In the face of our current doomscrolling epidemic, so many different tools, apps, and hacks have emerged to break our news and social media addiction. But none are cuter or guaranteed to bring a bigger smile than this one.
Cat Gatekeeper is a Chrome extension that interrupts your doomscrolling in a very simple yet intrusively charming way. Try spending too much time on a distracting site and a chubby cat pops up blocking the page and demanding your attention. A countdown timer appears for your predetermined (mandatory) break. All the while, the domineering, but cuddly cat lounges on your screen, waiting, fidgeting, and moving its tail until the timer is up.
The indie developer Zokuzoku built the extension on a pretty honest idea. Most of us don’t fall into time-wasting apps on purpose. We drift. One second you’re checking something quick, the next you’re 20 minutes deep into posts you don’t even care about. At their root, tools like this work by snapping you out of autopilot before the spiral starts. With Cat Gatekeeper, you can set a usage limit and break duration for a site. As of now, it supports most major social media sites such as X, YouTube, Facebook/Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and more.
What makes Cat Gatekeeper stand out and why it’s quickly become my favorite, is that it delivers not only on its promise to help curb your browsing habits in a delightful way, but also does so with no ulterior motives. According to the store page, the extension only requests permission to access the pages being viewed when installed, and doesn’t collect or transmit any data externally. It’s also extremely lightweight, using negligible CPU resources and only 16MB of storage.
Currently, the extension is only available on Chrome but other browser support is coming in the future. Go ahead and give this extension a try. If you’re like me, that extra feline-induced break is enough to think, “Aw, so cute” before asking yourself, “Wait, why am I here?”
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