Mark
I did not set out to build a blocker. I set out buying them: content blockers, accountability apps, DNS filters and browser extensions, one after another, for years, on my own devices and for my own reasons. Kellet is what I built after running out of ones worth trying.
Four things every one of them got wrong
Some of what I tried was bad. A few were genuinely good products that did exactly what they were designed to do. What none of them did was survive contact with the hour I had actually bought them for, and they failed in the same four places.
It only covered some of my devices
I have Windows machines, a Mac, an iPhone and Android phones. A blocker that holds on one of them is not protection, it is an inconvenience with a door in it, and the door is the device I reach for next.
Getting around it needed no skill
Open a different browser. Use the app instead of the site. Turn the extension off. None of that is a technical bypass, and if the way out takes thirty seconds then the tool is leaning on exactly the self-control I bought it to back up.
It could only judge the address
Blocklists work on domains, so the only question they can answer is whether I am allowed on a site at all. That leaves blocking every useful thing on Reddit or accepting the rest of it, and the thing I wanted stopped was never the domain.
It was either trivial to switch off or impossible to live with
Two opposite complaints with one cause: the rule was a switch. Either I held it, so an impulse undid it in a click, or somebody else did, so I could not change it when there was a real reason to. Almost nothing offered the middle.
None of those is a failure of willpower on the part of the person who installed it. They are design decisions, and a design decision can be made differently.
One mistake in four positions
Those four complaints are not independent problems that happen to share a category. They are one assumption showing up in four places: that a blocker is a list of addresses, guarded by a switch. Everything above follows from it. A list of addresses cannot know what is on the page, so mixed sites become all or nothing. A switch can be flipped, so the rule lasts exactly as long as the mood that set it. And both of them live wherever the software happens to be installed, which is never everywhere.
So Kellet works at the device level rather than inside a browser, because opening a different browser cannot be a viable escape route. It judges what is actually on the screen rather than only where it came from, so a site that is useful in one tab and not in another does not have to be blocked or allowed whole. Where somebody wants another person involved, that person can be given specific permissions rather than the keys to everything.
The part I care about most is what happens when you change your mind. Tightening a rule takes effect at once. Loosening one waits out a delay you chose in advance, and so does removing the app. That is the whole idea, and it is a small one: the person setting the rule and the person who wants it gone are not in the same frame of mind, and only one of them should be holding the switch.
It is not a wall, and I will not describe it as one. On hardware you own, with enough time and determination, everything is defeatable. What a delay does is make an impulse insufficient on its own.
What I write here
Every guide on this site carries my name because I wrote it, which is also why the byline links back to this page. Three rules I hold myself to on all of them.
- Name the better product when it is not ours. Where somebody else is the right answer for your situation, the page has to say so. A roundup that always arrives at the company paying for it is an advert with a table in it.
- Cite somebody who is not us. Any claim about bodies, brains or research is sourced to a health service, a professional body or a published paper, named on the page so you can check it. Our own marketing is not evidence.
- Date a page from the day the words changed. Never from the day the site was rebuilt. A freshness date that moves on a deploy is worth less than no date at all.
Calmer water is one decision away.
Kellet blocks the distractions you choose and lets you stay accountable to yourself, or to someone you trust.