DoomStopper: stops the urge to doomscroll in YouTube shorts

Adds a gradually increasing delay between shorts to reduce the urge to doomscroll and lengthen your attention span.

Ever opened YouTube intending to watch one video, only to realize you just lost an hour to Shorts? You didn't fail at willpower, the algorithm is just designed to keep you swiping on autopilot. DoomStopper is a different kind of blocker. Instead of blocking YouTube completely (which usually just makes you turn the blocker off), it uses gradual friction to gently snap you out of the scrolling trance. How it works: • Starts Invisible: The first time you scroll, the delay is 0 seconds. You won't even notice it. • Gradual Friction: Every time you scroll to a new Short, it adds a tiny 50-millisecond gray screen. • Unbothersome: The increase in delay is slow enough that you won't notice it video by video. For the first couple of videos, you probably won't even realize anything is happening; it will just look like it's taking longer to load. After about 20 videos, you will finally be able to see the delay and have to make the conscious decision to scroll to the next video. Eventually, the delay becomes just long enough, and just boring enough, that your brain decides to close the tab and do something else. After a couple of weeks, you will lose the urge to even open YouTube Shorts entirely. The science: Dopamine is the chemical in your brain responsible for reward and anticipation, basically, the chemical that tells your brain, "do that again." Each time you scroll, your brain, anticipating what the next video might be, releases a spike of dopamine, saying, "do that again, do that again." It works exactly like a slot machine: your brain is constantly anticipating a "win," so you keep pulling the lever. Overwhelmed by this, your prefrontal cortex (the logical, decision-making part of your brain) essentially goes quiet, leaving you to scroll mindlessly for hours without even realizing you're doing it. What's worse is that when your brain is flooded with too much dopamine, it assumes something's wrong. To try to fix it, your brain "kills off" the receptors that receive dopamine, making the same amount of dopamine feel less good. Soon, watching Shorts feels uninteresting, and everything else in real life (which releases far less dopamine than Shorts) feels incredibly boring. How DoomStopper fixes it: DoomStopper works by using a psychological tool called friction. By introducing a small, increasing delay, it breaks the instant-gratification loop. That brief gray screen acts as a "pattern interrupt." It creates just enough empty space for your logical brain to wake back up and ask, "Wait, am I actually enjoying this, or am I just scrolling?" Additionally, a gray screen releases zero dopamine. It reduces the anticipation of the scroll because your brain learns that swiping no longer equals an instant reward; instead, each scroll equals a boring period of waiting. By increasing the wait time very slowly, each scroll releases just the tiniest bit less dopamine. Not enough that it feels overly frustrating, but just enough that your brain starts reviving those dopamine receptors, making normal, everyday hobbies feel fun again. Stop scrolling on autopilot. Install DoomStopper and get your time and happiness back.