20-year-old Alex Slater says he wants to make the world a better place. No, not by achieving world peace or ending hunger, but by getting the number of men who watch porn down to zero. “I think helping a hundred million men quit porn would be awesome,” he tells Dazed on a call from Miami. “I don’t think it has any benefit at all to society.” To achieve this mission, Slater launched a porn addiction recovery app called Quittr, with several other young male co-founders, in August 2024. Now, he’s the CEO of the app he calls an “overnight success”, which he says has been downloaded nearly two million times. “December, January and February have been our biggest months in terms of subscriber growth, and I plan for it to jump way more in the coming months,” he says. 

So, why are so many young men hoping to quit porn? Like a lot of apps, the idea for Quittr came from the young founders’ own experience, and Slater’s interest in self-improvement practices. In 2021, he started working on his “discipline” by eating clean, scrolling less and working out. Cutting back on watching porn was just one part of his self-improvement journey, but he says it was integral to achieving his other goals. “Anyone who’s jerked off will tell you that, for the rest of the day, they will be low energy because, biologically, the mind thinks they’ve completed the ultimate goal of reproduction,” he says. “If you screw around with that system too much, you won’t get anything done.” As Quittr’s downloads would suggest, there are hundreds of thousands of young men who agree. 

On Quittr’s website, the app is positioned as a tool to help men “feel alive again”. “Millions of men are isolated, addicted, and quietly struggling – and no one is speaking to them honestly,” it reads. “Porn isn’t the real problem. It's a symptom of a deeper crisis of disconnection, suppressed emotion, and shame. We built QUITTR to break that cycle.” To help people quit porn, the app has an array of what it calls “expert-backed porn addiction therapy tools”. One of these is a panic button that tells you, “You’re better than this. Look at yourself”, when you feel the urge. There’s also a block for trigger sites, an AI support chatbot to guide you through urges, a dashboard to monitor your porn-free streaks and porn addiction support groups, for “strength and accountability”. 

Despite using terms like “neuroscience“ and “experts“, Slater says he came up with Quittr’s features himself to see what stuck. When I asked what specific research or studies they were drawing these supposedly addiction-healing techniques from, he said they’re still working on some of the “legitimising stuff“. “It’s run by 20-year-olds who did this for fun before it started ramping up,” he says. “We got excited and kept expanding, but there were a lot of things we did wrong.” This includes a recent data breach that exposed the masturbation habits of thousands of its users, according to a report by 404 Media. To that, Slater says he takes data security “very seriously”. “We recently identified and addressed a potential issue, engaged a security review, and implemented additional safeguards,” he says. 

One of the things Quittr is clearly doing effectively is online engagement. They work with male influencers across all spaces to spread the anti-porn message – from Christian life coaches who talk about lust being a “sin” to those who make videos about being stronger at the gym after quitting porn. And it’s clear when speaking to Slater that it doesn’t matter if Quittr’s users are motivated by self-improvement or religion; he just thinks it’s important they stop watching porn. “Some marketing efforts work better towards Christians, who take God more seriously than pure self-improvement,” he says. “But I want to expand: to target Muslim men, dads with families and people with erectile dysfunction.” 

“Anyone who’s jerked off will tell you that, for the rest of the day, they will be low energy because biologically the mind thinks they’ve completed the ultimate goal of reproduction. If you screw around with that system too much, you won’t get anything done”

One of Quittr’s several creators is Tom, a 24-year-old in Indianapolis who goes by @popcornwithtom online. He promotes Quittr in between videos on “high-testosterone board games” and “ultra-masculine ways to die”. “Porn is more accessible and normalised than any other drug you can get addicted to in a society,” he tells me. “I think people are starting to realise the effect it has on your relationships and how you can connect with women.” After the internet opened the door for essentially unbridled porn access, apps like Quittr indicate that young men are hoping to take matters into their own hands (sorry for the pun) and block their way out of algorithmic dopamine loops. For Tom, it was meeting his girlfriend that inspired him to cut porn out of his life completely.  “Afterwards, I really noticed a difference in how we connected,” he says. 

Porn as an addiction has been a hotly contested topic for years. Currently, pornography addiction is not a diagnosable condition, although studies indicate that approximately 70 per cent of men watch porn at least monthly. There are reports stating that porn may promote “sexual aggression” or that problematic pornography consumption can lead to higher rates of relationship dissatisfaction and sexual dysfunction, but no general agreement on what’s considered a “problematic” level of watching porn. Also, there’s a study showing that pornography use predicted depression over a period of six years, but it was only in men who disapproved of porn use. 

While the concept of young men banding together to quit porn may be music to the ears of many girlfriends and pastors alike, the idea that you won’t perform as well at the gym if you masturbate isn’t exactly sex-positive. It’s also happening against the backdrop of the current cultural conservative swing, with global studies showing young men and boys in particular have developed more traditional views about gender roles than older generations (such as the belief that wives should obey their husbands). Between the “gooning” communities bonding over excessive masturbation and the anti-porn creators who toggle between evangelical purity rhetoric and looksmaxxing culture, young men are being exposed to extreme ideas around self-pleasure.

For Tom, quitting porn was about aligning his actions with his faith. “It really helped with my self-confidence because I would portray this happy, extroverted dude who always tried to speak about my faith, but deep down I knew I couldn’t stop this one thing that I told myself I was going to stop every single day,” he says. “I was like, ‘If I can’t keep that promise to myself, how can I keep promises to anybody else?’” Now, post-porn, he says he can “preach confidently” when trying to inspire young men to follow in his footsteps. His mostly young male audience is listening; he says his DMs are flooded with others who swear quitting porn changed their lives. “Once I was able to conquer pornography, that translated into all the other goals I was trying to achieve,” says Tom. 

Slater also speaks a lot about discipline, and about making sure your actions aren’t bent toward “the will of the mind”. “Hard times create strong men,” he says. But his abstinent approach hasn't entailed giving up sex completely – as some of the more puritanical creators do. For him, it’s really all about porn. He believes that it’s the accessibility of porn on the internet that’s impacting men’s chances of finding a partner. “It’s screwing up their minds,” he says. “If you release and you have no one to share that moment with, you actually feel more lonely.” Instead, he suggests hitting Quittr’s panic button – after which, your phone will start vibrating. When asked what happens after that, Slater replies: “You snap out of it”.