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BlockTheNews
Protect your mental health and attention
An app designed to stop the outrage. 672 news sites, one deliberate breath, zero tracking. For iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Hey Product Hunt 👋
Today I’m launching BlockTheNews, a Safari extension for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that adds a deliberate pause before you open a news site.
The idea came from a simple realization: reading the news isn’t always a conscious choice. Sometimes it’s a reflex.
But in the last years the news got sour. And media companies are using emotional triggers to drive page views.
A large randomized study covering more than 370 million headline impressions found that each additional negative word increased clicks by 2.3 (https://www.nature.com/articles/...).
So BlockTheNews was built to intervene at the exact moment the habit begins. It comes with 670 news domains from more than ten countries. When you open one, the page is replaced by an unskippable six-second countdown. You’re then asked why you need to visit it right now. Your answer is never saved. If you continue, the site opens for ten minutes before closing again.
You can allow trusted sources, add your own distracting sites, or pause blocking whenever you want.
The first version was a conventional Safari content blocker, but that was too blunt. I rebuilt it as a Manifest V3 WebExtension using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, wrapped in a native SwiftUI app for onboarding, settings, subscription management, and iCloud syncing.
The extension runs at the very start of page loading so headlines don’t flash before the blocker appears. The domain list is compiled into fast local lookups, with fallback logic for Safari’s aggressively suspended background workers. Blocking decisions happen on-device, visited URLs are never transmitted, and the reason you type never leaves the page.
I’d love your feedback, especially on which publications or countries should be added next.
About BlockTheNews on Product Hunt
“Protect your mental health and attention”
BlockTheNews was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 9 upvotes and 2 comments, placing #62 on the daily leaderboard. An app designed to stop the outrage. 672 news sites, one deliberate breath, zero tracking. For iPhone, iPad and Mac.
On the analytics side, BlockTheNews competes within Health & Fitness, News and Fitness — topics that collectively have 121.9k followers on Product Hunt. The dashboard above tracks how BlockTheNews performed against the three products that launched closest to it on the same day.
Who hunted BlockTheNews?
BlockTheNews was hunted by Thiago Peres. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
For a complete overview of BlockTheNews including community comment highlights and product details, visit the product overview.
Thiago Peres