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Show HN: Scream to Unlock – Blocks social media until you scream “I'm a loser”

237 points madinmo | 1 comments | 25 Jun 25 10:49 UTC | HN request time: 1.031s | source

Hi all,

I kept wasting time on social media, even though I’d promised myself I’d stay focused. Regular site blockers didn’t help.

I needed something that felt annoying enough to break the habit. That’s how the idea came up: make the blocker ask me to say something embarrassing out loud before it lets me back in. If I actually have to yell “I’m a loser” into my mic. Even better - the louder I screamed, the more time I’d get.

So I put together Scream to Unlock. It’s silly, but so far it’s done its job. My social feeds stay locked unless I really want them.

Extension link - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/scream-to-unlock-ye...

Its open source and transparent - https://github.com/Pankajtanwarbanna/scream-to-unlock. No data collection or tracking, Audio processing happens locally in your browser. No recordings saved or transmitted.

1. dvh ◴[25 Jun 25 19:45 UTC] No.44381189[source]▶
I'm a programmer, a creative person, working on my projects, and regularly I need a short break, so on every break I usually lay in bed and checked the news and I often ended on YouTube watching more videos, wasting hours every day.

What eventually helped me was use css to replace entire YouTube (and other doom scrolling websites) with a motivational picture that says:

"One day, you'll realize that your dream died because you chose comfort over effort. Don't let that regret haunt you forever."

And it worked.

Edit: the css for yt looks like this:

    body {
     min-height: 100vh;
     background-image:url(https://example.com/effort.jpg);
     background-size: contain;
     background-repeat: no-repeat; 
     background-position: center; 
     background-color: black;
    }
    p,div,h1,span {display:none}