BlockTheNews

Protect your mental health and attention

Health & Fitness

News

Fitness

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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.