Three ways of blocking traffic to social sites – macOS edition
If there are times you need to focus and don’t want to be distracted pay attention to “Down a Rabbit Hole” effect. Study shows that being captured by few videos/images falling into the same category may lead to watching countless sequential videos on the same topic
Despite the variety of offerings available, consumers on these platforms often feel “stuck in a rabbit hole”, viewing countless sequential videos or images on the same topic, such as cat videos or artistic food photos.
— Cook 2019; Maher 2020; Muldrew 2019 as cited in K. Woolley and M. A. Sharid “Down a Rabbit Hole: How Prior Media Consumption Shapes Subsequent Media Consumption”
Question here is, how a regular macOS user can prevent this unintentional consumption of the materials. How can you, as a user, block the constant flow of the information. Here are three solutions I have used in the past.
Warning: This is very risky approach. Only for people who know what they are doing. Do not do this if you are not an expert!
With this approach you can redirect all the traffic to a given address to your computer. This way, you won’t be able to open a site even accidentally (e.g. somebody sends you a link to a cat video).
> sudo vi /etc/hosts
and then, add lines (you can choose whatever social media you like). Simply replace social.media.site.com with the name of the service you want to block.
127.0.0.1 social.media.site.com 127.0.0.1 localhost
With Little Snitch you are able to define access rules and block inbound and outbound traffic to your computer.
With it, you can easily create categories that group certain web pages and block access to these sites. This way, you have to intentionally allow yourself to browse the page.
With Screen Time, you can specify how much time you allow yourself to browse a given site. This is quite useful in case you want to allow yourself to watch, from time to time, some cat videos.
After setting the time, you will be informed it was consumed whenever you try opening the page
With any of aforementioned approaches you can avoid being captured within the Rabbit Hole. You can always allow yourself to watch more but, at least, you have something that stops you from mindless scrolling after you have been caught by the algorithm.