The typical online adult now spends over two and a half hours a day on social and video feeds — 18 hours and 36 minutes a week, or about 16% of their waking hours, according to DataReportal’s Digital 2026 Global Overview. For women aged 16 to 24 it is closer to 3 hours 40 minutes a day.
Advice about that usually ends with “delete the app.” That works for about a week, and then you recreate the account, because the app was never only the feed. It was also your messages, your group chat, the event you are going to on Saturday, the tutorial you needed for work.
On desktop, you do not have to make that trade. The feed and the parts you actually use are separable, and blocking one while keeping the other is far more durable than a decision you have to keep making.
Part of why it is hard to stop is that these feeds are built around how short attention already is. Gloria Mark’s research at UC Irvine has tracked average attention on a screen falling from about two and a half minutes in 2003, to 75 seconds in 2012, to 47 seconds in recent years. A format built from 15-second clips does not have to fight that; it fits it exactly.
The two shapes of the problem
Every one of these sites falls into one of two categories, and knowing which one you are dealing with tells you what is possible.
The feed has its own address. YouTube Shorts is at youtube.com/shorts. Instagram Reels is at instagram.com/reels. When that is true, the feed can be genuinely blocked — visiting it redirects you somewhere else, and the rest of the site is untouched.
The feed is the site’s front page. TikTok’s For You feed is what tiktok.com serves by default. On X, “For you” and “Following” are both x.com/home, and which tab you are on lives inside the page rather than in the address. Here nothing can separate the feed from the site, so the honest maximum is hiding the links into it. It stops being one click away; it does not stop existing.
Most tools in this space blur that line. It is worth knowing which one you are being sold.
YouTube Shorts
Blockable. Switch on the YouTube Shorts section and leave youtube.com off your block list.
What keeps working: normal videos at any length, your subscriptions, search, watch history, playlists, comments and channel pages.
The detail that matters here is the Shorts shelf. Blocking only the address leaves a row of Shorts thumbnails on your homepage on every visit — so the block arrives after you have already been tempted. The shelf, the Shorts cards in search results and the sidebar button all need to go too. Full guide →
Instagram Reels
Blockable. Switch on the Instagram Reels section and leave instagram.com off your block list.
What keeps working: direct messages, stories, your main feed, search and posting.
This is the one where “just block the site” fails hardest. Most people keep Instagram for messages, and blocking instagram.com takes those out — so the block never survives the first time someone needs to reply to something. Blocking Reels alone survives, because it costs you nothing you wanted. Full guide →
One gap worth naming: a profile’s own Reels tab sits at instagram.com/<username>/reels/, which the current rule does not match. The main Reels feed and individual reels are covered.
TikTok For You
Hide only. The For You feed is what tiktok.com serves by default, so there is no separate address to redirect — a rule that caught it would have to match the whole site.
What you can do is hide the links into it, so reaching the feed takes intent rather than reflex. What you cannot do is make it unreachable while leaving the rest of TikTok working.
If the feed is the entire problem — and for most people on TikTok, it is — the honest answer is to block tiktok.com outright. That is one click, and there is no cost, because unlike Instagram there is not much on TikTok you reach past the feed. Full guide →
Reddit r/popular
Blockable. Switch on the Reddit r/popular section, which covers both /r/popular and /r/all.
What keeps working: every subreddit you subscribe to, your home feed, search, comments and messages.
The distinction here is unusually clean. The subreddits you subscribed to are the ones you decided were worth your time. r/popular is the opposite of that decision — whatever is loudest on the site today, chosen for you. Removing the second while keeping the first leaves Reddit as the thing you actually signed up for. Full guide →
Facebook Reels
Blockable. Switch on the Facebook Reels section and leave facebook.com off your block list.
What keeps working: Messenger, groups, events, Marketplace and your timeline.
Same logic as Instagram: most people keep Facebook for one specific thing and get caught by Reels on the way to it. Full guide →
X “For you”
Hide only. “For you” and “Following” are both x.com/home, and the selected tab is never part of the address, so no rule can tell them apart.
Hiding the “For you” tab makes Following the path of least resistance, which is the only lever available. Given that X defaults to the algorithmic feed, that is a bigger change than it sounds — but it is a nudge, not a wall. Full guide →
The part that makes it stick: a schedule
Blocking a feed forever tends to fail the same way deleting the app fails. The pressure builds, and one evening you turn it all off.
Giving the feed a time works better than trying to erase it. Blocked from nine to five, back afterwards. Because the break is scheduled, you are not resisting all day — the feed will still be there at six, which takes most of the urgency out of the craving. It is the same argument as not trying to quit the internet cold turkey, applied to the specific thing that costs the most.
In SiteBlocker, sections attach to a schedule and follow its hours, exactly like the rest of your block list.
Doing it
- Install SiteBlocker for Chrome or Firefox
- Open the Block List tab and scroll to Distracting sections
- Switch on the feeds you want gone
- Optionally attach them to a schedule so they lift outside work hours
All six sections are free, and no account is needed to start. The overview lives on blocking short-form video.
