If you often find yourself scrolling social media and then regret the lost time, this chrome extension will block those sites and only unlock them if you scream embrassingly about your lack of discipline.<\/b>
\n«I am a loser.» Yeah, that’s what you need to yell to unlock a few minutes of social browsing time.\t
The ills of social media are pretty well-known, and the impacts are so well-documented that Meta, YouTube, and TikTok are now facing a lawsuit for making their platforms addictive. Australia has already banned social media for teens under 16 years of age, and multiple other countries are considering similar restrictions. And let\u2019s face it: social media can lead you into a doomscrolling spiral that is an utter waste of time and energy.
Enter Pankaj Tanwar, a developer who just created a Chrome extension that will make you scream at your computer in order to unblock social media sites. \u201cA productivity tool that blocks social media websites and makes you say embarrassing things to unlock them,\u201d says the extension\u2019s description on Google\u2019s web store. But screaming at your PC or Mac is not the whole solution.This is pretty cool
First, you must hit the loudness threshold while screaming, \u201cI am a loser.\u201d Next, you must increase the tempo of your embarrassing scream to unlock the time for which a blocklisted site becomes accessible. Based on how desperately loud you are, you might unlock a few seconds or minutes worth of social media surfing time.
The open-source tool is aimed at students, at-home workers, and basically any person with a computer who gets distracted quickly and ends up losing valuable time to mindless X or Instagram browsing. By default, the extension blocks X, Instagram, and Facebook. However, if you have other digital vices, ahem, you can simply add the URL and block those sites, too. I desperately needed it
Once you set up the extension, which also works well in other Chromium-based browsers such as ChatGPT Atlas, you will run into a full-screen blocker every time you try to visit the distracting sites. There\u2019s even a visualizer where you can see the loudness levels of your screen, and a timer underneath that shows you the duration for which the sites will be unlocked.
This won\u2019t be the first project of its kind. Rhys Kentish, a software engineer at a UK-based company, developed an app called Touch Grass that will require you to go out, literally touch grass, and click a snapshot as evidence to unlock distracting apps on your phone.
As far as the \u201cScream to Unlock\u201d browser extension goes, well, I desperately needed a solution like this. I visit X and Reddit for research and news gathering, but often end up wasting too much time getting distracted by random posts and rabbit holes. Thankfully, the little honor that I have left stops me from shouting at my PC and waking up my cat.<\/p>\n