Content Blockers Don't Work

It's 2026 and porn blockers still fall short

I said what I said. Content blockers don't work.

I've tried more content blockers than I can reliably remember. Qustodio, Canopy, BlockerX, FocusMe, Freedom, countless browser extensions, DNS filters, and plenty of others. Most were bad and comically easy to workaround. Some are actually quite good. But none of them solved the whole problem.

You can buy software that transcribes a meeting in real time, edits video by describing what you want, and writes most of a working app from a paragraph. Yet software built to do one comparatively simple job - stop certain things from reaching your screen - still misses the mark.

And not even in some obscure, highly technical way. Install almost any content blocker, spend twenty minutes with it, and you'll find the obvious holes yourself. It works on your phone but not your computer. It blocks on Chrome and Firefox, so you open a different browser like Brave or Zen. It blocks porn sites, but not explicit content on Reddit or X. It does nothing about soft-core content on Instagram that skirts the line. It isn't even remotely aware of fetish content. It filters the web while completely ignoring apps or files already sitting on your device or some external drive you stuffed in a drawer 3 years ago.

The problem isn't necessarily that these are bad products. Many of them do exactly what they were designed to do. The problem is that what they were designed to do is narrower than the problem they claim to solve.

A porn blocker doesn't work just because it can block Pornhub. That's the easy part. It succeeds two days later when you've changed your mind and actively want to get around it, but you find that you can't.

That's where most porn blockers fall apart. Some of them are genuinely difficult to remove, but all of them are incredibly easy to workaround.

This isn't an article about willpower or accountability, I'm not going to tell you that you just need to want it more or need to involve someone in your life who you can be accountable to. This is about the tools themselves: what different kinds of blockers can actually see, the holes they leave behind, why those holes matter, and what a content blocker has to do to actually work.

The first problem: they don't cover all of your devices

The most obvious failure in this category is also one of the most common: the blocker simply isn't available everywhere you need it.

That might have been acceptable fifteen years ago when most people did almost everything on one computer. It makes no sense in an age where the average user has a desktop, a laptop, several phones, a tablet, and even VR

I have Windows computers, a Mac, an iPhone, and multiple Android devices. If a blocker only supports Android, it doesn't matter how good the Android app is. The moment I sit down at my windows machine, the protection is gone.

The same problem shows up in different forms across the category. Some products support mobile but not desktop. Some support Windows but not macOS. Some technically support several platforms, but the feature set is completely different on each one. The strongest protection may exist on one device while another gets little more than a basic website filter.

If I'm trying to stop myself accessing porn and one of the five devices around me has no meaningful protection, then I'm not really blocked. I've just added a small inconvenience.

This is especially important because circumvention usually happens in the moment. You don't sit down and carefully evaluate the architecture of your blocker. You hit a wall, remember that your laptop isn't protected, and move over to it.

For a blocker to work in the real world, broad platform support isn't a nice feature. It's foundational.

And unfortunately, even when a product does support your device, that doesn't necessarily mean it actually filters the enter device.

The second problem: browser extensions are barely blockers

This brings us to one of the most common shortcuts in the category: the browser extension.

Browser extensions are attractive because they're easy to install, easy to build, and can do a surprisingly good job of controlling what happens inside a browser.

But the problem is right there in the name. They're just browser extensions

Install a blocker in Chrome and it can control Chrome. Open Firefox, Edge, Brave, Opera, or another browser and suddenly none of those rules exist. If you don't already have another browser installed, downloading one takes about thirty seconds. There are a lot of browsers these days, so you'll need to install a lot of browser extensions

That's not some sophisticated workaround. You don't need to know how DNS works, edit system files, boot into safe mode, or understand anything technical at all.

You just open another browser.

And even within the browser they're protecting, extensions have another problem: they're ultimately running inside software you control. Depending on how the blocker is built and what protections are in place, you may be able to disable the extension, remove it, use another browser profile, or otherwise step outside the environment it's watching.

If you're installing software specifically because you expect there will be a moment when you want to break the rule you previously set, a system that can be escaped by opening another browser isn't much of a barrier.

A serious blocker must operate beyond the browser.

The third problem: you can just turn them off

Blocking a website isn't particularly difficult. The difficult part is making that block stick when the person who set it up has a weak moment and knows all they have to do is spend 30 seconds uninstalling the application that's stopping them from accessing the content they want.

With most blockers, changing your mind is all it takes.

Open the settings. Remove the site from the block list. Disable the filter. Stop the app. Uninstall it. Whatever the mechanism happens to be, if you can reverse the decision immediately, the blocker is relying on your self-control - and if you had that, you wouldn't have installed a porn blocker in the first place.

That is a fundamental design problem.

When I decide to block something, I'm usually making that decision calmly and deliberately. I'm deciding what I want my behaviour to look like later.

The moment when I want to undo that block is often completely different.

Thats why friction matters.

If loosening a restriction takes effect immediately, an impulse can become access in seconds. But if that same change doesn't take effect for an hour, six hours, or a day, the decision becomes much less useful as a way around the blocker.

The point isn't to make settings impossible to change. You own the device. Sometimes you genuinely need to change them.

The point is to separate making the decision from acting on an impulse.

Some porn blockers try to solve this with passwords, which can work well if you're willing to have someone else set that password so you don't know it - but that needs to be done somewhere centrally like the web where all your devices are affected by it, not on each individual device. And if you're using the blocker on your own, a password you know isn't a barrier at all.

A porn blocker therefore needs something more than an on/off switch. It needs a way for the person you were when you set the rules to have some leverage over the person who later wants to break them.

But even if you solve that problem, there's another one waiting: blocking porn websites is no longer the same thing as blocking porn.

The fourth problem: porn isn't just on porn sites anymore

Blocking porn sites used to get you most of the way there.

It doesn't anymore.

Explicit content is everywhere. Reddit, X, Discord, Telegram, image searches, social feeds, forums and countless smaller sites can all contain porn alongside completely legitimate content on truly useful sites.

That creates a problem traditional website blockers are not designed to solve.

You can block Reddit entirely. That works. But maybe you actually use Reddit for programming, troubleshooting, hobbies, or communities you care about. The same is true of X, Discord and plenty of other platforms.

So you have a choice: block an enormous part of the internet because some of it contains porn, or leave it accessible and accept that the blocker can't distinguish between the content you want to avoid and everything else.

Sometimes that isn't even an option. You are not going to block Google simply because Google Search contains explit images or fetish content. You are not going to block instagram or facebook because the algorithm has learned you and floods your feed with thinly veiled OnlyFans ads.

Domain lists can't solve that problem because the domain isn't the problem.

The content is.

And apps make this even worse. Explicit content viewed through a native Reddit or X app may never touch the browser at all. A blocker can have flawless browser filtering and still be completely irrelevant to what's happening elsewhere on the device.

This is where the distinction between a website blocker and a content blocker matters.

A website blocker asks: Should you be allowed to visit this place?

A content blocker needs to ask: Should you be allowed to see this particular thing?

That's a much harder problem to solve. But in 2026, it's the problem a serious porn blocker actually needs to solve.

The fifth problem: they ignore what you're actually looking at

There is an even simpler hole that most porn blockers barely acknowledge: not everything you want to block comes from the internet.

You may already have explicit photos or videos saved on your computer. They might be sitting in Downloads, buried in an old folder, synced from cloud storage, or saved years before you ever installed the blocker. You may have even forgotten about them.

At that point, web filtering is irrelevant.

There is no domain to block. No DNS request to intercept. No browser to monitor. You double-click a file and it opens. On some devices you don even need to open the file because you can see its thumbnail.

The same problem applies to content arriving through other channels. Someone sends you an image through a messaging app. A cloud drive syncs a folder onto your computer. You download something while protection is temporarily loosened and access it again later.

Once the content exists locally, most blockers are completely blind to it.

And this exposes the broader problem with treating porn blocking as a web-filtering problem.

Porn isn't a website. It's content.

If the goal is genuinely to prevent explicit content from reaching the screen, it shouldn't matter whether that content came from Pornhub, Reddit, Telegram, Google Drive, or a folder sitting on your desktop.

Where it came from is increasingly besides the point.

What matters is what you're actually looking at.

The sixth problem: accountability is all or nothing

A lot of porn blockers eventually arrive at the same solution to the problems above: give somebody else control.

You choose an accountability partner and let them see what you're doing.

And to be clear, this can work extremely well

The problem is that most products treat accountability as binary. Either you're managing everything yourself or somebody else effectively holds the keys.

That's a pretty big leap.

Maybe I want someone to know if I disable a protection, but I don't want them controlling my block list. Maybe I'm comfortable sharing activity around explicit content, but not my entire browsing history. Maybe I want my partner to be able to approve an urgent change without giving them permanent control over every setting.

And some people don't want another person involved at all. This is, afterall, a sensitive topic for many people.

That shouldn't mean the blocker becomes useless.

Accountability should be a layer you can add to self-control, not a requirement for self-control to work in the first place. And when you do add another person, you should be able to decide exactly what they can see and what they can control. Accountability shouldn't mean surveillance.

There is a huge amount of useful territory between "I can undo anything I want whenever I want" and "someone else controls my device and sees everything I do."

Most porn blockers don't give that any thought at all.

So what does an effective porn blocker look like?

An effective porn blocker needs to work across all of your devices, not just on one of them. It needs to operate outside the browser, because installing another browser can't be a viable escape route. It needs to block known explicit sites while also recognizing explicit content appearing on sites and apps that can't reasonably be blocked altogether. It needs to account for content already stored on the device. And most importantly, it needs to remain effective when the person trying to get around it is the same person who installed it.

But it also has to be livable.

Settings can't be permanently locked because legitimate reasons to change them will eventually come up. Automated detection will sometimes get things wrong.

The answer, then, isn't an impenetrable wall. On a device you own and control, that's an unrealistic promise anyway.

The goal is to make an impulsive decision insufficient to get around the decision you made earlier.

That's the core idea behind Kellet.

Kellet works at the device level rather than relying on a browser extension. It blocks websites and applications, but it also uses on-device AI to recognize explicit content appearing somewhere that can't reasonably be blocked outright. Detection isn't simply porn or not-porn: nudity, covered nudity, suggestive material, and fetish categories can be controlled separately, with adjustable strictness depending on where you want the line drawn.

It also looks beyond the internet. On supported platforms, Kellet can scan images and videos already stored on the device and quarantine explicit material it finds. False positives happen, but can easily restore the file so you're protected either way.

But the part I think matters most is what happens when you change your mind.

Kellet doesn't pretend you'll never need to change a setting. Instead, you decide in advance how much friction those changes should have. Loosening protection can carry a delay. Removing Kellet can carry a longer one. An accountability partner can be given specific permissions if you want someone else involved, without requiring you to hand them complete control.

The idea is simple: make the rules while you're thinking clearly, and make them harder to undo in the moment.

Kellet isn't perfect, and there are limits I will always be open about. The biggest one is platform coverage, and it is worth stating flatly given everything I just wrote about it: Kellet runs on Windows today and nowhere else. Android arrives at the end of September 2026, macOS in Q4 2026, and iPhone and iPad in Q1 2027. Until those land, the argument I made above about needing every device covered is an argument Kellet does not yet fully answer either. It can't protect a device it isn't installed on so if you get a new phone, Kellet won't know about it unless you tell it. Automated detection will occasionally get something wrong. And no software can address whatever brought you to porn in the first place.

What it can do is put something between the impulse and the action.

Not an impossible-to-escape prison. Not another button you can turn off five seconds later.

A gap.

And sometimes, that's all we need.