weeks.
The quiet-software paradox
There's a thing that happens to the best background software. At first it does its job, and you feel grateful. Then you stop noticing. Then you forget you have it. That 'forgot it was installed' phase is the highest praise this category can get.
But dashboards are actively designed to pull you back. They want your attention. They want you to engage, even if only to admire. And each visit is a reminder: oh, this thing is installed, this thing is doing work, this thing is a product with a team and a roadmap.
For something you installed to achieve less noise, a dashboard is a contradiction.
What we did instead
Hushdot has a single button in the Chrome toolbar. Clicking it does one thing: pause and resume. No numbers. No settings page. No filter-list configuration. No allow-list UI.
Per-site allow-listing exists, but it's a two-click gesture in the toolbar popup for the specific site you're on. You can't open a list of every site you've ever allow-listed, because we didn't build that screen.
Statistics on what's been blocked exist, too, on the day of install. Hushdot runs a single benchmark the first time it activates, shows you the before/after on a real page, then never shows statistics again. You can re-run the benchmark manually. You can't pull up a graph.
The trade-off
This makes Hushdot useless for power users who want fine-grained control. We tell those people: use uBlock Origin. It's free, excellent, and has all the settings you could want.
Hushdot is for the other 99 per cent. The people who install something once, set it and forget it, and would prefer not to have a product-of-the-week notification every time they click something.
The highest compliment we can receive is 'I forgot it was installed'. Which means most of our users don't remember our name to give us that compliment. Which is fine. We only needed to remember it to build this.